Smells and Bells

Genesis Lantigua Touch: Comfort or Pain Hair shirts and metal cilice at the Can Papiol Romanticism Museum. Religion has been alive for ages, probably as long as the five senses have been working in and with humans. Some of the five senses are obviously central in major religions: taste in the eucharist and Jewish Sabbath celebrations, the sound of Quran recitals and of modern instruments at a local megachurch, the beauty seen in Hindu and Roman Catholic temples, even the olfactory organs are stimulated with incense in religious ceremonies. But historically speaking, where does the sense of touch interfere with religion? Let’s dive into it. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch by Constance Classen is an overwhelmingly informational resource for understanding the historical and religious influence of somatosensory, or the sense of touch, the sense that allows us to feel pain, heat, cold, texture, etc. Classen argues that there is one aspect of touch that cannot be tampered by t...

When JBK asked us what our favorite scent was in class, I responded with “smell”, because I can definitely appreciate a good scent. But after giving it some more thought, I think that the combination of sight and touch is what grounds me, and makes me the most calm. The idea of going into a sensory deprivation chamber totally freaks me out! I’d be scared that I would literally lose *touch* with reality. In the third chapter of The Deepest Sense by Constance Classen, Painful Times , Classen explains how blindness due to disease, malnutrition or accident was not uncommon in the middle ages (Classen 51). She also explains that a few blind individuals from this time became renowned craftsmen, their sense of touch heightened by relying on senses other than sight. Unfortunately, many blind people from this time were hired on construction sites as tradewheel operators, since they would not be scared by the sight of the sheer drop that was below them. This was a very dangerous job as the whee...

       At the beginning of the semester, one of our ice breakers was to say what your favorite sense is. I hadn’t really put that much thought into it before, but I eventually settled on Touch as my favorite. As a way of dealing with stress, and as a way to keep my hands busy, I started to make friendship bracelets and recently taught myself how to embroider. I soon ran into a problem however as I only have so much wrist space. I didn’t want to recreate the silly band era of my life just with friendship bracelets, so I instead decided to put them up for grabs on my dorm room door. The reason I was able to create so many in the first place was because of the need to do something with my hands. When I’m watching TV I often feel like I can’t fully pay attention to the content if I’m not also doing something else. I think it’s a bit of the ADHD brain going on there, but once I start to make bracelets with my hands I find it easier to concentrate. One of the things that I...

Artwork my dad made of a skeleton on the lid of a metal box      Classence talks in his book, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch , about the ways in which art can be tactile. He talks about how paintings can be tactile, but so can poetry. I have never thought about touch in this way before. Whenever I think about touch, I always imagine that it can only be felt through the fingertips, the skin, or other places on the body. I had never thought about your eyes or your ears experiencing a kind of touch. The more I think about it, though, the more I agree. I have been a storyteller and a writer for as long as I can remember, and most recently I have focused more on poetry than any other form of writing. I do really think that it’s because of its, in a sense, “tactile” nature. I love the ways in which poetry and alliteration can sound as you speak it, like Classence even talks about. The way a poem and the words I say sound specifically does mean a lot to me. I w...

Another aspect of Classen and touch that I want to “touch” upon besides what I mentioned in our group presentation (the necessity of touch through Harlow’s monkey experiment and how fun games are when we include touch and not sight) is the noticeable omission of tactile experiences in museums. Exploring history through touch makes the past come alive. While reading, I was reminded of when my family visited Graceland and went to the Elvis Presley museum. Part of the VIP tour included holding Elvis’ microphone, jewelry, etc., and this is so important, not only for die-hard Elvis fans, but for everyone to experience because “when we allow historical figures to be of flesh and blood, we make it possible to relate to them as fellow beings and, therefore, to make meaningful comparisons between their lives and situations and our own.” I believe touch is one of the best ways that we can understand the past, and it should be implemented in history lessons more. (Pictured here is my sister about...

I was raised in the Lutheran Church. The idea that God had allowed Himself to be embodied in the form of Jesus was omnipresent. He was not merely physical, though, He was human, and He had human experiences. Thus, He “could be approached as a broken body on a cross, as a baby nursing at his mother’s breast, or as a young man embracing a friend” (29).  I never fully grasped what this could mean because Jesus is no longer a physical presence in this world. His body was, in fact, minimized. As Protestants, the image of the crucifix, the Jesus who is in the midst of his agony, was not what we were taught to prize. Rather, we should venerate the empty cross. A pastor once said in a sermon that “Jesus isn’t on the cross anymore. Why dwell on Jesus’s suffering? What matters is that he rose again!” We were taught to see him as his spiritual self – his God self – not his human self. In my current pagan practice, my understanding of the deities is far different. They are not completely physi...