Some Thoughts on New Olfactory Experiences

I’ve noticed something strange about myself over the past few months, which I can only attribute (wholly non-scientifically) to a springtime bout with COVID: my sense of smell has gotten significantly better.

I have always had a middling sense of smell. It has never been the primary way in which I’ve navigated the world, and it has only played a modest role in my affective and aesthetic experiences. I also don’t really have an especially sophisticated vocabulary for scents, excepting some wine tasting notes I picked up from a friend a few years ago when I was going through a biodynamic wine phase: mineral, tarry, barnyard.

At some point this summer, I started to notice the smell of people on the metro more: not just what I normally perceived to be body odour, but new earthy undertones, and occasionally throat-chokingly rancid stenches that felt like they were being excreted directly and revoltingly into my brain. I threw out more than normal amounts of food I was convinced had gone bad. I ate some peaches of astonishing sweetness. I decided that a couple of perfumes I wear occasionally were kind of boring, actually: too-powdery and lacking depth, although I initially chalked that up to my own frustration at not smelling more androgynous. I found a whole world of lower registers that I had heretofore been almost completely oblivious to. Most thrillingly, I’ve been out in the woods and overwhelmed by a whole new sensorium: the profusion of decaying plant matter, aromatic roots, and stickily fragrant pollens made the entire experience fit together differently, and I was gripped with a pagan fervor for the church of nature.

This whole process has been interesting to me, not only because of my general fascination with aesthetics and the pursuit of new sensory experience; but also because of its neglect: culturally, languages for scent are mostly vague or specialized for a more technical audience (e.g. perfume makers), and smell has been broadly ignored in philosophy of mind and phenomenology. I feel deeply fortunate to have this kind of new experience as an adult (or at least, have my attention drawn to it in ways that were impossible before) and be able to consciously go through the process of grasping and mastering a new sense, coherently integrating it into my experience of the world. But what else is there for me to do with it? Rewatch Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and nod sagely at the screen? Get really into wine tasting? Finally read Proust?