Published in The North American Review, Vol. 293, No. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2008.
The smell crept onto the premises around midnight. It barely registered at first, just a few quiet fumes, faintly sweet. I was getting ready for bed, nothing amiss, really. So I gargled, pulled a segment of cinnamon floss between my teeth, and – after one last vigilant whiff – slipped into bed beside my sleeping wife.
I was stealing my fair share of the blanket when more particles of the lurking ether presented themselves. I reasoned this might be some sort of hallucination, a phantom scent like a ringing in the ear. No. Something glossy and astringent had now registered and was blinking on the smell radar. Something had definitely entered our air space.
I sat up, leaned over, and – rather furtively – began sniffing my wife’s head. Lisa’s hair emitted a soft shampoo fragrance suggesting sun-lit maidens and yellow fields of wheat; this wasn’t the prickly odor I was after. Still more delicately, I lifted her deadweight arm to inspect her fingernails, and I was burrowing below the covers to do some type of toenail investigation when she flinched.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Don’t you smell that?” I said. “My god, what have you done?”
She rolled over so that her back was to me. When I crouched to reexamine her head, she hissed, “Please – not now. Go to sleep!”
“Did you paint your nails or something?” I whispered. “It’s okay if you did – I just need to know.”
“You woke me up. You know I don’t do my nails.”
True. Even so, she must somehow be involved. So I persisted in grilling her about mysterious feminine essences – emollients, balms, unguents, and potions – the interrogations veering towards wall cleansers, floor wax, clandestine projects she might have undertaken. Had anything been zealously shellacked? Superglued? Had she, at any time, Michelangeloed beneath the bed to splatter a personal Sistine Chapel onto its wooden underside?
Now she was fully awake and smelling it too. What about the baby in the next room: was she breathing it in, as well? We got up and did a walk-through of the apartment, creaking over wooden floors to sniff in various crannies, checking pilot lights, sockets, pipes, and points of entry, all to no avail. We appeared to be on the brink of toxic alert, yet everything seemed intact – no commotion of sirens or men scurrying around outside in gas masks. No slimy sewer beast grinning in our walk-in.
We returned to bed with this uneasy feeling we were sharing our living space with an unknown. A loitering smell had slithered under the covers with us.
“Rose,” Lisa said. “Something’s up with Rose.”
Rose is our eccentric neighbor in the unit just below who occasionally, in the dead of night, succumbs to this impulse to redecorate. We listen to heavy objects being dragged over her floor or to frantic closet-rustling as if she’s trying to lay hands on some vital document or torrid love letter. Maybe Rose, in the throes of another nocturnal rampage, had neglected to open a window while denuding and lacquering an armoire.
We couldn’t identify exactly what it was we were smelling, so we settled on that explanation. It was late, Rose was silent, and the baby was sleeping peacefully. We burrowed into our pillows, the way you might barricade yourself against the neighbors’ loud party. Except a party eventually petered out, or you flopped downstairs in a robe to negotiate the noise level. This smell gave no indication of going away.
The following morning the inside temperature dipped. It was summer in San Francisco, the city cloaked in billowing mist, and we’d battened the windows against the fog’s damp slap. Lisa fired up the heater. Within minutes a tempest of fumes blasted through the vents flooding our place in toxins which were now eerily familiar. Our eyes burned as we scrambled to seal off the heat, swaddle the baby, and open the windows.
“Cripes!” Rose said as she opened her garage door. There, in the adjacent bay, was our problem: a cobalt blue, legendary 427 Mustang Shelby Cobra – gleaming and metallic – its fresh coat of paint blaring within the enclosure.
I winced. “I guess we found it.” The fumes were breathtaking. It occurred to me I was looking at something classic and expensive and that I probably should take a moment to revere it. The Shelby’s small, steel body was sleek and aerodynamic. A double white racing stripe ran in a sinuous slope from the grille to the tri-bar taillights. Here was brute force, copious engineering – the garage drenched in its pent-up stink.
“Something’s got to be leaking,” I said.
Behind thick lenses, Rose’s eyes blinked furiously, her nose quivering. “Scott’s baby. He told me he paid seventy grand for it.”
“Unbelievable.”
Beyond the car’s open top was the wooden instrument panel with its dizzying fireworks of gauges, dials and secret controls. This could’ve been James Bond’s car, situated beneath my home while he set out for some exotic, spy-chick co-passenger. But this didn’t seem like the right moment to be contemplating the miracle of suspension, torque, rigidity, calipers and spindle bolts, or to ogle its supercharged, 32-valve-600 horsepower, 6.4 liter-V-10 intimate parts.
Rose pulled a pen and a tiny, pink adhesive note pad from her sweater pocket. “That playboy must’ve had it painted or dipped in something then left it shut up in here.”
Scott has this boyish brown hair he’s often fussing with. He doesn’t live in our building but leases the garage for his car and his two motorcycles. I haven’t taken the time to get to know him. He’ll stand out in the driveway waxing one of his bikes, or he’ll leave it there idling while it coughs exhaust over my sweet peas. The noise and fumes drift up into the baby’s room or into our kitchen, until one of us kindly asks him if he’d mind not doing that. I tried saying hi to him one time. I laid down my muddy trowel, went up to him and made a comment about how his big, red Kawasaki must kick some serious ass off-road. But not once did he so much as glance over to acknowledge my sweet peas. So I left him to his bike and to his musings on velocity, good hair days, and slick metal things that spew lethal discharge.
Rose slapped a note on the side of the Shelby.
Scott! Your Shelby is oozing! We need this out of here ASAP!!
“We need to get a hold of the guy,” I said to Rose. “He needs to come take care of this.”
Two feet away from the vehicle was the heating vent intake, on which our apartment number had been painstakingly marked like a death threat.
“I’ll phone Jerry and get Scott’s number,” Rose said.
“Good luck. Jerry’s impossible to reach, especially on the weekend.”
Rose gnawed her lip. “You’d think the landlord would provide you with some way of being reached in an emergency.”
I gave a little laugh. “Don’t even get me started.”
“Listen, I need to get out of here,” Rose said, her eyes watering in the searing chemicals. “This stuff’s killing me.”
Call me hypersensitive and osmically-obsessed, but smells affect me. The corner bakery’s tantalizing vapors; a curry smoke exhalation from the local Indian restaurant; scents of the lumber yard, post office, Laundromat, flower shop; the soggy pong from a disheveled bus passenger. Each emits a unique olfactory essence in an urban smellscape. A cafe worker wipes a table with sudsy solvent, reducing the cappuccino at my lips to bath water. An oven pilot light flickers and I’m pure canary. I had a supervisor once who slathered on a French perfume called something like Licorice Nectar Eternity; I’d hold my breath against its everlasting sillage. I taught in a community where a chocolate factory belched out fudgy vapors over the railroad tracks, transporting me to a Roald Dahl universe. Robbie, my childhood friend, owned a red-bellied, Corn Island pet boa that crawled between his bedroom walls until it got wedged: that Poe-like putrefaction was unforgettable.
But smell is the uncelebrated and neglected sense. Sight and hearing rule the sensorium, while smell’s mystery and full implications elude us. Smell remains underprivileged, marginalized unfairly as the “lowest” or “most primitive” of sensory modes. Anthropologists and sociologists have long neglected it, failing to explain how smell influences social behavior and arouses emotions such as fear, disgust and attraction. How did this poor standing come about?
In the first place, individual smells are not easy to pinpoint. I have little difficulty aurally identifying each of the various instruments in an orchestra. In a restaurant’s scent clamor, however, my nostrils may be able to detect a brash tamarind or oregano, but I’m not able to discern further among basil, mint, ginger, and saffron. Yet, like taste, there’s an intimacy to smell: our contact with it takes place inside the body.
Smell resists taxonomy. Odors register on a pre-verbal, unconscious level but are fleeting and difficult to contain or localize. Lacking an adequate olfactory vocabulary, we are unable to accurately speak about smells. Poet Diane Ackerman writes, in A Natural History of the Senses, how impossible it is to describe how something smells to someone who hasn’t smelled it. “There are words for all the pastels in a hue,” she writes, “but who will name the tones and tints of smell?” The perfume industry seems to have come to the same conclusion: instead of imprecise descriptions, perfume ads in magazines are lined with scent strips. Scientists are incapable of measuring odor the way they measure light’s wavelength or the frequency of sound. “It would be nice if one smell corresponded to a short wavelength and another to a long wavelength, such as rose versus skunk, and you could place every smell on this linear scale,” says Randall Reed, medical researcher at Johns Hopkins, “but there is no smell scale.”
Primitive, immediate, non-cognitive, our sense of smell may seem a bit threatening. Fossil evidence tells us that early man probably had larger nasal cavities and a larger olfactory center in the brain. Our cerebral hemispheres, in fact, sprouted from what were originally reptilian olfactory stalks. Smells journey non-stop to the amygdala, the emotional hub in the brain’s limbic system. Other sensory stimuli reach the limbic system but first make stopovers to other regions of the brain. Lacking all ability to arbitrate such a process or to rely on rational thinking, we’re perhaps thrown off guard when emotional states like fear, anxiety, and aggression are activated beyond our cognitive control.
Among its greatest mysteries is smell’s clandestine link with memory. Smell detonates memory, unearthing experiences and emotions often long forgotten. Our mental representation of experience is imprinted by odor, which we then associate with a holistic perceptual event. We are unable to summon a specific odor memory, but olfactory stimulation can instantly recreate a long-lost sensory experience. Proust writes about this in Remembrance of Things Past, as his central character, Swann enjoys his madeleine biscuit and tea:
When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered…the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls…bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory.
Certain smells awaken my own memory, the scent-induced nostalgia sometimes startling, often pleasantly surprising. Cedar invokes Herman and Alma, childhood pet hamsters, situated among abundant, bald and twitching offspring. The loamy scent of mulberry leaves propels me back to the row of old shoeboxes in my fourth grade classroom where silkworms nibbled busily before spinning diaphanous sleep sacks. And, thirty years later, unbidden, the petroleum echo of WD-40 evokes my grandfather, kneeling at the wooden gate to tighten a bolt – a topography of light reddish hairs, freckles and veins defining his powerful, tool-clenching hands.
As a culture, we make certain assumptions about smell, illustrated in quotidian tasks like house-cleaning and personal hygiene. Take, for example the following misconception: to be clean it must smell good. During a typical housecleaning routine, I splash pine and spruce cleansers onto the floors, wipe at furniture with citrus-scented polish, then place a vanilla air freshener on the window sill. These odors suggest cleanliness – the perfume industry and other consumerist media remind me constantly of this. Yet, the bathroom’s pine purity or the lemony top notes of my newly-laundered clothes may have little to do with actual cleanliness.
An obsession with bodily cleanliness and deodorization further provokes us into attempting to do away with our own natural smell. “The idea that people should smell of people is deeply distasteful to western man,” anthropologist Michael Stoddart writes in The Scented Ape. My vigorous shower becomes a kind of demonifluge to erase part of my identity – a scrubbing away of my mild and personal scent. My confidence in my social standing tarnishes then erodes into self-consciousness and paranoia. Feet, breath, armpits, scalp and genitals must be scrutinized then fumigated and expunged through a counterodor of commercial products, enabling my body parts to become socially acceptable. In our society, natural body odor is first stigmatized then suppressed – camouflaged with minty mouthwash, chemically-enhanced deodorant, foot powder, and redolent shoe inserts. The media reminds me that I have choices. The media reminds me that I stink.
But surely perfume, with its instinctive sweet transcendence, must have come about through divine origin. In Exodus, none other than the Lord himself instructs Moses to concoct a perfume, and provides a recipe of myrrh, olive oil, cinnamon and cassia. My commercial aftershave’s artificially divine scent must surely impress both the Lord and other people. Regardless, I insist on wearing it to express my unique, personal self, despite the fact that millions of other consumers are using the very same product. I’ve now rendered my natural body odor – my personal, ‘offensive’ human scent – invisible. “What we most desire to smell like relates to the sexual lives of other organisms,” writes Stoddart, pointing out this paradox of substituting animal smells in order to smell more humanly acceptable. My commercial scent suggests a socially-condoned, human-sexual smell, yet one extracted from animals – ambergris, musk, and the anal gland secretions of sexually active civet cats.
Despite all our valiant efforts to suppress smell, each of us possesses an original olfactory ‘fingerprint,’ our own characteristic odor, influenced by variables such as diet, hygiene, body metabolism, and time of day. This fingerprint, in fact, is so distinct that for as long as two weeks after we’ve left them, a bloodhound can localize our individualized scent trails among a profusion of other scents. The bloodhound studiously sniffs at shoe imprints, tracking odors that penetrate our sneakers from millions of sweat glands in our feet. We not only emit a singular odor but also perceive the world through our own unique sense of smell. Our personalized combination of odor receptors enables us to respond individually to smells, resulting in subtly-nuanced odor associations. A healthy person, with a bit of training, can detect upwards of 10,000 different odors, while trained noses – perfumers, oenophiles, chefs, tea-tasters and whiskey blenders – are thought to be able to distinguish 100,000.
Back in our apartment, I grabbed hold of a magazine and fanned hopelessly at the poisonous air. I paced in circles awhile, striking matches and waving them around the living room like a desperate plague torch. We left a few urgent messages for our landlord, Jerry. Lisa duct-taped towels over the heating vents, and I climbed to the roof to prop the fire door open. Rose had gone off somewhere but had stuck one of her adhesive notes with her garage code to our door. So, I lugged a floor fan into her garage and placed it strategically between the Shelby and the heater intake. Then I planted myself a few feet away in front of our two-story building to stand guard while the enclosure aired out.
Our situation did not improve. We were worried about our baby – how her little lungs and developing brain cells were coping and what the long-term effects might be. Wasn’t she wheezing? Blinking and smirking just a little too much? What did she make of this menacing odor in her infant universe where everything, even great big stinks, was simply wonderful?
It was now afternoon and time to take further action. We left messages at the Health Service Department. Someone at Poison Control said there really wasn’t anything he could do and jokingly suggested we push the car out into the street. Lynn at the Air Resources Board provided a contact for the Air Quality Management District. That sounded fairly promising.
“My department does not deal with what’s on the inside,” an air quality inspector said over the phone. “That constitutes private space, which is between you and the landlord.” The Tenants Union advised us as well to confront the landlord.
We made more calls, the circuitous inquiries, inter-departmental phone transfers, false leads, and dead-end conversations all funneling back towards the Health Services Department, to an unequivocal authority – an official health inspector, the one we could at last turn to, who would resolve the crisis and bring our suffering to an end – a guy named Ed.
“I’m away from my desk!” Ed’s answering machine exclaimed cheerfully.
In fact, the voice said, Ed was out of the office for another week.
“If I am not dead by the time you receive this,” I groaned after the beep, “I’d appreciate your getting back to me.”
In the San Francisco Chronicle, I read about how a few of the other senses are controlled and regulated. In the auditory realm, new anti-noise ordinances restrict street preachers from disagreeable levels of evangelical amplification. A group of motorcycle bikers is banned from the local garlic festival because the insignias patched to their vests, depicting skull, wing, and top hat are deemed visually provoking. Touch is the touchy subject in an article about another lapsed and fallen clergyman. Other than an occasional dour report on grainy air particulates, why is it that smell barely makes an appearance in the arena of legal discussion?
Smell’s attenuation and poor current standing may extend back through centuries of scientific ignorance in which odors were presumed to be the agents, rather than by-products, of contagion and disease. Constance Classen writes, in A Cultural History of Smell, that medieval God-fearers looked upon fellow plague victims as “none other than the reek of sin made manifest.” To a large extent, combating the plague necessitated the control of corrupt air. To protect themselves against the pestilence, individuals carried around a plague torch, burning a potpourri of fragrant herbs from a tiny brazier at the top of their wand.
In the seventeenth century, it was suspected that contaminated air, or miasmas – a form of geological flatulence emanating from the earth’s core – brought about an imbalance of the humors. Martin Luther attributed this to evil spirits whose breath poisoned the air and infected the poor while injecting their bodies with a moral poison. Finally, in the nineteenth century, Pasteur was able to link disease directly to airborne pathogens and water contamination. The medical community began looking at microbes under the microscope, and the visual overtook the olfactory. Smells became inessential, considered least important among the senses in acquiring knowledge. Sociologist Anthony Synnott notes that textbooks on aesthetics typically concern themselves with visual beauty, the aural beauty of music, and perhaps taste and the tactile textures of skin, but not smell.
Even as smell’s importance diminished within the realm of the medical and aesthetic, smell continued to play a role in the growth of cities. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the urgent need for sanitary reform reflected problems such as waste disposal, an escalation in newly-built factories, the rise in urban populations, and the devastating epidemics of cholera and typhus. The cumulative, big city stench is difficult to fathom. Imagine the urban squalor in the Victorian London of Dickens, whose novels portray the shrill, gritty, hopeless city, “with no vent in the leaden canopy of the sky.” Until such sanitary reforms and legal restrictions were in place, pre-industrialized European city streets became conduits for the sludge of rotting foods, human and animal waste, dead cats and dogs, the entrails of slaughtered animals, and human blood let by barber-surgeons. Such images lead me to wonder how smell is controlled in our modern world and what exactly the legal olfactory parameters are.
In public spaces, such as malls, theaters, and parks, olfactory neutrality – with an exception being that of restaurant odors – is maintained. Offensive smells are usually banned from such areas by municipal, sanitary by-laws. But a considerably wide spectrum of smells, ranging from pleasant to repulsive, finds its way back into private space, the space of the home. Within this zone, odor interpretation seems to be subjective. What may be unbearable to one person may be tolerable to someone else. The local dump and landfill are regulated by zoning laws, and are typically isolated from the general public. Repugnant fumes contained within the spaces of the industrial park, freeway and sewage treatment plant are generally accepted as the inevitable byproducts of modernization with nuisance ordinances in place by which the public may complain about an odor.
There exists no official “Olfactory Authority,” no prevailing governmental agency to turn to. There is no smell police which bursts on the scene to order someone to turn down the smell. Are we left alone, then, to assume the odor defensive within our own homes? Or are we entitled to certain breathing rights within the private spaces we occupy? In our own apartment, we were contending with an offending malodor by attempting to deny its existence – attempting, in essence, to shut down our own biology. And it felt daunting, having to seal off the five million olfactory receptor cells that live within the thick mucous of our nose’s cave. The law obligates landlords to provide heat, plumbing, gas, pest control, running water, and a working phone jack. Where within the garble of the rental agreement is ‘odor control’? Are we not entitled to certain breathing rights within the private spaces we occupy? Has the time come to legislate smell?
The following Monday, day three of our smell problem, we got a message from Jerry telling us the young man with the vehicle was probably out of town and could not be reached. His phone had been disconnected, and there was no current contact number. We left several more messages to complain and plead for his help. Our calls were never returned.
Now we were fuming, burning, and at each other’s throats. I composed a letter at the computer in a last-ditch effort to communicate and document what was happening to us.
Dear Mr. Vaughan:
We are writing to express grave concerns about the highly lethal fumes we feel have invaded and are now compromising our living space
Then I stopped typing, massaged my throbbing head, forsook the document. In my helpless rage, diplomacy and diction faltered. On a ragged sheet of legal paper, I scrawled the following:
Jerry —
You miserable, scrawny fuck. Do something!
Lisa phoned our local fire department and got hold of a dispatch right away. I listened as she struggled to describe the odor. “Something enamel – paint thinner maybe, or — ”
“Gas leaking!” I shouted, probably with more passion than was absolutely required.
In under three minutes, a bona fide fire truck, with its masts of ladders, ropes and hoses, its battery of pumps, pulleys, cranes and levers, stretched across our block and screamed up at us. The dramatic dismount of rescue workers, the assemblage of concerned neighbors, sent my blood pumping as I stepped forward in my flip-flops to greet the crew with a big thumbs-up.
“Thank you everyone,” I shouted at the platoon, “for the immediate response.” Rose was already keying in her garage code.
The fire captain’s eyes were steely as he indicated for his men to stand back. “I’ll handle this,” he commanded. He was tan, sturdy in his rubber boots.
Rose led the way into the garage. “Here’s our problem.” She was pointing to the Shelby. “Smell that? He’s had it dipped in something.”
The fireman folded his arms while he surveyed the garage. He had sharp, chiseled features, a flat nose, and an intrepid jaw – the kind of jaw that might, at a moment’s notice, plunge directly into peril or coax someone’s cat out of a tree.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Rose indicated the car, which now had quite a few more adhesive notes stuck onto it. “Seventy thousand’s what he said he paid — ”
“It’s a fake,” the fireman said.
Rose ran a finger over the lustrous trunk. “Well, you can see how greasy it feels, and now it’s rising into our apartments.”
“You need to ventilate,” the fireman said, looking up at the ceiling. “With these older types of buildings you just — ”
“Can he do that?” Rose said, her voice rising. “Drive that vehicle in here and leave it cooped up, and we can’t get a hold of the landlord, and it doesn’t seem right that — ”
“You people need to ventilate,” the fireman said again.
“We are venting,” Rose said curtly. She was ventilating all right – in fact, hyper-ventilating. “Listen,” she continued. “I tried to bring my yoga mat into class this morning and the thing smelled so toxic, my Bikram swami refused to allow it into her studio.”
The fire captain nodded. “Ma’am, I can certainly appreciate that, but — ”
Rose sighed and crossed her arms above her head. “We were in the middle of an inverted pose, and she says to me, Rose, you take that thing out of here, it’s bad Prana for everyone, so then I — ”
The fireman put his hands into the air. “If I could just explain something here — ”
They both had their arms in the air now, while speaking simultaneously. I realized I wasn’t going to get a word in edgewise.
“Yoga’s all about purity.” Rose wrinkled her nose against the smell then closed her eyes. “When the breath is still, so is the mind.”
“Well, there you go,” the fireman said.
“Mind and body,” Rose intoned. “And soul.”
“Look — ” the fireman said.
“Not to mention karma,” Rose said. “I mean, you don’t go around inflicting smells on other people. You just don’t do that. I happen to be on the safety committee over at my school, and if this kind of thing were to happen there, the whole campus would be evacuated so fast you’d think it was — ”
“Oh yeah?” the fireman said. “Where do you work?”
“Over at Alamo. I’m a speech pathologist.”
“Really?” the fireman said. “What’s your name?”
“Rose. What’s yours?”
“Dan. Now listen to me, Rose, listen up for a quick second. What I need for you to do is to go back upstairs, open a few windows, and establish a cross breeze. You think you could do that for me?”
“We are,” Rose said.
“Play some defense,” Captain Dan said.
“We’re certainly trying to do all we can,” Rose said, “but it’s freezing, and it doesn’t — ”
“Rose,” Captain Dan barked, his jaw tightening, “ventilate.”
“Can’t you issue some sort of citation?” I asked. “Or have this thing towed?”
“No go,” Captain Dan said, taking a final look around. “We’ve inspected the premises and there isn’t any fire hazard. End of story.”
“Surely, there must be something you can do,” I pleaded.
Captain Dan shook his head. “I would have absolutely no authority,” he said with absolute authority.
At the Tokyo Institute of Technology, a new gadget called an Odor Recording Machine is currently under development, which captures then reproduces the world’s odors. The device has fifteen sensors with which it analyzes a smell. It records the odor’s recipe in digital format then, through a combination of ninety-six chemicals, replicates and vaporizes the result. Measuring in at a bulky three-by-two feet, the device is as yet too cumbersome to be portable. But before too long, cell phones will have scent-recording options and the capability to transmit scents across the globe.
Presented with such a heady technological possibility, what clouds of reeking, fetid particles might I wish to inflict upon our compassionless landlord or our insouciant playboy, Scott? I indulge in a personal ten plagues – my very own apocalyptic smello-drama:
- diesel haze
- sour breath
- singed hair
- slaughterhouse effluvia
- sulfur
- vomit
- raw sewage
- dung
- mildew
- Robbie’s boa
The relevance and role of odors varies from culture to culture, as does the interpretation of what passes for attractive versus repellent. “The cattle-raising Dassanetch of Ethiopia find nothing more attractive than the odor of cattle,” writes sociologist David Howes in A Cultural History of Smell, “a scent which carries notions of fertility and social status for them. Dassanetch men, consequently, decorate themselves with cattle bones and hides, and even wash their hands with cattle urine as well as smearing their bodies with cow manure. Dassanetch women rub their heads, shoulders, and breasts with butter in order to advertise their fertility and make themselves attractive to the men by their scent.” Ackerman describes remote tribes in places like Borneo, Burma, Siberia, and India whose word for kiss means smell. “A kiss is really a prolonged smelling of one’s beloved…. Members of a tribe in New Guinea say good-bye by putting a hand in each other’s armpit, withdrawing it and stroking it over themselves, thus becoming coated with the friend’s scent; other cultures sniff each other or rub noses in greeting.”
Once upon a time, however, in Western culture, smell did enjoy a much higher status. For premodern Christians, scent signaled the divine. A fragrance, mystical and ethereal, was believed to indicate the presence of the Holy Spirit and to adorn saints after death. The airiness of odors paralleled the airiness of spirits. An “odor of sanctity,” emerging as far back as the second century, described a supernatural essence emitted by individuals in a state of grace. Odor was associated with both the breath and the life force. In creating a sacred atmosphere for ritual, religious groups have long controlled fragrance through scented rosary beads and flower bouquets for altars and shrines. The burning of incense unites participants in a common experience, as they take in, and are enveloped by, the same, integrating aroma.
The odor of sanctity is rooted in ancient aromatic myth and ritual. The Latin word sagax (sagacious) refers both to a keen sense of smell and a sharp mind. Roman gods were thought to exhale mystical, ambrosial scents. Greek philosophers speak of an inner fire, or pneuma – an element of supreme importance for one’s spiritual well-being. In the Jewish-Hellenic Book of the Secrets of Enoch, each of the sensory modes is linked to various body parts: smell is assigned to the soul.
From a socio-historical perspective, the reliance on smell to help delineate cultural differences seems only to have gotten us into trouble. In The Foul and Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Alain Corbain examines odor in France in the 18th and 19th centuries and points to a distinct odoriferous identity designated to each sector of the population, including peasants, nuns, redheads, Jews, Blacks, Cossacks, cleaners, Germans, Finns, rag pickers, the poor, virgins, and prostitutes. Across racial lines, smells have long provoked strong reactions of pleasure and disgust as the unfamiliar body odor of one ethnic group results in an olfactory classification by another. For centuries, predominant social groups have made use of such olfactory symbolism to pass judgment, justify avoidance behavior, and further ‘legitimatize’ class and social order. Olfactory racism emerged from a concept of tribal unity and moral identity through smell. Odor was interpreted as ‘intrinsic’ to one’s racial or social group; one’s own group was perceived as the odorless norm, and therefore proper and good, while other groups were labeled as foul, morally corrupt, and therefore, evil. In our own country’s history, smell was used to ‘justify’ racial segregation and oppression. Thomas Jefferson expressed xenophobic stereotypes of many whites of his era when he stated that Blacks have “a very strong and disagreeable odor.”
In addition to racial stereotypes, odor often delineated class through distinctions such as rich versus poor. “The real secret of class distinctions in the West,” George Orwell wrote, “is summed up in four frightful words… The lower classes smell.” Olfaction divided the world into good and bad. While the rich enjoyed well-circulated air, fragrant gardens, and scented interiors, the poor suffered leaky chamber pots and jars that reeked of fish and foul resin.
Our sense of smell remains a powerful sensory tool which shapes personal identity and offers both insight and appreciation of the world. Yet, throughout history, efforts to regulate smell have led to social and scientific misconceptions which only seem to have further stigmatized and marginalized it. In disparaging and underestimating such a vital sensory possibility, we mistakenly pursue what Roy Porter defines as an ideal of odorlessness. The notion of erasing smell leads me to a disquieting premonition of olfactory silence. Perhaps some future, more enlightened society may succeed in regulating smell without diminishing or eradicating it.
Where might increased odor regulation lead us? I try to imagine a world essentially devoid of odor, centuries from now, in which all human contact with smell is strenuously controlled. A type of soul-less biosphere comes to mind, an enormous, enclosed bubble where artificial fragrances are piped in through air conditioning ducts in what Mark Peltier, aroma-therapy entrepreneur, defines as “olfactory Muzak.” What would our experience of the world be without smell? What kind of impact would this have on our taste buds? Flavor is a combination of tongue sensations and circulating odors; many foods, such as apricots, garlic, coffee, and chocolate, are not even identifiable without smell. We taste only five flavors – sweet, sour, salt, bitter and savory; everything else we define as flavor is really odor. In such a futuristic, anosmic world, what would become of the pleasure of eating, divested of smell’s savory power to stimulate craving? What would dinner amount to without the wafting foreplay of baked lasagna, the gorgeous suspense of chocolate chip cookies? In such a world, perhaps our ability to smell continues to attenuate through evolution until eventually it disappears altogether: the nerve endings retract, our olfactory bulbs shrivel to superfluous ornaments, and noses become vestigial – ridiculous nozzles, beaks and snouts merely for show.
Perhaps Freud offers the most compelling explanation for the downfall of smell. Freud examined human behavior from the perspective of evolution, theorizing as to why modern man found it necessary to diminish his relationship with smell. As Jim Drobnick summarizes in The Smell Culture Reader, “Smell was too powerful a sense, because of its close link to animality and sexuality, and needed to be sacrificed as a precondition for civilization itself.” For Freud, smell represents the meeting point of desire and shame, viewed as an indicator of madness and savagery, bestiality and insanity. The suppression of smell becomes, therefore, one of the defining characteristics of “civilized man,” and any attempt to cultivate smell signifies a regression to an earlier, more primitive state. Freud’s conclusion is simple: the survival of the human species is at stake.
We’ve long since emerged from the forest where, like the wolf, we depended on smell to demarcate territory and signal the presence of danger. Beyond dangers such as leaking gas and rancid foods, our survival relies much more upon sight and hearing – sensory modes once much less evolved than smell. As human posture uprighted itself, not only did the eye replace the nose, but the nose was removed from both the proximity of scent trails and from the anal-genital area of the body. From our present evolutionary vantage point, the image of two dogs mutually sniffing suggests bestial sexual behavior. One’s embarrassment about smell surrounding the organs may lead to an entangled association of genitalia and excretion with that of shameful feelings about sex.
Individuals replicate the process of evolution in their personal, psychological development, Freud speculates in Civilization and Its Discontents. No shame or disgust occurs in early infancy towards excretionary functions or their products. As a person matures, a delight in odors that the infant once engaged in should accordingly acquiesce to visual pleasures. Because the childlike pleasure in smell plays a significant part in the genesis of neurosis, adults who continued to emphasize the olfactory were thought to be arrested in their psychological development. Smell became the characteristic animal sense and sight the dominant human sense.
Call me mad, immature, stubbornly Paleolithic, simian in my yearning to celebrate the vibrant odor world surrounding me. Lisa’s off running errands, so I take our daughter out of the apartment to escape our odor problem and to give our lungs a respite. We stroll into Golden Gate Park, scrunching musty leaves, as my olfactory sensors awaken to enjoy cypress, pine, jasmine, and eucalyptus. I’m eager to share the scents of trees with my daughter, just as I would like to acquaint her with the crow’s gravelly prattle or the charcoal tinge of lurking clouds. In the park’s open space, I inhale swaths of recently trimmed lawn and heaps of woodsy mulch. I confess to some primal urge to wallow in scents the way my daughter must be encountering them – through an alertness and fascination newly-awakened.
And what if smell were to vanish in a future world? Which scents would I cling to and most wish to celebrate? Which would I place in a time capsule – my own nostril nostrum of olfactory rapture?
- The flirtatious trickle of morning coffee
- Garlic’s protracted pungency
- My taco’s green bedding of cilantro
- Freshly cut cedar
- A buttery deluge of cinema popcorn
- Dark chocolate liquefying on the tongue
- A swollen peach
- The ocean’s saline sneeze
- Tennis balls liberated from the can
- Our baby girl’s downy, yeast aroma
Beyond the bison paddock at the western end of the park, it is smell which marks my primary sensory encounter with the ocean, just prior to its cool tingle against my face and hands. We head right at the T-intersection, climbing the short bend, and only a moment later do my eyes register the blue swell of waves and my ears their distant crashing.
A week passed. Then Scott finally showed up and zoomed away in his nasty toy. Our problem – just like that – vanished.
“Seventy grand he paid for that thing,” I said from the window.
“Well, thank god that’s over with,” Lisa said. “I don’t know how our lungs survived.”
“Or our nasal passages.”
We were standing in our kitchen, Rose down below busily thumping away. It was evening and the windows were open. Our brows had unfurled, and at long last our breathing was uninhibited. We could relax now and lay our defenses to rest. We were feeling victorious and inspired – suspiring and enjoying plentiful cups of unadulterated air. Here, in the best of all volatile worlds, regulation-free, the sublime and the hellish coexisted.
I smiled and took Lisa’s hand. We’d gone into the vortex – passed through the eye of the smell, and come out the other side. I wanted to hold on to an ephemeral feeling of olfactory liberation, a feeling difficult to articulate – call it the sweet success of smell.