We've taken on a project at Wednesdays@One that is at once too close to our dailiness and too peculiar to talk about easily. I had to think for a moment or two to put a title to this blog entry. Transport of the senses? What does that mean?
What I hope it means, and what I hope this little project clarifies for us--or teaches us--is how a sensory perception can immediately, sometimes forcefully, remove us to another place and time. In this regard, think Proust and madeleines.
So already I can see the inadequacy of my title. We're not talking about the senses, exactly, or sensory perception, but memory. Still, what I've challenged you, colleagues, to write about isn't so much what you remember (as in, a place, a time, a thought or feeling about either), but that surprise slippage, sometimes jolt, into a past that a certain sound, smell, cast of light, touch or taste precipitates. I've asked you to think and write about the evocation of a familiar world via some cookie dipped into your tea.
I believe this happens to all of us every day. We encounter a certain aroma or fragrance, a measure or two of a melody, a brush of a particular fabric, that reminds us of a time and a place. "Reminds" might not be appropriate, either. "Re-feel" might be the better descriptor. That brief, almost inconsequential encounter takes us out of our day, our task or thought of the moment--it takes us out of the moment!--through a rent in time to another us, a former us. It brings an extinct version of us back to life, if only for a few seconds.
But we ignore this brief transport, as inconsequential, a distraction from more urgent things. Reverie is good for poets, but the rest of us have our day to get through. This project asks us to be poets once again, to set aside whatever chore or care we may have at the moment, and to try to focus on that something that does it for us every time, that very intimate something.
Intimate is the key word here. We can all think of a piece of music, a popular song, a melody that evokes an earlier time and place for us. But really, how intimate is that? I sometimes hear a song by a 60s Brit folk rock band named Fairport Convention and am taken back to the wooly 1960s. But that's not really what this project is about. That's too common, too public, too . . . communal. Nothing truly personal there!
The kind of transport I'm talking about is brought about, abruptly, by that madeleine that launches Proust's world. In my case, a certain olfactory sensation has always done the trick; and that is the smell of a dusty, long-closed up space, that musty fragrance that transports me instantaneously to boyhood and a particular cottage on a channel leading to a lake. That smell evokes the colors, textures, sounds, rhythms, as well as the excitements and boredoms of the summers spent there in childhood. I come across that smell in irregular places, like sometimes when opening a book that has not been taken off the shelf in many years.
And that's what I'm trying to write a poem about, or for, or to. I hope that's what you're trying too.
What I hope it means, and what I hope this little project clarifies for us--or teaches us--is how a sensory perception can immediately, sometimes forcefully, remove us to another place and time. In this regard, think Proust and madeleines.
So already I can see the inadequacy of my title. We're not talking about the senses, exactly, or sensory perception, but memory. Still, what I've challenged you, colleagues, to write about isn't so much what you remember (as in, a place, a time, a thought or feeling about either), but that surprise slippage, sometimes jolt, into a past that a certain sound, smell, cast of light, touch or taste precipitates. I've asked you to think and write about the evocation of a familiar world via some cookie dipped into your tea.
I believe this happens to all of us every day. We encounter a certain aroma or fragrance, a measure or two of a melody, a brush of a particular fabric, that reminds us of a time and a place. "Reminds" might not be appropriate, either. "Re-feel" might be the better descriptor. That brief, almost inconsequential encounter takes us out of our day, our task or thought of the moment--it takes us out of the moment!--through a rent in time to another us, a former us. It brings an extinct version of us back to life, if only for a few seconds.
But we ignore this brief transport, as inconsequential, a distraction from more urgent things. Reverie is good for poets, but the rest of us have our day to get through. This project asks us to be poets once again, to set aside whatever chore or care we may have at the moment, and to try to focus on that something that does it for us every time, that very intimate something.
Intimate is the key word here. We can all think of a piece of music, a popular song, a melody that evokes an earlier time and place for us. But really, how intimate is that? I sometimes hear a song by a 60s Brit folk rock band named Fairport Convention and am taken back to the wooly 1960s. But that's not really what this project is about. That's too common, too public, too . . . communal. Nothing truly personal there!
The kind of transport I'm talking about is brought about, abruptly, by that madeleine that launches Proust's world. In my case, a certain olfactory sensation has always done the trick; and that is the smell of a dusty, long-closed up space, that musty fragrance that transports me instantaneously to boyhood and a particular cottage on a channel leading to a lake. That smell evokes the colors, textures, sounds, rhythms, as well as the excitements and boredoms of the summers spent there in childhood. I come across that smell in irregular places, like sometimes when opening a book that has not been taken off the shelf in many years.
And that's what I'm trying to write a poem about, or for, or to. I hope that's what you're trying too.
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