Some mornings my head is like a little dog panting, whimpering, and straining at his leash. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go! My head gets me up and leads me around all day. Sometimes it’s dinnertime before I remember that I have a body.
And the idea that this body can give me pleasure–well, that’s a really hard one. I used to think that because I read hip French books about sexual ecstasy I had somehow escaped my Calvinist heritage–the idea that the body is shameful and only a narcissistic lazybones would pay any attention to it. No such luck. My version of Calvinist body-denial was compulsive reading, and the more I read–about French people’s ecstasies, which are usually pretty cerebral anyway–the more I hid out from my own body. A body that, let’s face it, is plumper, paler, and more easily winded than I would prefer.
Falling in love changed things. Intimacy with a woman who was learning to accept and even love her body gave me new eyes to see (and new nerve endings to feel) my own. I started–just started–to think of my body as a means of communication with the world, not a sausage case for Great Thoughts. I wanted to go further.
It was my wife who found Nancy Conger, professor of the five senses. A slender young woman with apparently bottomless reserves of energy and optimism, she lives in an old farmhouse in western Wisconsin, plays the violin, and teaches people how to get out of debt, simplify their lives, and use their senses for entertainment and joy. She even teaches a one-night class called “Sensuous Living.” Laurie and I enrolled.
A class in sensuousness. An idea not without irony, amazing that we actually have to study this stuff. Five perfectly sensible-looking adults perched on plastic chairs in a drab little classroom in Minneapolis, with Nancy presiding in a sleeveless black jumpsuit. On two tables toward the front: nasturtiums in a vase, a strip of fur, a piece of sandpaper, a twig, a violin, a seashell.
“Lick your forearm,” said Nancy, “and smell yourself.”
Lick my forearm and smell myself?
I looked around me. The matronly woman in the purple blouse and matching shoes was licking her forearm. So was the shy 40ish guy with the salt-and-pepper beard, and the thin, Italian-looking young woman with the big braid. Finally, feeling uncomfortably canine, I licked myself. I sniffed (“Little, short sniffs, like perfumers use,” said Nancy). Hmm. A faintly metallic aroma. Sniff, sniff. Beneath it, something breadlike.
Like a wine, I had a bouquet.
Then Nancy got us out of our chairs to wander around and “smell what doesn’t seem to have a smell.” I put my nose right up next to a big pad of paper on an easel. Faint wheaty aroma like my school tablets in fifth grade. All the sunshiny, chalk-dusty, gentle boredom of elementary school came back, like a tune.
A brick gave off a mysterious musty tang, charged with the past. A quarter smelled sour, a metal door bitter and somehow sad.
“Smell detours right around your thinking brain, back to the limbic system at the bottom of the brain, where memory is,” Nancy told us. She also explained that smell can be hugely improved, made more subtle and precise, if you keep sniffing. “Smell dishes. Smell clothes. Smell everything,” she exhorted.
I did want to keep on smelling, but we were on to a trust-and-touch experiment. We paired off (I went with the big-braid woman) and took turns blindfolding and leading each other. I put my partner’s hand on a brick, a door, a seashell, a twig.
Then I put on the blindfold (it smelled powdery and lusciously feminine), and she led me. Without any visual clues to tell me what things were supposed to feel like, I met each surface with a small thrill of tactile freshness. A metal door, I discovered, was studded with sharp little grains. A twig was as rough as sandpaper, and the sandpaper itself practically made me jump out of my skin. With most of the objects, I enjoyed a few wonderful seconds of pure sensation before the thinking brain clicked in and gave the thing a name. But click in it did; and that’s when the magic ended.
The evening concluded with experiments in sound (Nancy played her violin very near each of us so we could feel the vibration in our bodies) and taste (we passed around a loaf of focaccia), but as we drove home I was still hung up on the smell and touch thing.
My nose, which I had mostly used as a passive receiver of pretty large and often alarming signals (skunk crushed on an Iowa road, underarms needing immediate attention, and so on) felt amazingly discriminating, having actually sniffed the difference between a door and a quarter. My fingers still tingled with the thrill of sandpaper and brick and (blessed relief!) fur.
The part of my head that names, makes distinctions, and is vigilant against stupidities pointed out that five middle-class white folks in a certain demographic had just spent three hours rubbing, if not exactly gazing at, their navels.
The honorable side of my Calvinism (as a kid I lived on Calvin Avenue in Grand Rapids, Michigan, just down the street from Calvin College) bridled at the idea of stroking my nerve endings like some French decadent poet, while an entire society–an entire world–splits along economic fault lines.
A third part of me rejoiced: I had discovered the cleverest answer yet to television. It was the exquisite entertainment technology of a body–my body. Anyone’s body. It is–or could be–an immediate rebuke and alternative to the technologies of consumerism, which coarsen, obscure, jack up, deny, extend beyond reason, and in general do numbing violence to the subtle, noble equipment for receiving the joys of life that we were all issued at birth.
Anyone can sniff a leaf or reach out to the rough bark of a tree. Anyone can listen for a little while to the world. And anyone can do it now, at the kitchen table, in the schoolroom, at the racetrack, in the hospital bed. And we can keep doing it until we believe again in the wondrous beauty of our own equipment (absolutely no amplification from Sony required).
