Can You Taste It?

on rasa

Taste and smell, the nebulous senses. You catch a faint whiff of something on a street corner, and suddenly you're transported back to your grandmother's house when you were 5 years old. You walk past a make-up counter at the mall and suddenly the face of your first girlfriend floats in front of you, the smell of her perfume. You bite into a dish, and you can't quite place it, but some hint of its floral effusion drops you into a longing you can't begin to place.

There's something more solid about the other senses, more literal. We say "what you see is what you get," and call things that are demonstrably real "tangible" or "palpable." There's a denser reality to what we see, what we feel, what we hear.

Our eyes and ears and hands, they present us with the most solid, dependable layers of reality. But our noses, our tongues? They show us something else. They hint at other layers, layers where time is softer, where distant moments are closely connected. They sweep us up on currents that, just for a moment, seem like they carry the fragrance of reality itself.

The Sanskrit word rasa has a few meanings, one of which is "flavor." Others are closer to "essence" or "nectar." The metaphor of rasa has been applied to the arts for the past couple thousand years, and especially to acting. In the original philosophy, there are 8 core rasas, aesthetic flavors that can be transmitted from actor to audience — flavors like anger, terror, amazement, and love.

The tantric master and philosopher Abhinavagupta reworked and expanded the original theory, emphasizing a new flavor, shanta rasa or the flavor of peace, as the spiritual underpinning that the others emerge from and return into. He also brought rasa out from a more performance based frame to a more metaphysical frame — the rasas as, more or less, aspects of reality that can be sensed in the arts. We can taste flavors of reality more keenly in the arts, where they are distilled, but we can also taste them everywhere else in our lives.

---

I get a bad taste in my mouth out here. Aluminum. Ash. Like you can smell the psychosphere.
— Rust Cohl, True Detective

I didn't get a lot out of studying literature in college, but one big thing I did get was the frame of defamiliarization. The idea is that when we take familiar things and describe them in a way that makes them feel strange or unfamiliar, we can allow our audience to experience that thing afresh, as if for the first time. We interrupt the habitual patterns around it, and let some fresh angle shine forth.

This is what a lot of good poetry and prose does, the reason we love it so much when it hits: it scrubs the patina of habitual perception off the world and lets us experience it with original awe.

In the True Detective quote above, Rust could have just said he felt uneasy; he could have said he hated this town and the people in it; he could have said he felt infected by the dullness of the world out here. Instead, he spoke directly from synesthesia. He spoke from the rasa. He approached from none of the familiar angles. Aluminum. Ash.

I want to do something more religious. Explore America in the screaming night. Yin and Yang in Kansas. That scene.
— Don DeLillo, Americana

If that's not a rasa I don't know what is. There's a fragrance there, something un-pin-down-able and totally defamiliar but real.

---

Somewhere beyond ideas of subjective and objective, there is a field. Rasa is there.

This is what I've tended to take from the term transjective, but I can't say if that's what others mean by it. Iain McGilchrist also points somewhere close to this in his writings on valueception, the direct perception of values or virtues in reality. They are objective presences that are subjectively perceived, and sensitive to the ways they are perceived, liable to alter their qualities depending on the quality of perception. Beauty, for example:

Since there is no formula for beauty, any more than there is for truth or goodness, it cannot be commanded, but must be wooed... And, though it is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that is only half the story: the eye must also discover the beauty that it could never create. Much as I argued that moral values, within certain limits, are universal, beauty is also more universal than we have been taught to think.

Beauty has a million million rasas all its own — they are both objectively real and subjectively inflected.

Not just with beauty, but with every rasa, we both discover them and create them. Both are true. Neither is more true.

---

I have a vision of a world where we are each sensitive to the rasas we move through day by day, moment by moment. This framing of existential flavors and scents, it feels rich to me. It has a redolent appeal that "vibes" and "energy" just don't.

Not "what's the vibe of this party," but "what flavors do I taste in the psychosphere here?"

Not "does he have good energy?" but "is the scent of aliveness on him?"

Not "this place has a weird aura," but "I taste rotting copper."

There's a poetic invitation in the expression of rasa, a wish to share your experience with others. Defamiliarization is a part of it, but so is familiarity. It's intimate, sharing with people your inner world in a way that avoids cliche and assumptions, a way that lets you share the flavor of a shared experience — and invites someone to notice how your experience is fresh and different from theirs.

"Driving on highways like this, it's like the sunlight is manufactured, caustic."

"Really? My rasa here is more like... like a hundred mossy caves, coursing down a blacktop river."

There's a precision here that is not and cannot be reducible to the precision of the sciences, the precision of measurements and graphs. It's a precision of the soul, a precision the ego can lay no claim to, can only resonate like a chime upon encountering it.

Rasa doesn't just mean flavor — it means essence, it means nectar. The flavor of an experience touches on the essence of it, on the root of its existence. Its rasa is the emanation, the secretion of this deeper root. It's all the same thing. The material experience, the metaphysical root, the emanated nectar of its existence — it's all the rasa.

Get a notebook, carry it with you everywhere. Notice the flavors, the scents, the vibes and energies of each experience, each person, each encounter and place and event — and record them. How can you defamiliarize this experience enough that it can be precisely shared from a fresh angle? How can you give to someone else, and to yourself, the unique musk of this moment, of the way it lands in your body and consciousness? How can you get better at this every single day?

It's a seduction, really. Something pheromonal between you and reality. Something feral and erotic. What more intimate sense is there than taste? You have to take something into your body to taste it; when you taste, you invite the world to become a part of you. You invite yourself to receive the world, to surrender to it.

And you can invite others to receive your experience, to taste you. All it takes is a few words. All it takes is a surrender to the synesthetic defamiliarization, to the aromatic spoor of what comes when you unclasp your cliches. To yin and yang in Kansas, the screaming night. To Aluminum. Ash. To Manufactured sunlight and rotten copper.

To the fragrant nectar of a Sanskrit noun.