Wednesday, April 20, 2005
The Odors of Perception
This’ll be part one of a three-parter. It’ll wrap up on Friday, and then I’m going to take a couple of weeks off. I’ve almost filled up my essay book and I need to come up with some “content,” as they say in the biz; also, monday’s my birthday and my present to me is taking it easy for a week. The following week I go to Austin for a conference, and doubt that I’ll have access to a computer there. So read slowly, my friends - this’ll have to last into the second week of May.
It’s one thing to believe instinctually that smells have an especially powerful emotional pull, that they can revive memories more effectively than any other sense; it’s another thing altogether for your psych 101 professor (the good one, the one who wrote the textbook) to attest to as much as a clinical fact. The sense of smell has been scientifically linked to somatic memories, recollections in which the whole body participates. Properly stimulated by scent, you can actually sense that old air on your skin again, or that pavement beneath your feet; you can recall the layout of a room that hasn’t existed for years or the way things looked thought a window deep in your past. Dr. Gleitman said that one whiff of the local bay air and he suddenly, instantly, reacquired his old mental map of Berkeley from 20 years prior. And now, 20 years after I heard that story, I know that the smell of a hot dog cart will always remind me of Philly - in particular, the corner of 36th and Walnut.
I tend to be olfactocentric - I’m particularly inclined to notice smells, sample them, pick them out and think about them. I try to learn what I can from smell in any situation, even though all too often that particular spectrum of sensation really isn’t in play. But sometimes my nose tells me a great deal about what’s going on; then again, sometimes it sends me right back to a distant time and place that touches my very core in a way that nothing in the present can come close to reaching. As these moments, my sense of smell is a veritable portal to my past and to a larger, richer world, one that seems to exist at different spots in the space-time continuum at once. My elevated sensitivity to smells enhances the impact of these fugue experiences for me, and even today, some things - ordinary normal things that most people smell and don’t think about once, much less twice - some things that I smell send me right into a nostalgic reverie. Here’s a few of my favorites:
Blue Tip Matches: We lit candles on Friday and Saturday nights when I was growing up. The occasions were regular but that somehow enhanced, rather than diminished, their significance. Even when I might not have had the patience for the whole Friday sunset ceremony, the candlelighting at the start was always nice. And it was always linked to that delicious smell of sulphur and wood, a whiff of fulminant scouring a rough edge on the vision of a splendid table set with bright linen and gleaming candlesticks in the golden evening air. Or, on havdalah Saturdays, when we lit the candle with three wicks and then, after the short ceremony, extinguished it in the pool of wine: the bluetip smoke still hanging in the air, blending with the sudden carbonization of cotton wicking and the vaporization of wine, an odor that permeated my mind as we sat in sudden darkness, singing psalms. Whenever someone lights a bluetip now, be it for a birthday cake, pilot light or cohibo, some part of me still anticipates a numinous, if not sacred, event.
come back tomorrow for the next 60% of my “smell this” stories. or don’t. jeez. I’m not the boss of you.
