We Do Not Smell Simple

… this unstable, complex mixture, this partially undone knot, trailing a thousand threads, is not subject to repetition, never achieves invariance: too circumstantial to begin beating in time, too fluid, diluted, chaotic. … [K]nowledge [on the other hand] eliminates such unstable circumstances, it planes down rarity.

This is from The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies by Michel Serres (2008, 1985):

… Clear, distinct knowledge presents or represents a space. Confused knowledge flows and returns along fluent times. Is present, certainly, but its past floods back, and it remembers.

Take this and drink. Do this in memory of me.

[ ... ]

… Smell seems to be the sense of singularity. Forms reappear, invariant or recurrent, harmonies are transformed, stable across variations, specificity is countersigned by aroma. With our eyes closed, our ears stopped, feet and hands bound, lips sealed, we can still identify, years later and from a thousand other smells, the undergrowth of such and such a place in a particular season at sunset, just before a rain storm, or the room where feed corn was kept, or cooked prunes in September, or a woman.

… The smallest point of a rare apex, a highly complex compound, a blend of a thousand proximities, unstable knot of capricious currents, an aroma comes about like an intersection, or confusion, we do not smell simple, pure odours.

… But this rare trace in the aerial fluid, this unstable, complex mixture, this partially undone knot, trailing a thousand threads, is not subject to repetition, never achieves invariance: too circumstantial to begin beating in time, too fluid, diluted, chaotic. On the contrary, knowledge eliminates such unstable circumstances, it planes down rarity. Its catch-cry: In the same circumstances …

Improbable, blended, specific singular odours, their time and place uncertain. Now suppose that a rare blend should appear a second time in the random turbulence of the air, that this unique confusion should recur, improbably; the  knot gathers in its threads, the apex pulls up its base, the tributary subsets burst forth as they intersect, a whole world rushes in: bodily position, enchantment, colour, circumstances crowd around, rarity reappears, richly ornamented and decorated; here, for want of frequency, memory is not transformed into knowledge, but we are dazzled, ecstatically, by our proximity to this overabundant memory.

My most recent previous post from Serres’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/