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~ No one rejects the gift of fragrance, except the obtuse (ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib )

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Archivi della categoria: Musings

Anosmia and the “nose of the heart”

13 venerdì Feb 2015

Posted by oveis in Musings

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Anosmia, Inanities, Love, Mediterranean, Musings, swaying

Anosmia is the inability to perceive odor. It is usually temporary (due to a trauma, for example) or permanent (very rare), or limited to one or more specific odors. Many people, for example, are anosmic to musks, which because of their molecular structure, can be hard to detect. Temporary anosmia to musk is particularly common – try to smell a musk for a long time and you’ll likely experience a temporary anosmia to the other types of musks.

This to say, I’ve been away from the blog for a while and the trend is not going to change anytime soon. Thing is, the book is taking more than expected, but I’m in the run-up to submission, and can hardly afford distractions. It is not the only reason why I’ve been absent from here though. I have become temporary anosmic. No, I can still smell – I am reminded of it every time a pass by my perfume making station, and this morning my senses were assaulted by a violent scent of honeysuckle and broom (very unusual, for an early February London morning) that make me want to brave a “dirty honeysuckle”. No, my olfaction is alive and kicking. It is my soul that has become anosmic, not permanently, I hope.

Islamic esotericists have developed an articulated physiology of the “subtle body”, in which, by way of analogy, they talk about the “eye of the heart” to refer to that subtle organ that provides the ability to perceive the spiritual realities. I like to think that, besides the “eye of the heart”, there could also be a “nose of the heart” you can smell spiritual smells with (a treatise on perfumery I am translating by Muhammad Karim Khan Qajar, a 19th century Iranian Shaykhi master seems to allude to something along these lines). If that is the case, well: the nose of my heart is somehow anosmic, or perhaps just caught a cold. Whatever that is, I am currently incapacitated to talk about perfumes, think about perfumes, sit down and blend perfumes. I’d probably need to move to a base in the Mediterranean for the nose of my heart to reopen to beauty and sway in the delight of smells again, but that too seems not to be going to happen soon. But oh, how I’d need that.

Ellena on solitude and creativity – A diffuse review of The Diary of a Nose II

22 sabato Nov 2014

Posted by oveis in Book Reviews, Musings

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Companionship, Henry Corbin, Jean-Claude Ellena, Research, Solitude, Sufism, Teamwork

One of the most comforting things that I am learning through reading The Diary of a Nose is that even great noses tinker. They go about doing their job through a trial and error process the exact same way as I do. Now, putting together a formula, blending the ingredients and finding out that you have to start again from scratch because the result sucks, can be depressing. Knowing that the likes of Ellena sometimes happen to ditch a draft because, well, they think it sucks, gives you hope.

This image of Ellena smelling his drafts, evaluating them and ultimately judging them unworthy to survive evoked in me the idea of the delicate relationship that governs every creative undertaking, suspended in between solitude and teamwork.

There are two things that the French philosopher and historian of religion Henry Corbin would remind time and again in nearly all of his writing. The first was how, vis-à-vis the abyss of the monde imaginal, ‘historical criticism loses its rights’. It was Corbin’s elegant way to claim for himself the right to treat the visionary experience in religions as a fact, a mantra he disseminated his work with as a reminder of his own brand of phenomenology. The second is his evocation of the years of study under Etienne Gilson at the Religious Science Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and the elating experience of reading and interpreting the primary sources with him: Gilson would read straight from Latin and the extraction of the meaning was a collective effort, an inexhaustible process whereby the study group would make the text itself alive and speaking centuries after its redaction.

Intelligence, I got to think, pondering the image of Gilson evoked by Corbin, is the result of a collective effort – no significant achievement can be obtained in total solitude. I think, among many other examples, about the Sufi concept of ṣuḥba, or about the many (and cruel) experiments conducted over history in which a human being was left living in total isolation from all social interactions (they would not survive for long, if you were wondering). But – and here’s where Ellena’s account of his working in isolation comes in – companionship and teamwork have to be balanced out with individual, and to some extent secluded, work; and there you go – Sufi ṣuḥba balanced out by khalwa, the solitary retreat, usually lasting forty days. Ellena, who made the choice of working away from the decision-making centre of the company he is head perfumer of, admits that “the majority of ideas are the fruit of day-to-day work, sometimes the result of meeting people, country walks, idle strolls, readings, moments when the mind is free to roam”. That is to say, a balanced combination of solitude and interaction. I know it can be a luxury. I remember the couple of years after my PhD when I was an “independent researcher” (a self-reassuring way to say that you’re looking for a job in academia), and the frustration of working away from colleagues, removed from the informal exchange of ideas, inspiration and criticism that you need to produce anything meaningful.

So, yes, I guess that what I wanted to say is that, as a perfumer, I am now somewhere on the solitary side of the creative process and, although I cherish it as it allows me to work out my own way and style with relative tranquillity, my own interaction with fellow perfumers, with few illustrious exceptions, is probably too limited at the moment, and this is something that needs to change. My fragrant khalwa needs its share of ṣuḥba.

On Fabrizio De Andrè, smells and life as a work of art

30 giovedì Ott 2014

Posted by oveis in Musings, Stories

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Authenticity, De Andrè, Inspiration, Love, Musings

Yesterday, in melancholic moment, I bumped into Rimini, a particularly heart-wrenching song by the late Fabrizio De Andrè. De Andrè was an absolute genius, and his sudden death in 1999 left many in Italy with an incurable sense of void. His death woke many of us up to the reality that his voice would not have commented on our world and its miseries and joys forever. Rimini then led me to this interview:

Now, Fabrizio De Andrè wasn’t keen on giving interviews, but in the few he gave every word uttered is heavy as a stone and sharply meaningful. He was used to speak his truth with a warmth, humility and precision that one would think he took it from the same mysterious source he drew the lyrics of his songs from. As much as his relationship with the supernatural was troubled, to say the least, and despite his iconoclastic anarchism, I wouldn’t hesitate to call that source ‘divine’. In this sense, his words were always an entrenching and rigorous exercise in what the Greek called parrhesia.

The way De Andrè conducted the interview had me thinking about the notion of the care of the self and the connection between ethics, aesthetics and truth. Briefly and simply put, the care of the self is a fundamental principle of moral rationality, which has been exiled form modern thought and simultaneously deprived of its ethical content in current practice. The connection between ethics and aesthetics, however, is necessary if one want’s to turn life into a ‘work of art’, to borrow a Nietzschean expression. It is a call to practice beauty, which I think is one of the marks of De Andrè’s life and work.

Now, what does this have to do with perfumes. It does.

This interview sparked a reflection on my own practice and the role I want perfumery to have in what I do. As I have said, in order to make sense of a fragrance, you have to tell a story around it.  But alas! when you do it, you are doing it to make it attractive, to trigger emotions, feelings and memories. The risk of it is slipping into affectedness and inauthenticity.  If, with Plato, rhetoric is the art of making truth persuasive, marketing is the art of making a lie appealing. What I am trying to say is that, in the practice of perfumery and its necessary marriage with words, one has to practice the discipline of the care of the self: making love to words cannot degenerate into raping them.

De Andrè was well aware of that. Answering to the last question on an prize he had just been awarded, he responded by eluding the question. Western, Aristotelian obsession with telling the black from the white, he says, results in being obsessed with victory: ‘I am rather against victories, and awards are victories’. With his usual yet always stunning and unsettling sensibility for the wretched of the earth, he goes on: ‘The other side of a victory is a loss, or even multiple loss. And these awards gratify the most vulgar side of my self’. De Andrè managed to make of his life a work of art, and did so by being truthful to himself by exercising parrhesia in his art as well as in his thought. Whatever the art or craft one is busy with, it’s so easy to slip into falseness, to get phony and affected – which would compromise not only art, but also life.

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BS in Islamic Studies

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bgirl rhapsody

Perfume... and Stuff

Il senso perfetto

di odori improbabili e puzze (im)possibili

Ballandalus

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در کوچه های بیدخت

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Practical examples and theoretical reflections on the do's and don'ts of using digital tools for your study and research in African and Asian Studies.

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Perfume reviews from fragrance evaluator

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A scented journey from Canada to Grasse.

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un blog malin-comico

ho detto sì all'amore ma non avevo capito la domanda

আলাল ও দুলাল | ALAL O DULAL

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Gianni De Martino

No one rejects the gift of fragrance, except the obtuse (ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib )

Kafkaesque

Lane Lexicon

KEIN PFUSCH, BITTE!

No one rejects the gift of fragrance, except the obtuse (ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib )

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Il blog di Maurizio Polese

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