He liked to think that wherever he happened to go, he got into people’s heads. He wormed his way inside them, influenced them, guided the moments he joined—that’s how he understood his purpose, his role here and there: as a joint venture—as surely as a ray of sunlight illuminates a day or the rain dampens your hair. Few knew him directly or had access to him, and yet many had encountered him. He was the Master of Scents. He ruled …
Tag: Proust
Two Poems on Perfume by Anne Gorrick + Scented Paintings
these two perfume-inspired poems by Anne Gorrick are by turns intricate and expansive, concrete and ephemeral. They sparkle with sensual language, and shimmer with celestial spirit. “Perfume is invisible. Many people roll their eyes at it, as if you’re asking them to believe in ghosts. There is a flaky, new age, intellectually negligent perception that surrounds scent,” Gorrick explains in an interview at Galatea Resurrects. “But it’s an entire realm that is completely Proustian, sometimes plangent, dimensional, symphonic.” At Aromatica …
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Proust’s Madeleine: The Smell & Taste of Recollection
Many have written on the stunning way smell and by extension taste seem to circumnavigate our intellect to bring us face to face with the past, but few have written the phenomenon so eloquently and influentially as Marcel Proust. At Aromatica Poetica, we acknowledge this famous madeleine scene from the first book of A la Rechearche du Temps Perdu, translated variously as Remembrance of Things Past and In Search of Lost Time, as a foundational text. Here it is excerpted …
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Individuation & the Power of Scent: An Interview With Florian Birkmayer MD
Florian Birkmayer is the kind of multidisciplinary spirit we love at Aromatica Poetica. Trained as a psychiatrist, deeply influenced by Jung, and devoted to the healing power of scent and the natural world, particularly aromatherapy and equine therapy, his practice has led him to found Aromagnosis with his wife Cathy Skipper. Together they are developing an online and live learning curriculum that is truly unique, including classes such as Alchemy, Aromatherapy and Medicine of the Soul, Intuitive Plant Communication, Hydrosols …
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