A Natural History of the Senses (44 page)

“Most days.”

“And then you write?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t think this is unusual?”

“Not for me.”

A quiet, distinguished scientist friend, who has published two charming books of essays about the world and how it works, told me that his secret inspiration was “violent sex.” I didn’t inquire further, but noted that he looked thin. The poets May Swenson and Howard Nemerov both told me that they like to sit for a short spell each day and copy down whatever pours through their heads from “the Great Dictator,” as Nemerov labels it, then plow through to see what gems may lie hidden in the rock. Amy Clampitt, another poet, told me she searches for a window to perch behind, whether it be in the city or on a train or by the seaside. Something about the petri dish effect of the glass clarifies her thoughts. The novelist Mary Lee Settle tumbles out of bed and heads straight for her typewriter, before the dream state disappears. Alphonso Lingis—whose unusual books,
Excesses
and
Libido
, consider the realms of human sensuality and kinkiness—travels the world sampling its exotic erotica. Often he primes the pump by writing letters to friends. I possess some extraordinary letters, half poetry, half anthropology, he sent me from a Thai jail (where he took time out from picking vermin to write), a convent in Ecuador, Africa (where he was scuba-diving along the coast with filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl), and Bali (where he was taking part in fertility rituals).

Such feats of self-rousing are awkward to explain to one’s parents, who would like to believe that their child does something reasonably normal, and associates with reasonably normal folk, not people who sniff rotten apples and write in the nude. Best not to tell them how the painter J. M. W. Turner liked to be lashed to the mast of a ship and taken sailing during a real hell-for-leather storm so that he could be right in the middle of the tumult. There are many roads to Rome,
as the old maxim has it, and some of them are sinewy and full of fungus and rocks, while others are paved and dull. I think I’ll tell my parents that I stare at bouquets of roses before I work. Or, better, that I stare at them until butterflies appear. The truth is that, besides opening and closing mental drawers (which I picture in my mind), writing in the bath, beginning each summer day by choosing and arranging flowers for a Zenlike hour or so, listening obsessively to music (Alessandro Marcello’s oboe concerto in D minor, its adagio, is what’s nourishing my senses at the moment), I go speed walking for an hour every single day. Half of the oxygen in the state of New York has passed through my lungs at one time or another. I don’t know whether this helps or not. My muse is male, has the radiant silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to me directly.

There is a point beyond which the senses cannot lead us. Ecstasy means being flung out of your usual self, but that is still to feel a commotion inside. Mysticism transcends the here and now for loftier truths unexplainable in the straitjacket of language; but such transcendence registers on the senses, too, as a rush of fire in the veins, a quivering in the chest, a quiet, fossillike surrender in the bones. Out-of-body experiences aim to shed the senses, but they cannot. One may see from a new perspective, but it’s still an experience of vision. Computers now help to interpret some of life’s processes, which we previously used only our senses to seek, trace, and understand. Astronomers are more apt to look at their telescope’s monitors than to consider the stars with their naked eyes. But we continue to use our senses to interpret the work of the computers, to see the monitors, to judge and analyze, and to design ever newer dreams of artificial intelligence. Never will we leave the palace of our perceptions.

If we are in a rut, it is a palatial and exquisite rut. And yet, like prisoners in a cell, we grip our ribs from within, rattle them, and beg for release. In the Bible, God instructs Moses to burn incense sweet and to His liking. Does God have nostrils? How can a god prefer one smell of this earth to another? The rudiments of decay complete a cycle necessary for growth and deliverance. Carrion smells offensive to us, but delicious to those animals who rely on it for food. What they excrete will make the soil rich and the crops abundant. There is no need for divine election. Perception is itself a form of grace.
In 1829, Goethe, writing about color theory, said: “One searches in vain beyond phenomenon; it in itself is revelation.”

There is so much physical variation among people—some have strong hearts, some have weak bladders, some have steadier hands than others, some have bad eyesight—it’s only logical that senses should vary, too. Yet how much in agreement our senses are—so much so that scientists can define a “red wave” by saying that it is produced by a vibration of 660 millimicrons, which stimulates the retinas to see red. Tones are defined equally precisely, as are the temperatures at which we feel hot or cold. Our senses unite us in a common field of temporal glory, but they can also divide us. Sometimes briefly, or, as in the case of artists, for a lifetime.

I woke one morning this winter after a sudden heavy snowfall to see the evergreens in front of my house bent in half under a burden of snow and ice. Unless I freed them, they would snap under their own weight, so I took a shovel and started bashing the branches to shake the snow down. Suddenly one of the heaviest branches let fly, and snow burned my face like sunlight, iced and clung and kept on pouring as I stood, chin tilted toward the dam-burst, pillar-calm, with my every sense alert. But what a puzzle for the neighbor boy, jarred from his play by that basso
whump!
, to see a madwoman gripped by her own storm. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him wrinkle his face, then ravel his sled-tow and tramp away. For me, time did a lazy soft-shoe; long minutes seemed to pass, and I thought of mammoths, goose down, Ice-Age cunning, the long white drawl of a glacier on the move, snow avalanching down a polar chasm. For him, the same moment fled like a gnat.

For convenience, and perhaps in a kind of mental pout about how thickly demanding just being alive is, we say there are five senses. Yet we know there are more, should we but wish to explore and canonize them. People who dowse for water are probably responding to an electromagnetic sense we all share to a greater or lesser degree. Other animals, such as butterflies and whales, navigate in part by reading the earth’s magnetic fields. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that we, too, have some of that magnetic awareness. We were nomads for so much of our history. We are as phototropic as plants,
smitten with the sun’s light, and this should be considered a sense separate from vision, with which it has little to do. Our experience of pain is quite different from the other worlds of touch. Many animals have infrared, heat-sensing, electromagnetic, and other sophisticated ways of perceiving. The praying mantis uses ultrasonics to communicate. Both the alligator and the elephant use infrasonics. The duckbill platypus swings its bill back and forth underwater, using it as an antenna to pick up electrical signals from the muscles of the crustaceans, frogs, and small fish on which it preys. The vibratory sense, so highly developed in spiders, fish, bees, and other animals, needs to be studied more in human beings. We have a muscular sense that guides us when we pick up objects—we know at once that they are heavy, light, solid, hard, or soft, and we can figure out how much pressure or resistance will be required. We are constantly aware of a sense of gravity, which counsels us about which way is up and how to rearrange our bodies if we’re falling, or climbing, or swimming, or bent at some unusual angle. There is the proprioceptive sense, which tells us what position each component of our bodies is in at any moment in our day. If the brain didn’t always know where the knees or the lungs were, it would be impossible to walk or breathe. There seems to be a complex space sense that, as we move into an era of space stations and cities and lengthy space travel, we will need to understand in detail. Prolonged Earthlessness alters our physiology and also the evidence of our senses, in part because of the rigors of being in zero gravity,
^*
and in part because of the lidless sprawl of deep space itself, in which there are few sensory handrails, guides or landmarks, and everywhere you look there is not scene but pure vista.

Species evolve senses fine-tuned for different programs of survival, and it’s impossible to put ourselves into the sensory realm of any other species. We’ve evolved unique human ways of perceiving the world to cope with the demands of our environment. Physics sets the limits, but biology and natural selection determine where an animal
will fall among all the sensory possibilities. When scientists, philosophers, and other commentators speak of the real world, they’re talking about a myth, a convenient fiction. The world is a construct the brain builds based on the sensory information it’s given, and the information is only a small part of all that’s available. We can modify our senses through bat detectors, binoculars, telescopes, and microscopes, broadening that sensory horizon, and there are instruments that allow us to become a kind of sensory predator that natural selection never meant us to be. Physicists explain that molecules are always moving: The book in front of you is actually squirming under your fingertips. But we don’t see this motion at that molecular level, because it’s not evolutionarily important that we do. We’re given only the sensory information crucial to our survival.

Evolution didn’t overload us with unnecessary abilities. For example: We may use numbers in the millions and trillions, but they are basically meaningless to us. Many things are unavailable to us because they’re not part of our distant evolutionary background. In an odd way, one-celled animals may have a more realistic sense of the world than higher animals do, because they respond to every stimulus they encounter. We, on the other hand, select only a few. The body edits and prunes experience before sending it to the brain for contemplation or action. Not every whim of the wind triggers the hair on the wrist to quiver. Not every vagary of sunlight registers on the retina. Not everything we feel is felt powerfully enough to send a message to the brain; the rest of the sensations just wash over us, telling us nothing. Much is lost in translation, or is censored, and in any case our nerves don’t all fire at once. Some of them remain silent, while others respond. This makes our version of the world somewhat simplistic, given how complex the world is. The body’s quest isn’t for truth, it’s for survival.

Our senses also crave novelty. Any change alerts them, and they send a signal to the brain. If there’s no change, no novelty, they doze and register little or nothing. The sweetest pleasure loses its thrill if it continues too long. A constant state—even of excitement—in time becomes tedious, fades into the background, because our senses have evolved to report changes, what’s new, something startling that
has to be appraised: a morsel to eat, a sudden danger. The body takes stock of the world like an acute and observant general moving through a complex battleground, looking for patterns and stratagems. So it is not only possible but inevitable that a person will grow used to a city’s noises and visual commotion and not register these stimuli constantly. On the other hand, novelty itself will always rivet one’s attention. There is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins. Whatever it is, it looms brightly, its edges sharp, its details ravishing, in a hard clear light; just beholding it is a form of revelation, a new sensory litany. But the second time one sees it, the mind says, Oh, that again, another wing walker, another moon landing. And soon, when it’s become commonplace, the brain begins slurring the details, recognizing it too quickly, by just a few of its features; it doesn’t have to bother scrutinizing it. Then it is lost to astonishment, no longer an extraordinary instance but a generalized piece of the landscape. Mastery is what we strive for, but once we have it we lose the precarious superawareness of the amateur. “It’s old hat,” we say, as if such an old, weatherbeaten article of clothing couldn’t yield valuable insights about its wearer and the era in which it was created and crushed. “Old news,” we say, even if the phrase is an oxymoron. News is new and should sound an alarm in our minds. When it becomes old, what happens to its truth? “He’s history,” we say, meaning that someone is no longer new for us, no longer fresh and stimulating, but banished to the world of fossil and ruin. So much of our life passes in a comfortable blur. Living on the senses requires an easily triggered sense of marvel, a little extra energy, and most people are lazy about life. Life is something that happens to them while they wait for death. Many millennia from now, will we evolve into people who will perceive the world differently, employ the senses differently, and perhaps know the world more intimately? Or will those future souls, perhaps further away from any physical sense of the world, envy us, the passionate and thrill-seeking ones, who gorged ourselves on life, sense by sense, dream by dream?

Hold a glance a little longer than usual, let the eyes smolder and a smile creep onto the lips, and a small toboggan run forms in the
chest as the heart gets ready to race. Novelty plays a large role in sexual arousal, as e. e. cummings, a master of sensuality and titivation, suggests in his poem “96”:

When cummings wrote this beautiful love sonnet, he certainly didn’t know (or need to) that studies would later reveal how men’s testosterone levels jump when a new woman enters the room. The simple fact of her novelty is physically exciting. But the same is true for women and their hormones when a new man enters the room. For social, moral, esthetic, parental, religious, or even mystical reasons, we may choose to live with one partner for life, but our instincts nag at us. There is nothing like the thrill of being new for someone. And even though everything related to love—the roller coaster of flirtation, the thrust and parry of courtship, the razzle-dazzle of lovemaking—has probably evolved so that two people who have a good chance of producing and raising hearty offspring will find each other and mate with a strong biological sense of purpose, we don’t always feel obliged to play by nature’s rules. The challenge (and highwire fun) of love is finding ways to make each day a fresh adventure with one’s partner.