I became aware of the largeness of the globe. At the time I collected foreign stamps, and to this day the smell of gum, with which I plastered them in an album, brings back to me that spacious awakening.
-Pilgrim's Way, Lord Tweedsmuir.
A year or so ago my daughter, home on break, said she imagined sensing the world by smell alone and writing about it. What an amazing idea! I had never heard of such a thing.
He ain't got no distractions
Can't hear those buzzers and bells
Don't see lights a flashin'
Plays by sense of smell
-Pinball Wizard, The Who.
Could, instead of imagining such a world, a fully-"sensed" person temporarily deprive herself of ophthalmoception, audioception, gustaoception, tactioception, and experience the world with olfacoception only?
There would be a period of acclimation necessary, Hooo-Doggie, would there have to be a period of acclimation. If one were suddenly deprived of sight, by blindfold, say, and of hearing, by powerful ear plugs, there would be instant disorientation...How would you temporarily get rid of taste? I don't know, throw taste back in. The world by gustaoception and olfacoception....Touch. Can't temporarily paralyze oneself, too dangerous. Limit tactioception, can't eliminate it. That would leave you a two-sensed person...There would be instant disorientation. The senses of smell and of taste would not immediately compensate, as we know they do eventually, but not at first. How long does it take?
The person should be taken from her environment two-sensed and transported to another, completely unfamiliar. You'd have to have a fully-sensed, ever-watchful, partner, an Anne Sullivan, in this enterprise. You could cry "Help!" and he would have to respond, but not with "Coming!", you couldn't hear that, by acting. The Helper would have to be very disciplined; couldn't explain, "Ben, we're in The John Smith's Stadium at the confluence of three Shit Creeks, nestled in a valley below Red Rock," couldn't do that, would be cheating, couldn't use his five senses to help you with your two.
Tons of people have experienced the world blind. Helen Keller, blind, deaf and, because her illness struck at so young an age, practically dumb at first. That's really what we're talking about, Helen Keller. We couldn't have too helpful a partner, not Anne Sullivan, who,
..began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand that every object had a word uniquely identifying it.
n. But a temporary Helen Keller, that's what we would render ourselves in order to experience the world by smell and taste (almost) solely and a temporary Anne Sullivan Lite, is who we would need.
Edgar Allen Poe wrote, from his imagination, "Footfalls," a short story about a blind person who was able to identify a murderer, as I recall, from the person's heavy footsteps. Keller, from Wikipedia,
...learned how to tell which person was walking by from the vibrations their footsteps would make. The sex and age of the person could be identified by how strong and continuous the steps were.
...
She was able to enjoy music by feeling the beat and she was able to have a strong connection with animals through touch.
We would have memory, of course. We would know from memory that what our Helper is cooking us for breakfast is bacon, we would know the smell of bacon from when we were fully-sensed. Shit. So that sucks. Did bacon smell so good when we first smelled it? Hmm. That's what we'd be trying to get at. I think it could be approximated. I know it could be approximated. We couldn't erase our memory but if we removed as much of the familiar as reasonably possible and had a Helper, one previously unknown to us, one disciplined, e.g., to cook strange foods not in our memory banks, we could closely approximate a two-sensed experience of the world and write about it. That would be, literally, transcendent writing.
