Smells and Bells

 As someone that doesn't really use incense or candles or anything, I feel this blog post will be a little lacking. However, this will not stop me. Scent is important. If you know anything about it, you know that we use it to eat, to love, to identify, to do pretty much all the important things we do. A main component of memory is scent. "... while buried in the hair of one’s wife it might remind a husband of the desire he felt for her on their wedding day." - Green In this blog post, I will be examining my own sensory perception of different scents. As I mentioned, I don't use incense, but my close friend does. When I go to her room, I feel calm, content, maybe a little excited beyond that. I used to not really like the smell of incense; all of it smelled too strong for me, too earthy and smoky. Now, I just think of her. It makes me think of her immediately, filling my senses with the memory of tangled limbs and laughter. Instead of pulling a, perhaps, more...

Compared to the other senses, smell is not used as often as vision, hearing, or touch. Due to our daily reliance on the senses, we deem smell as a pretty unimportant sense but, it's a monumentally important tool in order to perceive the world. Smell is a very unique and nuanced sense; Green "The function of aroma is organized around contradictory characteristics as well, such as employing fragrance for utilitarian or pleasurable purposes and its own spatial relation of inside and outside," (141). Imagine spending the night at a friend's house and the friend does not notice that the entire house smells musty. Not only do people become acclimated very quickly to smells, but this acclimation may lead to most people not noticing the smell they emit. As a visitor to a cornucopia of smell, we notice the nuances of smell that a resident might not be keen to. Oftentimes I feel more or less comfortable in a house I am visiting depending if the smell is pleasant or n...

As a kid, I loved the smell of perfumes, but I never had any myself. In elementary school I hated "girly things" such as the color pink, perfume, concerns about my hair or appearance, but as I grew older I began to embrace the change that comes with being an adult. I don't know much about perfumes, and I'm sure there's science about it I could learn, but I usually go off of how pleasant the smell is to me, which I don't think is based on statistics.   "Eros Perfume Bottle" Last semester I went to Syracuse, New York to visit some friends, and we went to the mall where I picked out my first perfume. If I had to describe it, I would call it complex, mature, something that doesn't quite fit my image but I'm okay with that. In A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman, she meets with a perfumer who talks about the mechanics of making a successful scent to then sell to the public. As a kid I didn't know what the big deal was; I ...

There is something that is intoxicating about the smell of someone you may not know. A woman that is other in the bible smells of spice and intoxicants, while a man smells of putrid meats. I cannot say that I am unaware of the way that one may smell to another. There have been countless times where I have been victim to the putrid smell of a random man on a bus. What fascinates me the most out of all of this chapter is the feminization of Israel and how many of the other nations that are masculine in nature and the polar opposite of Israel. The most prevalent example from the book that I can think of is Rome, in all rights the nation of Rome is the polar opposite from Isreal. The core of the matter is that Isreal is one of the first monotheistic religious nations, while Rome is known to be one of the most polytheistic nations before the Catholics took over. While there is the obvious statement that Isreal is the wife of God, it is also important to mention the infidelity of Isreal....

"Spices and perfumed oils do not endure over long periods of time, however, and the destruction of incense, through burning, is integral to its employment" (Green, 5)  After reading this, what struck me as interesting wasn't the actual fact, but rather, by conclusions to be made about the power(s) of scent and its limitations. Is the power of scent reliant on its state of temporality? This idea was further elaborated by the scientific notion of scents dissipating from our perceptions after a certain period of time. This corresponds with the phrase of spending enough time in a monkey exhibit, you no longer smell it. The longer you stay in an area and experience a particular scent, the less you experience and eventually it begins to fade into oblivion. The same can be said with certain skin receptors which are only activated once and then are only activated again when another touch or a change of touch occurs. The same applies with all of smells. Eventually we all get...

What a google search revealed a nard to be Starting on Valentine’s Day, we started reading The Aroma of Righteousness by Deborah Green, explores the imagery of fragrance in rabbinic literature. Two months later, we had Dr. Rachel Herz from Brown give a lecture on her work unraveling the neural processes of olfaction and gustation. The readings and lecture gave the class a well-rounded understanding at how scent is employed in ritual for invoking emotion. As mentioned earlier, our sense of smell is the most memorable due to its proximity to the pre-frontal cortex. Although research behind this phenomenon is relatively recent, practitioners of religion understand the influence of associating scents with divine concepts. In her introduction, Green mentions how we lack a vocabulary to describe our sense of smell, and refer to such using simile, metaphor or simply naming the scent. The explanation for such is that the olfactory bulb is located so “far down” that the circuitry co...

Deborah Green explained the importance of metaphor, simile, and metonym in describing scents, because of the connection with emotional reaction.   In the Song of Songs, she states, “we must assess the scent comparisons and even the emotions they may evoke, completely and on their own terms, however difficult this may be” (85).   The link between the words shemen (oil) and shem (name) is important as the name of the individual and fragrances are not mentioned, rather the words discuss flowing oil.   By using the word shemen, a metaphor is used to generate a connection between scented oil and the lover.   This metaphor also indicates that that both the name and fragrance of their lover’s perfume is pleasing.   By using scent, the woman is able to yearn for her lover when he is not present by recalling his perfume, indicating a seductive aspect to fragrance.   Scent becomes erotic through references to spices, flowers, and even vines, because they are used ...

In  The Aroma of Righteousness,  Deborah A. Green works to interpret and understand the role smell plays in jewish religious literature. One goal of this reading was to make the reader think about the religious use of scent, aroma, and smell in Judaism. But woven amidst all of this sensual analysis is a deeper question. What, or who is God? I have my own definition, but it is not something that I am very confident about and I struggle to clearly put it into words. The best I can do is say that God is an entity or energy. i don't want to presume to know what or how God manifests but my most recent guess is that God  G enerates,  O perates and  D estroys. This is a new definition for me and it is always changing. I have tried to define God from the perspective of the mind, of thought, of ideas but maybe there might be benefit in trying to answer this question by using my senses. In this reading Green attempts to show how rituals such as lighting incense he...