‘I am dying,’ she answered. ‘I am going home. I am going back where I came from—you might call it my return.’
Another week passed, and now Bhagawhandi no longer responded to external stimuli, but seemed wholly enveloped in a world of her own, and, though her eyes were closed, her face still bore its faint, happy smile. ‘She’s on the return journey,’ the staff said. ‘She’ll soon be there.’ Three days later she died—or should we say she ‘arrived’, having completed her passage to India?
18. The Dog Beneath the Skin
Stephen D., aged 22, medical student, on highs (cocaine, PCP, chiefly amphetamines).
Vivid dream one night, dreamt he was a dog, in a world unimaginably rich and significant in smells. (‘The happy smell of water . . . the brave smell of a stone.’) Waking, he found himself in just such a world. ‘As if I had been totally colour-blind before, and suddenly found myself in a world full of colour.’ He did, in fact, have an enhancement of colour vision (‘I could distinguish dozens of browns where I’d just seen brown before. My leather-bound books, which looked similar before, now all had quite distinct and distinguishable hues’) and a dramatic enhancement of eidetic visual perception and memory (‘I could never draw before, I couldn’t “see” things in my mind, but now it was like having a camera lucida in my mind—I “saw” everything, as if projected on the paper, and just drew the outlines I “saw”. Suddenly I could do the most accurate anatomical drawings.’) But it was the exaltation of smell which really transformed his world: ‘I had dreamt I was a dog—it was an olfactory dream—and now I awoke to an infinitely redolent world—a world in which all other sensations, enhanced as they were, paled before smell.’ And with all this there went a sort of trembling, eager emotion, and a strange nostalgia, as of a lost world, half forgotten, half recalled.[15]
‘I went into a scent shop,’ he continued. ‘I had never had much of a nose for smells before, but now I distinguished each one instantly—and I found each one unique, evocative, a whole world.’ He found he could distinguish all his friends—and patients—by smelclass="underline" ‘I went into the clinic, I sniffed like a dog, and in that sniff recognised, before seeing them, the twenty patients who were there. Each had his own olfactory physiognomy, a smell-face, far more vivid and evocative, more redolent, than any sight face.’ He could smell their emotions—fear, contentment, sexuality—like a dog. He could recognise every street, every shop, by smell—he could find his way around New York, infallibly, by smell.
He experienced a certain impulse to sniff and touch everything (‘It wasn’t really real until I felt it and smelt it’) but suppressed this, when with others, lest he seem inappropriate. Sexual smells were exciting and increased—but no more so, he felt, than food smells and other smells. Smell pleasure was intense—smell displeasure, too—but it seemed to him less a world of mere pleasure and displeasure than a whole aesthetic, a whole judgment, a whole new significance, which surrounded him. ‘It was a world overwhelmingly concrete, of particulars,’ he said, ‘a world overwhelming in immediacy, in immediate significance.’ Somewhat intellectual before, and inclined to reflection and abstraction, he now found thought, abstraction and categorisation, somewhat difficult and unreal, in view of the compelling immediacy of each experience.
Rather suddenly, after three weeks, this strange transformation ceased—his sense of smell, all his senses, returned to normal; he found himself back, with a sense of mingled loss and relief, in his old world of pallor, sensory faintness, non-concreteness and abstraction. ‘I’m glad to be back,’ he said, ‘but it’s a tremendous loss, too. I see now what we give up in being civilised and human. We need the other—the “primitive”—as well.’
Sixteen years have passed—and student days, amphetamine days, are long over. There has never been any recurrence of anything remotely similar. Dr D. is a highly successful young internist, a friend and colleague of mine in New York. He has no regrets— but he is occasionally nostalgic: ‘That smell-world, that world of redolence,’ he exclaims. ‘So vivid, so real! It was like a visit to another world, a world of pure perception, rich, alive, self-sufficient, and full. If only I could go back sometimes and be a dog again!’
Freud wrote on several occasions of man’s sense of smell as being a ‘casualty’, repressed in growing up and civilisation with the assumption of an upright posture and the repression of primitive, pre-genital sexuality. Specific (and pathological) enhancements of smell have indeed been reported as occurring in paraphilia, fetishism, and allied perversions and regressions.[16] But the disinhibition here described seems far more general, and though associated with excitement—probably an amphetamine-induced dopaminergic excitation—was neither specifically sexual nor associated with sexual regression. Similar hyperosmia, sometimes paroxysmal, may occur in excited hyper-dopaminergic states, as with some post-encephalitics on L-Dopa, and some patients with Tourette’s syndrome.
What we see, if nothing else, is the universality of inhibition, even at the most elemental perceptual leveclass="underline" the need to inhibit what Head regarded as primordial and full of feeling-tone, and called ‘protopathic’, in order to allow the emergence of the sophisticated, categorising, affectless ‘epicritic’.
The need for such inhibition cannot be reduced to the Freudian, nor should its reduction be exalted, romanticised, to the Blakean. Perhaps we need it, as Head implies, that we may be men and not dogs.[17] And yet Stephen D. ‘s experience reminds us, like G.K. Chesterton’s poem, The Song of Quoodle’, that sometimes we need to be dogs and not men:
They haven’t got no noses The fallen sons of Eve . . . Oh, for the happy smell of water, the brave smell of a stone!
I have recently encountered a sort of corollary of this case—a gifted man who sustained a head injury, severely damaging his olfactory tracts (these are very vulnerable in their long course across the anterior fossa) and, in consequence, entirely losing his sense of smell.
He has been startled and distressed at the effects of this: ‘Sense of smell?’ he says. ‘I never gave it a thought. You don’t normally give it a thought. But when I lost it—it was like being struck blind. Life lost a good deal of its savour—one doesn’t realise how much ‘savour’ is smell. You smell people, you smell books, you smell the city, you smell the spring—maybe not consciously, but as a rich unconscious background to everything else. My whole world was suddenly radically poorer . . .’
There was an acute sense of loss, and an acute sense of yearning, a veritable osmalgia: a desire to remember the smell-world to which he had paid no conscious attention, but which, he now felt, had formed the very ground base of life. And then, some months later, to his astonishment and joy, his favourite morning coffee, which had become ‘insipid’, started to regain its savour. Tentatively he tried his pipe, not touched for months, and here too caught a hint of the rich aroma he loved.
Greatly excited—the neurologists had held out no hope of recovery—he returned to his doctor. But after testing him minutely, using a ‘double-blind’ technique, his doctor said: ‘No, I’m sorry, there’s not a trace of recovery. You still have a total anosmia. Curious though that you should now “smell” your pipe and coffee . . .’
15
Somewhat similar states—a strange emotionalism; sometimes nostalgia, ‘reminiscence’ and deja vu associated with intense olfactory hallucinations, are characteristic of ‘uncinate seizures’, a form of temporal-lobe epilepsy first described by Hughlings Jackson about a century ago. Usually the experience is rather specific, but sometimes there is a generalised intensification of smell, a hyperosmia. The uncus, phylogenetically part of the ancient ‘smell-brain’ (or rhinencephalon), is functionally associated with the whole limbic system, which is increasingly recognised to be crucial in determining and regulating the entire emotional ‘tone’. Excitation of this, by whatever means, produces heightened emotionalism and an intensification of the senses. The entire subject, with its intriguing ramifications, has been explored in great detail by David Bear (1979).
16
This is well described by A.A. Brill (1932), and contrasted with the overall brilliance, the redolence, of the smell-world, in macrosomatic animals (such as dogs), ‘savages’ and children.
17
See Jonathan Miller’s critique of Head, entitled ‘The Dog Beneath the Skin’, in the Listener (1970).