The This, page 4
For a moment Rich said nothing. Was that an answer to the question he’d asked? What even was that little speech?
‘Uh …’ he said. His phone told him that time was up. ‘Uh … thanks.’
Aella Hamilton got to her feet in one smooth motion. It took Rich a couple of goes to rock his centre of gravity into a viable getting-up position. Bellies do that to a body, once they get beyond a certain size. Finally he was on his feet.
The lift door slid open as he walked towards it. As he stepped into the shiny compartment and turned to face Aella Hamilton one last time, she said:
‘You don’t have to be alone, Alan.’
‘I …’ he said. Then he thought: Is this the hard sell? Parting shot? Not me, lady. Think again. But the best deflection he could think of was: ‘I don’t go by Alan. People call me Rich.’
‘Not very kind of them, don’t you think? Hardly your fault your parents died young.’ The lift door was being dilatory when it came to its closing. ‘You would certainly have preferred to make your own way in the world and have your parents still alive,’ Aella was saying, ‘rather than your parents’ money and them dead. But people are only cruel because they’re lonely. That’s the radical truth of cruelty. Lonely existences are toxic things. It comes clear, sometimes, for us as for you – a thirteen-panel structure, a yurt as big as a hill.’
Alan blinked, and blinked, and then he blinked again. Why wasn’t the lift door closing?
He said: ‘Huh?’
‘We wonder,’ said Aella, smiling with more human warmth than she had done before, ‘if you might not be the one to bring your unique pharmakon to us, and so find yourself home. Don’t you think?’
‘That …’ Rich started to reply, processing what she had just said. He gulped and stalled. The fuck? ‘That’s …’ he tried again. ‘That’s a pretty creepy … a creepily surveillance-culture thing to say, if you don’t mind me saying.’
In truth, he was more astonished than angry.
‘People feel obliged to complain about surveillance, but actually they crave it,’ said Aella Hamilton, easily. ‘After all, the alternative is being ignored, and nobody wants that. The Invisible Man went mad from the isolation, not from the attention. We need to be seen, as human beings, and the problem with today’s world is that so very few people are properly seen.’
‘They said … I mean they told me you were a fucking cult,’ said Rich, ‘and I didn’t believe them.’
But his heart was pounding super-hard, like he was about to have a fit of some kind, like he was about to rush out of the lift and strike her, or perhaps kiss her on the mouth, to get her to shut up. Adrenaline flushing through his system. Life, life and its sharpness. And finally – finally – the lift doors were closed and the excitement in the centre of his stomach was augmented by the sensation of descending. He was out of the building’s main entrance and blinking in the sunlight of Lower Richmond Street before he even realised what he was doing.
‘Professor Strass, welcome to the vidcast!’
‘It’s my pleasure, Landon.’
‘Let’s talk about your new book, The Odourless God. If I understand, your argument is that the human belief in God, and the numinous sensations we have with respect to those feelings, are rooted, evolutionarily speaking, in the diminution of our sense of smell? In what you call the odourless sublime?’
‘Exactly so. My starting point is uncontentious. It’s a matter of basic evolutionary fact – we have become alienated from our sense of smell. Our long-ago ancestors had much more acute senses of smell than we do, and navigated their world much more by smell and touch than by vision.’
‘As many animals do today.’
‘My dog for one! Indeed it was my dog that set this whole project in motion. But, yes, that’s my starting point. It’s from that starting point that I extrapolate into more shall-we-say hypothetical intellectual territory. Over the timescale of recent evolution sight and smell have swapped places in our human sense-hierarchy. Now we largely navigate the world with our eyes. But we have carried over a sense of smell as intimate, bodily, personal and sight as remote, distant, uncanny.’
‘Tell us about your dog!’
‘I was taking my dog on a walk one autumnal day and he was sniffing every tree stump and heap of leaves, tail wagging, totally immersed in the joyous immediacy of his experience. We passed through a little copse of trees near my house, and came out the other side where there was a broad expanse of copper-coloured leaves at the edge of the rec. The wind ticked the far edge of this carpet, and it stirred, as if alive, and Steps – my dog – changed – tail down, ears back, peering into the middle distance. He was spooked by this movement because he could see it but he couldn’t smell it. It freaked him out. I mean, his eyesight was never very good, even for a dog – but that moment … suddenly I saw it.’
‘The thesis of this book?’
‘Yes indeed. You see, Landon, we’re a huggy, close-knit, smell-and-touch collection of species, we simians. That which we can’t touch, that which we can’t smell … the moon, the lightning flashing across the sky, the horizon – these spook us in a profound way … register with us as uncanny, immense, far. And we’ve carried that apperception through into modernity. I mean, we keep trying to drag God back from His infinite remoteness and eternal inhumaneness. We keep trying to smell Him. Jesus says next to nothing about sexual morality in the Gospels, except some stuff about how we shouldn’t be so quick to judge. But for a hundred generations his followers have talked endlessly, obsessively about sexual morality. Why? Because sex is intimate – touch and taste and smell – and that’s where we’re comfortable. So we keep trying to drag God into our beds with us, even if He is there to judge and tut-tut. But that’s not where the numinous impulse originated. It was something seen, very far away, beyond our reach. Something radically unsmellable. Our ears go back, our tails go down, we get that fizzy sensation in our stomachs. We feel something is there, something beyond us. God. The great unodour.’
‘You say God doesn’t smell, but if I think of God I think of … let’s say – incense? The smoke of sacrifice and so on.’
‘Yes, and fragrant oils and unctions, and all the olfactory paraphernalia of worship. But of course that’s not God. That’s us, offering God what we sense he lacks, smell. That’s us trying to supply the uncanny absence, trying to bridge the unsettling distance, between us and God. In our hindbrains, bedded down by the inertia of evolution’s longue durée, is a belief that the world is what we can touch, and taste and smell. But there is more to the world than that. There is the world that we can neither touch, taste nor smell, yet which we can see – and as our vision became increasingly important to us as a species, with a correlative waning of our olfactory powers – that unsettles us in a profound way. That sense of something slightly off kilter, existentially speaking … the sensation we associate with that, which Aldous Huxley call the numinous … that is behind our religious feelings. Actual religions are attempts, some less, some vastly more elaborate, to make sense of that twist in our reality.’
‘And you think this has something to do with our addiction – you do use the word addiction – to social media?’
‘I think this is the core reason, the hidden reason why we have all converted so rapidly and en masse as a species to social media, yes. These new technologies allow us the sorts of instantaneous connections and intersubjectivities that, not so long ago, were only possible in face-to-face encounters with other human beings. But with face-to-face encounters our exchange is underpinned by somatic evidence. If you are close enough to whisper to somebody, you can smell them. But social media is a constant stream of intimate, emotionally charged communications that are, whatever else they are, perfectly odourless.’
‘The emotion they are charged with is often anger, of course.’
‘Indeed. And we tolerate that. We even seek it out, although it makes us unhappy. Think how many people on Twitter refer to it as this hellsite. They’re only partly joking, and yet they still flock to it. Strong emotion is stimulating. But – and this is the crucial thing – human-to-human anger is somatic. Fists fly and you can feel the punches, you can smell the sweat. And when we make up, after a row, we hug and kiss and smell one another. Think of “make-up sex”, for example! Those somatic cues are important in the way we, as a social body, modulate our stronger emotions. And those somatic cues are missing, both with respect to the wrath of God, and on social media. These new screen-based interactions expose us to the vast wrath of the collective and yet deny us the somatic cues to make sense of, and remedy, that anger.’
‘Because they are odourless interactions, and so make us think, on a subconscious and atavistic level, that we are mediating our intersubjectivities through God?’
‘Exactly so.’
‘So what of Jesus? Christians believe in his case God became a man. He must have been smellable, no?’
‘I think the whole question of Christ is fascinating, really. One might say, in a common-sense way, that if Christ was a regular first-century AD man he could have carried with him the odours of a regular man. But is that how Christ figures, in art? In worship? Think of all the representations of Jesus – don’t you think that, in almost all of them, he looks remarkably scrubbed? Clean? Odour-free? Do we contemplate Jesus using the privy? Do we ever consider – I don’t say this to be blasphemous, but simply as a function of something we all recognise as integral to human embodiment – a farting Jesus? The ancient Greeks believed that the gods smelt faintly of honey, not of usual human reeks and stinks, and surely something like that is true of Jesus in our imagination of him. Don’t you think? Similarly it is important that Jesus never engaged in that intimate, odoriferous human business of sexual intercourse. It is a balance, I think. When he is fully man Jesus eats and drinks with other human beings, but when he resurrects, and is, as we could say, transitioning back to being fully God, what does he say to his followers? Noli me tangere. Noli me tangere. “Don’t touch me.” That kind of physical intimacy is not the true currency of God.’
‘So if you’re right, what are the implications? Where, for instance, do you think social media are headed?’
‘There has always been a utopian dimension to social media. Look back on the early days of these formats, and how many people were gushing about its world-changing, utopian possibilities. It hasn’t panned out that way, of course. But neither are these media going away. I predict they will increasingly mediate our human interactions, and that we as a species will be increasingly driven into them. To desomaticise our connections. Driven for reasons we don’t consciously comprehend, because to us these odourless screen-mediated spaces feel godly, somehow. For better and worse. A god of love and an angry, jealous god. But a god.’
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