The Scent of A Speech

Carrie Chiang encouraged us to read Patrick Suskind's "Perfume" when we read "One Word After Another" in "the Art of Speechwriting" in Toastmaster Magazine January issue. I was curious and saw the DVD immediately.

I played again and again the part when Giuseppe Baldini taught Jean Baptiste Grenouille the secret of making a perfume, "Just like a musical chord, a perfume chord contains fours essences of notes carefully selected for their harmonic affinity. Each perfume contains three chords: the head, the heart and the base, necessitating twelve notes in all. The head chord contains the first impression lasting a few minutes before giving way to the heart chord. The theme of the perfume lasts several hours. Finally, the base chord, the trail of the perfume lasts several days."

Somehow the standard operation procedures of making a perfume reminded me of the color codes of speech crafting by Marilynn Mobley. Once she finishes an early draft, she marks each line with a different colored marker--red might be for facts and figures, green for anecdotes, and yellow for humor. She then spreads out the whole speech on the floor or tapes it to a wall to allow her to scan for wide swatches for red, green or yellow.

But Giuseppe Baldini added that, "twelve essences could be identified but the 13th, vital one could never be determined, that will ring out and dominate the others. The ancient Egyptians believed that one can only create a truly original perfume by adding an extra note, one final essence. Legend has it that an amphora was once found in a pharaoh's tomb. And when it was opened, a perfume was released. After all those thousands of years, a perfume of such subtle beauty and yet such power, that for one single moment, every person on earth believed they were in paradise."

If the soul of beings is their scent, so is it of speeches. I need to activate my nose to find scent for my next speech, a head, a heart, a base, and a vital essence.