Remembering Smell by Bonnie Blodgett

To me, this book is not that big of a divergence from the lust list because in lust, all the sense are in hyper-drive. Lust moves us from the plebeian sight and sound that navigate us through all daily activity, to get us close enough to touch / caress and to inhale deeply. A lover surely can sweet-talk a way into your brain through your ear, but the scent of a woman (or man) lingers longer in the memory. “Unlike images and sounds, one pathway for odors goes directly to the brain’s emotion and memory centers without being filtered by the circuits involved in higher intelligence.”

Blodgett lost her sense of smell from one careless dousing of Zicam, an over the counter nasal spray that the FDA finally banned years after its manufacturer settled a $12 million lawsuit to hundreds of injured people. She writes about the isolation and depression that sets in from not picking up on both dangerous smells (metal burning on the stove) or the aromas of preparing food or working in the earth to clear a perennial garden. “Is smell’s ability to trick us into losing ourselves in the moment (in pure delight) a cornerstone of human happiness?”

This book does not read like a disease of the week television show (not that I ever watch them) but like introspective musings. Blodgett weighs her life against her sensory loss, delves into the Internet as all us symptom-searching fanatics, and exposes an array of doctors and researchers, as well as occasionally referencing her tale to Proustian literary legacies. How can a person make a caricature of herself using only one stroke, one sense? What bodily infirmity does one dream-dread at night, loss of sight, becoming crippled? In one paragraph, she explains herself, per se:

“Smell used to ground me in the here and now. It took the edge off my essential solitude. It challenged my irrational (or not) fear that reality is unreliable and can slip away at any moment. Certain smells are ravishing and others foul, but all of them possess an animal component that is absent from sight and hearing. You can’t over think a smell. It’s there whether you want it or not, having its way with you, like music, but more potent for its subtlety, its immunity to reason, how it affects you without your knowing it, how it makes things real on their own terms. Makes you real in a way that has nothing to do with you.”

So now I think about my own inventory of smell. I find it nigh onto impossible. The memories as Blodgett knows are only triggered by the smell. It is not the aroma that is cherished for itself, but for the waves of endorphins that was through the body in its recall. “ … like Sleeping Beauty, who can only be awakened by a certain kiss from a special prince, smell and all its attendant emotions lie dormant until triggered by smell itself.” I wiggle my nose like the witch in I Dream of Jeannie …. I am itching for my transporting fragrance.