Tuesday, April 6, 2010
96
This must be what it is like to be a dog. A world of smells. A map unseen, unknown, to the usual human awareness. To be aware of the hidden symphonies of odor, the blind cacophonies of fragrance. This is all too much. Overwhelming. He hadn't smelled it, before. The senses are as much your friend as they are your enemy. He is powerless before such an assault. But it is not the smell that is assaulting him. It is the newness of his own ability to sense the smell. His own abilities are assaulting him. He, that which he has become, that which he is becoming, is assaulting him. It is an assault without any direct physical pain or damage. It is an assault that is harmless to his body. He does not fear for his body. Or if he does, the fear passes quickly. He fears for his mind -- for the depth of anxiety and loathing into which it has entered in the abject awareness of the nose, of his head, of his lungs, of his body. For now, the smell is beyond the physical (if physical it ever were) and into the metaphysical, the mind, the spirit. It is a smell beyond smell. He fears for his mind. Yet, even in the midst of this fear, he can feel that the fear will pass and he will, in all likelihood, become stronger for it. He attempts to embrace the smell. To let himself flow into it, be bullied by his own mind's reaction, to be bullied by his own senses, to lose his fears in his own fearing, to lose his anxieties in his own penchant for anxiety. And he will try, he realizes, to enter into his own sense of the abject with no confidence in ever coming out on another side, no conviction that he will be able to transcend, nor even that transcendence is an available option.
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