What Did the Past Smell Like?

this resonates so much for me as i also grow and distill lavender essential oil at my farm. then i started growing other perfumery herbs and plants. creating scents is not a job for me, but it's almost like a meditation. each 'fragrance' has a profile but to me, they also have a 'time and place' sense.

the project mentioned is euro centric and i think its different in other parts of the world. for me..growing up in india, there are a lot of fragrances that bring back memories. sandalwood reminds me of my grandfather...orange blossoms takes me back to what can only be another lifetime in some exotic middle eastern walled garden...the fragrance of earth after the first summer showers, petrichor. i can go on but it will be boring. i used to wonder why i am awash with so many 'visuals' mentally when i recognise a fragrance even though i havent even been to some of the places in those mind movies. then it hit me. books! i read a lot and i think when i read..because english isnt my first language..i bolster and decorate words with other 'senses' by imagining that i am 'there' inside the pages with those words.

this is one of my favourite sensory readings...from the seven pillars of wisdom, t.e.lawrence.. http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100111h.html ...

[...]The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'.

But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told me, 'is the best: it has no taste.' My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.[...]

and when i read that, i knew..i just knew that was the 'smell of the desert'. just as tangible as the rose or jasmine or lavender. for one brief moment, i was the Bedouin myself.

on a slightly different(related?) note, today Gingko Bioworks based in Boston can create any fragrance you want(or can dream up) with their fermentation tanks. so there's that.