The smell of the new

Growth and evolution are matched and marked by widening ambits of consciousness. The earliest and most primitive organisms interacted only through body to body contact; then the sense of smell developed - the ability to detect chemicals originating at a remove - followed by hearing - an awareness of larger-scale changes in the physical environment - and only much later through sight, which allows distant objects to be perceived through the complex computational process of extracting implicit order from light.  Similarly the new-born child initially knows no world, only itself. Later, as it ages and orders its senses, it apprehends its mother, its room, the wider landscape, until finally as an adult it can assimilate the experience of the universe.

This progression, to knowledge at a distance, is related to a corresponding movement to action at a distance manifest in mankind's obsessive refinement of weaponry.  To know through touch or smell usually implies being known in the same way - always in the case of touch, which is mutual by definition; heard knowledge is safer, and that gained from sight safer still.  It is the same with weapons; the whole sorry thrust of their development has been the desire to inflict pain and death without risking either.

There are therefore deep and ancient reasons why the more perilous modes of apprehension - touch and smell - should remain so charged for us, and why our society becomes daily more and more visual and hence aloof and isolated.  Touch is obviously intimate, its own symbol of closeness; but the sense of smell tends to be ignored and undervalued, even regarded as the most feral and hence base of the senses - though it is capable of moving us powerfully and unexpectedly.

For example, most have experienced that jolt of recognition brought about by encountering a smell that immediately conjures up a long-forgotten scene, perhaps from earliest childhood - a sense of what could perhaps be called déjà flairé.  Such catalysts are rare and involuntary, But there are other, more routine smells that can grip us almost as strongly.

That moment when you step into a brand-new house to be greeted by the scent of fresh-sawn wood, the clinging odour of carpet, barely-dry paint and putty hanging in the air like a tangible cloud.  Or when you sit inside your gleaming new car, and are overpowered by the smell of leather and a rich melange of plastics.  Or the first time you switch on a new piece of electronics, a television or audio system, and you savour the pungent aroma of pristine components burning in, of exotic, unnameable resins, latter-day frankincenses.

These are the smells of the new, the smell of an object as it is before it becomes clogged and soiled by use, and by us.  In those first few encounters we are put back in touch with things as they are, things met close up; in those brief moments we return to our origins as simple animals, as children; for an instant or two, we experience the world without the cleverness and fear which maturity and evolution have instilled in us.

(29.10.89)

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