Hyperosmia

By CK Wilde

“You will know you’ve found the right one when they smell right”

-Willum Bunce

Scent is the only sense not fully processed by the neural cortex. The stimulation of smell bypasses the thalamus and smacks right into our brains, triggering a vast array of instantaneous emotional and somatic responses.

I’ve always had a highly developed sense of smell. The faintest whiff of specific scent can send me reeling. Certain odors will start a veritable cascade of sense memories- wet dog, jet fuel, roses, apple wood smoke, ambrosial scotch whiskey, petrichor, sourdough bread rising, Barolo red wine, old paper, chicken broth, dried marijuana flower,  sour asparagus piss, black mold, hot butter, hidden rotting flesh, fresh cow shit, piles of dry pine needles decaying… certain cleaning products bring on blinding migraines, as do sundry washing detergents and perfumes. A vacated elevator can be a claustrophobically dizzying array of polyester farts, cheap cologne, flop sweat, reeking feet, and iron laden blood. I can tell when some people are menstruating from the tang of estrogen around them, likewise men’s acidic testosterone levels are annoyingly discernible from their sweat.

Some smells are as overwhelmingly comforting as a warm duvet fresh from the dryer: Alpaca wool redolent of high mountain passes, my mother’s perfume, a fresh new cigar, deep forest honey, a frangipani in full bloom, spicy bay rum, a cool dill pickle, fried cheese too hot to handle. Other scents are an overpowering assault on my very sanity: Acrid plastic smoke, electric refinery smog, fetid still water, cheap body sprays, uric acid from unwashed gaminess, musty old clothes, new polypropylene packaging, certain cleaning solvent products, exhaust from old cars- though strangely, diesel gas fumes in small amounts are delightful and remind me of far away lands and times long gone by.

Scents have edges to them, a field of saturation and intensity that waxes and wanes with invisible zephyrs caprices. People all have very distinct smelltastes, like colorways. Their heads and hair a different musky bouquet than their arm pits, crotches, and feet. The taste of their spit and cum has a complementary matching but distinctly different flavorscent. A halo of odor exists around each individual; their proximity announced by pheromones, habits of choice, of cloth, and pungent oils.

Buildings have a symphonic melding of aromas: human, animal, vegetal, artificial, and fungal. The sepulchral incense of churches ripe with sweaty shame and pungent fear, or glorious honeyed joy and blessed balms for a weary soul. Libraries have the musty funk of a million dog eared volumes slowly dry rotting in cool repose. A hospitals aura of dogged reuse for life and death in hyper rapid cycles, barely masked by industrial strength cleaners and stringent detergents. A kitchens chaotic chorus of savory burn, boil, bake, sizzle, and sink; a lingering witness to the never ending battle against deliquescing foul foodstuffs, mold, fungus, and rot. A hotel bedroom full of rank dead dreams, sickly sweet bugs, and varied seeping effluvia.

I smoked cigarettes for years, in part to diminish my sense of smell, and to mask the world in wreath of sweet tobacco smoke. I associate tobacco with a devil may care sense of sacred adventure; it is a holy and masculine interlocutor between earth and sky.

My father took a pipe and eventually to cedar boxed cigars. On special occasions we shared the rare and patient ritual of repose centered on cigars slowly filling the space between us with a redolent medium of obnubilating smoke clouds, a curling ceiling of our shared breath made risible. Smoke shows the eddys and currents, the waves and oxbows, the drifts and washes, the dizzying arabesques of air until dissipation and dissolution fades again the illustration of miasmatic potency and delicate wafting to simple neutrality and base olfactory invisibility.