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20 aug 06 "Describe the stench of the potato." imagine the scent of fethid, ancient kitchen garbage that's been left to fester in the heat for a while. then, take away the sickly sweet colors that grace aromatic trash. there you have "Rotting Potato In a Car", by Barnacle. c'est magnifique. i already talked about smells in general, i think. someone asked a question a while back about how long they could go without a shower before they started to smell socially unacceptable, which i answered (3 days) as well as delved a bit into "odor aesthetic relativism", or "what makes a smell good or bad to us?" the answer to this general-purpose aesthetic question ("how can we tell one thing is more beautiful than another? furthermore, what is beauty? is it subjective? if so or if not, what's generating these responses?") is tough when it's applied to sound or image, but it seems a little bit clearer when it's applied to smells. going back to evolutionary psychology (as always), we see that the nose is there to give us information, as opposed to appreciate art (such as the scent of the rotting potato). that said, we know that smells tell us if something is good to eat, if a fire is nearby, if a skunk just got hit by a truck, whether or not someone has brushed their teeth, etc. in many of these situations, smell might severely affect health. consider the smell of rotting meat (or a rotting potato) -- you avoid it because it smells "bad" (or a certain way), and indeed if you'd partaken of it then you might get food poisonoing. how do babies respond to smells? i would guess that they respond to smells much in the same way dogs do -- depending on how strong the smell is, they react with a little bit of interest, great interest, or get overwhelmed. a dog might smell rotten meat and know not to eat it, but the smell might not register as "bad" to him. indeed, i wonder if all aesthetics aren't a human contrivance. we can say the same thing for image and sound: the purpose of our sight and hearing is to give us information. if we hear roaring coming from the cave, we don't go into it. if we see a raging bear, we avoid it. but does that mean that the associated sounds and sights are inherently "unpleasant"? yeah, i'd have to say that there are some naturally unpleasant smells. consider the natural, involuntary revulsion and nose-wrinkling one experiences when smelling something bad. today, i had to use the bathroom at work immediately after someone else had taken a huge dump in it, and the smell couldn't be described as anything but foul; no amount of artistic philosophy could have made me rejoice in that scent. also consider that smell is the most powerful memory-triggering sense -- if we smell something we smelled five years ago, it brings vivid memories shooting back. well, at least it does for me, and i heard somewhere that it does this for others, too. maybe this powerful, visceral effect has something to do with the "natural absolutes" of smell aesthetics that seem to exist, or at the very least seem to exist more in smell than they do in sight or hearing. same with taste, and touch -- it's easy to imagine a universally unpleasant taste (powerfully bitter) or feeling (pain). i guess sight and hearing are the only ambiguous ones. outside of a blinding light and 200 decibels of sound (or the scraping of fingernails across a chalkboard), how can we say that one sight or one sound is more or less pleasant, or beautiful, than another? images produce associations, which are different than the image itself, and which might be universally unpleasant: consider a film of a baby being eaten alive. i think everyone would agree that this is an unpleasant image, because of what it is an image of -- not because of the particular configurations of lines and colors. even an abstract painting might trigger some repressed memory in someone and cause them to curl up into the fetal position (well, probably not, but you get the idea). but still, that's the associations produced by the image -- not the image itself. so, it looks like the "odd men out" are sight and hearing -- the other three senses enjoy some universal aesthetics (if we can even call it that). so, maybe a rotting potato is universally non-beautiful. i, for one, would not have wanted to have been locked inside my car for two days while the potato was dangling in my rear window. describe the smell of the potato? it smelled bad. however, it smelling "bad" didn't preclude its smelling "interesting". i remember an instance on an airplane during its descent. i had some sort of congestion, and my sinuses tried to decompress as we landed. the ensuing pain was excrutiating -- i'd truly never felt anything like it. although it was certainly not pleasant, the pain was so overwhelming and intense that i actually thought to myself, "hmmm...i didn't know pain like this was possible" (pain as art?); it was interesting, just like the potato. |
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