I remember arising from a hammock and trudging through the lodge, my legs moving with the same consistency of dampness' smell. Though confused, though a "verde verde que te quiero verde" moment, the slowness of smell and the pervasiveness of odor mirrors the grogginess of sleep. Like the specter which haunts our sight, odor feels present yet absent.
Rushdie asks "What kind of idea are you?" of his characters in The Satanic Verses. With the same urgency, I ask myself, "What sense do I live in?" Do words or pictures capture the rain best (or should I rid myself of representational arts, either being there or not knowing about it at all?)
After all, poetry is not just the sounds since even in translation Neruda's concepts signify. Or is what I love neither of them, but recreated touch rubbing gently over the tips of curled hairs, brushing skin only accidentally as I recreate—and in a way truly feel myself—rolling into the already warmed parts of the bed.
How does a student of art history reconcile a love of poetry, the power of language and ideas and novels historically with the increasing role of the visual currently? How do I look at a history where my own discipline is arguably less descriptive of that moment?
What if our historical imagination isn't an image of a past but the text of it, the narrative of life. But don't narratives capture memories—false and true—that engage a sense? Neruda calls for "a poetry as impure as old clothes" yet I saw none of his words in the smell suffocating the compound in Costa Rica, born of constant rain and wetted clothing.
But in a sense I do since I am corporeally here in a way that his poetry absolutely requires of readers. What use is color if you can't smell the browning banana or taste the ripeness of a berry caught between two figures as it descends from the tree amid rustles?
Relying on our senses is an unreliable way to understand the world around us; we inject subjectivity simply by living in our universe full of scents, textures, and colors. Not only does a scent change based on where we are in the world, but there is manipulation also in processing the world. What sense do we privilege? How, when, and why?
Part of my intellectual journey is understanding the ways literature, the visual arts, location, the smells of a site, the sounds of a people, all intersect, so in the coming weeks I hope to focus on particularly resonate synesthetic pieces—films that speak in colors and books that give off smells.