801.20 The Omnidirectional TV Set

801.21 Children looking at TV today look at it quite differently from the way it was to the first generation of TV adults. It begins to be very much a part of the child’s life, and he tends to accredit it the way adults accredit what they get from their eyes. When children are looking at a baseball game, they are right there in the field. All of our vision operates as an omnidirectional TV set, and there is no way to escape it. That is all we have ever lived in. We have all been in omnidirectional TV sets all our lives, and we have gotten so accustomed to the reliability of the information that we have, in effect, projected ourselves into the field. We may insist that we see each other out in the field. But all vision actually operates inside the brain in organic, neuron-transistored TV sets.

801.22 We have all heard people describe other people, in a derogatory way, as being “full of imagination.” The fact is that if you are not full of imagination, you are not very sane. All we do is deal in brain images. We traffic in the memory sets, the TV sets, the recall sets, and certain incoming sets. When you say that you see me or you say “I see you,” or “I touch you,” I am confining information about you to the “tactile you.” If I had never had a tactile experience (which could easily be if I were paralyzed at conception), “you” might be only where I smell you. “You” would have only the smellable identity that we have for our dogs. You would be as big as you smell. Then, if I had never smelled, tasted, nor experienced tactile sensing, you would be strictly the hearable you.

801.23 What is really important, however, about you or me is the thinkable you or the thinkable me, the abstract metaphysical you or me, what we have done with these images, the relatedness we have found, what communications we have made with one another. We begin to realize that the dimensions of the thinkable you are phenomenal, when you hear Mozart on the radio, that is, the metaphysicalonly intellectually identifiableeternal Mozart who will always be there to any who hears his music. When we say “atom” or think “atom” we are intellect-to-intellect with livingly thinkable Democritus, who first conceived and named the invisible phenomenon “atom.” Were exclusively tactile Democritus to be sitting next to you, surely you would not recognize him nor accredit him as you do the only-thinkable Democritus and what he thought about the atom. You say to me: “I see you sitting there.” And all you see is a little of my pink face and hands and my shoes and clothing, and you can’t see me, which is entirely the thinking, abstract, metaphysical me. It becomes shocking to think that we recognize one another only as the touchable, nonthinking biological organism and its clothed ensemble.

801.24 Reconsidered in these significant identification terms, there is quite a different significance in what we term “dead” as a strictly tactile “thing,” in contrast to the exclusively “thinking” you or me. We can put the touchable things in the ground, but we can’t put the thinking and thinkable you in the ground. The fact that I see you only as the touchable you keeps shocking me. The baby’s spontaneous touching becomes the dominant sense measure, wherefore we insist on measuring the inches or the feet. We talk this way even though these are not the right increments. My exclusively tactile seeing inadequacy becomes a kind of warning, despite my only theoretical knowledge of the error of seeing you only as the touchable you. I keep spontaneously seeing the tactile living you. The tactile is very unreliable; it has little meaning. Though you know they are gentle, sweet children, when they put on Hallowe’en monster masks they “look” like monsters. It was precisely in this manner that human beings came to err in identifying life only with the touchable physical, which is exactly what life isn’t.