I’m ten years old, walking down Rowe Street in Eastwood, holding my Mum’s hand so I don’t lose her amidst the flow of Saturday morning shoppers. We walk past a bakery. Mum stops in the middle of the flow of human traffic and inhales deeply. ‘Oh, smell that! It’s wonderful!’ she smiles as the scent of bread just out of the oven blasts out from the bakery.
I’m frustrated. ‘I can’t smell. I told you that.’ I say. Mum recalls this as one of the earliest memories she has of me not being able to smell. She dismissed what I was trying to say as being a typical tantrum. She said I seemed angry. I was.
If I were older I would have asked, as I do now, for Mum to try to describe the scent to me. I ask everyone this, each time they point out a scent or aroma or even a foul-scented odour. Very few people have been able to articulate what they can smell. The more patient friends and family will call on metaphors but run out of creative energy once they realise just how difficult it is to explain something that is so intuitive.
One summer when I was 20 years old I had a passionate affair. My lover one day said that the bedroom was filled with the smell of sex. I asked him to describe it as a colour he said it was a citrus-green, with the acidic tang and underlying sweetness of the rind of a lime.
For the most part though, the people around me have been unable to help me understand their world. When they say ‘Smell that!’ they’re inviting me to appreciate the world as they do. Yet they’re not empowered with the vocabulary or structure for communicating in order to do so.
How would you describe a painting to a blind man?
Imagine standing in front of the ‘Birth of Venus’ in the Uffizi gallery in Florence. Where would you start to share your experience with your friend who cannot see? Should the artwork remain in accessible to him simply because he lacks one of the senses?
How would you describe the scale of the painting to a man who has never seen a handyman’s ladder? Or a giraffe? You could describe the scene – but he’s never seen a naked woman, let alone a young, virginal, nubile woman standing in a seashell, covered in drifting waves of silken gold hair.
Perhaps the metaphors you choose could come from the other senses. Touch and texture is a tactile way to relate to the world. The attending nymph looks the way a warm freshly baked bread roll feels, pliant and warm, yielding and returning to form as you squeeze them.
The colours in the Birth of Venus are vibrant, but not harsh, like the sun on a mild spring day. Venus’ hair dances among small flowers as together they’re lifted by a mild ocean breeze and the god’s propelling breath. The painting looks the way Spring feels – the welcome warmth of the sun gently thawing the last cold tendrils of winter that reach into our days and dissipate by noon when the sun is at its highest.
To describe the painting in terms of sound, you could talk of the gentle strumming of lyres. You could play renaissance-era music to give a sense of the painter’s perspective. Teach the blind man a dance and he’ll feel the motion in the painting, the movement of the painter’s brushstrokes. Cover your own chest first in talcum powder and allow the man to feel the contours of your own body in order to appreciate Venus. Allow the blind man to run his fingers lightly over the painting so he can feel the layers of paint. Make him stand next to the painting and ask him to reach as far as he can up the frame, then to reach down to find where the frame of the painting ends before it reaches the floor. Have him stand amongst a tour group as they look on the painting for the first time and let him eavesdrop on what the tour guide and the participants say. Ask him to listen to their tone, because a painting is not just oil on canvas but is the way it makes us feel and the things it makes us say.
I have been tsk-tsk’d at by countless art gallery docents and visitors for wanting to touch the artwork. In Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary art hangs a snowball in a chandelier by XX. It’s been on permanent display since XXXX. I visit the MCA about four times a year and each time I include a stop by the artwork. The ball of ice rests on the arms of the chandelier and is guarded by faceted crystals. There is no water underneath the display, it does not drip. A small generator sits within the ice sphere and keeps it at the perfect temperature that ensures its survival. I’ve been asked to leave the gallery before for touching the artwork. But it confuses me. I don’t understand how we can appreciate the artwork for how incredible it is, without touching it. For when my fingertips slide across the surface of the snowball I feel goose-bumps all the way down my arms. My brain tries to compute the improbability – synapses firing, retrieving relevant knowledge files from my internal memory. Without touching the snowball are we just to blindly believe that it is cold? I don’t know if that was the artist’s goal.
It may be not that we have limited imaginations, but that until now, there has not been a need to extend our imaginations far enough.
When I ask people to explain a smell to me, my request is often dismissed. It’s not that my friends don’t want me to understand, but that they don’t know how to do it. That it is a shortcoming in their own communications that stops them from being able to do so. Smell, amongst those empowered to do so, is so intuitive, so primal that it’s uncomfortable for people to explore it.
I’m only now starting to understand the anger that started when I was ten years old. I was talking to Mum the other day and I pointed out that saying ‘Smell that!’ but not offering any more information is like saying to a blind man that the ‘Birth of Venus’ is beautiful, but not offering any further information. The ten –year old me was trying to understand, but was being denied the information from the people who I felt should be helping me find my way. As a ten year old I interpreted my Mum’s unwillingness to explain smell to me as a way to dismiss me, to say that she did not believe me, or that trying to help me was not worth the effort.
It has taken me decades to understand that it wasn’t that my Mum did not want to explain, but that she didn’t know how to.
Smell science has had major developments since 1999. XX Birnbaum’s Book XX
It’s not fair for me to expect people to be able to communicate with me in a way that I understand, when they have never been taught how to.
But is it fair that I should expect compassion?
Imagine the blind man again. And imagine telling him something is ugly. Even worse, imagine telling him he is ugly. Repulsive. Odious. Disgusting. Tell him emphatically. Put emotion into it. Let him hear from your tone how awful you find his visage. But don’t tell him what it is about him that makes him so repugnant. Even when he asks for more information, or help, your only available response is to dismiss him.
This is how confused, isolated, misunderstood and dejected a congenital anosmic feels when someone tells them that something about them, or their home, has a ‘bad’ smell about it. Insult is added to injury when the ‘smeller’ refuses to give any further information.
Early one warm Thursday morning, a few months ago, I walked to work, a 45 minute walk from home. I wore my office outfit – a pencil skirt, camisole, cardigan and thick black tights to shield my legs from the cold. For the walk, I swapped my formal office shoes for running shoes so I could be comfortable while walking. When I got to the office I saw that another colleague and I were the only people in early at the office. I had a number of meetings that morning and I had to sort out the paperwork for each, so I needed that extra time I had created by arriving early. I sat on my regular desk chair, changed my shoes from my running shoes to office high heels and turned to my computer.
A few seconds later my colleague said ‘Poo! Who took off their shoes? They smell!’. Clearly it was me. I was mortified. I guess my running shoes were overdue a good airing. But this left me in a quandary. Was it my whole foot that stank? Had I stunk out the entire office? Would gradually people arrive and be fumigated at the sliding glass door to our floor? Was my desk area going to smell ‘bad’ all day? Was I making everyone else uncomfortable, their working day unbearable?
I grabbed my handbag and my running shoes and tottered out the door as quickly as my pencil skirt and high heels would allow. I clip-clopped out of the building, up Erskine Street, across the lights and into the chemist on Kent Street. I spent $30 on new tights, foot spray and asked for an extra few plastic bags. I ran back to the office, through reception and buzzed myself into the wash rooms on the ground floor. Once in the privacy of the washroom I kicked off my heels and yanked my tights off. I bent at the waist and contorted my legs one at a time into the waist-height basin so that first one, then the other foot could get a good soaking and a scrub with the hand soap. I used the paper hand towels to dab my feet dry and then I blasted each offending foot with the aerosol foot spray. I filled the offending running shoes with so much spray that I coughed, and then threw the shoes into one plastic bag, tied a knot, then another plastic bag, tied another knot and wrapped the whole lot in a third plastic bag. The bag was flung into a locker in the downstairs hallway and I swiped my pass at the lift and travelled back up to Level 5, to my desk amidst the streaming in of other colleagues filing into the office. With minutes to spare I collated the papers into the relevant folders and embarked on a morning of meetings. I prayed that I wouldn’t cause more offense in the tiny, windowless meeting rooms.
Thankfully, I drew no more disapproving looks. Nobody else sent me into a spiral of panic.
I suspect that the smell of my over-ripe running shoes dissipated fairly quickly. When I asked a colleague at lunch time she said she couldn’t detect any noxious odours.
The fact is, I have no way of knowing. It’s the not knowing that makes my mind race into the farthest corners of improbability. The earliest memory I have of this really upsetting me was at university.
Each tiny room in the University of Canberra student residence halls measured 2 metres across. I know this because there were only two ways you could configure your standard-issue furniture without enlisting the assistance of an industrial design student. Either the single bed on it’s iron frame and wayward springs, could run parallel to the security-meshed window, or perpendicular to it. A long bookshelf was affixed to the wall at the perfect height for knocking your head after a big night at the university bar. Around each bed were huddled a standard-issue desk, standard-issue drawers and a bar fridge. At the end of the room, next to the door and opposite the window, was a floor-to-ceiling cupboard and a small sink with a strip of blinking fluorescent light above it. The world’s smallest studio.
Once the furniture was in place, there was clearance area on the floor of about 1.5 metres square – enough room to lay down an Indian hand-embroidered woollen rug from the weekly markets up on the university concourse. Pea-green coloured curtains hung from a rod affixed up near where the walls met the vermiculite spray concrete ceiling. The carpet was short pile, brown and had orange flecks that matched the orange paint on the door. There was a multitude of hiding spots for an offending smell – from the slightly sticky carpet to the slow-gurgling S bend below the sink.
Each floor of the ‘Old Ressies’ in Canberra held 24 rooms, had an average population of 31 acne-pocked eighteen and nineteen year olds and unlimited potential for the creation and retention of stench. On the hall-facing side of each door was usually a piece of A4 paper torn from an exercise book or textbook. Next to each piece of paper was a blob of blackish-blue blu-tak and a stubby pencil. This was the primary form of communication between students who lived on residence. In 1994, before email and text messaging were known to anyone outside of the US military, if you wanted to see a friend who lived on campus you had three options. First, you could attend a lecture although there was little likelihood of seeing any undergrad student awake and paying attention. Second, you could hang out in the bar, which was the more likely place to find a university student – whether they lived on campus or not. Your third option was to visit their room on campus and, if you find the door locked and the resident either ignoring you or adventuring far away, the best method of communication was to wrestle the stubby pencil from the fowl blu-tak’s grip and scrawl a message on the piece of paper.
It was by these means that I received a message that ruined my afternoon. Returning from a class (yes, I did actually attend some lectures in between arguing about Marxism and taking ‘artistic’ black and white photos) I noticed, amongst the unreadable scrawl on my door, that there was a new message.
‘Rach, something in your room smells really bad. Just thought you should know. Scottie xx’
My hands shook so fast that it was seconds before I could lodge the key into the lock. I lunged into the room, as if my moving quickly would mean that I could catch the invisible intruder mid-offence. I looked around the room. Boxes of cosmetics and make-up stacked under the sink. Empty bottles of spirits, now plugged with candles and dressed in wax drippings. A beer glass with dying daffodils in green water. I opened the door. I flung the sash window upwards and roughly tied my hair back with a rubber band. Then I spent the next thirty minutes systematically upended every part of my room in an attempt to expose whatever it was that had created the odour to which Scottie had referred.
I sat on the edge of the iron bed frame. The bed sheets lay rumpled on the floor, the plastic-covered mattress leaned against the U2 Rattle and Hum poster on the wall. Clothes hung to the hangers by their labels or one shoulder. The contents of every drawer – cassette tapes, floppy disks, highlighter pens, hair bands, concert tickets, Polaroid photos, were strewn across the desk and cascaded to the floor. I slumped. And wept. I couldn’t work out what it was that could smell so bad. I thought I had followed the rules. I was plagued by an invisible force against which I had no defence. I clomped down the hall in my loosely-laced 10 hold Doc Martin boots. I dialed the internal extension number of the hall that Scottie lived in. Someone answered, called out to Scottie and I heard him come to the phone.
“Raaaaach” Scottie sang down the line.
“Scottie. What is it? I have looked everywhere” I panted at him through sobs.
“Nothing” he laughed.
What?
There was no smell, Rach. It was a joke.
Oh. Pause. I look up at the ceiling. Ok.
See ya.
Yeah, see you later.
I sank to the floor and rested my forehead on my folded arms. I sat like that for a while, until one student runs past, and then another – using the door frame to slow himself as he rounds the corner. I pull myself back to my feet and trudge back to my room, to face the carnage I had wrought.
Smell is an instinctual sense. It functions to protect us against potential threats – predators and poison. In 1994, as it is now, there aren’t many threats that we would depend on our smell to alert us to. Smell has taken a back seat as one of the key players in our defence system. It’s role is supplementary, an adornment, a neurological bauble, a source of pleasure, pain and humour. But it’s not essential to daily functioning in the modern world as say, sight or hearing are.
Those people in command of the full suite of five senses can afford to treat smell as a joker, a supporting role, a nice-to-have, but inessential part of daily life. Congenital Anosmics don’t have that luxury. Our sleeping sense (for I refuse to give up on my olfactory system completely) is our Achilles heel. It can hobble us, and humble us and make us grateful for the senses through which we do experience the world. It can also leave us confused, isolated and misunderstood.
