Sitting on the porch of a Cape Cod house in mid-August, the salt air that I have known intimately since childhood carries intimations of the nearby sea to my nose. It has an unmistakably familiar fragrance, but almost indescribable in its complexity and its delicacy. Whenever I return to this place, I know I am getting close by the smells that mix the land and the sea into the air. It has moisture in it, this gently moving air this morning. I don’t just feel it caressing my skin, I am smelling it now, especially as my attention narrows and sharpens to take it in. It carries a seaweed aroma, ever so faint, a wet sand aroma, an eel grass aroma, an aroma of all the plant and animal seashore life surrounding us on three sides in tidal pools and on the beaches. There is also the smell of damp dank earth from the nearby sassafras woods and wetlands, and occasional wafts of the hydrangeas in the flower garden, and from the uncut grass baking in the increasingly strong mid-morning sun. There is also the unmistakable earthiness of the shredded black mulch recently put down around the cedar trees, and also the faint smell of wet stucco being spread like nut butter onto the new house under construction next door.
But look what I have done. I cannot describe the smells themselves, nor the feel of this smellscape, except by analogy, or by naming objects and hoping they evoke something within you that might recollect places and times in which you had similar experiences and could remember the timbre of the fragrances. I cannot bottle the essence of this smellscape for you or for me. It is complex, infinitely rich, unique, and changing in every moment, all the while staying approximately the same. It cannot be contained, preserved, or transferred. I can name the possible sources but struggle to convey the actual experience. You would have to smell it yourself to know it, and even then, it would be hard for us to talk about and perhaps better if we didn’t, richer and more sensory and sensible if we just remained silent in the experiencing of it rather than retreating, as we are so often apt to do when we have any kind of experience, into our heads and right into more or less mindless speech, a narrative that so easily kills the unspeakable richness of the silent sensing knowing sharing.
Fragrances offer us a world unto itself via our most delicately attuned sense. The nose can detect infinitesimal levels of aromatic compounds, a few parts per trillion in some cases. Smell is fundamentally a molecular sense, as is taste. Of course, smelling and tasting are closely related anatomically and functionally. When our nose is blocked up, it is hard for us to taste anything.
Molecules in the air are the source of all smell experiences other than those we generate solely through memory, when we somehow manage to excite the olfactory brain in just the right way to re-create a Proustian experience as vivid as the original. Even though our own olfactory prowess is meager compared to most animals, still it is the case that “nothing is more memorable than a smell.” Our attraction or our aversion can be instant, reflexive, animal-like in nature when a scent is particularly pleasant or unpleasant. The long-evolved, some would say primitive, although there is little primitive about it, biological imperative of approach and avoidance always lurks at its most basic here in the world of smells, with us in its reflexive grip. Indeed, compounds known as pheromones link us to each other, help us find each other, and just as with other species of animals, participate in choreographing the social and sexual dances we engage in and the choices we make in deciding with whom to pass on our genes in new combinations to future generations. The search for chemical attractants that can be manufactured and marketed to the masses is now the Holy Grail for fragrance company laboratories. Small wonder.
With most smells, being neither too pleasant nor too unpleasant, well, we are likely to miss them altogether. Even with strong smells, the nose is soon saturated. A few moments of immersion and we are apt to smell nothing, not even noxious fumes. The nose is a fine instrument, but it tires quickly if overwhelmed. It’s hard for us even to smell the food we are eating right through a meal.
Once again it is the air that mediates between source and detector, for the air delivers far more than sounds to our ears. Smells, scents, aromas, fragrances, stenches, and stinks travel its byways. Our dogs know them so much more vividly than we do, and often long before we do for those we can detect at all. Dogs inhabit a smellscape far richer than ours. Theirs is a predominantly smell-defined universe that provides them with huge amounts of relevant information, information about other dogs, people, and places, apparently whole histories and itineraries can be inferred. Apparently the olfactory epithelium in the nose (which is really where the business of smelling takes place) of a dog can have up to seventeen times the surface area of ours, and over one hundred times the concentration of smell receptors per square centimeter. The olfactory cortex of rats and shrews is a huge proportion of their entire cortex. In humans, that proportion is minuscule. Of course, shrews and dogs do not have the huge areas of cerebral cortex uncommitted to sensory and motor functions that allow for our far more elaborate cognitive and creative functioning.
Sometimes I think that the main purpose of walking my dog is to give her time to explore the wider world through her nose. Each spot she comes to is a public bulletin board of messages and notations announcing who and what have already passed this way, which other denizens of the neighborhood, canine and noncanine, are afoot. Many particular spots invite her, for reasons unknown to my senses, to roll on her back in the tall summer grass, her belly splayed open to the sky, head to one side; or, in winter, to respond to the scents and textures peculiar to deep snow recently fallen that resonate with her silver Siberian Husky genes. In such moments, she will stick her snout down into the snow and plow this way and that right over her eyes, taking in a world I am a stranger to. Without adequate time for smelling, I imagine her brain and her being, her husky essence are bereft, somehow not stoked in the ways they require daily, if not hourly or moment by moment, for her to be her full dog-self. She needs to be free to wander wherever her nose carries her, but this has its own problems in a human-dominated world. In any event, she is my meditation teacher in this, as in so many other ways. Really, she is walking me more than I am walking her. When I can remember this, I am in closer proximity to the more-than-human world. It helps me to step out of time, and out of my head.
People, countries, cities, villages, buildings and houses, landscapes, seascapes all have their signature aromas. A first whiff of New Delhi is never forgotten, and so it is for most places and seasons, except when we mask and sanitize them compulsively. Scents speak to us of many things, evoke many feelings, emotions that go way beyond nostalgia or mere memory. Scents and fragrances can plunge us into grief or ecstasy. And yet, and yet… they wake us up too, invite us to surrender entirely to the present, basking in the fragrance and the fragrances of now.
The wind one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.
“In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I’d like all the odor of your roses…”
ANTONIO MACHADO
Translated by Robert Bly
Perhaps it is not surprising that Machado feels an urgency in the demand for reciprocity between the odors in the wind and the fragrances within his own being. But were they ever separate?