Adventures in Smell: the Drowsy Scent of Velvet-Petaled Roses

“The flower shop was here and it was my father’s domain, but it was also marvelously other, this place heavy with the drowsy scent of velvet-petaled roses and Provencal freesias in the middle of winter, the damp-earth spring fragrance of just-watered azaleas and cyclamen all mixed up with the headachey smell of bitter chocolate.”

Patricia Hampl, The Florist’s Daughter

That’s a gorgeous quote, isn’t it? Revel in the words.

If we were reading a shopping list, the Wernicke’s region of the brain, involved in processing language, would light up. But due to the skill of the writing here, the writer has enabled the olfactory areas of our brains to also get involved. The physical experience, as we read, is not much different from if we’d savoured those odours ourselves.

Smell. Aroma. Bouquet. Flavour. Perfume. Scent. Stench. Whiff. Tang. Emanation…

We are amazing creatures.

If I say to you – freshly washed, dried and ironed sheets…can you smell them?

Daffodils… Let the yellow go, and smell them.

Dog shit on the bottom of your shoe. I bet you can sniff out that one!

If I say, remember the scent of someone you loved, a long time ago…. You can reawaken that, can’t you? Even decades later.

The power of smell. If I railed about vomit, and kept at it, my power of suggestion, just an imagined stench, could make you throw up.

And if I talk about fresh bread – don’t you rise and expand?

“‘When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls.”

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

I suggest now that, standing up, you ground your stance, and relax your attention.

Sensory impressions come and they go, they arrive and they leave. Notice how your attention is drawn by different stimuli in the environment – sights (colours, shapes, light and shadow), sounds, smells, tastes (even if just air), the texture of touch (perhaps your feet on the ground).

Now close your eyes – in doing so you reduce sight to negative shapes on a dark background.

We’re going to focus on smell. What can you inhale from your immediate environment?

If your first thought is nothing, don’t give that any time. It’s true that smell is not one of the human animals’ strongest senses (it’s even perhaps, our weakest). But we can train it. It can tune in quite quickly.

If you can smell something, don’t be too quick to search for words to it… instead, note what effect it has on your body. Does it make you tense or relax, expand towards, or recoil? Or is your body unchanging – neutral?

If you’re still seeking out an aroma, and feel so inclined, you might like to move off the spot, to walk around (carefully, obviously, as you have your eyes closed). Feel yourself to be an antenna – orienting towards, searching for, an odour.

Notice if fears come in… my sense of smell is no good, there’s something wrong with me, I’m losing my sense of smell with age etc. Or any self-judgements… I’m no good at this, blah de blah. Release any judgements: they’ve unhelpful, irrelevant, and probably inaccurate too.

Notice without judging: you’re an animal-human-writer; you’re all curiosity; you’re a gatherer of information. Remember John Keats, who said writing makes everything interesting. Everything is intriguing and useful to the writer. We’re here, the writer, fascinated and engaged with the world, looking the tiger in the eye. We’re fearless.

You might find that a word or words arise to label the smell… If it’s a judgment word (e.g. yuk, delicious) take no notice. If it’s a noun, a naming of the thing that smells, let that go too…

We’re looking for words that evoke in the reader the experience of smelling the smell.

If your attention wants to go somewhere else, allow that, but remind it of its task – to come back to the smell. So, the bird of attention might alight from the tree, but after turning a few times in the sky to feel its wings, back it comes.

"After a while, I stretched out on one of the benches and closed my eyes. The kerosene smelled like lacquer, and I kept feeling waves of nausea. My bones were cold. I could isolate the icy scent of pine trees that sneaked through the walls. Sometimes grace is a ribbon of mountain air that gets in through the cracks."

Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually), Thoughts on Faith

If words aren’t coming effortlessly – no problem. Let’s turn to metaphor, and play a little:

- If this smell were a car, what would it be?

- If this smell were a flower, what would it be?

- If this smell were a product in a supermarket, what would it be?

-If this smell were a character in a story, who would it be?

Don’t think out the answers, just see what pops out. Does that help you to think how you might describe your wordless smell experience in words?

Another tip: when smell stumps us, we can turn to other senses for help:

- If this smell were a colour, what colour would it be?

- If this smell were a sound, what would it sound like?

The words that best describe it will have their origin in your body, they might arise from a sense of movement there, a beat, or a rhythm, or a vibration. So imagine the smell has a rhythm… Tap it out with your hand, or foot… Do any words arise from that movement?

It’s true that I’m challenging you with this subject. Stay with your sense of yourself as an embodied animal. Believe yourself to be a creature finding its way through the woodland darkness at night… Be a dog, with his honed sense of smell. Even better, be that dog’s nose!

And now, relax your mind. Let an images fade away, and just be with the smell.

Rest into it. You can do this even if it’s not what we would normally consider a pleasant smell. It won’t do you any harm.

How solid is it? How big is it? Can you find its edges?

If you’d like to, go one stage further and visualise that you’re diving into the expanse of it. Swim in it… (front-crawl, back-stroke, even doggy-paddle :)

Let the sea of it expand… Now see what words rise…

As the writer, it’s like you’re calling out a sound that echoes, or creating ripples by dropping a pebble into water. You channel your embodied reaction to your experience on to the page, and it is embodied by your character or narrator. It’s then received into the body of your reader or audience. They lose themselves in the experience you describe.

They do what all reader and audiences seek – they feel, and they experience the sense of release…

This is the main article in this month’s Wild Words Monthly Newsletter. Sign up here. It’s free.

The guided exploration, taken from a recent Wild Words residential course is based on art-based psychotherapy exercises, as well as yoga and non-duality practices. Recently, I’ve particularly enjoyed the teaching of Rupert Spira.

Thank you Peter Reid for the photograph.