Anyone with interest in literature knows how important our nose is. Anyone with an interest in life knows it too. Our nose stands out in front of us, our nose is the flagbearer of who we are. There are beautiful noses, enormous, straight, bent, hooked like an eagle noses, small and delicate and pointy and firm ones, all proud foretellers of character. There are ugly and sad noses whom we equally bestow personality on and then there's that vast community of decent, ordinary noses which struggle to beat eyes and mouth to the early attention span. We all have got our nose to live with. Oh, yes, noses can be changed, fun idea. Worth an awful lot of money. In general people prefer to get to grips with their nose and learn how to make the most out of what they long considered a disadvantage.
We love famous noses. They tell what a nose should be like this season and they show us examples of unabashed nosepride. That's what we can aspire to, feeling good about who we are. We let our stars change their faces for us and we secretely love when it all goes wrong. But most revered are the special noses, the ones people all over the trading world spoke miracles of and which nowadays are presented to us by way of commercials, with of course very few stories making the cut. We can handle only so little information as we need our brains to perform our required task. Still, we honour our nose. As we should. The nose is the most direct route to our memories, always active and waiting for us to listen to its stories. Breath through your nostrils and try to remember moments when you weren't using your nose. Difficult, huh? Our nose knows everything first. Throughout history, many people have pointed out the meaning of the nose, its uses and interpretations and the unexpected power it might weald over lesser noses. I'm not going to copy that here.
To get to the point, it seems these days we are entering a period where the human nose is denied its rightful position in the balance of senses, something which is to have dire consequences for our societies and way of life. The first signals are visible everywhere and have been for a while. Most eye-catching are the screens people are using ever more widely to view the world around them, passing by each other in a dreamlike state of concentration on another reality. It's not problematic that people are in contact with people elsewhere, if they are, because before screen time (the years ten b.s.t. let's say) we also preferred talking in established groups. The real issue is we can't smell that screen world, we miss a vital element for shaping our views. We may be getting too visual.
Death is not death without the smell. Indeed, screen death merely tells us death exists and is supposed to be the end all of our stay in consumer paradise, hope to see you next time not, so you cannot really take it seriously, whether games or news, yet we get saturated with such images as if there were no tomorrow. Can we get a second off of feeling bad about ourselves, please? The only way out is turn around, refuse all that shit that is keeping you down. Stop wanting to relieve your anger, just control it and put it to sleep. This takes a lifestyle away from crass competition. Not easy to find. I see a lot of people struggling to put themselves in positions of moral neutrality where they can enjoy their goodness and wellbeing at affordable costs. There's always some professional hardness seeping into their tolerant selfportraits. Yet I see them trying and at least be in on the story.
Stop wanting to fulfill your desires. Here's where it gets ugly. Our screen society is built on desire. We only do what we want and we can only accept what is happening to us if someone wanted it so. Depending on our power level, minumum to zero for most, we get swept back and forth between more influential desires, trying to enjoy the ride by doing perks. Perks, the needle of the business generation. Why not slow down, work less, do less, eat less, cool down yourself and your economy, get acquainted with the lightness of your life (though not useless as you will move thousands of people, often the same, in all kinds of major and minor ways on your daily whereabouts). Life without nose is dangerous. It's sad enough some people have to live without smell or are seriously hampering the abilities of their organ through drug intake. The rest of you lot should stay true to your sharpest observer, because your eyes are always willing to see what isn't there and your ears will cling to lies. The nose knows what's going down, from danger to peace to seduction.
Another area where the lack of respect the nose is given produces disastrous results, is the world of science. Scientists are among the most ignorant people I know. They deliberately reduce their insight gathering abilities to what only their eyes and ears offer them (very few researchers trust their nose) and then they use this extremely limited scope of facts to come to improbable conclusions which, thanks to their improbability, are supposed to be a sign of extraordinary intelligence. Scientists are unable to believe. Therefore, they must destroy everything they find on their path, to see how it works. Also, scientists' favourite field of interest is finding ways to quicker and more effectively destroy humanity. In psychology, they have learned how to make people unhappy, in medicine how to poison them, in energy how to destroy their habitat and in politics how to kill them by the millions.
Apart from scant use of nosy information and perhaps therewith a cruel indifference to our common experience, one of the more bizarre assumptions of scienstists is the idea that what cannot be proven does not exist. To give an example, for a long time scientists were convinced that the world was made of atoms, that atoms were the smallest unity possible. Even though the eye couldn't see them, logic told they had to be there, so not accepting this truth was of willful and criminal ignorance. Then they found that atoms in fact are built of a small core and some miniscule elements circling this core at relatively enormous distance, that atoms are very much like our solar system and that the number of elements circling the core dictates how we humans perceive these atoms. This is radically different from the idea that atoms cannot be further split, yet I have never read or heard about a scientist who apologised for having misled the public and forcing school children to get the wrong idea.
This concept of everything people believe which can't be seen isn't there and thus rests on supersticion and gullibility, though probably true in the way we are played with, does not make up for how we are physically prepared for such thoughts. It seems quite clear people want to believe. It keeps their mind occupied and offers certainty in exchange for diminishing circumstances, yes, but part of it stems from an innate conviction that there is an ordening principle to existence, that it didn't necessarily came into being by accident, even if scientists won't allow us to think otherwise. Certainly, people have always lived according to this idea and have found it a source of inspiration whenever taking care of nature wouldn't come easy. Capitalism took us out of this mindset and energy wrecked havoc on the globe, but every generation is still born with a spiritual essence, as if breeding on cold-heartedness can't really get rid of it.
So, clean your nose and take a deep breath and let the smells you know enter your mind. Once there, other senses may be revived, such as your intuition. But you must begin with accepting all the smells around you and learn to estimate new ones. Yes, life stinks, I know. It's what we have. It's due to chemical madness more than good old dung, so keep away from the pertinent ones. I grew up in a permanent stink, I know they are never a reason to give up on your smell.
