What's That Smell?!

Once, when asked, "which of the five senses would you keep if you had to live without the other four?" I remember choosing the sense of touch. I could imagine compensating for the others, but touch felt necessary. It was the one that would assure one's shape, one's relationship to space and things in it, provide the feedback as to where one stopped and started, tactile relatedness and, not least, provide the natural pleasures of being alive in a body. This "favorite" sense has led me to choose vocations that depended on digital dexterity and the ability to "know" through the fingertips: handcrafts, haircutting, massage and cooking.

But now, if asked, it seems I have been chosen, be it a gift or a curse, to be the standard bearer for the very specific, the exquisite realm of the olifactory. Linked to memories of a lifetime, I could probably write a whole field guide to the personal history of my stalwart sense of smell. This page is merely the prologue. I could have been one of those people who smell things for a living: a wine taster, perfumier, rose breeder, culinary herbalist, a truffle snuffling pig, a forensic bloodhound. For a human, the nose isn't necessarily the grandest sense since we tend to favor the rational mind. But emotions are intensely rooted in the same region of the brain that houses our sense of smell, our memories and our deepest sense of survival. For better or for worse.

There is such a dynamic tension between attraction and repulsion. A fine line between ripe and spoiled, fruit and rot, wine and vinegar, cheese and mold, compost and garbage, soil and filth. There are smells I will never forget and never tire of: coffee perking, bacon crisping, spaghetti sauce simmering, onions browning. In contrast, there's probably nothing more annoying than not to be able to identify a smell. My last boyfriend's house had an odor that disagreed with me and I'm sorry to admit, came between us. Such an intimate detail! I would have preferred any noxious smell to this! It smelled dangerous, toxic, like a chemical, like decay, maybe a special sore of mildew, dry rot, termites? It permeated everything. It infiltrated us.

The nose knows? If something is safe to eat, if something will taste good, be nourishing, etc. As we might say one can have an "inner sense" about things, or see things in "the mind's eye", we might also have an "inner nose"! The famous writing cook, M.F.K. Fisher calls it her mind's palate - her way of imagining what something will taste like or rememberences of tastes from the past. I know exactly what this is! I can taste things in my mind - ingredient by ingredient or all together in some dish. The inner nose leads in some way to a deeper knowing/seeing/tasting. Cassandra in her madness, was said to have been able to smell both "past and future blood" The olifactory imagination could stem purely from biology or serve simply as a means to eat the right thing, but there is a passing through into madness with each of the senses. This is the question that leads me everywhere, that proceeds me.