Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema

 

Pg. 81

Time, said St. Augustine, is a threefold present: the present as we experience it; the past as present memory; the future as present expectation. Hopi Indians, who thought of themselves as caretakers of the planet, used only the present tense in their language: past was indicated as "present manifested," and the future was signified by "present manifesting." 6 Until approximately 800 B.C., few cultures thought in terms of past or future: all experience was synthesized in the present. It seems that practically everyone but contemporary man has intuitively understood the space-time continuum. Synaesthetic cinema is a space-time continuum. It is neither subjective, objective, nor nonobjective, but rather all of these combined: that is to say, extra-objective. Synaesthetic and psychedelic mean approximately the same thing. Synaesthesis is the harmony of different or opposing impulses produced by a work of art. It means the simultaneous perception of harmonic opposites. Its sensorial effect is known as synaesthesia, and it's as old as the ancient Greeks who coined the term. Under the influence of mindmanifesting hallucinogens one experiences synaesthesia in addition to what Dr. John Lilly calls "white noise," or random signals in the control mechanism of the human bio-computer.