Not Sweating the Small Stuff

Sensory As Opposed To Between-The-Ears Experience

I always look with more than a little pleasure at this photo - taken in central Paris the trip before the trip before last. I think somewhere near the Pompidou Centre, which as you probably know houses the Musée National d'Art Moderne ...

(Not my image)

(Not my image)

(Not my image)

... with the amazing exposure and colour-coding of its structural functionalities.

There's a space area out front ...



... where we watched this Japanese guy doing a performance piece.

But I digress.

So I remember watching the kids play in and round The Face, particularly the one in The Hand - and registering the tactile sensory nature of their activities.

And recalled that this was the way I mostly (or preferentially) began to experience the world.

Like lying down on the patio at home at the height of summer just to savor the smell of water evaporating on the hot hot concrete. At 3 or 4.

And the aroma of fresh grass cuttings spread over the compost heap. And of seaweed washed up and rotting on the sand at the waters's edge near. On the beach opposite our week-end away holiday house. The sensations literally tingling in my nose.

The distinctive almost plastic smell of the pages of my first 'John and Betty' book ...


... and the cold silky texture of the pages as I pressed them against my face.

The unexpected erotics of the stale aroma of Martin Davies' furry crotch - when at 11 I was kneeling in front of him just to look at his dick. And the warm intensively pleasurable smell of his hairy muscular legs and broad fleshy naked feet.

Renewal of any one of these early olfactory experiences brings almost unimaginably intense pleasure. That between-the-ears memories can't begin to match.

Same for you?