Marula Amarula

2009 Couldn't resist a bottle on an end-aisle ... having read Lyall Watson's writing on the plant - what would it taste like?  

Amarula a cream liqueur with an elephant with tusks on the label: this natural liqueur is produced from the unique fruit of the marula tree and fresh cream; product of South Africa.

I find it has a slight citrusy tang and creamy vanilla blend.

In an article perfumer Vedat Ozan sent to me at the end of 2009 on Upcoming Flavors marula is listed ...

click here and scroll down  see animals enjoy the fermented fruit

 












Was the BBC documentary of animals getting "high" once a year with the marula tree's fermented fruit monkied with?
I have no idea other than Amarula didn't have that effect on me ... for better or worse 

photo: Marula tree and fruit, Transvaal, South Africa by Rotational

Smell with the Breath of the Sky

 














I tien tien fung
... a sigh in the sky

from Lyall Watson's work on Winds

In the language of Tewa Indians
a 3-syllable term translated as
art or creativity means
water-wind-breath
A beautiful evocation of
the creative process
about catching the current,
breathing in, breathing out
in-spiration, breathe in spirit,
ex-halation, release it into the world
        
 - Robert Moss
 
from his book 
Dreamgates: An Explorer’s Guide to the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life Beyond Death

Pastel: Wellfleet Bay Deb Dwyer

written in ink that slowly fades away

Pig society is smell-bound.

Almost everything pigs do
is determined
in some
way
by odor.

Scent-marking and scent-reading help to define these limits and to cement social communication.

In our attempts to make sense of systems that are beyond our sensory grasp, I suspect that we disparage some scent-laying practices by passing them off as “territorial markings.” The fact is that pigs are not really territorial at all but operate movable home ranges, shifting these as they adapt to the seasons. They are generous with their secretions for a different reason, one that has more to do with identity than property. They are protecting themselves, rather than their surroundings, finding security in society instead of territory, laying down olfactory perimeters that are flexible.

.... Every warthog lives in a world filled with messages from every other warthog in the area – so that each one knows exactly where everyone else is, how they are, what they have been eating, and how long ago they passed this way.  

It must be like getting lots of letters every day from all your friends and family, letters filled with news and gossip, but written in ink that slowly fades away.

- Lyall Watson
Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs

 
photos:
Phacochoerus Africanus Hells Gate National Park, Kenya Joachim Huber
Warthog in Ngorongor Nicor
Illustration: Musical Book Lura Astor

beautiful young adult's book

Warriors, Warthogs, and Wisdom: Growing up in Africa is a lovely read written for young adults. Lots of heart and some smelly facts, authored by Lyall Watson.

The young Watson befriended an orphan warthog who became part of the farm's family and gained the name Hoover. In Watson's longer book Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs he could emphasize pigs' olfactory expertise.

Hoover ran away one day to be eventually found at the site where he was originally orphaned when his family had been killed and eaten. A bush elder tracking low to the ground in search for the pet says to the boy, “Intibane, the ugly one. He has very smelly feet.”

The author continues, "Which is true. Pigs have poor eyesight and only average hearing, but their sense of smell is fantastic. They are walking scent factories, with special glands on their faces, at the corner of the eyes, on the chin, in the mouth, under the tail, and even on the ankles. And warthogs have particularly strong glands on the pads of their feet. Everywhere they go, they leave tiny little droplets of their own personal smell behind them, which can last for days. Every warthog lives in a world filled with messages from every other warthog in the area – so that each one knows exactly where everyone else is, how they are, what they have been eating, and how long ago they passed this way. It must be like getting lots of letters every day from all your friends and family, letters filled with news and gossip, but written in ink that slowly fades away."

"He (pet warthog Hoover) had a great memory and never forgot an odor." 











 ... the imagery of smells as ink stories that slowly fade away.

Reminds me of the burnaway cypher silks in Leo Marks' Between Silk and Cyanide.  



photo: BS Thurner Hof 
Illustration: Color Wave Lura Astor

Sniff 'n' Poof !

I love Lyall Watson's Jacobson's Organ!

Don't worry, you have one, and you and you and I ... we play them marvelously ... lovely smell music.

Published in 2000, Jacobson's Organ: and the Remarkable Nature of Smell from another interdisciplinarian, is a delight to read.

 
We think because we smelled ~ Lyall Watson

Smell is governed more by instinct than intellect, moving through our lower brain while other senses take a different freeway, transmitting via one's upper brain.

Dr. Watson passed in June of 2008 at the age of 69. He answered many of the questions I have begun to raise on this site.

First Smell
 
In his commentary on Patrick Suskind's book Perfume I found kindred perspectives. On people's surprise that the main character, orphan turned murderer, Grenouille, has powers of extreme smell receptivity, Watson says, "He produces all the evidence of what we call 'second sight' by the exercise of what we might instead call 'first smell'.

yes!

And, in my opinion, importantly Watson writes

"I believe that where Perfume ultimately fails is in its emphasis on the dangerous savagery inherent in the sense of smell Suskind lingers on the details of fragrant, hapless maidens stalked by an obsessive maniac who sniffs out his prey, instead of exploring everyone else’s untouched potential. This is a little disheartening. It really is time we stopped denigrating the power and influence of smell in all our lives. And yet, smell has been culturally suppressed for so long that one has to wonder. Perhaps heightened olfactory consciousness really would be dangerous to the established social order. Think what we could do with it!"

To that I respond, more heartening, lifely ... fun and funny things.



Lyall Watson addresses smell's effect on our hormones, which dovetails with earlier posts here addressing some precarious side effects of birth controls, especially in relation to smelling and truth in mating.

"We know that the odour of a strange male’s urine lowers the level of pituitary hormones in pregnant female mice and results in miscarriages. It has been shown that strange male urine can even shift the hormonal balance so far that female hamsters never become pregnant at all. And the same results in rodents have been produced by androgen-rich human urine. But no one seems to be looking at the possible role of smell on the fertility of women who work, perhaps as cleaners, n surroundings where they may be exposed to the urinary odours of unfamiliar men.

We should worry about such things. They represent real risks to any woman who is both pregnant and has an intact Jacobson’s Organ. An informal survey among my own friends suggests that young wives do often have difficulty conceiving for the first time when living in the home of their husband’s family, surrounded by the odours of brothers and fathers-in-law. They often fall pregnant within months of finding a home of their own."

 












 
I remain vividly aware of scent and color.

Watson, ".... I believe that there may be still other ways of olfactory knowing. These involve synesthesia, not taking away a sense and allowing others to compensate for the loss, but adding one sense to another in ways that reinforce them both."

 
A bit of the organ's historical context and lore:

"This elusive feature is the Organ of Jacobson, named after the sharp-eyed Danish anatomist who discovered it nearly two centuries ago. It is easy to miss. The external evidence consists simply of a pair of tiny pits, one on either side of the nasal septum, a centimeter or two above every human nostril. But the fact that it does exist changes everything.

Far Smell
 
1780, an obscure civil servant on Ile de France (now Mauritius) wrote to his Minister of Marine and announced that he had discovered a way of detecting ships while they were still below the horizon. He called it nauscopie, and describe it as ‘anticipating by means of smell’, the olfactory equivalent of ‘far sight’, a sort of ‘far smell’. Unfortunately we know no more details about his technique, but history records that it enabled him to win a great deal of money in wagers."

There is so much more in the rich books he has left us; mine them. 

For now, I leave you with this:




 


















"I don’t believe we have even begun to come to terms with our sense of wonder. We still have a lot to learn, particularly from those parts of the sense housed in the rhinencephalon  the old ‘smell brain’.

Mysteries abound there, and reveal themselves only when we have the courage and the imagination to ask the proper questions.


Jean Jacques Rousseau says,
The sense of smell is the sense of imagination.
It greatly disturbs the brain.

Indeed, and it still does."


Images: Circle Fumes/Woman/Wind/Under Beauty/DNA Egg Lura Astor Art

Sense of Wonder

 
I don’t believe we have even begun to come to terms with our ‘sense of wonder’.

We still have a lot to learn, particularly from those parts of the sense housed in the rhinencephalon  
– the old ‘smell brain’. 

Mysteries abound there, and reveal themselves only when we have the courage and the imagination to ask the proper questions.  - Lyall Watson

I find the cavils
of self-appointed committees
for the suppression of curiosity
very tedious

 - Lyall Watson

Illustration: Bottle from Perfume Series Lura Astor