The perception of odors is conjured up in a part of the brain called the olfactory bulb.  The olfactory bulb is part of the brain’s limbic system - a set of structures that also form emotions, behaviors and long term memories. 

Smell is comprised of fleeting transience.  In its very manifestation is mimics memory.  Invisible.  Powerful.  But a subtle wind can carry it away. 

Schmüdde

We lose something when we don’t care for our culture.  We lose something more when we create culture that isn’t worth caring for.  The current popular export of American creatives is made to be disposed of.  We are becoming a nation of mankurts - people that cannot recall their native cultural roots and origin - because growing up admiring the beauty of Wal*Mart is an oxymoron.

Print by Max Klinger ~1919

On Time and Narrative

Volume I of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica itemizes a list of events in Gaul that occurred during the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries.  Although it lists facts, it doesn’t have any of the elements that we would think of as story.  It gives us an idea of culture and conflict.  It lists the events in humanly experienced time.  This form of time has no high points or low points.  It is endless.  It does not conclude.  It simply terminates.  The list of times are full, even if the experiences are not.  There is very little romance and no sense of nostalghia in the true annals of history.

An excerpt from 709-734 A.C.E:

709: Hard winter.  Duke Gottfriend died.
710: Hard year and deficient in crops.
711:
712: Flood everywhere.
713:
714: Pippin, Mayor of the Palace, died.
715:
716:
717:
718: Charles devastated the Saxon with great destruction.
719:
720: Charles fought against the Saxons.
721: Theudo drove the Saracens out of Aquitaine.
722: Great crops.
723:
724:
725: Saracens came for the first time.
726:
727:
728:
729:
730:
731: Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died.
732: Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Sunday.
733:
734:

To Sit at an Unknown Table

                  by Sandro Penna, born June 12, 1906

                       translated by Alexander Booth

To sit at an unknown table
To sleep in someone else’s bed
To feel the already empty square
Swell in tender goodbye

Front row: A.G. Nikolayev; Y.A. Gagarin; “Vostok” chief designer S.P. Korolioff; training director Karpov; parachute trainer N.K. Nikitin.
Back row: P.R. Popovich; G.G. Nelyuboff; G.S. Titov; V.F. Bykovsky.

It is a well known fact that, at the beginning of the space race, the Soviet authorities refused to admit failure in their manned missions. They made great efforts to hide any trace of those pilots or cosmonauts that either perished or were, in some other way, disgraced.

The first series of pictures presented here are known as the “Sochi” photographs, because they were taken at the Black Sea resort of Sochi in May of 1961, shortly after the successful orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin.

The picture with the six cosmonauts has been released in at least four versions, three of which were notable for the absence of one of the cosmonauts, airbrushed into oblivion by the state censors. The missing cosmonaut has been identified as Grigory Grigoryevich Nelyuboff. The current story from Moscow is that Nelyuboff was expelled from the cosmonauts’ corps for bad behavior (apparently he got into a fight). He fell into disgrace and committed suicide in 1966.

via The Lost Cosmonauts - Erased from memory

“I always say searching for yourself can be the loneliest search because you don’t even have yourself to go with you.”

Bruno Catalno, In Search of Missing Pieces

His works reveal his desire to capture the viewer’s attention while stamping his unique mark on the subject. … These astonishing works, with their dashed bodies and the determined lack of volume, invite the viewer to mentally reconstitute its limits. … Through his statuary, he re-enacts the adventure of the human species, always between two riverbanks, repelling all borders