What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [97]
Proustian memory is involuntary; we have no control over its recording or its recall. Because it is recoverable on demand, Adams-style odor memory is a more useful storage medium—it embodies our common past and gives us a way to preserve it. Some people improvise their own olfactory scrapbook. An attorney who was in his thirties at the time once described his method for inducing scent-fueled visions of the past:
I grew up on the Nevada desert in a small mining town. Since my seventeenth year my residence has been in California in the San Francisco bay area but I never have and never will learn to be happy in the fog and rain and dampness. I have a perpetual nostalgia for the sun, warmth, clear, clean air, the peculiar lemon desert fragrances and the great panoramic vistas and strong colors. I have spent part of several summers in the Tahoe district and each time have brought home a good bunch of sage brush which I keep in a receptacle and not infrequently smell. When I do, visual and emotional sensations arise within me in considerable clarity of the desert scene. A slight sniff doubles and redoubles that tranquil nostalgia.
The scientific study of smell memory is currently in flux. After a long and fruitless detour spent quantifying a literary fiction, the field is abandoning the idea that smell is unique among the senses. Just as the larger field of memory research has retreated from the notion of indelible flashbulb memory and questioned the veracity of eyewitness testimony, smell experts are recognizing that memory for odor is like memory for anything else—subject to fading, distortion, and misinterpretation. With this realization, we give up some long-held ideas, but throw open the windows for a breath of fresh air.
CHAPTER 11
The Smell Museum
My collection of semi-used perfumes is very big by now, although I didn’t start wearing lots of them until the early ’60s. Before that the smells in my life were all just whatever happened to hit my nose by chance. But then I realized I had to have a kind of smell museum so certain smells wouldn’t get lost forever.
—ANDY WARHOL
ANDY WARHOL MAY HAVE SAVED MODERN CULTURE without even realizing it.
Memories fade and get harder to find amid the mental clutter of a busy life. For a given smell, the odds that it will produce a riveting flashback shrink with each resniffing. That special scent becomes less special, its links to the past grow steadily weaker. Warhol’s solution was ingenious: he would wear a cologne until it built up strong emotional connections, then retire it to his personal smell museum. Once out of active rotation, the cologne’s memories were locked in, never to be confused with others. The Warhol wear-and-retire method was unusual but effective. By not switching back and forth between scents, he avoided the loss of memorability that psychologists call interference.
It’s easy to reach into the past when the missing link sits on a shelf, clearly labeled. But even a cologne collection has its limits—brands don’t live forever. Commercial death occurs when the last bottle comes off the production line, and psychosensory rigor mortis sets in with the last spray from the last bottle. An extinct fragrance triggers no memories. To preserve links to the past, we must preserve the juice itself. How will we know what we’re missing when it’s not there to smell?
The James Joyce scholar Bernard Benstock concludes that the juice doesn’t matter as long as we have literature: “[E]ach work of fiction is posterity-proof. No captured smell specified in Ulysses is ever lost in the rereading or fails to register its full pungency for every new reader.” Why is Professor Benstock so sure that every reader gets a noseful from the novel? This seems like wishful thinking. A reader may be able to reimagine a familiar smell, but for one he doesn’t know, he’s left to guess. To reexperience the smells of times gone by, one needs the actual stuff; without it, written references and therefore