SMELL & SENSIBILITY
A thousand surge at us as we begin our walk.
Sweat, sand, soap, dung, camphor, flowers, oil, oranges, fish, pigeons, disinfectant, wet earth, deodorant, varnish, burnt rubber - each blending with the distinct other, explosively at one instance, and gently at another, creating one choking gulp of life-odour at a time.
We succumb to the methodical olfactory attack; the other senses take a reluctant back seat.
And suddenly, as we navigate our way through the heart of Dadar, we look at each other for a moment and smile at the mutual realisation of having just smelt ' humanity'.
Showing posts with label SPACE ON THE NOSE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SPACE ON THE NOSE. Show all posts
Sunday, March 03, 2013
Monday, January 12, 2009
ADAM ON SPACE ON THE NOSE
A NOSE FOR MEMORY
Of all the senses, smell is the most powerfully linked one to memory. Perhaps it’s because part of the faculty for this sense occupies a space that’s considered to be the oldest or most primal region of the brain?
Certainly, our oldest memories, particularly those of childhood, seem to be most easily triggered by the smells they are linked to ⎯ from the subtle and sublime scent of a mother’s embrace (as ubiquitous as it is unique), to the delicious and delightful aroma of a freshly baked pie (a sort of archetypical smell of childhood in Western societies).
For the most part, the smells of childhood are created outside of our control. But at some point in our development, we shift from being passive receptors of smells, and become more actively involved in creating and choosing them. In this respect, through the use of smell, we become what might be called “memory makers”; some of us more consciously so than others.
I’m watching this take place right now with my teenage daughter. She’s taken it upon herself to change the brand of laundry detergent that we’ve been using in our home for many years. Interestingly, the first articles that she’s chosen for receiving this new scent are her bed sheets, pillowcases and comforter cover. (A space that’s begging to be explored.) Changing the laundry detergent seems to be an attempt on her part to use smell to mark a “space” that’s a departure from the past, as well as an arrival of a memory now set for the future.
What memories have you made lately? Or rather, smelled anything good lately?
Of all the senses, smell is the most powerfully linked one to memory. Perhaps it’s because part of the faculty for this sense occupies a space that’s considered to be the oldest or most primal region of the brain?
Certainly, our oldest memories, particularly those of childhood, seem to be most easily triggered by the smells they are linked to ⎯ from the subtle and sublime scent of a mother’s embrace (as ubiquitous as it is unique), to the delicious and delightful aroma of a freshly baked pie (a sort of archetypical smell of childhood in Western societies).
For the most part, the smells of childhood are created outside of our control. But at some point in our development, we shift from being passive receptors of smells, and become more actively involved in creating and choosing them. In this respect, through the use of smell, we become what might be called “memory makers”; some of us more consciously so than others.
I’m watching this take place right now with my teenage daughter. She’s taken it upon herself to change the brand of laundry detergent that we’ve been using in our home for many years. Interestingly, the first articles that she’s chosen for receiving this new scent are her bed sheets, pillowcases and comforter cover. (A space that’s begging to be explored.) Changing the laundry detergent seems to be an attempt on her part to use smell to mark a “space” that’s a departure from the past, as well as an arrival of a memory now set for the future.
What memories have you made lately? Or rather, smelled anything good lately?
Saturday, January 10, 2009
RO ON SPACE ON THE NOSE - 3
COFFEE & BAGELS
It's Friday morning. I sit in a corner office on the 14th Floor of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, working on Microsoft. I bite into an Onion Bagel, bluntly cut with a plastic knife and schmeared with spring onion cream cheese. As the aroma of coffee wafts from the kitchen across the corridor, emotions wash me in different flavors; most of them are chicory-bitter, and a very few, sweet. I’m immediately transported to a Friday morning some ten odd years ago.
The cluster of downtown San Fran’s grey-brown buildings, kafkaesque, darkens my moving vision. The grating wheels of the cable car make auditory furrows upon the nerves of my teeth. A cold lonely wind wraps me in its arms and clings to me; when I embrace it back, it slaps me on the face.
In these few seconds, I am acutely aware of how outcast I was all those years, the embers of my spirit stubbed out by that apparently refined, non-smoking society. I think of what I left behind – a civilized prison that went to great lengths to pretend not to be one, in a culture outwardly refined and accepting and respectful of difference, but hiding its hypocritical ugly face under a beautiful, smiling, subtle mask of discrimination.
I thought I’d forgotten it, forgiven it, but it emerges from under the layered years of denial, popping up in the foreground like an expanded window on my Mac.
I no longer feel the ice-blue resentment against that clique; I was never a part of it anyway, and now, in a rear-view rush of gratitude, I know I will never be. That brand of exile no longer has the power to terrify me like it did, perhaps because I don’t look for mirrors to reflect my identity, or even my existence, any more. I’ve learnt to bite it back like I do every winter in New York.
San Francisco, you bitchcold city. But I must be a little kinder to you, you helped me become who I am today.
I sit on the 21st Floor of 135 Main Street. Swanlike ships glide under the Bay Bridge, leaving frothy white trails on an intense blue Pacific. I stare at my Mac, so grateful to be finally accepted.
A man with the grey beard sits cross-legged like a technological mystic, talking Microsoft on the carpet everyone has tread upon with their shoes, ruffling my cultural obsessive-compulsive sensibilities ever so little. Ah, he smokes, which makes him less civilized then. A narrow brown woman, softly scornful and unobvious in her beauty, flashes me a smile as she walks up the stairs to finish her strategy document.
There are others who make little impact on me, all with that cookie-cutter question-mark intonation, that same, pale, manufactured look, perhaps their only raison d’etre to please the mammoth, swallowing corporate powers-that-be.
A bus beeps – that same beep I have heard so often on Howard Street. The smells of Starbucks on California Street whisper memories into my nostrils again, and the late September air, with a little shiver in it, wipes in vignettes of Embarcadero Center and the howling fog around.
The honking of enraged New York traffic wakes me up to a new reality.
Everything is the same, yet everything is different. I'm still working on Microsoft, but I’m Ro, the New Yorker.
And my ultimate acceptance is only by myself.
It's Friday morning. I sit in a corner office on the 14th Floor of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, working on Microsoft. I bite into an Onion Bagel, bluntly cut with a plastic knife and schmeared with spring onion cream cheese. As the aroma of coffee wafts from the kitchen across the corridor, emotions wash me in different flavors; most of them are chicory-bitter, and a very few, sweet. I’m immediately transported to a Friday morning some ten odd years ago.
The cluster of downtown San Fran’s grey-brown buildings, kafkaesque, darkens my moving vision. The grating wheels of the cable car make auditory furrows upon the nerves of my teeth. A cold lonely wind wraps me in its arms and clings to me; when I embrace it back, it slaps me on the face.
In these few seconds, I am acutely aware of how outcast I was all those years, the embers of my spirit stubbed out by that apparently refined, non-smoking society. I think of what I left behind – a civilized prison that went to great lengths to pretend not to be one, in a culture outwardly refined and accepting and respectful of difference, but hiding its hypocritical ugly face under a beautiful, smiling, subtle mask of discrimination.
I thought I’d forgotten it, forgiven it, but it emerges from under the layered years of denial, popping up in the foreground like an expanded window on my Mac.
I no longer feel the ice-blue resentment against that clique; I was never a part of it anyway, and now, in a rear-view rush of gratitude, I know I will never be. That brand of exile no longer has the power to terrify me like it did, perhaps because I don’t look for mirrors to reflect my identity, or even my existence, any more. I’ve learnt to bite it back like I do every winter in New York.
San Francisco, you bitchcold city. But I must be a little kinder to you, you helped me become who I am today.
I sit on the 21st Floor of 135 Main Street. Swanlike ships glide under the Bay Bridge, leaving frothy white trails on an intense blue Pacific. I stare at my Mac, so grateful to be finally accepted.
A man with the grey beard sits cross-legged like a technological mystic, talking Microsoft on the carpet everyone has tread upon with their shoes, ruffling my cultural obsessive-compulsive sensibilities ever so little. Ah, he smokes, which makes him less civilized then. A narrow brown woman, softly scornful and unobvious in her beauty, flashes me a smile as she walks up the stairs to finish her strategy document.
There are others who make little impact on me, all with that cookie-cutter question-mark intonation, that same, pale, manufactured look, perhaps their only raison d’etre to please the mammoth, swallowing corporate powers-that-be.
A bus beeps – that same beep I have heard so often on Howard Street. The smells of Starbucks on California Street whisper memories into my nostrils again, and the late September air, with a little shiver in it, wipes in vignettes of Embarcadero Center and the howling fog around.
The honking of enraged New York traffic wakes me up to a new reality.
Everything is the same, yet everything is different. I'm still working on Microsoft, but I’m Ro, the New Yorker.
And my ultimate acceptance is only by myself.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
RO ON SPACE ON THE NOSE – 2
CHERRY BLOSSOMS
When Spring beckons with silver-throated birds, Nature crafts a paintbrush from the soft fibers of wispy clouds. She wets the brush with the sky's joyous tears, and sweeps the landscape with even, flat strokes. Then, she dabs the pointy tip into the colors of the earth and all its muds and silts and soils, to dot the just-moistened landscape. Innocent white petals blush modestly with delicate daubs of rose and fuchsia; some turn mauve and lavender, others peachy salmon, misty yellow and coppery brown.
How else would Cherry Blossoms in Japan come to be?
Beauty in its intensity can be almost unbearable to the eye; in this case, it is apparently unbearable to the Nose – at least for some – when pollen is sprinkled into the air like fairy dust.
And so the Japanese Face Mask comes to be.
Perhaps no other culture knows to draw spatial boundaries around the nose as does Japan’s. Like everything else, the reasons are many-nuanced. Sometimes, they also stem from an innate consciousness etched into the culture from as long as time can remember. It’s the consciousness of a collective society, one with deep respect for another’s olfactory border. Reasons for such consideration for one's companions? A cold, a viral, a flu, a sneeze. All of which teem with more germs than the letters on this page – scrolled down.
In a culture that’s also detail-oriented, perfectionist and conscientious about going to work every day – come rain, shine or cherry blossom – a common cold isn’t reason enough to shirk the necessary responsibility.
And so they don the mask.
When Spring beckons with silver-throated birds, Nature crafts a paintbrush from the soft fibers of wispy clouds. She wets the brush with the sky's joyous tears, and sweeps the landscape with even, flat strokes. Then, she dabs the pointy tip into the colors of the earth and all its muds and silts and soils, to dot the just-moistened landscape. Innocent white petals blush modestly with delicate daubs of rose and fuchsia; some turn mauve and lavender, others peachy salmon, misty yellow and coppery brown.
How else would Cherry Blossoms in Japan come to be?
Beauty in its intensity can be almost unbearable to the eye; in this case, it is apparently unbearable to the Nose – at least for some – when pollen is sprinkled into the air like fairy dust.
And so the Japanese Face Mask comes to be.
Perhaps no other culture knows to draw spatial boundaries around the nose as does Japan’s. Like everything else, the reasons are many-nuanced. Sometimes, they also stem from an innate consciousness etched into the culture from as long as time can remember. It’s the consciousness of a collective society, one with deep respect for another’s olfactory border. Reasons for such consideration for one's companions? A cold, a viral, a flu, a sneeze. All of which teem with more germs than the letters on this page – scrolled down.
In a culture that’s also detail-oriented, perfectionist and conscientious about going to work every day – come rain, shine or cherry blossom – a common cold isn’t reason enough to shirk the necessary responsibility.
And so they don the mask.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
GUY ON SPACE ON THE NOSE
JOURNEYSCENT
Taking my daily commute, I follow my nose’s sensations along the way.
The scents in the hallway outside my door are simple: old carpet and dried paint. Flat and persistent, they crowd me from behind, shooting me forward like a pea through a straw, down the stairs and out the door.
Outside are a thousand scents, churning, traveling, growing and dissipating, as if I’ve discovered a new frontier. Exploration beckons, but as a dutiful worker I glide toward the subway instead.
I turn downhill after passing the last building on the block, and riding the wind, the scent of the sea hits me, faint but pervasive. It transmits the essence of that broad flat expanse of blue, miles away.
In the subway, the attacking scent of acrid burnt metal cuts an endless gash through my mind, like the tracks that run for miles from the city center to the land’s end.
In my office, the mix of dry, monotonous, faintest odors (must; bleached paper; alcohol-tinged equipment and floors; baked and cooled air ducts) presses me gently down into my chair.
- Simple, flat scents = a long, directional tube
- Millions of churning scents = a wide, dark, uneven surface
- Faint but pervasive smell = broad, flat expanse
- Metallic, cutting smell = a long slit
- Faint mixes of monotones = low overhead
What spaces do other kinds of scents convey?
Sunday, January 04, 2009
RO ON SPACE ON THE NOSE - 1
THE PRINCESS AND THE P
Why is reward linked to hard work, and in this case, punishment?
My journey to The Land of Fragrances & Flavors, Scents & Spices – the land of Jasmine & Jackfruit, Orchid & Lychee, Frangipani & Mango, Rice & Pandan Leaf – is always fraught with olfactory ordeals.
On the aircraft, the apparatus placed by the creator at the center of my face quivers at sharing space with so many breathing, coughing, sneezing, spluttering, sniffing, oozing, emitting, expelling, discharging beings called “humans”. My Nose is very challenged, despite Singapore Airlines’ clever attempt at Sensory Branding, with a patented scent that is melded into the perfume of flight attendants, blended into the hot towels they offer before take-off, and imbued into the brand itself – a smooth, sensual, seductive, sexy scent that is “exotically Asian, with a distinct aura of the feminine.”
Exotically Asian, my foot. For my Nose, it is a journey of extreme hardship, of the intense suffering of its sensibilities, of penitence to be paid, of abstinence even, as it cries out to my lungs to stop demanding air.
For over 20 hours, my Nose is pummeled with the smell of international travel – a motley mix of the fermemted stench of baggage, of never-washed upholstery, of reheated airline meals, of unkempt passengers, of unwashed armpits, of un-flossed crevices, of masking perfumes which only enhance underlying notes.
Even in Business or First, it is much the same – if only less intense.
Perhaps no other sense is as invaded and infringed, penetrated and pervaded, abused and assaulted, raided and ravaged, as is the Space on My Nose.
The ordeal is finally over. I am soaring in a taxi redolent of Pandan Leaf and Jasmine Rice. I roll down the window like a dog hungry for new smells.
The scents of Singapore wash out my brain of all its recent traumas. The air, purified clean with Nature’s own hand – a tropical thunderstorm – carries many a pious offering to my nose.
An offering of Buddhist temple incense, the fragrance of fresh rain upon sun-scorched earth, the whiff of fresh-mowed grass, the clean smell of rainforest tree bark, and the exotic scent of orchids.
The real journey is about to begin.
Why is reward linked to hard work, and in this case, punishment?
My journey to The Land of Fragrances & Flavors, Scents & Spices – the land of Jasmine & Jackfruit, Orchid & Lychee, Frangipani & Mango, Rice & Pandan Leaf – is always fraught with olfactory ordeals.
On the aircraft, the apparatus placed by the creator at the center of my face quivers at sharing space with so many breathing, coughing, sneezing, spluttering, sniffing, oozing, emitting, expelling, discharging beings called “humans”. My Nose is very challenged, despite Singapore Airlines’ clever attempt at Sensory Branding, with a patented scent that is melded into the perfume of flight attendants, blended into the hot towels they offer before take-off, and imbued into the brand itself – a smooth, sensual, seductive, sexy scent that is “exotically Asian, with a distinct aura of the feminine.”
Exotically Asian, my foot. For my Nose, it is a journey of extreme hardship, of the intense suffering of its sensibilities, of penitence to be paid, of abstinence even, as it cries out to my lungs to stop demanding air.
For over 20 hours, my Nose is pummeled with the smell of international travel – a motley mix of the fermemted stench of baggage, of never-washed upholstery, of reheated airline meals, of unkempt passengers, of unwashed armpits, of un-flossed crevices, of masking perfumes which only enhance underlying notes.
Even in Business or First, it is much the same – if only less intense.
Perhaps no other sense is as invaded and infringed, penetrated and pervaded, abused and assaulted, raided and ravaged, as is the Space on My Nose.
The ordeal is finally over. I am soaring in a taxi redolent of Pandan Leaf and Jasmine Rice. I roll down the window like a dog hungry for new smells.
The scents of Singapore wash out my brain of all its recent traumas. The air, purified clean with Nature’s own hand – a tropical thunderstorm – carries many a pious offering to my nose.
An offering of Buddhist temple incense, the fragrance of fresh rain upon sun-scorched earth, the whiff of fresh-mowed grass, the clean smell of rainforest tree bark, and the exotic scent of orchids.
The real journey is about to begin.
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