Page 49 - Pedas Magazine edition 67

BOOKWORM

“The tropics were an olfactory revelation. She
realized that, coming from a temperate place like
the other Santa Cruz, her own Santa Cruz, she’d
been like a person developing her vision in poor
light. There was such a relative paucity of smells in
California that the interconnectedness of all possible
smells was not apparent. She remembered a college
professor explaining why all the colors the human eye
could see could be represented b a two dimensional
color wheel: it was because the retina had receptors
for three colors. If the retina had evolved with four
receptors, it would have taken a three-dimensional
color sphere to represent all the ways in which one
color could bleed into another. She hadn’t wanted
to believe this, but the smells at Los Volcanes were
convincing her. How many smells the earth alone had!
One kind of soil was distinctly like cloves, another
like catfish; one sandy loam was like citrus and chalk,
others had elements of patch or fresh horseradish.
And was there anything a fungus couldn’t smell like
in the tropics? She searched in the woods, off the
track until she found the mushroom with a roasted-
coffee smell so powerful it reminded her of skunk,
chocolate, which reminded her of tuna; smells in
the which reminded her of woods rang each of these
notes and made her aware, for the first time, of the
distinguishing receptors for them in her nose. The
receptor that had fired at Californian cannabis also
fired at Bolivian wild onions. Within half a mile of the
compound were five different flower smells in the
neighborhood of daisy, which itself close to sun-dried
goat urine. Walking the trails, Pip could imagine
how it felt to be a dog, to find no smell repellent,
to experience the world as a seamless many-
dimensional landscape of interesting and interrelated
scents. Wasn’t this a kind of heaven? Like being on
Ecstasy without taking Ecstasy? She had the feeling
that if she stayed at Los Volcanes long enough she
would end up smelling every smell there was, the way
her eyes had already seen every color on the color
wheel. “

BerI LoncArevIc
Funny we are, we humans.
Ill give you Jonathans Franzen insight on this matter
spoken through the eyes, and the nose, of a main Beri’s latest book is My Friend Vincent.
character of his new book Purity. Jonathan Franzen is Now the book can be bought in all the
a true maestro, and one of my favorite writers. better bookstores around Balii,My Cup
of Love, Rose Avenue,
Enjoy his words, maybe we can all learn something El Kabron, Deus ex Machina, and
from the fact that reality is not what it seems, and that Drifter Surf Shop.
we should be very careful what we believe in. There
is no such thing like new colors - new colors are only As you would expect, he’s not a social
those we weren’t previously aware that exist. network devotee, but you can still contact
him at beriloncarevic@yahoo.com
* * *

47 47