Scents and Sensibility
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Highlights
- I started mixing things together. I was fascinated by the synergies of combinations, how two quite familiar smells carefully combined could create new and unrecognizable sensation. Perfumery has a lot to do with this process of courting the edges of unrecognizability, of evoking sensations that don’t have names, or of mixing up sensations that don’t belong together.
- You don’t have to dabble for very long to begin to realize that the world of smell has no reliable maps, no single language, no comprehensible metaphorical structure within which we might comprehend it and navigate our way around it.
- It’s strange how you arrive at ideas, how thoughts consolidate themselves out of the most disparate and unlikely beginnings, and how often those beginnings are realizations from experience that something isn’t possible (or alternately is possible but not interesting).
- When they failed to notice, or at least attach any importance to, was that their language, the language of classical written composition, simply didn’t have any terms to describe Jimi Hendrix’s guitar sound on "Voodoo Chile" or Phil Spector’s production of "Da Doo Ron Ron" - arguably the most interesting features of those works.
- We become more and more comfortable with the idea that there are all sorts of ways of describing and organizing phenomena, that there are descriptive languages that don’t translate into one another, that there is no absolute basis upon which to decide between one language and the other, and that anyway, "the same set of phenomena" is a shifting field of energies that we choose to give the same name to until it gets so confusing that we have to find another.
- Big Ideas (Freedom, Truth, Beauty, Love, Reality, Art, God, America, Socialism) start to lose their capital letters, cease being so absolute and reliable, and become names for spaces in our psyches. We find ourselves having to frequently reassess or even reconstruct them completely. We are, in short, increasingly uncentered, unmoored, lost, living day to day, engaged in and ongoing attempt to cobble together a credible, at least workable, set of values, ready to shed it and work out another when the situation demands.