Smells and Bells

“To have an opinion, one must overlook something.” The excerpt we read from The Authors of the Impossible and its discussion of the powers gained by an individual free from the constraints of an ego reminded me, of course, of ghosts and the paranormal. Because humans have physical bodies, we have developed a concept of the “self.” The ego gives us this sense of distinction between ourselves and the world around us. There can be physical bodies without an ego, there can be individuals without bodies or egos, but there cannot be egos without bodies. If there is nothing physical to separate the self from the outside, how can there be an ego? I am aware that very few of Freud’s ideas about the id, ego, and superego are taken seriously anymore, but allow me to indulge myself for just a moment. Some people have overly strong egos, which can make them close-mined or lacking in empathy. The self is all that exists. Others can have no ego, which gives them the “’impossible’ powers” describe...

In the book The Deepest Sense, Classen writes that medieval Europeans believed strongly in the power of touch. The touch of a saint, according to their conception, could heal the sick. A witch’s touch could cause someone to become ill. While perhaps most of us no longer worry that a women who is sleeping with the devil is going to poison us, we certainly recognize the power of touch in new ways. The connection between health and touch has come up several times in this class now. After reading this most recent book, I can’t help but think back to A Natural History of the Senses, which recounted how important touch is in helping premature babies start to thrive. Apparently, a person doesn’t have to be a saint to heal someone with a touch; all they have to do is volunteer at a NICU. This is just one of the cases in which the sense of touch can help us heal.  The discussion of touch and animals in The Deepest Sense reminded of something I had read about how pets lower children’...

“Hindu thought is most distinctive for its refusal to make the one and the many into opposites. For most, the manyness of the divine is not superseded by oneness. Rather, the two are held simultaneously and are inextricably linked.” (Eck, pg. 28) The section of Darśan: Seeing the Divine Image in India was really interesting to me. Usually when you see something you take it as face value, instinctively categorizing it into whatever niche your brain thinks it fits. We divide animals, plants, objects, even other humans into often arbitrary categories when our vision goes unchecked. In such a sight-based religious practice, it would be easy to see how one could think of deities as unattached to each other, each having distinct and separate attributions mutually exclusive with others. However, in Hinduism, this difference does not mutually exclude oneness. When explaining away the visual distinctions we make between humans, whether it be due to race or gender or body shape or some other v...

http://house-of-larva.com/ Our senses are not infallible. They make mistakes all the time. What we see or hear or smell can be distorted or misinterpreted. We are gullible, believing almost anything if our senses tell us it is true. Often we are completely unaware of the mistakes they make. Drag is about illusion. It creates a space to explore and celebrate gender and sexuality in new and exciting ways. Many assume that the illusion is as simple as men dressed as women. They see humor in the “mistake” their senses make when they see someone in drag. However, there is an honesty in drag. Our senses are not making a mistake. In fact, drag may be the only way that we can authentically see gender for what it is: an illusion. Performance is always a part of gender. We are constantly putting on a show, expressing our gender in everything from how we talk to how we walk to how we dress and beyond. When we perceive another human being’s gender, we can only sense this performance. Our se...

Muslim people engaged in Qur’an recitation in Indonesia would never describe what they are doing as music. Islam has a complicated relationship with music, and even beyond that the Indonesian definition of music require instruments. However, Anna Rasmussen claims that the recitation she is studying is a form of music. We discussed this in class, which made me wonder at what point chanting becomes music. I think the answer lies in the concept of the “festivalization of religion” that Rasmussen brings up in chapter four. There is a fine line between ritual and art. First, I do not believe that most people would describe their own rituals as a form of art. The application of that label requires an outsider’s perspective in many cases. Second, the Indonesian government encourages the performance of religion in a way that transforms ritual into art. This may be how Qur’an recitation can become music. When recitation becomes a public event and a competition, the intention behind it is tran...

“Therefore the reverent person ought to have his intention connected to the higher things, and have his eating be to sustain his body alone and not to be drawn to physical pleasures, for being drawn to physical pleasures is the cause for the loss of both body and soul, and the cause for forgetting the point, for out of eating and drinking he will become full of himself [lit., lift up his heart] and stumble into great pitfalls and sins, and do things which should not be done.” This quote from the Second Gate perplexed me. The idea that a person could altogether avoid taking pleasure from food seems odd. If food did not make us feel good, if it was just a tool to avoid starving, much of the social and cultural aspects of eating would become irrelevant. Taste is the sense that has the most power to bring us together. Eating is a social behavior. We come together for family meals, we mark special occasions and holidays by altering what we eat, we celebrate by eating, we make guests feel w...

Religious beliefs and public health today often find themselves at odds. Because of a tendency to associate religious people with everything from abstinence-only education to opposing vaccinations, it is easy to see faith as an obstacle to public health. However, the translation we read of the First Gate paints a very different picture. I enjoyed this reading because I immediately saw a clear connection with my major. Most people today credit John Snow as the founder of the modern field of public health. He mapped out the spread of cholera and found that it was concentrated in specific groups of people that got their water from the same wells. Today we know that bacteria live in that water, and when people drank it they became infected. This was a landmark discovery and he was a very smart man, but I am not sure he actually founded modern public health. One of the key tenants to the field is disease prevention and overall population health. These were achieved all the way back in the m...

From https://www.theodysseyonline.com/synesthesia-hear-colors The desire to alter perception and consciousness is not unique to humans. Cats feast on catnip until they get loopy and birds get tipsy off fermenting berries. As we learned from our guest speaker, many animals are just as prone to addiction as humans are. Alcohol, cocaine, opiates, nicotine, and many other mind-altering substances have the same appeal to animals as they do to humans. However, we also learned from our guest speaker that there is one important exception: hallucinogens. In a lab, a rat that is given a hallucinogen will not return to it the same way it would with most other drugs that humans use recreationally. One explanation is that these drugs are simply not addictive and so the animals sees no point in pursuing it. But this does nothing to explain why humans actively seek out hallucinogens, and why we are the only species that appears to want to use them over and over again. Why does the same subs...

Music is something seemingly inherent to human nature. As far back as there is evidence for speaking there is evidence for music. The kind of melodies are surprisingly complex, too. Ackerman gives credit to the European middle ages for the development of polyphony, or individual parts coming together and harmonizing, but this actually began much earlier. Hurrian tablets found in sites like Ugarit contain instructions for playing hymns. The oldest of these dates all the way back to 1400 BCE, and what can be translated of the lyrics reveals that it was a hymn for the goddess of orchards. The video above is what it would have sounded like. The melody involves call and response and, more significantly, harmonies. Both call and response and harmonies are forms of communication through music. This is significant because it often requires more than one person to play. The implication is that music has been used to communicate for thousands of years, perhaps since humans began to talk to ea...

“You can’t pick out a fragrance for someone else.” That was what my mom told me in high school. It seemed to me that perfume was something all the grown-up women in my life used, so I figured it was time for me to get in on the action. I asked her if she would get me some perfume for my birthday and she refused. She told me that everyone has to pick their own fragrance. Perfume is generally a gift only received from a romantic partner because it is so intimate. Even then, a scent picked for you by someone else may never feel quite right because our scent is tied to our personality.  http://stylecaster.com/beauty/perfume-for-your-personality/ Scent is an incredibly intimate, personal sense. It starts with the simple nature of how it works; to smell someone, you must be close enough for their particles to reach your nose. There are very few people in one’s life that spend enough time in this close proximity to actually know someone else’s’ scent. We know the smells of lovers and ...