Can you smell the sun? Gallery Huuto Jätkäsaari, Helsinki, 2014.
You can’t smell sun or maybe you can, if you think that everything around you has an odor and in most cases that smell originates from the sun. Some years ago astronomers stated that the center of our galaxy actually would smell of rum. In a search for organic compounds they also found quantities of ethyl formate, which implies that our galaxy tastes like raspberries. Tastes like raspberries and smells like rum, or maybe the sun smells like amaretto with peanuts, but the sand definitely smells like sun and heat.
Nothing is more memorable than a smell. A scent can be unexpected, momentary, and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake, when wild blueberry bushes teemed with succulent fruit or another memory of baked cookies in the oven at grandma’s house in a countryside village or even a family barbecue in the late summer sunburnt grass yard… Hit a “tripwire” of smell, and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.
