Leafy Perception and Sorting out Detail

When I first started this blog, I alluded to, and then briefly wrote about my experience nearly losing my eyesight.

At the time, I was aswirl with fears and recalculations of life and trying to come to terms with it all.  As for many people, sight is my dominant sense.  I am a teacher, a reader, a writer; a filmmaker; and a musician whose greatest strength might be sight reading.

And I am a gardener.  Who studied it seriously enough to make it an avocation, and who chose not to make it a vocation, but relies upon it as a form of meditation.   So it was not the generic laments of "how will I read?" or "how can I create images on film?" or "will I be valuable, can I even function happily, as a musician who cannot read music?"  Each of those had their own levels of solvability.

It was when I looked across one of my garden beds out front, thinking I would scan for weeds, and realized I could not even differentiate the leaves of the wanted plants, that I was whalloped.

One of many amazing things about the human eye (and our brain) is how we can see this, this image as recorded by a camera, but then also instantly and seemingly simultaneously scan for up close detail.  Standing from this point, I can look into and across the top of the foliage and identify where errant grasses and weeds are.  Kind of hard here, even if you click on the picture and open it up bigger.

So I have to approximate what our eyes can do.  Kind of like I needed to that day I stood a few paces away from the bed out front, and had a rapid, blistering series of realizations.

Like our amazing eye/brain communication, I was simultaneously realizing "Hey, I can't see the weeds!"  and "Hey, I can't see...much of anything.  Green.  That's it."  All the while moving in closer and closer...

The killer was I got right in on top of the leaves.  Which, in that case, were siberian iris, ornamental grasses, and regular lawn grass grown tall enough to flower and go to seed.

Not that I'd know.

I was done for.

***

I take a lot of close up and macro images.  For all kinds of reasons:  they rarely fail to interest me, it's a shortcut to helping make a picture "work," it's the only way to be sure certain details my eye-brain is registering are being communicated to the viewer.

When I lost my eyesight--when it went fuzzy, when I watched it glaze over and out--I didn't just lose a type of input.  I lost an important physical metaphor for sorting and thinking.  Learning and practicing are complex things, and putting learned practiced knowledge and ability to work creating is yet another complex something.

When it comes to camera images, you can sort manually that which your brain does intuitively.  See that picture there, with the angelica and the purple iris in the foreground and the peach and purple iris in the left background?  Pull it up large.  Let your eye scan over it.  Decide what it in sharpest focus.  In photography parlance, you are identify just what plane in the depth of field was made to be the center of attention.

In overblown fiction parlance, a character hones their eagle eyed attention on the pointy sharp edges of a loosely fronded angelica stalk, and notes the sharp contrast between edge and the surrounding air.

Either way, you just sorted detail that was already sorted. Look again; that picture was not taken by having the camera a foot away from the angelica.  The camera is at a distance, and zoomed in on the angelica stalks.  The fence in the far background is over 10 feet away from the angelica, and not a soft wash of grey, but series of sharp edged planks with clearly visible graining and splinters.  WHEN one's attention is upon it.  This angle/lens choice removes the option of paying attention to that.

So, you sorted a further level of detail from a collection of input that had already been pared.  That's a lot of thinking.  That's a lot of deciding where and when to pay attention.  

All of the levels are important.  When you stand back from the garden, there is a flow, a rhythm, both in the moment and over time.  There are colors to mix/complement/contrast, smells to consider, heights to account for both in terms of visual pleasure and plant survival.  Whose pleasure and whose survival, of course, being another set of variables.

***

So when I think about the ability to scan a planted area and pick out the wanted from the not wanted, feel the rhythm the planting establishes and determine if there are any breaks or hiccups, imagine what the textural and color palette will present in the future and if amendments should be made accordingly, I occasionally think of what I imagine a perfumer does.  How they select their elements to play together in the moment and over time, in what proportion...and how they must reach in to "pluck" that which does not belong, whether instinctively (thanks to long experience) or by careful process of elimination.  Or guesswork, which will lead to learning.  In my imagination, it is instinctive--but as a gardener I know that sometimes it is long experience which leads to the non-thinking but correct gesture.

On the other hand, as a musician, I know that the "right" gesture can be the result of training, or instinct, or a combination of both.

I also know that my ability to garden was ominously threatened by the prospect of losing my sight.  Which at the time reminded me of the dreams I would sometimes have in my youth about losing or seriously injuring a finger, as my instrument requires the use of all fingers on both hands.  

Perfumers must hate having colds, right?  Or the threat of brain trauma leading to anosmia?  Or even the temporary anosmia that can result from certain illnesses or conditions?

all photographs author's own

What form of art is perfume?

One of the things that has fascinated me about perfume since I first fell down the rabbit hole is the notion of an associated language.  Most art forms have an attendant vocabulary -- what is this "fade out" (unique to vision + time art), this "ellipsis of time" (shared between motion picture and text, presented differently mechanically, yet leading to the same assumption), this "gesture" (a term heard relating to acting and to visual arts, but which can diverge quite a bit from their overlapping meaning).  When I started paying attention to perfume, and to people who wrote about it, you could almost see the reaching for ways to communicate the olfactory experience.  There was the concrete ("notes,"), the experiential metaphor (the makes me feel like path, which can lead you to some purple prose), the parallel metaphor (trying to equate a perfume with a piece of music, for example).  The parallel metaphor seemed to swim in the same pool of exploration as the attempts to explain what the experience of perfume is.

In 2-D visual art, you have lines and relationships and color and "gesture" and such to communicate a representation.

In prose, you have vocabulary and turn of phrase and arrangement of plot and information you choose to leave in or out, assembled in linear time, to communicate an experience.

In music, you have tonal quality and a choice of pitch scaffolds (scales of various sorts) to hang notes presented in linear time, and a choice of one note or many at any given moment on that line, and a choice of voices (generated by humans, or instruments, or what have you) singly or in combination at any given moment on that line, which can be arranged into motifs which are repeated and varied or abandoned or not.

In film, a visual frame (which can present the {illusion of} motion, or a static image) and a soundtrack are assembled in linear time, and make use of how objects are placed in the frame, gesture, movement, dialogue, ambient sound, color, ellipses, etc.  Or not.

In dance, you have a three dimensional frame, the movement through which, as well as the gestures of the dancers themselves, is presented in linear time, usually along with a soundtrack.  Styles of gesture are recognized ("ballet," "tango," "jazz"), punctuation of time is integral.  As it is with music and film and textual narrative, natch.  But here, the punctuation is not disconnected from the body creating the expression.  The body is the punctuation.  Perhaps that's why I missed saying it before?

In theater, you have a three dimensional frame in which you place objects and people through which you move characters and sound and other elements over linear time.

In perfume, what do you have?

First of all, you have sensory input to a receptor that is not employed in any other of the traditional "fine arts."  Your nose, natch.  Forms and mechanics of reception are important.  Entire schools of criticism have developed around reception being The Thing that is important in understanding, particularly when it comes to art.

But since the ragged assembly of art forms and how they are expressed I offered focuses on what is presented, let's attempt to speak to that.

In perfume, you have the presentation of different notes (the smell of x), in different voices, arranged singly or in multiples, over the course of linear time.

It seems so simple.  But really, should those notes be expressed by their cognate in reality?  I.e., should we say cinnamon, or the word for the molecule that when bound in a given fashion, is the thing which lands in your nose and makes you think "cinnamon"?  What if it smells like a cognate, but is lab created?  I.e., peach or Persicol?

Can we tease out the difference between a "chord" and an "accord"?  As in, is there a difference in simply assembling given notes because a perfumer likes the effect of them sharing the same space in the same time from a perfumer assembling notes and creating a resulting effect that is uniquely identifiable and more than simply the sum of its parts?  When we here a C minor 7th, do we hear the individual notes, or the mood?  Does it depend on where the root is located?  Will the language here get confusing?

**
Anyway, I think like this.  I haven't yet wrapped my head around it all in a way that I am comfortable with.  And I think that is partly because the community is still very much in the process of locating a definition, and a language.  All languages, of course, are always being shaped to one extent or another.  But this one is kinda being birthed as a golem:  fully present, but still in need of shaping.

*
Andy Tauer offers a lovely vision of what he sees the art of perfume.  He refers to perfume as an "immersive sculpture."  Apparently, this phrase is now part of the Tauer text...on PR materials, his new packaging, and will appear soon on the website and blog.  He offered a brief post two days ago about it, framing the concept within an interviewer's request to explain "what is immersive sculpture?"

He uses the immersive sculpture idea to suggest mutable three-dimensionality, and the idea that it is a form the wearer/receiver inhabits.

Andy's found a way to weave reception right into the concept, a way which won't let you ignore it.

I'm intrigued.

I'm still plugging away with my cognates, of course (I lean toward music and film), but the empty areas are kind of cocking an eyebrow over there and saying "you have to pay attention."

I am.

Be always drunk...

...said Baudelaire, whether it be on wine, poetry, or virtue--as you wish.

Or perfume, perhaps? Either direct experience, or giddy exploration thereof?

I know I have enjoyed other intense dalliances, affairs, and marriages with music, and writing, and gardening, and collecting, and jewelry making, and .....

In related musings, the topic of perfume as art is on the front burner again. The Times Literary Supplement has an article which explores the question in the context of dicussing Turin/Sanchez Perfumes: A Guide; Nathan Branch recently opened by quoting that article, then bringing up comic artist Stan Lee's recently receiving a National Medal of Arts; Helg invokes the perfume as art question during recent posts exploring the economy of perfume and nostalgia at Perfume Shrine.

I may circumvent the whole question of Is Perfume Art/Can Perfume Be Art? by following Baudelaire's lead. Simply being drunk on it is okay by me for now.

I shall endeavor to not be wanton with it, or fresh water, of course.