James & Kay Salter – Osip Mandelshtam
THE SIX SENSES
One cannot think well, love well, slep well, if one has not dined well
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Brillat-Savarin recognised the five basic senses -taste, touch, hearing, sight and smell- but he believed there was a sixth sense: physical desire, a unique and distinctly French idea.
Everything subtle and ingenious about the first five senses, he wrote, was due to this sixth, “to the desire, the hope, the gratitude that spring from sexual union.”
Well, call me Anglo-Saxon, but BS is a bore if he doesn’t understand the mutual implication of desire in the five senses. Desire uncompromised and desire realised.
I prefer Osip Mandelshtam’s notion of a sixth sense, mooted during his journeying to Mount Ararat:
Ashtarak. “I have cultivated in myself a sixth sense, an “Ararat” sense: the sense of attraction to a mountain.
Now, no matter where fate carry me, this sense already has a speculative existence and will remain with me.”
[p. 57 Journey to Armenia Next Editions 1980. Orig. Puteshestviye v Armeniyu Zvezda 1933.]
Do we have to choose? Does a mountain sense include desire etc. or desire include “the sense of attraction to a mountain”? Then again, what is it with mediators and authorisation?
A mountain sense is my candidate because it adds something distinct and dimensional to the core senses in ways that desire doesn’t. I write that having climbed Shatrunjaya, ‘the mount that realises all desires’, more than once…
NB See my Note ‘js; reader’s revenge & last night 2006’ on the entanglements and ambivalence of these things.
NOTES FROM A FRUITSTORE 