An Ode to the Schnoz

An Ode to the Schnoz

In all kinds of popular culture, our senses are inundated with color and sound—lush representations of what we’re supposed to feel and think and how we should behave when we’re presented with these kinds of sensual situations. So thanks, socialization, for teaching us how to behave when we’re presented with an image or a noise. I couldn't have done that on my own.

Smell-o-vision scratch-and-sniff cards in the 1960’s tried to present us with the same kind of automatic response to smell, but it didn’t work. Smell is such a poignant and, thanks to an inability to really mass produce scents in the way we mass produce other sensory things, an unadulterated way of sensing the world. Why don’t we put more value in it?

Smell can’t really be represented in any medium. People in movies sometimes sniff and say, “Smells great!” or “Honey, what’s cooking?” but smell isn’t usually very much part of a the movie’s plot. Even books can’t accurately describe the sense.

Aimee Bender’s wonderful The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake exquisitely described taste sensations, but I’ve never read any written words that describe a smell without comparing it to something else. “She smelled like trees” or “She smelled like her grandmother’s pot roast” would work adequately in a short story or novel, but it’s not really saying anything. The only communal possibilities of smell are relating them to shared experiences and even then, generalizing isn’t really possible.

Sure, you can say that “she smelled like her grandmother’s pot roast,” and that probably leads to situational rememberance—not a smell remeberance. For the most part, smells cannot be brought up again with just a thought. You have to tangibly smell that smell to bring back the linked memory. That’s why we can only describe smells with memories—and even then all we’re conjuring up in our minds is the memory of the event hypothetically linked to the smell.

That’s why when I think about smell I think about something pure. Unlike sight or sound, what tricks can smell play with us? We are taught from our earliest childhood that our eyes play tricks on us—that bus you see in the distance is really just the trees and the setting sun. Sound, too, is rife with misguidance. The evil laughter in the night may be created by a creaky house, wind and an active imagination.

But smell is pure and, in most cases, cannot lead us astray. I think of the time when I liked someone in my freshman year and searched for her perfume in all of the stores in the city. I never found it and now—and even then—I couldn’t tell you what it smelled like. Store-bought gravy could never mimicthe way the smell of my grandmother's gravy hung heavy and still in the air. Even now, I remember Thanksgivings at her house, but I'll never smell that smell exactly again. Not that I can recall what I'm missing.

Smell memory is acute with sense recreation. You know when a smell is wrong more easily than you can recall each small detail in a memory. Your mother could tell you that yes, yes, you wore a blue dress on the day of your baptism and you’d incorporate that image into your baptismal memory. But if she added a couple of pinches of pepper to your grandmother’s well-loved gravy recipe and you smelled it, you’d know it was different this time.