Who
Nose
When I smell wild woodbine (Honeysuckle,
to you) I'm no longer a middle-aged balding, overweight eejit sitting
at a computer. No. I am once again six years old, standing in a field,
with my mother, on a June evening while buttercups grow profusely underfoot.
The smell of chalk dust and it's 1952. And I sit in gap-toothed amazement
in Lacken National School.
One whiff of creosote and it's the early days of rural electrification
and ESB poles are being delivered to West Wicklow by the lorryload. I
could go on and on.....
Olfaction or smell is our most evocative sense. 'Ever noticed how your
childhood home seems smaller than you remember it? When you bring that
old cracked LP down from the attic and play it you'll find that your memory
has been playing tricks on you. And maybe even the things you remember
feeling. But the sense of smell is accurate. Animals rely on odours to
locate food, recognise trails and territory and to find a willing mate.
The smell of new mown hay will do a better job on recapturing my childhood
than the sound of the corncrake or the mirror-like surface of the Blessington
Lakes on a July evening.
But being "civilised" means we have lost a lot in the area of smelling.
Our social behaviour is not controlled by scent; or so we think. Therefore
we suppress our awareness of what our nose tells us. But despite our best
efforts to become refined we haven't lost it all. Mothers can recognise
their babies by smell and newborn babies recognise their mother the same
way.
But I'm digressing. (As opposed to rambling, like I normally do)
I started off about the evocative power
of smell.
French novelist Marcel Proust, in The Remembrance of Things Past, has
put it much better than I can;
"When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead,
after the things are 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".
Not bad for a man that didn't ever get the whiff of heather in Kylebeg.
When certain chemical substances attach themselves to receptors on our
sensory cells it can transport us back in time. Anatomical studies show
that the average human being can recognise up to 10,000 different odours.
It is of course difficult to describe any of the smells, which emanate
from our surroundings. Usually the best we can come up with is a crude
analogy; "Like a Rose" or "You'd swear it was an old dry toilet". We can
say that something is a deep red or a light blue but there is no smell
scale. Yet, somebody has decided that freshly cut grass smells a little
like blood because they share a similar molecular structure based around
magnesium (chlorophyll) or iron (haemoglobin).
An American company, Smell This, is now producing aerosols which emit
the smell of everything from a campfire to wet laundry. And the Gifted
Hand in County Tipperary (Ph; 00 353 67 41777) are selling a little package
containing a small bit of peat and a little slate hearth. And once ignited
that will bring you back. Whether you are in a high rise apartment in
Sydney or a mansion in Dallas, if you come from rural Ireland, the smell
of turf smoke will bring you back to your grandmother's cottage.
I think it was Sir Sydney Nolan who said that all art is an effort on
the part of the artist to recapture his or her youth. What better way
to recapture those golden years than with a sniff? If the whiff of starched
linen brings you back to that young one in a country lane on a summer's
evening or the aroma of almonds enables you to relive a perfect Christmas.....fire
away.
The International Society of Chemical Ecology is dedicated to the study
of pheromones (pheromones are substances we can't see and don't consciously
detect, yet strong evidence suggests that hey are in the air all around
us all the time). The reason we aren't affected or influenced by all the
pheromones in the air is that they aren't meant for us.. They are species-specific.
These substances rule the animal world's mating habits. And how often
have you said of a relationship; "What does she see in him" or "They are
unlikely bedfellows" Well the answer may be in the nose. Dr. Alan Hirsch
of the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Centre, in Chicago says;
"Once we're attracted to another person's odour, even an odour below the
level of conscious detection, a strong sexual and emotional bond is possible".
I wonder will scientists, some day, make a discovery whereby a smell will
activate our recall button completely and ALL the relevant information
stored in our subconscious will be recalled by, say, the smell of a dandelion?
Who nose?
by
Mattie Lennon
23rd December 2001
Discuss
This Article