Poetic noses

 Roy Bedichek did not say that Christopher Morley was a great poet. He said that great poets had written some silly things about the sense of smell. By contrast, Morely’s list of common odors reminds us of the pleasures of paying attention to our noses.

Bedichek recalled a passage in Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Satan’s ability to smell carrion is compared to that of vultures. The poet pictures a horde of vultures, drawn to the scent of an army of men who are about to die.

It’s an astonishing image. But it doesn’t hold up. In Milton’s day, people believed that human beings who were about to die smelled of death. People also believed that vultures find carrion by smell, rather than by sight. The beliefs beneath the image were wrong.

Bedichek admired Milton and quoted his poetry. He didn’t have much to say about Morely, other that in the 1920s, he wrote “Smells,” a short poem that was popular. The charm is the list of familiar smells: ground coffee, pipe tobacco, campfires.

Morely’s list prompted me to make my own.

• Sources: Morley’s poem “Smells” is here:

https://allpoetry.com/Smells

Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960. The essay “Famous Literary Noses” is Chapter 16, pp. 187-202.

Morley's note to friends

 When Christopher Morley died, two newspapers published a message he’d written to friends:

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

 

I like to think of it as an alternative to an obituary, but I’m an old newspaperman and like alternative ways of doing things. I’d rather read a note than an obituary.

Morley was once well known as a writer. I got curious and looked up some of his poems because Bedichek mentioned him in The Sense of Smell.

• Sources: The Literature Network’s article on Morley is here:

https://www.online-literature.com/morley/

The Bryant Library in Roslyn, N.Y., where Morely and his family lived, has several pages on the writer. This is a good place to start:

https://bryantlibrary.org/local-history/articles/christopher-morley-a-brief-biography/

Tolstoy's 'Calendar'

 A few years ago, we renovated a little house, and I became a reader of Cool Tools, a blog in the spirit of theWhole Earth Catalog. I was interested in reciprocating saws and disc sanders when I started reading, so I smiled the other day when I saw a note recommending Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom.

It’s a good recommendation. The jarring part was thinking about the book as a tool.

Tolstoy thought his Calendar was his most important book — and he didn’t really think of it as his. He was interested in collecting the world’s wisdom as a kind of common property, and so he kept commonplace books and copied aphorisms that helped him.

The sayings he collected eventually went into the Calendar. A day’s entry might include three or four short quotations from other thinkers and comment from Tolstoy. He asked:

 

What is more precious than to communicate every day with the wisest men of the world?

 

I have used the book, but I’m afraid I did so with little insight. I failed to see how I used the Calendar as a tool to prompt my own thoughts, to prod a sleepy, sluggish mind into gear over the day’s first cup of coffee. I failed to notice that I started this online collection of notes just a couple of years after finding a copy of the Calendar.

If you ask me, the useful tool is the idea that each day, you will see something, read something, hear something, that’s worth putting down. The idea that something happened that’s worth a second thought.

• Sources: Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom, translated by Peter Kekirin; New York: Scribner, 1997, p. 7.

The note from Cool Tools is here:
https://kk.org/cooltools/book-freak-211-tolstoys-guide-to-daily-wisdom/

Terror in fiction

 It’s a cliche of drama: an opening scene in which villains terrorize the helpless.

I suppose I was profoundly moved the first hundred times I saw such a scene. But now I find myself wondering whether it’s believable, which is a bad spot to be in when you are reading a story or watching a show.

I don’t want to make light of trauma. I know that many people have been killed, tortured and scarred. But I also know that people who rely on violence and terror are sometimes disappointed.

Among the gruesome offerings of the internet are pictures of the corpses of Ben Kilpatrick and Ole Hobek.

Kilpatrick, better known as the Tall Texan, was famous. As a young man, he ran with Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, Kid Curry and Will “News” Carver. Hobek was a petty crook who met Kilpatrick behind bars.

In 1912, Kilpatrick, out of federal prison, decided to rob a train in West Texas. It was a strategic error. The law-abiding railroad employees were meaner than the outlaws.

As I heard the story, Kilpatrick got the drop on the trainmen and rifled through the railcars while Hobek guarded the engineer. One car had a crate of oysters on ice, destined for El Paso. The crate contained an ice maul.

While Kilpatrick was pillaging, a railroad employee named David Trousdale used the maul to knock his brains out.

Trousdale then picked up Kilpatrick’s rifle and fired a shot through the top of the railcar, guessing that Hobek would investigate. Hobek did. When he peeked around a heavy trunk, the railroad man shot him in the head.

Years ago, I stopped at Dryden, where Kilpatrick and Hobek boarded the train on the way to Sanderson. They were bad, bad men. They also had no idea what they were in for.

A note of caution: The details of Baxter’s Curve Train Robbery vary wildly. Some sources reverse the roles and fates of Kilpatrick and Hobek. Some tales provide details that conflict with the evidence of the photographs. I would say that the story long ago passed from fact into fiction.

If I were writing the fiction, I’d start with a minor detail. After the photographs were taken and the folks of Sanderson had a kind of public holiday, lawmen went out to Baxter’s Curve and apprehended an accomplice, an 11-year-old boy who allegedly was paid to mind the getaway horses.

I think I’d tell the story from his point of view.

Smelling snakes

  I grew up hearing sentences like this: 

Grandmother smelled a rattlesnake by the henhouse, so she got a hoe and killed it.

 

I have never smelled a snake. The assumption was that my nose was defective. No one ever suggested that the odor of a rattlesnake was too faint to be detected by a human with a normal sense of smell.

Whether rattlesnakes smell is a question that still interests me. But Roy Bedichek, who couldn’t smell rattlesnakes either, went beyond that obvious question and got to a more complicated claim: Does the smell of a rattlesnake change with its mood?

The usual claim is that a resting rattlesnake smells like a green watermelon or a cucumber. A “mad” rattlesnake — one that’s excited enough to strike — smells like a wet dog.

Though dubious, Bedichek thought the first part of that claim made sense. Rattlesnakes are ambush hunters. If a mouse got a whiff of an odor that resembled the smell of a gourd, it wouldn’t expect to be bushwhacked. Such a scent would a kind of camouflage.

Bedichek was investigating the claim in the 1950s. He didn’t find a satisfactory answer. But he did find a researcher at UCLA who was doing electrocardiographs on rattlesnakes.

The researcher, Dr. Raymond B. Cowles, was measuring the heartrates of snakes exposed to the smells of skunks and king snakes, both of which eat rattlers. Heartrates jumped, as you’d expect. If a sensitive instrument can detect one physiological change when an animal is stressed, it’s reasonable to check to see if there are others.

But I’m afraid that science is progressing slowly in the area of indicators of rattlesnake moods. I haven’t found an answer to Bedichek’s question.

• Source: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960. The essay “’A Various Language’” is Chapter 10, pp. 128-35. I think it’s a model of Bedichek’s writing — an example of the kind of thinking done by people who are interested in the natural world and consider themselves a part of it. I wish an anthologist would discover it.

Stumped by sycamores

 Roy Bedichek tells of going on a walk through a grove of sycamores. He started looking for a word to describe the odor.

Dictionaries failed. He checked the poets, but they don’t help either.

 

Indeed, there seems to be no way of imparting to the unfamiliar nose a hint of what it is like to inhale in early morning or at nightfall this damp, woodsy odour. 

 

Knowing a smell is a bit like knowing a color. It’s something you’ve experienced or you haven’t. If you don’t know what red is, a description isn’t going to help.

I don’t know what gave Bedichek the idea of writing The Sense of Smell, but I suspect it had something to do with that morning walk through a grove of sycamores.

I do know what that is like: experiencing some natural wonder and then finding myself at the limits of language — and thus thought.

• Source: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960, p. 17.

Being smelled out

 Theophrastus, the ancient biologist, suggested that our noses are above our mouths so that they can be used to test food before we eat it.

It seems like such an obvious principle I tend to forget the rest of the story. As Roy Bedichek said, nature has done a lot of experimenting. The olfactory organs of many insects are in their antennae. The “noses” of ticks — they are called Haller’s organs — are in their feet.

I was thinking of Bedichek’s observation because the ticks are out.

And although I know that my theory that all ticks lurk in blackberry vines when the berries are ripe is an example of observer bias, I found ticks on blackberry vines almost immediately.

When a large animal such as a man with an interest in natural history is near, the tick on the blackberry vine extends her forelegs and waves them. The Haller’s organs are in the forelegs, and the tick is combing the air for compounds such as pheromones and carbon dioxide that will allow her to find her host.

It’s the equivalent of a dog putting its nose to the wind.

It’s hard for me to imagine. Like Theophrastus’s thinking, mine is conditioned by my sensory system, which favors sight and hearing over smell. It’s hard for me to understand forms of life in which smell — or what we think of as smell — comes first.

• Sources: Roy Bedichek, The Sense of Smell; London: Michael Joseph, 1960.

Meredith Swett Walker, “An Up-Close Look at the Tiny Sensory Pits That Ticks Use to Smell”; Entomology Today,” Jan. 16, 2018. It’s here:
http://entomologytoday.org/2018/01/16/up-close-look-tiny-sensory-pits-ticks-use-smell/