The orchestra took just a handful of minutes to exorcise my angst, and then they went on relentlessly enchanting me. Soon the music captured me, and after a while I started to see the music as colour in movement, brushstrokes of red and yellow and electric blue appearing in the air above the orchestra: every movement of bow on strings created a visual echo. The room was bathed in psychedelic light. I didn’t see any of this with my physical eyes, but the colours appeared in my mind’s eye, like vivid memories, in an experience that anticipated and mirrored the one I would have years later in the presence of Reflection. Classical music makes you sit and listen; it is a sensuous experience before it is an intellectual one.
I am not a music expert. I can read music and for a while I used to torture a saxophone pretending I was playing, but I don’t have a musical ear, I don’t have any musical culture to speak of, and I definitely do not have discerning tastes. I don’t know the first thing about music, intellectually speaking. I enjoy it for the sheer sensual pleasure that it gives me.
The fiddle was once known as ‘the Devil’s instrument’, because, when played with suitably diabolical fervour, it would arouse yearnings of a sinful nature (a desire to dance, or – God forbid! – to roll in the grass). The violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini was refused a Catholic burial when he died in 1840 because he was rumoured to have made a pact with the devil. A similar story was told about the bluesman Robert Johnson, who was rumoured to have acquired his musical gift after selling his soul to the devil at a dusty crossroads. Music – visceral and sensuous – belongs to the devil, and so do the pleasures of the body.
Marsilio Ficino, a marvellous Renaissance priest, mage and philosopher, believed that we have a body, a soul, and also a ‘spirit’, an intermediary between them. Music, for Ficino, is made of the same substance as the spirit, it is spiritual itself. As a consequence, music, through the spirit, moves our whole person, body and soul – and it could change our whole person.
Ficino held the belief, common in his time, that the universe is held together by a beautiful network of connections. The stars have special virtues, and in a form of cosmic echo, these virtues are also present, in diluted form, in plants, trees, rocks and other components of the natural world. Ginger and chamomile, for example, were considered to share the virtues of the Sun, which had the power to heal.
So it is with music. For Ficino, each of the stars in the heavens is playing its own tune. The cosmos as a whole is endlessly singing and playing a stunning harmony, a ‘music of the spheres’, which we never notice because it is always – and has always been – present. The mage, the artist, could mirror the harmonies of the Sun itself, and its virtues. A mage could summon up the music of a star to heal a friend.
This magical world view might (or might not) be too much for our modern sensibilities. But it certainly tells us at least two important things. The first is that by paying attention to our senses, we can enter into a deeper communion with the world we are part of. The second is that we are surrounded by an aural reality we have stopped listening to. In a world of building sites, roaring cars, and adverts screaming at us from television and computer, we have grown as deaf as we have ever been to the harmonies of the spheres.
The spheres still play. The composer John Cage shut himself in ‘an echoic chamber’, a chamber that blocked all sounds, and in that perfect silence, he heard a silence that was all but perfect: he heard ‘two sounds, one high and one low’.6 He explained it as the twinned sounds of his nervous system and his blood circulation, but as Sara Maitland has noted, this is far from being a scientific fact. The same sound has been heard by all sorts of people who have gone searching for silence (Maitland herself among them), and no one knows for sure what it is. It may be not a problem, but a mystery.
As above, so below. As the universe, so everything it contains. I have already mentioned that one of my favourite pastimes when I was growing up was to sit on the beach and look at the sea. Sometimes I would close my eyes, and rather than look, I would listen. I would do this especially as summer was drawing to a close, when a deep sadness at the dying of the season took hold of me. The waves came ashore with a broken rhythm, never exactly the same. It was a very different sound from the one the beach had made just two weeks before, when electric tunes and human voices had obliterated the sea and the wind. The tunes and voices only lasted a couple of months each year; the waves were there before the beach-goers came, and they were still there after the beach-goers left.
The waves will still be there after I leave.
By tuning in to them, I was tuning in to a cosmic time span that was too big for me to understand. I did not need to; I could just sit down, and listen.
*
‘The lower classes smell,’ wrote George Orwell.7 These ‘four frightful words’, he explained, sum up the essence of the class system. The lower you are on the social scale, the worse your smell.
Orwell’s words reflect a continuing reality. Seeing a homeless person prompts a variety of reactions in us, ranging from charitable concern to discomfort. Smelling a homeless person, however, can tilt us in the direction of suspicion. Old clothes and a dishevelled appearance are one thing (there are Oxbridge dons who are happy to sport such a look, after all), but the sour tang of an unwashed body suggests ‘outcast’ status. The person emitting this animal scent is not ‘one of us’; surely they lie beyond the pale of society.
Remember what we said about social realities? They are the stories that our society tells about the world, and that come to define our reality. Smell can reinforce them strongly. Luckily, it can challenge them as strongly: we can use smell to go against the grain of disenchantment.
We think of smell almost exclusively in negative fashion. When you say of something, ‘that smells’, you mean it smells bad; if you want to indicate the opposite, you qualify your statement by saying ‘it smells nice’. The smells we appreciate the most are the ones that we don’t notice. The chief requirement for our friends is that they do not smell – we appreciate them wearing some nice cologne, but that is not necessary in the way, say, that it is necessary for them to wear trousers. Town planning aims to create visually interesting environments, and in the best cases even quiet ones, but it does not concern itself at all with the smell of those localities, other than to ensure that no smell is present. We take it for granted that odours are unpleasant, and our main concern about them is how to get rid of them. This is what we must change.
Smell takes us into uncharted waters. It feels alien to us, a leftover of a bygone era.
Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast, described the frustration he felt when he tried to create a map of an area of woodland the way badgers do, by using smell rather than sight.8 Badgers take paths marked by odours: there are no visible signs to indicate that a specific line across a field is a path, but the badgers passing through that field will know a path is there, and will walk it. To them the line is… we could say ‘visible’, but that only goes to show how bad we are at talking about smell. An olfactory line is not a line you can see. The best verb we have is ‘to perceive’, which is annoyingly generic. We lack the most basic words to even conceive the world of aromatics.
Our sense of smell is weaker than other animals’, and yet, after some training, Foster was able to distinguish trees by smell, and in more general terms he gained an olfactory understanding of his patch of woodland. He found, though, that he always translated that understanding into visual terms, using metaphors like ‘walls’ and ‘paths’: he was unable to stay at the level of the scent, to appreciate odours for what they are. Our difficulties with smell are not only a matter of physical perception (or the lack thereof); in modern Western culture at least, smell has been largely erased from consciousness.