The Five Senses by Michel Serres

Author:Michel Serres
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Statue

Entering the room heavily, a statue interrupts the feast, as is customary.

Its marble exterior denies it the use of any of its senses. The philosopher who built it and leads it inside has reserved the right to open up the senses, as he sees fit, to the different impressions they are capable of receiving. Organized like us on the inside, animated by a spirit devoid of any kind of ideas, heavy with the scent of rose, crowned with carnation, jasmine, violet and bandaged, it enters amidst guests whose spirit has come from the floral or earthy bouquets making up the peacock’s tail surrounding the glass of Yquem. The statue takes it seat amidst the mouths and tongues.

Beneath the cold, smooth, untouched skin, veined like marble, the body resides inside a black box. Its master, Condillac, activates the entrances: he opens or closes a well-defined window through which a single, well-filtered, specific piece of information penetrates. He experiments on his automaton, analytically and systematically. He begins in the domain of scent, with rose, then carnation, jasmine and violet.

Which rose did he use, and which violet? Parma violets, tricoloured and hooded? Sweet violets, dog violets, common blue violets, Russian violets? As though nobody in the living world had ever picked a rose and smelled its heady fragrance. Which colour variety, from which latitude and nurtured by which gardener; we should specify the season and the exact week during the course of its flowering. One May afternoon, the weather still not really mild . . . one glorious September morning . . . having gone to the Parc de la Bagatelle to better appreciate the emotional state of Condillac’s statue, I found myself laughing out loud and crying like a baby when confronted with the spatial explosion of the different hues and the speckled palette of different varieties. Did the statue find itself submerged in the delicate fragrance of Great Maiden’s Blush, the most beautiful of all speckled roses, Petite Lisette, Queen of Hearts, Princesse de Venosa, the Carmo-sine or Jacqueminot? Not to mention the much-neglected dog-rose and other varieties. Bathed in this new peacock’s tail to the point of drunkenness, could or would even the most expert sense of smell want to fall back on analysis? And would gardeners or expert perfumers from Grasse not laugh till they cried at the excessive sophistication of the experiment, where the automaton is concerned, and at its crude and profane ineptitude when dealing with flowers? The machine frightens the guests – it is imposing. One day we will construct, and respect, a computer capable of distinguishing a Sauternes from Coca Cola. We will have forgotten that the latter has a fixed formula, reducible to a finite sequence of words or codes, and that the former, unstable and individuated, is as variable as watered silk. We will have forgotten the empiricism of the gardener, the overwhelming profusion of roses and the confusion of their fragrance.

And, said the old gardener, whom the terrifying statue wanted to silence,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.