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animal_quills2007-04-18 11:11 am
faileas-grey.livejournal.com) wrote in animal_quills2007-04-18 11:11 am
Scent- Perception
I know its a little late, and it wasn't actually written for the prompts, but rather its an essay originally written for a book of essays (most of which which originally appeared on LJ and my website) that i should be releasing soon.It does fit the theme of perception for me, so here we go.
To me being an animal person is quite significantly a matter of sense and feeling.In addition to the fact that i notice some of my senses a fair bit- i doubt they are enhanced in terms of ability (spider sense would be so awesome though)- even if people are convinced i can see behind my back (i don't, i hear and notice shadows and other small things. Its fun letting people think that), but rather in terms of them being paid attention to and heeded, i tend to feel additional things, perhaps the best way to put it is energy in terms of a certain sort of synthesia.
This synthesia is a little hard to describe. It is the smell of colours and textures, the crisp gossimer thin blue wind flowing past your body, wrapping around you like ribbons of etherially thin silk
While i was born and brought up in a city, even one that claims to be a garden city, i love wild places. There might be green, but cultivated, neat green feels like its sleeping. Real wildish forests have a life,the green of trees slowly growing, stable yet more alive than anything else you've ever felt, a hymn to life itself/
And the smell some animal folk have, the disarmingly familiar scent, both wild and comforting, letting you know these people are like *you*.I tend to suck at the last one, sometimes smelling that scent, looking around, then realising the slightly intense girl sitting next to me, or the one in the red dress who happened to be across the room at the local game shop (i suck at pinpointing it though, and usually when i do, i'm a little shy to walk up to total strangers and ask them if they are were/therian/animalfolk).
It is a sense i call smell, but more than that, combining a little of every sense i feel, and somehow being far more than that.Oddly though, when i smell things through this sense, my conventional sense of smell gets somewhat stronger. I once got overwhelmed by the smell of mint from someone chewing gum roughly 5 meters away from me.It could be that since i mainly associate this sense with smell, i notice smells more(i don't believe its some kind of spider sense or something of that nature).
Its also how i percieve my empathy to be. People smell of emotions, it rises off them like an odor or a perfume. Sometimes, if a place is crowded enough, it can be overpowering, like walking into the cosmetics department of a large shopping center, a million mixed smells assaulting the senses.Its a smell and a feeling, and a colour all at once. Its a little hard to describe in mere words a sense that permiates everything.
Not just people have it. I tend to pick up the happy bouncing PERSON!PET ME! *tailwags* from dogs,an innocent joy fanned by boincing and wagging tails- granted you'd need to be totally oblivious not to notice.Cats acting too cool to care but edging closer to their owners (well not quite so well as dogs, i'm not quite a cat person).
In a sense this is how i see my world, as the many coloured feelings of smell, of people and of places.
This synthesia is a little hard to describe. It is the smell of colours and textures, the crisp gossimer thin blue wind flowing past your body, wrapping around you like ribbons of etherially thin silk
While i was born and brought up in a city, even one that claims to be a garden city, i love wild places. There might be green, but cultivated, neat green feels like its sleeping. Real wildish forests have a life,the green of trees slowly growing, stable yet more alive than anything else you've ever felt, a hymn to life itself/
And the smell some animal folk have, the disarmingly familiar scent, both wild and comforting, letting you know these people are like *you*.I tend to suck at the last one, sometimes smelling that scent, looking around, then realising the slightly intense girl sitting next to me, or the one in the red dress who happened to be across the room at the local game shop (i suck at pinpointing it though, and usually when i do, i'm a little shy to walk up to total strangers and ask them if they are were/therian/animalfolk).
It is a sense i call smell, but more than that, combining a little of every sense i feel, and somehow being far more than that.Oddly though, when i smell things through this sense, my conventional sense of smell gets somewhat stronger. I once got overwhelmed by the smell of mint from someone chewing gum roughly 5 meters away from me.It could be that since i mainly associate this sense with smell, i notice smells more(i don't believe its some kind of spider sense or something of that nature).
Its also how i percieve my empathy to be. People smell of emotions, it rises off them like an odor or a perfume. Sometimes, if a place is crowded enough, it can be overpowering, like walking into the cosmetics department of a large shopping center, a million mixed smells assaulting the senses.Its a smell and a feeling, and a colour all at once. Its a little hard to describe in mere words a sense that permiates everything.
Not just people have it. I tend to pick up the happy bouncing PERSON!PET ME! *tailwags* from dogs,an innocent joy fanned by boincing and wagging tails- granted you'd need to be totally oblivious not to notice.Cats acting too cool to care but edging closer to their owners (well not quite so well as dogs, i'm not quite a cat person).
In a sense this is how i see my world, as the many coloured feelings of smell, of people and of places.
no subject
As for the last lines, this has nothing to do with empathy to me, it's simple observation and evrybody do this. Even among people, what some call empathy isn't to me. Picking up the smell, subtle movements and changes in a person and analyzing them appropriately relates more to psychology and normal behavior in social creatures than anything else.