A Natural History of the Senses (2 page)

How sense-luscious the world is. In the summer, we can be decoyed out of bed by the sweet smell of the air soughing through our bedroom window. The sun playing across the tulle curtains gives them a moiré effect, and they seem to shudder with light. In the winter, someone might hear the dawn sound of a cardinal hurling itself against its reflection in a bedroom windowpane and, though asleep, she makes sense enough of that sound to understand what it is, shake her head in despair, get out of bed, go to her study, and draw the outline of an owl or some other predator on a piece of paper, then tape it up on the window before going to the kitchen and brewing a pot of fragrant, slightly acrid coffee.

We may neutralize one or more of our senses temporarily—by floating in body-temperature water, for instance—but that only heightens the others. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses. We can extend our senses with the help of microscope, stethoscope, robot, satellite, hearing aid, eyeglasses, and such, but what is beyond our senses we cannot know. Our senses define the edge of consciousness, and because we are born explorers and questors after the unknown, we spend a lot of our lives pacing that windswept perimeter: We take drugs; we go to circuses; we tramp through jungles; we listen to loud music; we purchase exotic fragrances; we pay hugely for culinary novelties, and are even willing to risk our lives to sample a new taste. In Japan, chefs offer the flesh of the puffer fish, or
fugu
, which is highly poisonous unless prepared with exquisite care. The most distinguished chefs leave just enough of the poison in the flesh
to make the diners’ lips tingle, so that they know how close they are coming to their mortality. Sometimes, of course, a diner comes
too
close, and each year a certain number of
fugu
-lovers die in midmeal.

How we delight our senses varies greatly from culture to culture (Masai women, who use excrement as a hair dressing, would find American women’s wishing to scent their breath with peppermint equally bizarre), yet the way in which we use those senses is exactly the same. What is most amazing is not how our senses span distance or cultures, but how they span time. Our senses connect us intimately to the past, connect us in ways that most of our cherished ideas never could. For example, when I read the poems of the ancient Roman poet Propertius, who wrote in great detail about the sexual response of his ladyfriend Hostia, with whom he liked to make love by the banks of the Arno, I’m amazed how little dalliance has changed since 20
B.C.
Love hasn’t changed much, either: Propertius pledges and yearns as lovers always have. More remarkable is that her body is exactly the same as the body of a woman living in St. Louis right now. Thousands of years haven’t changed that. All her delicate and quaint little “places” are as attractive and responsive as a modern woman’s. Hostia may have interpreted the sensations differently, but the information sent to her senses, and sent by them, was the same.

If we were to go to Africa, where the bones of the petite mother of us all, Lucy, lie, just where she fell millennia ago, and look out across the valley, we would recognize in the distance the same mountains she knew. Indeed, they may well have been the last thing Lucy saw before she died. Many features of her physical world have changed: The constellations have shifted position a little, the landscape and weather have changed some, but the outlines of that mountain still look much the same as when she stood there. She would have seen them as we do. Now leap for a moment to 1940 in Rio de Janeiro, to an elegant home owned by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, whose music, both rigorous and lavish, begins with the tidy forms of European convention and then explodes into the hooting, panting, fidgeting, tinkling sounds of the Amazon rain forest. Villa-Lobos used to
compose at the piano in his salon—he would open the windows onto the mountains surrounding Rio, choose a vista for the day, draw the outline of the mountains on his music paper, then use that drawing as his melodic line. Two million years lie between those two observers in Africa and Brazil—their eyes making sense of the outline of a mountain—and yet the process is identical.

The senses don’t just
make sense
of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern. They take contingency samples. They allow an instance to stand for a mob. They negotiate and settle for a reasonable version and make small, delicate transactions. Life showers over everything, radiant, gushing. The senses feed shards of information to the brain like microscopic pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. When enough “pieces” assemble, the brain says
Cow. I see a cow
. This may happen before the whole animal is visible; the sensory “drawing” of a cow may be an outline, or half an animal, or two eyes, ears, and a nose. In the flatlands of the Southwest, a speck develops a tiny line at the top.
Cowboy
, the brain says, a person who has turned his head, revealing the silhouette of a hat brim. Sometimes the information arrives second- or thirdhand. A roll of dust in the distance: a pickup truck at speed.
Reasoning
we call it, as if it were a mental spice.

A sailor stands on the deck of a ship, holding semaphore flags snug against his side. Suddenly he lifts them, swings both to the right in a take-it-away-man gesture, then turns, squats and sweeps the flags overhead. The sailor is a sense transmitter. Those who see and read him are the receptors. The flags are always the same, but how he moves them differs depending on the message, and his repertoire of gestures covers many contingencies. Change the image: A woman sits at a telegraph key and rattles Morse code along a wire. The dots and dashes are nerve impulses that can combine in elaborate ways to make their messages clear.

When we describe ourselves as “sentient” beings (from Latin
sentire
, “to feel,” from Indo-European
sent-
, “to head for,” “go”; hence to go mentally) we mean that we are conscious. The more literal and encompassing meaning is that we have sense perception.
“Are you out of your senses!” someone yells in angry disbelief. The image of someone sprung from her body, roaming the world as a detached yearning, seems impossible. Only ghosts are pictured as literally being out of their senses, and also angels.
Freed
from their senses is how we prefer to say it, if we mean something positive—the state of transcendental serenity found in an Asiatic religion, for example. It is both our panic and our privilege to be mortal and sense-full. We live on the leash of our senses. Although they enlarge us, they also limit and restrain us, but how beautifully. Love is a beautiful bondage, too.

We need to return to feeling the textures of life. Much of our experience in twentieth-century America is an effort to get away from those textures, to fade into a stark, simple, solemn, puritanical, all-business routine that doesn’t have anything so unseemly as sensuous zest. One of the greatest sensuists
*
of all time—not Cleopatra, Marilyn Monroe, Proust, or any of the other obvious voluptuaries—was a handicapped woman with several senses gone. Blind, deaf, mute, Helen Keller’s remaining senses were so finely attuned that when she put her hands on the radio to enjoy music, she could tell the difference between the cornets and the strings. She listened to colorful, down-home stories of life surging along the Mississippi from the lips of her friend Mark Twain. She wrote at length about the whelm of life’s aromas, tastes, touches, feelings, which she explored with the voluptuousness of a courtesan. Despite her handicaps, she was more robustly alive than many people of her generation.

We like to think that we are finely evolved creatures, in suit-and-tie or pantyhose-and-chemise, who live many millennia and mental detours away from the cave, but that’s not something our bodies are convinced of. We may have the luxury of being at the top of the food chain, but our adrenaline still rushes when we encounter real or imaginary predators. We even restage that primal fright by going to monster movies. We still stake out or mark our territories, though
sometimes now it is with the sound of radios. We still jockey for position and power. We still create works of art to enhance our senses and add even more sensations to the brimming world, so that we can utterly luxuriate in the spectacles of life. We still ache fiercely with love, lust, loyalty, and passion. And we still perceive the world, in all its gushing beauty and terror, right on our pulses. There is no other way. To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses—how they evolved, how they can be extended, what their limits are, to which ones we have attached taboos, and what they can teach us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

To understand, we have to “use our heads,” meaning our minds. Most people think of the mind as being located in the head, but the latest findings in physiology suggest that
the mind
doesn’t really dwell in the brain but travels the whole body on caravans of hormone and enzyme, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell, hearing, vision. What I wish to explore in this book is the origin and evolution of the senses, how they vary from culture to culture, their range and reputation, their folklore and science, the sensory idioms we use to speak of the world, and some special topics that I hope will exhilarate other sensuists as they do me, and cause less-extravagant minds at least to pause a moment and marvel. Inevitably, a book such as this becomes an act of celebration.