The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [115]
Memory plays a crucial role in creating an aesthetic structure in experiencing mind. Beardsley speaks of repeatability, balance, and In order for repetitions and pattern to be grasped in music, poetry, fiction, you have to be able to remember individual elements—words, notes, sequences, melodic fragments, fictive events, names, etc.—over long periods. Events that happen at the end of a five-hundred-page novel can echo events from its very beginning, or throw into new light passages in its middle chapters. Even ordinary, untrained perception music may require being able to remember and arrange in the imagination hundreds of elements for an individual piece. Normal human memory is filled with a stupendous quantity of coherently arranged arts depends on an ability to discriminate elements and see how they arranged in the imaginative experience of a work.
Smells resist this kind of imaginative arrangement. You can hear fifty words or fifty musical notes and understand how they carry forward complete imaginative experience. If these elements are the beginning poem or a musical work they will be discrete, and yet unified in a experience that is more meaningful than any one element itself. then, to imagine an experience of fifty successive smells—whether individual aromas or mixtures—presented as a work of art to the imagination. Since smells tend to obliterate each other in ways that the semantic fields of words do not, making experiential distinctions would be hard indeed. Could you remember sequences seven, eight, and nine time you were at smells forty-one and forty-two? Could the human mind be trained to place these separate experiences into an imagined whole, one that is available for disinterested contemplation?
It seems impossible: we did not evolve to process olfactory information in the way we process the meanings of notes, words, or even colors partic u lar artistic contexts. I acknowledge that professional perfumers can make smell distinctions that would defy normal perception that such an extraordinary nose and olfactory memory as that possessed by the wine expert Robert Parker are within the realm of human possibility. I also accept that smell can powerfully incite memory: virtually everybody—not just Marcel Proust—knows foods and aromas will transport the mind back to childhood experience. This intense singular capacity is not, however, what is required to reconstruct present in the mind an imaginative work of art. It is far too crude suggest that words and tones are somehow of the mind, while aromas are associated with the body, and that this is the reason smell will therefore never provide the material for high art. Rather, it is our ability to remember smells and arrange them into aesthetic wholes that the issue.
There is yet another problem with smell as an art medium: its failure evoke or express emotions beyond those of personal association nostalgia. Smells, unlike colors, do not have names of their own: they always identified by what they are smells of (vanilla, orange blossom, feelings (burning incense with one’s religion, for instance). But smells oddly without the intrinsic emotions of the sort that seem to inhere the structures of music or the expressively colored forms of painting. The philosopher Frank Sibley appears to agree with this point when that smells and flavors “are necessarily limited: unlike major have no expressive connections with emotions, love or hate, grief, terror, suffering, yearning, pity, or sorrow.” Thinking back to cluster criteria listed in chapter 3, the absence in olfactory