Hacking "Sense and Creativity"!

Assalamu Alaikum dear reader friends!!

Happy to be back with a "sweet sounding" greeting for the New Year!!

Wish you all a happpppyyyyy New Year filled with success and prosperity!!!

Life has been going well dear amigos... with the help of books and music! What is life if one doesn't have time to read at least 50 pages or so, before going to sleep every night?!

So friends this time I chose this beautiful treatise on "senses" by Diane Ackerman!! The book is called A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES!! Thanks a million Dr Kunhammad for introducing me to this growing genre called Sensory Studies!! Special thanks to Dr Rufus, our admin @Readers' Rendezvous, for his stimulating ideas on Creativity which inspired me to write this post!

Sensory Studies involve a cultural, anthropological, sociological, psychological, and an aesthetic approach to the study of senses. In short, "The sensorium is a fascinating focus for cultural studies" says Walter J.Ong in "The Shifting Sensorium". You can learn more about this discourse Here.

I found the name of the book A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES so unique and intriguing. I came across this book at AnyBooks App (To download click here).(Believe me this app is really amazing... Lists down all the famous reads, national and international, all for free, in just a single click!!! I highly recommend the app for y'all..!!)

And now it's time to learn how the book works.. trust me... It works like magic!!! Ackerman's fluid language flows through our senses like liquid gold mixed with chocolate sauce... So touching... Soothing... Full of sense and essence!!! It's so irresistible that you can't stop reading or cease to feel its intensity. Ackerman has structured it with such a genius that the words describing "smell" are appetizing, the words describing "touch" are tactile and thrilling, and the words describing "hearing"  are so loud and impactful!!

I've listed here a few essential topics discussed by Ackerman. They include, "The Personality of smell", "Anosmia", "Cleopatra's Hairs", "Speaking of Touch", "The Skin has Eyes", "Kissing", "Subliminal Touch", "The Social Sense", "The Bloom of a Taste Bud", "In Praise of Vanilla", "The Hearing Heart", "Quicksand and Whale Songs", "Is Music a Language", "The Painter's Eye", "Synesthesia", and "Fantasia". These topics encompass some of the most surprising and unimagined landscapes of the human senses like the cartography of smell, auditory niches, movement of temperature, sensory frightmares, tasting colours, and sounding smells!! 

Ackerman's unusual use of similes, phraseology, and metaphors makes the text so lively that the reader seems to drown in its tune and tenacity. Religions, Cultures, Anthropology, Literature are the different tangents set carefully by her on a single lane called "senses", which is quite a huge task and deserves to be applauded for its accuracy and intricacy. She connects different senses through stunning etymological excavations. And connects cultures through synergistic sensory constructs. 

Let me jot down a profound quote from the book for y'all...!

"How we delight our senses varies greatly from culture to culture... yet the way in which we use the senses is exactly the same. What is most amazing is not how our senses span distance or cultures, but how they span time. Our senses connect us intimately to the past, connect us in ways that most of our cherished ideas never could." (Diane Ackerman, A Natural History)

I felt this true to the core that senses carry us across time and space. Senses have no limits within the environment that we are caged in. They are exclusive of the control of our ego, I reckon. We salivate when we feel food; we indulge in rhythms of music and get lost in time; We feel special when we are touched; and sometimes touch may become a stigma too! The semantics of senses, thus, evolve and convolve with our emotions. They are unpredictable!

At this juncture I so want to bring to my readers' notice this latest song BADDEK EIH (click here to watch) by the most popular chanteur from Morocco, Saad Lamjarred, to enhance the experience of relishing the dimensions of creativity in Sensory Studies. This amazing singer has a Guinness World Record of achieving more than 500 million views for his song "L'mallem" within three months of its release!

Diane Ackerman makes a sublime statement, "Mother and child are united by an umblical cord of sound" (Diane Ackerman, A Natural History). Similarly, the listener is united with Saad's arpeggios by the umblical cord of music!! The tenor of his voice is as vibrant and affecting as the notes of a flute, and is as fresh and crisp as the clear fragrance of mountain air. In my modes of solitude and complacency, a hot cuppa accompanied by Saad's playlist will definitely paint my sobriety with a bucolic pleasure. The Arabic accent, which is so blended with religious intensities in my life, is given an amplitude of dexterous modernity in his songs. His other hits like "L'mallem", "Ghazali", "Enty", and "Casablanca" are equally beautiful and distinct in their style. His revolutionary usage of  Darija (Moroccan Arabic language) in his vocals sets him apart in global pop-music scenario according to Sarah Zaaimi, a Moroccan journalist from Springfield. She declares that:

"What is important in Saad's music, contrary to other Maghrebi singers who seek acceptance from the Middle East by rejecting their dialects and singing in Egyptian and Lebanese, is that he dared to bring Darija from the periphery to the center of the music scene."

Despite the recent allegations on him, he's discovered to be the most sought-after artist throughout the world. It is the artistic experience, inspiration, and expression in him, that counts valuable to the viewer/listener. An artist gives expression to transcendental experiences as claimed by Timothy Leary: 
"To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist... When you teach someone how to perform creatively.. you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly" (Timothy Leary, Changing My Mind, Among Others). 
TS Eliot captures the same idea in these verses, "music heard so deeply/ That is not heard at all, but you are the music/ While the music lasts" (TS Eliot, The Dry Salvages). So it is the art that lingers inside us as an experience that emerges as an unfaded product of creativity. 

In Saad Lamjarred we find an aesthetic seduction and a transcendental experience, as Ackerman perfectly etches, "Life showers over everything, radiant, and gushing. The senses feed shards of information to the brain like microscopic pieces of jigsaw puzzle..." (Diane Ackerman, A Natural History). When enough pieces of information assemble in our brain it conceives a sensory image of what we feel. Similarly, through brilliant composition of "microscopic rhythms" Saad brings a wholesome piece of art unto us. Ultimately, it is through observation of sensory sanctity that we comprehend true art. To imbibe Ackerman's extraordinary metonymical language and to absorb Saad Lamjarred's ingenious musical vocabulary one must succumb an open-hearted curiosity about the world. To sum up, I would like to quote the eminent poet from America, Mary Oliver, who reflected on the central commitment of the creative life:

"The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time."

On a similar vein, Rainer Maria Rilke contemplates the power of appreciating creativity:

"One must see many cities, men and things..

One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning..

One must have memories of many nights of love.. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window..." (Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge)

Signing off,

With love,
Rasheeda Madani.

Courtesy: Readers' Rendezvous/ Wikipedia/ Wikiquotes/ Forbes.com/ AnyBooks/ YouTube/ Brainpickings/ Sensorystudies.org/ Goodreads

Books: 1. A Natural History of Senses- by Diane Ackerman

Image Courtesy: Google