Category Archives: senses

Inspiration Monday: Silence

Husband sitting in the partially ruined church at Oxburgh, Norfolk

I was reading the chapter on silence in Christina Baldwin’s book ‘Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as Spiritual Practise’, and it immediately rang bells for me. I have a particular reason for this. Let me explain:

One of the symptoms of the chronic illness with which I live, ME/CFS, is sensitivity to noise. Some days are better than others, but there are everyday sounds in modern life that can create physical agony for me. And no, I’m not kidding. I mean, I get actual pain. A cold electric current feeling up and down my spine and a nauseating icy pain in the back of my skull. Unpleasant to say the least.

For the first three years of my illness, I couldn’t listen to any music with a beat at all. Every thud of bass was like a knitting needle jabbed into my neck. No pop radio, no rock, no hand jiving in the car to the Stone Roses or the Pet Shop Boys. No Elvis. No Beatles. Nothing.

I couldn’t listen to anything much. Mozart and Bach worked, a little Handel mixed in. Beethoven proved too noisy, as did anything after him, although I did find I could handle some Vaughan Williams. Opera was right out, so goodbye to my favourite tenor, Placido Domingo. I just couldn’t bear to listen to him anymore.

Most of the time, though, any kind of noise was painful.

So for three years I avoided places where the music was piped, and had to ask friends who listened to music perpetually to turn down their stereos, which was mortifying because they just didn’t understand.

I adjusted to a world without music.

I learnt a different way of listening.

I listened to the birds, the ones that make pretty sounds, and the ones that don’t. I learnt I could set my watch by the rooks in the tree opposite the house. (They all get together and start shouting at one another at 3.30pm, no matter what time of year it is.) They’re funny, like one of those noisy markets where everyone is shouting about their wares. I’m rather fond of rooks now.

I learnt to hear the vegetation around me too, the creaking trees and rustling shrubs, the fresh new spring leaves and the rattle of the dried autumn ones.

And the animals. The scuttle of mice in the undergrowth, the mewling squeaks the rabbits make, the scrabble of the squirrels on the roof tiles. The buzz of the mason bees under the window in the summer, the drone and thump of the hornets throwing themselves against the window, attracted by the light, in autumn.

I came to realise how much noise pollution we endure, day after day, the constant onslaught of a life lived with continual racket, the radio, the TV, the iPod, the piped music, the slot machines, even the roar of conversation echoing in the cavernous, sound-reflecting spaces of shopping malls. And how much we use recorded sound to blot out our minds, to stop us thinking too much.

The Christian mystics said that prayer is talking to God, but it isn’t much use if you don’t listen for when He speaks back. To hear the Divine, we have to be in silence. This is just as important when the voice that speaks inside us is the big, blousy, shriek as when it is the almost inaudible whisper. The practise of creativity demands that we listen. Sometimes, we have to listen hard, and without distractions.

When did you last spend time in silence? Do you make space for a little quiet time daily? Do you relish that moment when the kids are in bed, and you can sit down at the kitchen table with a glass of wine, take a deep breath, and just listen to the noises the house makes around you as it settles for the night? Or do you fill every waking hour with a constant cacophony to drown out the voices inside your head that are telling you the life you are living is not fulfilling you?

Out of the quiet comes not only spiritual fulfilment, spoken of in all religions, but human creativity. Out of silence come the stories we tell, the fantasies and day dreams that grow into novels, plays, paintings, films, concertos and ballets.

When we cultivate stillness, when we listen, we give our brains space to breathe. And yes, sometimes we then have to face up to the uncomfortable truths of our lives. But often, we have the opportunity to tap into wells of creative inspiration previously unknown to us. Our Muse’s voice can be heard.

You don’t have to take a vow of silence to benefit from stillness, and I’m not saying you should give up the joy of music. (I’m back on it now, and believe me, its one of my greatest inspirations.)

Listen to yourself.

What I am suggesting is that you take time daily to be in stillness. To listen to the sounds of the world around you instead of filling the void with canned synthetic noise. To listen to yourself. It may only be ten minutes, or the time you spend in the bathroom every morning, or half an hour before bed without the telly on. You don’t have to meditate, although that is good too. No, this is a different idea, a way of being quiet with ourselves, a way of listening for the inspiration to come. I know you lead a busy life, no doubt, and that quiet in a city is hard to find. But I assure you, it is there. You can find it. And when you do, immerse yourself in its balm, as often as you can, and allow it to feed your creative life.

Happy Creating,

Writing the Senses: Smell

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Nose (self portrait) watercolour and pencil

I spoke before about what I call Embodied Writing. I don’t think you have writing that is truly immediate and visceral without grounding it in the physical. Using your senses is one way to do this.

I looked up the sense of smell, and was blinded by a great deal of science on the olifactory system. A couple of little morsels I did manage to glean included:

Women have a stronger sense of smell than men, and their sense of smell is most powerful during ovulation.
The senses of smell and taste are related, and both depend on responding to volatile chemicals in the atmosphere. Which is presumably why I sometimes feel like I can ‘taste’ a smell.
In the human brain, the temporal lobes, which deal with cognition and memory, and the olifactory bulbs, which handle the perception of smell, are very closely linked. Scientists have speculated that this is what gave Homo Sapiens the evolutionary advantage over their rivals. It also means that smell and memory are closely linked, which is why certain smells can take you back to breath-takingly vivid memories of the past.
You sense of smell starts deteriorating in your teens, but that said, some pensioners have a better sense of smell than the average twenty-something. Like taste, though, smell is likely to be something you will lose as you get older.

Smell helps us identify the ripe and healthy food from the rotten. It helps us select a mate, and stay safe from dangers such as fires and wild animals. Smells connect us with our past, with positive and negative memories.

Nurses in front line dressing stations in the First World War reported vivid memories of the odors of rotting flesh amongst the casualties; and we all remember that quote from the film ‘Apocalypse Now’ about ‘the smell of napalm in the morning’.

For many of us, the scents of cinnamon and nutmeg instantly transport us to Christmas, and the smell of a favoured sun tan lotion can have us basking on a tropical beach even if we are actually sitting in a park in Barking. Watching cookery programmes is often so frustrating for this reason too – why doesn’t someone invent ‘Smellivision’? And if you have ever walked into a supermarket and found yourself drawn to the Bakery, even though you only came in for loo roll, don’t be fooled. Marketing specialists know how seductive that delicious scent is, so they pump the scent of baking bread through the air conditioning system to coax your brain into feeling hungry – and thus buying more.

Smells are hugely evocative, from the smell of poster paint on our first day at school to the aroma of wet earth after a summer storm, and that is why they are so important in writing.

Writing Exercises:

Take out your writing notebook and note down some of your favourite smells. What are the scents that are the most evocative for you? Make a list, then choose one and write down the memory that is associated with it, or why you chose it. Take the time to write in as much detail as you can. Think up as many adjectives, as many ways of describing the smell as you can.

Over the next few days and weeks, make a point of thinking more about your sense of smell, and the smells around you. If you are like me, and not a perfume wearer, or someone particularly aware of smells, you may have to work at this. Try to keep it in mind. Every day, try to pick a particular smell and write about it in your notebook, describing it as much detail as you can, and making connections with its context, or what memories it evokes for you.

Take yourself on a ‘Smell Safari’. Visit a florist’s and smell the flowers. Hang out at the bakers or in a shop that sells spices. Health Food shops and New Age shops often have interesting scents. Walk around the park, or in the country, smelling nice things and the nasty ones. (Don’t get too close to the nasty ones, though, for health reasons!) Don’t forget to take your notebook and make copious notes. Don’t limit yourself to nice perfume stores, though they can be interesting in themselves. There are millions of smells out there to sample, and very few of them are manufactured.

Write a few character sketches of people you know, describing them solely by their smells. What about the characters in the stories you are writing at the moment – what would they smell like? What smells would they like, and why?

Find out more about your sense of smell and how it works. Maybe you can work out the science better than I have. Then, test it out. What smells excite you, what smells depress you? Do some smells make you fearful? How do you react emotionally to individual scents?

Read Patrick Sűskind’s splendiferous masterpiece, ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’. A whole book written about the sense of smell? Yes, it’s incredible. You won’t believe your eyes. Or possibly your nose.

Imagine a familiar smell. Now take out your notebook and write about a context or scene in which that familiar, comforting scent becomes sinister, even terrifying. Now try it the other way around.

Once you have built up this memory bank of information about smell, think about how you can incorporate it into your writing. How can you use it to describe your characters, what telling details of scent will be enough to show your reader a person’s nature?

Happy Sniffing,

Embodied Creativity

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In my last post, I talked a little about telling details, those tiny things that communicate so much. Noticing them requires opening the mind. But there is another rung on the ladder with this: Opening to the body.

I call this embodied writing. By this I mean the kind of writing that includes the visceral details of what it is like to inhabit a physical body. Physical sensation, not just ideas and emotions.

Our bodies are not just the ‘transport’ we inhabit, as dear Sherlock likes to put it. They interact with the environment in order to gain information about it for survival purposes. They do this through the medium of the Senses.

Touch

Taste

Sight

Smell

Hearing

Our eyes, noses, ears, tongues and skins gather data and feed it back to the brain, which sifts it and uses it to build up a picture of the outside world. This means that our experience of life is formed as much by our body’s external contact as it is by our thoughts and ideas. As writers particularly, we spend so much time locked inside our heads, submerged in ideas for stories, that we forget we have bodies. Our bodies get neglected, or worse – sometimes writers abuse their bodies because they actually get in the way of the work by demanding annoying things like food and sleep. We forget that our bodies are the foundation of our art.

By using the sensations they give us, we can enrich our work exponentially, making it more immediate, tapping into common experience and tissue memory.

Over the next few weeks, I am going to talk about ‘Writing with the Senses’ in an effort to get you and me out of our heads and into our bodies with our writing. We will be working our way through each of the senses, being mindful of the feedback they give us, using them to ground us in our corporeal selves, and bringing the gorgeous experiences they give us into our creative lives. I’m doing this myself, because I really need to be present inside my body right now, instead of having my brain flying about sixteen feet from it, attached only by the barest thread of consciousness. And I thought you might be interested in joining me!

So, in the meantime, do this:

Take a few minutes today, tomorrow, daily if you can. Just stop. Take a deep breath and let it out. Bring your mind inside your body. What sensations can you feel? Do you have a pain in your toe, or an itchy insect bite? Did you eat spinach for tea that left that annoying coating on your teeth? Is your belt too tight? There doesn’t have to be any great revelation. Just notice.

Taking a moment at regular times during the day in order to be present inside your body is an invaluable exercise in grounding yourself and being mindful. And it is a great prelude to thinking about the Senses.