18Libro_Sinestesia_completo-final

But the night also has its perfume. If for Aragon the night had the perfume
of a “great nocturnal cyclamen”, Colette had the sensation that “an invisible
gardenia, feverish and white, opens its petals in the darkness”.
—From the “Dictionnaire du langage parfumé”
Fernando Prats
Of the muscle of the heart a sensitive fiber of light flows, with emanation of a
luminous scent aiming towards the South Pole.
Eulàlia Valldosera
The navel of the world stinks
Smoking is a practice that connects us with the instinct of feeding ourselves.
The only action that the newborn baby performs instinctively is sucking. It
smells the mother’s breast, which, induced by the nearby presence of the
baby, produces milk, which sometimes pours out and wasted before the infant
manages to take the nipple.
Smoking is, for those who have hade the vice for some time, a compulsive,
mechanical action, like any other manifestation of instinct. It is, at the
same time, an action that entails passivity, contradictory though this
may seem.
Smoking is a symbolic act. The newborn baby is nourished not only by the
milk, but also by affectivity, through physical contact with the mother. The lungs
envelop the heart, and the smoke inhaled and held there a few moments warms
it. Smoking also nourishes us affectively. Primarily, instinctively. In the long
run, however, it creates in us a need more powerful than this affect of fleeting
warmth that the smoke has had.
Anyone who smokes is surrounded by a ragged cloud, volatile ash. Anyone
who lights one cigarette after another is consuming time. Acting compulsively in
wanting to stop time. And all that remains of the action is the ash, the stub and
an aroma.
Carlos Irijalba
The Intangibility of Inertia
Inertia describes how the territory is not one, single and flat. At the same time,
neither are memories, and their importance is marked by the sense with
which they are connected. The memory of smells engages other, less common
parameters in this culture of ours. The sense of smell is capable visual and aural
of leaping decades in a second.
During two years of filming, the project was carried out at various locations
in the Basque Country, Navarra and Cantabria. The weather meant that the
sessions had to be reduced to two summers, in which we were frequently surprised
by thuderstorms, and the parched earth, dried out by the eucalyptus trees, sent
up a dust laden with nuances. The eucalyptus is one of the species that deplete
the soil most severely, and they grow very fast. They are cut down every summer
and sawmills abound in the area. Their smell impregnates whole valleys and that
indescribable smell accompanied us during long nights of filming.
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