The Makeup of Reality: Why Other Senses Are Not Given Their Due
Let’s start with a scene that might be familiar to many parents. Your teenage son returns after a decisive exam. His performance on this might determine the course of his future. You hear him stomp into the dining room. Two feet away, inside the kitchen, as you slather a sandwich with chutney, you stifle the question that is frothing over your thoughts. You peer out to catch a glimpse of his face.
As always, he wears a nonchalance that can mean anything or nothing. He heaves his backpack off his shoulders and slouches into a chair. His ears are clamped with headphones, his eyes seized by the phone’s screen. You’ve held back so far for three painstaking minutes, wherein the clock’s ticks seem to echo the ultrasound’s heartbeat, the trepidation and hope you had heard seventeen years ago when he was curled up inside your womb. You try to coat your voice with a fake detachment, but maybe the concern leaks into the three words you sound out: “How was it?”
He hears you. He momentarily slips off his headphone and says, “Grrreat!” Just one word and the headphones are slipped back on and the phone emits a wicked gleam. You’re a mother, as attuned as you once were to his fetal movements, his nighttime hunger, his nappy rashes. You don’t just hear the word. You hear the gloom and disappointment in his fallen pitch; you hear the biting sarcasm that creeps in with the rrrs; you hear the anguished pause before the headphones clap into place.
For once, you can shut your eyes and comprehend what he’s saying. Because your ears are hyper-attentive. Just about then your phone rings. It’s a friend who suspects that her husband is unfaithful. She says he looks typically composed when he returns from work, just slightly disheveled by his long commute. But there’s a strange perfume that hangs about his shirt. Only a whiff, but it socks her olfactory cells like a gut punch. It’s not his aftershave, it’s something else. A woman’s deo. She doesn’t need to search his expression or interrogate his eyes. Her nose can sniff the change.
It’s strange that as human beings we can be sharply aware of certain micro-sounds and the faintest of smells – the tonal shifts in a kid’s voice or the scent that wafts around a partner’s shirt – and yet be shockingly oblivious to other sensory inputs that texture our environment. Both writers and ethnographers are cognizant of the manner in which other senses are ignored and sight is accorded more valence than it deserves when stitching up the constituents of reality.
After all, if those of us who are sighted, close our eyes for a few seconds and pay attention to our Indian city noises – the squeals of two-wheelers, the thumps of new constructions, the toothy shrieks of road drills – we realize how we inhabit an overloaded and persistently streaming soundscape. Sounds that writers like Ved Mehta, who was struck by meningitis at the age of three and robbed of his sight from thereon, have harnessed to write some of the more dazzling descriptions of the country; sounds that have alerted first-time visitors to how listening to a foreign country can be more revealing than taking in the sights.
In Word Painting, the writer Rebecca McClanahan offers several techniques to enhance descriptions with senses. Onomatopoeia can help with capturing sounds. Even if you would prefer not to include too many representative noises – the sizzle of pancakes, the rustling of winds – writing standout passages requires attending to your ears as much as to your eyes. And also to your nose, skin and tongue, with no one sense accorded a kingly position.
Beyond the ‘how’ to exploit your various senses in reading or writing the world, it’s illuminating to dip into the history of senses. After all, there are social and cultural reasons for sight being accorded such a commanding status. The scholar of senses, Constance Classen posits that the Western manner of ordering and numbering senses is not the only way of “seeing” the world. Other cultures have had different ideas about the number of senses and the manner in which our subjective experiences are conceived. Even in pre-modern Europe, speech was considered a sixth sense.
Moreover, sight has both masculine and colonial notions attached to it. After all, colonizers observed and then categorized and surveilled their subjects using visual differentiators: skin color or other visible markers of racial origin. On the other hand, the ‘primitive’ cultures were known to use the body or touch or other intuitive methods to sense the world. (Remember the stereotypical American Indians, laying their ears to the ground, to sense an oncoming train or storm.) From a gendered perspective, women in the West were largely relegated to the realm of the body or the tactile senses: cooking, sewing, handicrafts. Whereas men appropriated the powerful domains of sight: science, painting, writing.
There are other fallouts of the current hierarchy of senses. Reason is associated more with vision, as in “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Whereas smell is relegated to intuition: “I smell a rat.” Children are educated to read and manipulate visual symbols – alphabets and numbers – but hardly encouraged to sniff or taste their way into knowing. As Classen writes, ‘foul’ smells also have a social context. In the 18th Century, when the palace of Versailles did not have sanitary facilities, the odor of urine pervaded its grounds; the smell was then accorded a prestige that would be unimaginable today.
Regardless of the position any of us might inhabit today, or the profession we practice, it might certainly widen our thinking to take in the world in other ways. After all, every sensory organ can be enhanced if we attend more closely to its messages.
References
Rebecca McClanahan, Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively, Writer’s Digest Books, 1999
https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/senses