tom (01/31/83)
The following is an actual conversation, stemming from the initial
quotation. Be forewarned, it is frank. I would appreciate comments on it.
Send them to {gi|utah-cs}!arizona!tom.
"Smell is a floating part of something else received into your body.
Treasure it -- it is holy."
--Tuli Kupferberg
If odor is so holy, how do you distinguish the odor of rotting pomegranates
from the equally odorous and therefore equally holy eau de cologne that the
sorority girls like to impart to the halls of UCC. It may not be smoking
peppermint but its a smell just the same. I demand equality for odors in our
lifetime
--B
It's easy, by the pretentiousness of the smell (i.e. unnaturalness). It's
not unlike physical whores being morally superior to corporate whores.
--A
Nature works in strange and mysterious ways. At one time, natural bodily odors
were used to attract members of the opposite sex for purposes of mating. How-
ever, with the advent of civilization and its accompanying trend toward ab-
straction, a mere natural odor wasn't sufficient to arouse passion in members
of the opposite sex (since men and women smell alike after a week without
bathing). Consequently, new odors had to be discovered to fulfill this aim.
Since sorority girls do not desire to attract your type but rather budding
young execs from the MIS dept. and since you do not wish to attract sorority
girls but rather repel them with your particular (no less pretentious I might
add) odor, I'd say you are both targeting correctly (aside from the fallout to
neutral odor fans like me) and are about even.
--B
I disagree (no surprise I'm sure). Men and women may smell alike after a
few unwashed days above the waist, but certainly not below (at least to an
odor connoisseur). How could you possibly claim that immersing oneself with a
combination of yeast shit and refined dinosaur rot (made to oversimulate
natural odors) is not pretentious? Perhaps not perfuming oneself can become
pretentious, as was once the case with a former roommate of mine who
reveled in the odor of his flatulence, smelled all his clothing deeply before
deciding whether to wash it and recoiled in desperate fear at anyone's
slightest intention of using Lysol. So perhaps there is a reasonable middle
ground? I say it is on my former roommate's side, but not to his degree.
--A
Well, once we get into matters of degree, there is no ground for discussion.
It comes down to a matter of personal taste. Personally, I have nothing against
someone reveling in the odor of his own flatulence or anything else, so long as
he doesn't impose said odors on me. For this reason, I might find myself on
your roommate's side of the argument (although his flatulence could probably
be smelled all over town which would change the verdict). Like the rights of
non-smokers, we have a very ambiguous issue of human rights. I recognize the
right of everyone to conduct hygiene in whatever way they please, or fulfill
whatever habits they happen to possess. However, I am somewhat allergic to
cigarette smoke, heavy perfume makes me light-headed and dizzy, and profuse
odors of the organic variety hit me in the pit of the stomach. We have here
an obvious dilemma with no apparent solution other than for everyone to be
the same. We don't want that do we, so we must tolerate and accommodate each
other's personal tastes on the matter, pretentious or not.
--B
Oh yes, one more reason why I like the sense of smell. Smell is perhaps the
most evolutionarily primitive sense -- it is the categorization of neighboring
molecules. It is the crudest way to sense the environment (I would like to
count taste and smell as one since they function similarly). Because it
is so old, I claim it enables one to get in touch with the old brain,
something that is not always easy to do. I can remember numerous instances
of getting a waft of something which instantly brought to memory a vivid
wordless description of a prior experience with its associated emotions. No
doubt, this is what the old brain is (was) all about. Picture a dog giving
you the whiff (I imagine that dogs don't have much more than is in our old
brains), the dog catalogs your smell and any short term emotions you give it.
Next time you meet, you get the wiff again and the dog remembers, "Oh yeah,
this smell scared me or this smell made me feel good or this smell
threatened me."
--A