As I walked back to the dorm I thought about the fact that the smell is the strongest of the senses. One sent can trigger a memory from decades before. It is not something that people often think about in regards to things other than themselves, how do I smell? Does my breath smell? Does my house smell good? These are thoughts that people have. And in todays world products are sold to appease these thoughts. We have deodorant, perfume and cologne to cover up body oder. We have mouth wash, mints and gum to cover up bad breath. We even have Fabreez to cover up any left over smells in our living spaces. I had to wonder if anything we smell is natural anymore.
I am writing about this because later as I read Ceremony I realized that the sense of smell( as well as the other senses) was important to the story. "He walked in the evening air, which was cool and smelled like juniper smoke from the old man's fire"(127). In this scene Tayo is walking outside and he is able to smell something natural, juniper. There are many other scenes like this in the book, but as I read this line it occurred to me that I do not even know what juniper is let alone what it smells like. I do know the difference between Clinique's Happy and The Gap's so pink, I can also tell you which one costs more.
My point here is that today in the world we are so busy covering up the natural that we don't see what we are losing. In Ceremony we can see how tied to the land we are supposed to be and how going against nature can poison us. I have to wonder in the future if we will be able to smell anything that is not a processed chemical? I would be sad to think that this could even be a possibility. But I hold out some hope because as I took my walk the entire time is smelled like rain, and though Yankee Candle may have a sent titled rain, the real thing smells nothing like it.
Yes! I have noticed this before too! You go into a store and you look at the candles and some of them are things like cinnamon and Christmas cookies but other things are just mimicking natural smells that we should be able to smell without having to buy a candle, like lilac and freesia. Why do we do this? We have the real thing outside our door. Why do we feel the need to mimic it with false imitations? All we have to do is go outside and we can have the real thing for free. It reminds me a lot of the conversation we had at the beginning of the year about fake trees. And in many ways it reminds me of Food, Inc. We remove ourselves from nature as much as possible with steel buildings, cars and roads. Then we realize how removed we are from the natural world but instead of moving away from it all we buy fake plants and fill our living space with them. We keep finding new, more advanced ways to solve problems for things created by our technology, things that could be fixed just as easily by abandoning the technology.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting that Ceremony constantly reminds us that the main character has this connection to the Earth that the rest of us don’t. He is living on the land in a way that we don’t and therefore he is able to experience these things that we are only able to substitute with candles, fake plants and more technology when that is the thing we are trying to escape.