A Natural History of the Senses Read Free

Indo-European
sent-
, “to head for,” “go”; hence to go mentally) we mean that we are conscious. The more literal and encompassing meaning is that we have sense perception.“Are you out of your senses!” someone yells in angry disbelief. The image of someone sprung from her body, roaming the world as a detached yearning, seems impossible. Only ghosts are pictured as literally being out of their senses, and also angels.
Freed
from their senses is how we prefer to say it, if we mean something positive—the state of transcendental serenity found in an Asiatic religion, for example. It is both our panic and our privilege to be mortal and sense-full. We live on the leash of our senses. Although they enlarge us, they also limit and restrain us, but how beautifully. Love is a beautiful bondage, too.
    We need to return to feeling the textures of life. Much of our experience in twentieth-century America is an effort to get away from those textures, to fade into a stark, simple, solemn, puritanical, all-business routine that doesn’t have anything so unseemly as sensuous zest. One of the greatest sensuists * of all time—not Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, Proust, or any of the other obvious voluptuaries—was a handicapped woman with several senses gone. Blind, deaf, mute, Helen Keller’s remaining senses were so finely attuned that when she put her hands on the radio to enjoy music, she could tell the difference between the cornets and the strings. She listened to colorful, down-home stories of life surging along the Mississippi from the lips of her friend Mark Twain. She wrote at length about the whelm of life’s aromas, tastes, touches, feelings, which she explored with the voluptuousness of a courtesan. Despite her handicaps, she was more robustly alive than many people of her generation.
    We like to think that we are finely evolved creatures, in suit-and-tie or pantyhose-and-chemise, who live many millennia and mental detours away from the cave, but that’s not something our bodies are convinced of. We may have the luxury of being at the top of the food chain, but our adrenaline still rushes when we encounter real or imaginary predators. We even restage that primal fright by going to monster movies. We still stake out or mark our territories, thoughsometimes now it is with the sound of radios. We still jockey for position and power. We still create works of art to enhance our senses and add even more sensations to the brimming world, so that we can utterly luxuriate in the spectacles of life. We still ache fiercely with love, lust, loyalty, and passion. And we still perceive the world, in all its gushing beauty and terror, right on our pulses. There is no other way. To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses—how they evolved, how they can be extended, what their limits are, to which ones we have attached taboos, and what they can teach us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.
    To understand, we have to “use our heads,” meaning our minds. Most people think of the mind as being located in the head, but the latest findings in physiology suggest that
the mind
doesn’t really dwell in the brain but travels the whole body on caravans of hormone and enzyme, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell, hearing, vision. What I wish to explore in this book is the origin and evolution of the senses, how they vary from culture to culture, their range and reputation, their folklore and science, the sensory idioms we use to speak of the world, and some special topics that I hope will exhilarate other sensuists as they do me, and cause less-extravagant minds at least to pause a moment and marvel. Inevitably, a book such as this becomes an act of celebration.
    * Someone who rejoices in sensory experience. A sensualist is someone concerned with gratifying his sexual appetites.

S mell

    Smell is a potent wizard that