A Leap of Faith on Leap Day: How to Evaluate Smells

The temple bell stops,

but the sound keeps coming
 
out of the flowers.
—Matsuo Bashō (1644—94)

For the past 29 days interesting patterns have appeared in double digit annotations for each day. Something new appears between 02 and 20 and today it ends with 022920, which also happens to be the hex code for a very dark cyan at 0.8% red, 16.1% green and 12.5% blue. Humans gravitate towards harmony and meaning, but in doing so may lose sight of the value of being present. This is especially true when it comes to learning how to evaluate smells.

The formula for getting better at evaluating smells is simple and counterintuitive. Smell beyond what’s there and what you think you can smell. This approach is true for every sense, but it’s especially true for smell because the human experience of smelling is hardwired to emotion and memory. Attachment to likes, dislikes, and ephemerality independent of vision inhibit the embodied experience of smelling. It’s really that simple. You need to get out of your own way.

Think of smell as a haiku that dissolves after you’ve read it. If you trust the experience, a distillation of meaning beyond words will take up residence within you. If you grasp at each word in an attempt to fix the experience in time you’ll lose the haiku's essence. This is not often articulated, but it’s the lived experience of people who follow their nose in life and for a living. Listen. Can you hear the sound coming out of the flowers?

Notes:
You can see the dark cyan color in lower right side of the temple bell image.

Smell and Tell: Brian Eno Smells

A journalist was interviewing musician/producer Brian Eno in candlelit room when the artist opened a faded lime-colored metal briefcase filled with “an array of phials” containing raw materials used in perfumery. The year was 1982 and the article was titled “An Evening with Brian Eno”. This was the first interview where the subject of scent became the main topic of discussion—it wasn’t the last.

Brian Eno is a full-on smellaholic who continues to collect raw ingredients used in perfumery for private enjoyment and inspiration. What is it about the art of perfumery that continues to fascinate the renowned founder of ambient music? How does Eno’s passion for smells shape his creative output? (Hint: if you download his Bloom app on iTunes you’ll find a breadcrumb trail of synesthetic clues).

What are Brian Eno’s favorite smells and why do they have the impact that they do? Recode your concept of creativity. Get inside Brian Eno’s olfactory mind and find out what happens when normal instruments are abandoned and disconnected events are smelled in circuit.

The Smell and Tell series of art+science programming is led by Michelle Krell Kydd, a trained nose in flavors and fragrance who shares her passion for gastronomy and the perfume arts on Glass Petal Smoke. Smell & Tell builds community through interactions with flavor, fragrance and storytelling. The unique and popular series celebrates its eighth anniversary year in June at the Ann Arbor District Library and is ongoing.

Smell & Tell: Brian Eno Smells
Date: Wednesday, February 19, 2020
Time: 6:30-8:45PM
Location: The Ann Arbor District Library, Pittsfield Branch
Address: 2359 Oak Valley Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48103
Phone: 734-327-4200
Admission is free and is sponsored by AADL
Link to Event: https://aadl.org/node/398023

Notes:
Recommended reading for insight into a collaboration between Brian Eno and Maurice Roucel that's curious and mysterious: Brian Eno, Maurice Roucel and the Perfume of Unfinished Business.

Brian Eno Smells debuted at the Ann Arbor District Library in 2018. Attendees and new fans of Smell & Tell at the library wanted an encore. Et voila. There's a new smell added to the scent flight; a perfume that a woman Eno encountered declared as aphrodisiac. Eno associates it with biblical Nard (Spikenard), but it's something completely different. You'll have to attend the program to smell Nardo and find out what it really is (I have it and production is officially discontinued).

Lesson? Don't rely on aphrodisiac lore when you get a sample of of Nardo perfume from a woman in Ibiza: "...a woman I met in Ibiza gave me a minute bottle containing just one drop of an utterly heavenly material called Nardo (I later came to think that this was probably spikenard oil, extracted from a shrub growing at between six and eight thousand feet on the Himalayas and used by wealthy Indian ladies as a prelude to lovemaking)." Tsk-tsk, Brian.

Smell & Tell: Sacred Scents Across Abrahamic Traditions

The ritual use of incense and perfumes is linked across Abrahamic traditions. You can literally smell it. Sacred scents occupy the space between liminality and the numinous, which is why describing a smell is challenging. Is it possible to break through this cloud of unknowing? The answer is yes and it requires an understanding of science, self and a sensorial leap of faith.

We can’t see smells. Even when we “see” the source of an aroma the lived experience of smelling is guided by emotion and memory. Western sensory hierarchy values vision over other senses so “seeing” gets in the way of understanding the essence of a thing. The antidote to this cultural bias is engaging “inner vision” and conquering implicit bias related to smell and culture.

Discover the olfactory tapestry of relational unity that weaves its way through Judaism, Christianity and Islam via sacred scents. Attendees will learn how to transcend the abstract nature of scent into articulated lived experience via Smell Mapping, a sensory evaluation technique inspired by professional perfumery training.

The scent flight for this program includes: Tibetan Deer Musk tinctured in vintage Mysore Sandalwood, Myrrh (Somalia), Frankincense (Oman), Laudate Chrism (United States), Greek Orthodox Jasmine Incense, Spikenard (Nepal), Bakhoor (Saudi Arabia), and Besamim (Judaic Spice Blend).

The Smell and Tell series of art+science programming is led by Michelle Krell Kydd, a trained nose in flavors and fragrance who shares her passion for gastronomy and the perfume arts on Glass Petal Smoke. Smell & Tell builds community through interactions with flavor, fragrance and storytelling. The unique and popular series celebrates its seventh anniversary year at the Ann Arbor District Library and is ongoing.

Smell & Tell: Sacred Scents Across Abrahamic Traditions
Date: Thursday, January 23, 2020
Time: 6:30-8:45PM
Location: The Ann Arbor District Library, Downtown Branch
Address: 343 South 5th Ave, Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Phone: 734-327-4200
Admission is free and is sponsored by AADL
Link to Event: https://aadl.org/node/398022

Notes:

The Sacred Scents Smell & Tell debuted at the University of Michigan on November 7, 2019. The inclusion of olfaction in an educational setting was a "first" for some students and faculty in attendance, which led to lively discussions during and after the program.

Sacred Scents raised awareness of the value of the sense of smell in relationship to anthropology, diversity, history and religion. It was designed to support Remapping Peoples of the Book: Theorizing Abrahamic Vernaculars, an Mcube at the University of Michigan.

Mcubed is housed in the University of Michigan Office of Research, as part of the president and provost’s Third Century Initiative. It is a seed funding program that stimulates and supports innovative research.

Smell & Tell: Helen Keller’s Smelling Session with Perfumer Michel Pasquier

Helen Keller participated in a smelling session with a perfumer in the fall of 1950. The event was described in an article titled “The World Through Three Senses” that Keller wrote for the March 1951 edition of Ladies’ Home Journal. The name of the perfumer was conspicuously absent, which was odd considering the postwar boom in women’s perfumes and the fact that Keller was an avid gardener who adored flowers.

It turns out that Helen Keller didn’t leave the perfumer’s name out of the article— the editor did. Michelle Krell Kydd discovered this after the American Foundation for the Blind launched the first fully accessible digital archive of The Helen Keller Collection in June 2019. The draft of “The World Through Three Senses” wasn’t hidden behind a paywall; it was hidden in plain sight. The perfumer’s name was Michel Pasquier.

Msr. Pasquier was an independent perfumer who compounded fragrances in his lab at 7 West 46th Street in New York City. Keller joined a small group of women in Westport, Connecticut who met with the perfumer and evaluated eight unidentified perfumes, each inspired by a single flower. The women used Pasquier’s “whiff sachets” during the exercise, and tried to guess the name of flower that inspired each perfume.

We’ll recreate the smelling session experienced by Helen Keller using single floral notes supplied by International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF). We’ll also smell Pasquier’s Tobruk perfume (1952) and see a vintage Pasquier gift set that includes the whiff sachets that Helen Keller referenced in “The World Through Three Senses”. Join us for several historic “firsts” at this Smell & Tell.

The Smell and Tell series of art+science programming is led by Michelle Krell Kydd, a trained nose in flavors and fragrance who shares her passion for gastronomy and the perfume arts on Glass Petal Smoke. Smell & Tell builds community through interactions with flavor, fragrance and storytelling. The unique and popular series celebrates its seventh anniversary year at the Ann Arbor District Library and is ongoing.

Smell & Tell: Helen Keller's Smelling Session with Perfumer Michel Pasquier
Date: Wednesday, December 18, 2019
Time: 6:30-8:45PM
Location: The Ann Arbor District Library, Pittsfield Branch
Address: 2359 Oak Valley Drive, Ann Arbor, M 48103
Phone: 734-327-4200
Admission is free and is sponsored by AADL
Link to Event: https://aadl.org/node/397484

Note:
Helen Keller communicated the value of the sense of smell throughout her lifetime. This is thoughtfully developed in an essay titled “Smell, The Fallen Angel”, which appears in the sixth chapter of her book, The World I Live In (1904). Keller felt that smell was a noble sense “neglected and disparaged” in ocularcentric culture. It still is.