03/05/10 13:25:21

Folks tend to think, since we know everything else about the human body, the nature of the olfactory sense must be well detailed in medical literature. Not so! We've only just started to figure out the physiology of smell in the last 10-20 years. This travesty of senses is due in part to the fact that many philosophers have denigrated smells in general, from Plato to Kant. This fact in turn is probably connected to the notion that some smells are categorically bad and some smells are good, in an objective sense; how could a higher sense involve the rank, the funky, the offensive? We natural perfumers and we who are guided by what we smell tend not to see good and bad so much in the fragrances which greet us; every aroma and odor has its proper place.

The main problem I see with the denigration of scent is this: because we're taught that smell is of the lowest order, we have no vocabulary to discuss what is our most complex sense.  Yet Italo Calvino asserts, "Everything is first perceived by the nose, everything is within the nose, the world is the nose." According to Calvino's frame, we exist in this odoriferous world because we smell, because we are smelled and we do smell in turn. Returning to the character of Grenouille again, he realized of a sudden that he himself had no odor; he had been ignored and downtrodden his whole life through because he had no human presence. Part of his macabre experience of the world involves giving himself an aroma.

Because Grenouille worked in that most amorphous of areas, the olfactory, his destiny was to be ignored by the mainstream world. We know well politicians, writers, filmmakers, but how many of us can name a few famous perfumers through the ages? Only those with specialized knowledge are aware. Our ignorance is in no way related to the overwhelming importance of smell, in getting acquainted with the earth, in sensing our own self esteem, in distinguishing ourselves from others; rather, it has mostly to do with the elevation of the visual, literary, and intellectual above every other realm of human pursuit.

Yet we who exalt our sense of smell are only too clear about the primacy of our olfactory sense, an importance made succinctly clear by a single salient factoid: the axons, the neural transmitters, active in the olfactory bulb need pass through only two synapses before reaching the brain; no other sense, not vision, not touch, not hearing, offers a more direct connection between a given sense and our experience of the world. We who revel in the supremacy of scent perfectly well knew that; one can't but come to the conclusion that it will be some time before the rest of humanity catches up to us.