"Lose your mind and come to your senses"
- Fritz Perls
"All our knowledge begins with the senses"
- Immanuel Kant
"You cannot understand the meaning of life by trying to rationalise it. You can only feel it."
- Albert Einstein
Increasingly we live in a world in which we are stuck in our thinking minds, losing touch with our senses, cut off from our bodies.
Many musicians are familiar with that panicky feeling when the thinking mind kicks in during a performance, with criticisms, judgemental thoughts, fears of failure, of making a mistake, memory lapses. Our hearing, both internal and external, seems to have deserted us, our bodies become tense, and we lose physical control. We need to discover the joy of coming back to our senses.
A joy which is wonderfully described by the writer, Alan Garner:
"Language is kinetic. It's all to do with the whole body.
If, for instance, as a writer, you are going along in a sentence and you have a choice between two words, somehow one word will feel better than the other, and you use that. That works fine in the hand, but on a keyboard there's no feel to it. The noise is the same, whichever key you press, it's all a dull affair.
Whereas with writing, it's a bit like painting I think. It goes through the arm from the brain, to the surprise of the writer, the words go down on to the paper. It's not mystical, it's mysterious. It's one of the joys of writing."
While celebrating the undoubted gains of technology, we should remember also the significant losses.
Gloria Steinem echoed this advice when she wrote:
"I hope the readers will consider, in this age of the world-wide web, that we still need to be in the same room, with our five senses, to fully empathise with each other."
Let us also be aware that one our most important senses is completely absent from online communications.
"Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth."
- Margaret Atwood
"Magic is really only the utilisation of the entire spectrum of the senses."
- Michael Scott
Virginia Woolf creates a wonderful range of sensory imagery in her book, 'A Room of One's Own':
"Here was I, sitting on the banks of a river, lost in thought. To the right and left, bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even, it seems, burnt with the heat of fire. On the further bank, willows wept with the sound of perpetual lamentation, the hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again completely, as if he had never been. There one might have sat the clock round, lost in thought. Thought, to call it by a prouder name than it deserved, had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reeds, letting the water sink it, until, you know the little tug, the conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line, and then the cautious hauling of it in, and then the playing of it out. Alas, laid on the grass, how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked, the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water, so that it may one day become fatter, and worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may see the cause of what I am going to say. But however small it was, nevertheless it had a property of its kind. Put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting and important, and as it started and sank hitherto and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still."
Great writing stirs the imagination and re-awakens the senses.
"Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory,
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
"I could foresee my music as a wonderful fusion of perfumes, colours and sounds."
- Claude Debussy
One of Debussy's greatest works, L'Apres-midi d'une faune, was described by a critic at the first performance as being "wholly sensual and voluptuous."
Debussy's sensuous and exquisite music was reflected in the man himself, with his refined tastes and love of beautiful things.
"One longs madly for a work of art, whether it be a ravishing painting, an Oriental vase, or a new tie."
His fine taste was expressed in his love of food.
Even from his earliest days, Debussy enjoyed the most refined culinary tastes. He recalled a schoolfriend's mother taking him to the Patisserie Prevost in Paris.
"I can still remember clearly the cup of chocolate Gabriel's mother used to buy me, and how I would choose from the luxury items an exquisite little sandwich, or a tiny dish of pasta, instead of gorging on buns like my greedy friends."
Perhaps we can follow Debussy's example, and learn to take just a few minutes in the midst of our busy lives to savour the smell and taste of the coffee bought on the way to work, or to relish the flavours and textures of even the humblest sandwich at lunch time. Just for a few moments we can re-awaken our senses, and begin to perceive the world as a sensory playground.
During the recent pandemic, many people experienced a re-awakening of their senses when the frantic pace of modern life screeched to a violent halt. Amidst the deprivations and suffering, we found consolation and unexpected joy in hearing birdsong for the first time in our city centres, and in the prescribed daily walks, which enabled us to appreciate anew the beauties of the natural world around us.
Movement, particularly as expressed in walking, is usually regarded as one of our key senses, in addition to the familiar five, touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. It is a way of aligning our minds and bodies with the world. Walking stimulates the imagination and the creative impulse.
Throughout history poets, writers and musicians have found inspiration in moving on foot, feeling a sense of moving in time. Beethoven, Mahler, Tchaikovsky and Britten all found walking an essential spur for their creativity, and Mozart revealed in a letter of 1798:
"When I am feeling most myself, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. These ideas form internal sounds, of which those that please me best I retain in my memory.
I am told that I hum these sounds to myself, and, if I continue in this way, it occurs to me that I may combine these morsels so as to make a good dish of it."
Having revealed most tellingly how he moves from one sense to another in his compositional process, we hear in a final extract:
"I can survey and see the whole like a fine picture or a sculpture. I do not hear the parts successively, but all at once."
Mozart shows clearly in his letters an overlapping of his senses, indicating a high level of synesthesia.
We cannot all be Mozarts, but we can use our senses more fully, to access our own individual creativity, and to experience the wonders of life, in every sense.
"If I, blind, deaf, find life rich and interesting, how much more can you gain by the use of your five senses?"
- Helen Keller