Tastes and smells that disappeared overnight from my sensory system

In July 2015, my taste and smell systems automatically gave up all forms of alcoholic beverages as soon as they discovered their sudden inability to distinguish between red/white wine and beer. This automatic nullification was a consequence of my accident in the staircase of Gamone. Naive observers imagined that I had been drunk when I fell down the stairs, and that the accident “forced” me to give up drinking. That might sound right… but in fact it’s totally wrong. If I were physiologically capable of appreciating wine and beer, I would have surely been “sorry” to abandon them, and tempted to take a drop from time to time, as when I was bottling my walnut wine last year. In fact, I tried to taste a tiny glass of walnut wine, to see if I had added a sufficient volume of alcohol (part of the familiar recipe for walnut wine)… but I discovered with utter amazement my incapability of detecting the presence of any such substance in my precious walnut nectar… which I promptly gave away to a friend. These days, I still try to recall what my walnut wine — or any wine or beer whatsoever — actually tasted like. But nothing rings a bell. Worse still (or better still, if you prefer), I can’t possibly “miss” something that suddenly disappeared from my sensory system. Now, if I had heard somebody talking like that a few years ago, I would have said that he was trying to lead me up the garden path.

At times, I was so astounded by all the automatic changes in my body since the staircase accident that I even imagined (and still do from time to time) that some kind of artificial intelligence had taken control of my body. That’s how I felt recently when a tribe of academic dinosaurs from Toulouse tried to ask me to take an article I had written in French and “translate” it back into my native English. I’m convinced that, if one of those old-timers were to read what I’ve just written, they would exclaim “Clearly, William doesn’t appreciate our plans for translation because he’s brain-damaged.” Allow me to die laughing!

Another comparable disturbance occurred when I was examining plans for the creation of a movie script based upon Rilke’s novel Notebook of Malte. An initial version of my script was called Adieu, Abelone. A few days ago, I sent a copy to a female friend named Elizabeth, who’s a writer. I tried to make it clear to her that my scenario dealt with the fictitious relationship between two imaginary individuals : Malte and Abelone. Instead of tackling that subject, Elizabeth decided instantly to examine the authentic relationship that once existed between the novelist named Rilke and a very real lady named Lou Andreas Salomé. It was my fault. The misunderstanding between Elizabeth and me had been brought about by the extraterrestrial AI creatures who had brain-washed me into believing that characters in a fairy-tale can indeed spring into existence when a witch waves her wand at midnight.

At times I look upon my accident of July 2015 as a terrible event. Most often, though, I see it as a divine gift from my Guardian Angels.