When you’re more
sensitive than usual, more energetic, more awake, literally more alive,
there can result a transmutation of perception, a fusion of the
senses.
A woman steps out
of a boutique. In her hair is the February sun, and a tug of wind, and
in the same instant you catch a furtive scent on the breeze, almost
imperceptible, something you may or may not have ever smelled before, or
maybe it is the air’s freshness itself, you don’t know and the question
doesn’t cross your mind.
So far so normal,
but today your impresssions are confounded, the scent of the sky is part
of the description of her hair, no less than is its brownness and sheen,
no less than its hesitating dance in the
wind.
The blueness of the
sky too is in her hair, and on her mouth, and in the perfectly unique
way she has of falling forward slightly when she
walks.
Later, when you
think if over, your realize your error, your illusion, for that
particular blueness, that fragrance, cannot possibly be in her hair. The
impression was an accident of circumstance. You will see her again
another day, in a different setting, when the sky is grey and overcast.
Does she become a different woman?
And yet you feel as
though her nature has been as if penetrated and changed by that certain
blue and scent, forever. Her beauty has evolved and deepened, and when
you do see her again, in a different light and season, and if your mind
is particularly clear that day, you will once again see that blue glint
on her hair and shoulder, you will catch that fragrance in her smile or
frown, and clinging to her jacket.
And you will know
that you are not recalling or imagining the past but witnessing
something fresh and real, something in her nature, in spite of dull
logic’s barbarian atttempts to crush it out of
existence.