The Smell of the Soul and the Smelling Soul

Abstract

Starting from a oneiric representation with a strong emotional-olfactory content (miasma, fetid smells), is reported a narration linked to the author's early life, evoking poignant, painful and nostalgic memories. An exploration of an olfactory path to the unconscious emerges through a synchronistic and incubative relationship between the events related to the health emergency of the Coronavirus pandemic and the transpersonal dimension of the Anima mundi. In this imaginal space, memories and primordial images with a strong mythic content converge. From the image of a poet who reads her writings, the author found himself immersed in his uncanny restlessness restlessness, in his uneasiness. These emotional tones accompanied him on his return home and, during the night, in a particularly significant dream. He perceived and sensed its evocative potentiality, in turn capable of activating ancient domestic images moving forgotten sulphurous smells. Just as the complex structures its roots in the collective unconscious, so these sensory/olfactory images are combined with «Shadow stench». In a diaphanous, nebulous and protean interlayer, the images slowly transformed, giving back, as in an airy and clean room, a condition of well-being that the author was able to collect in a suggestive poem. The numinous experience deeply shaken the psyche and the reflective processes themselves towards moments of intense and courageous creativity. A short biography covered the entire writing, paying full homage to a differentiating ulteriority that was waiting for the path to exist. The emergence of meaning was synchronistically captured through a sort of perturbing emotional and collaborative intelligence between Covid-19 and adaptive self-organizing symbolic systems: hence the way to a poem that, in memory of distant times but not too much, emerged by giving itself to the contention between the two co-protagonists of the dream: the author and the Irish goddess Badb Catha (battle crow).