Following my nose

Mnemosyne the Greek Goddess of Memory

Each morning I say a prayer by St. John Henry Newman that opens with, “Dear Jesus, help me to spread your fragrance everywhere I go.” I love the rhythm of the line, I love its sentiment, but I also love the tickle it provides my spiritual imagination; love that it makes me wonder, if only for an instant, what exactly the “fragrance” of Christ might be or, more literally, might have been. At first I think perhaps he might have smelled of cedar. I have a slight fixation with the cedars of Lebanon. They’re so often referred to in the Bible that I imagine they must have really been something extraordinary—and the smell of them even more so. If there were indeed vast forests of them, how wonderful it must have been to walk through them, to have that smell all around you. And Jesus was a carpenter. Maybe he worked with cedar. Maybe the smell of it clung to him, moved with him, became his personal scent. Then again, for that matter, less romantically, maybe the fragrance of Christ is simply the smell of a 1st century smalltown manual laborer, which actually has a romance all its own. I’ve a very fond memory of planting the summer flowers along the fence with my father when I was a boy, and the fragrance of the memory is the smell of my father’s sweat, not of the petunias.

Science tells us that odors are processed in one of the most primitive parts of the brain, a part developed in the very earliest mammals, and that it’s very closely connected to the limbic system, which plays a major role in determining mood, emotion—and memory. In fact, of the five senses, the sense of smell is the one most closely connected to memory. We all have memories prompted by smells and smells prompted by memories. Among my own palette of redolent recollections are the smell of my grandmother’s house (especially the bathroom: a rose-scented soap); the smell of freshly waxed floors on the first day of school; the smell of nuns; the smell of the city bus the first time I went downtown by myself; the smell of the hardcover edition of Main Street in the basement bookshelf (the smell, really, of the whole Sinclair Lewis collection); the smell of my mother’s jewelry box; the smell of cotton candy at the Ice Capades; the smell of the hay bales at the end of the toboggan run; the smell of my sandbox; the smell of cow pastures as we drove up to the lake (the smell of the pines that told us we were almost there); the smell of cornfields in August; the smell of my gerbil; the smell of the gym at my boys’ school; the smell of boys. I could go on and on. My whole life stinks.

Which makes me wonder: was it simply the power of the scent that cemented these commonplace episodes into long-term memory? I don’t think so. If that were the case, why wouldn’t I remember all other encounters with it—or at least some? My grandmother was a simple woman. I’m sure the rose-scented soap in her bathroom was nothing fancier than Dove, which I’ve certainly come across numerous other times in my life. Why don’t I remember them? More likely, it seems to me, is that the mind uses scent as a bookmark for a whole set of associations, feelings, and side memories. Something in the psyche, in the soul, says, “This is important. Something’s happening here. This means something—something you’ll need to be reminded of now and then” and tags it with the scent for future reference. The memory of the bathroom and the soap are a memory of how much I loved my grandmother, her otherness (her age, her accent, her poverty); a memory of independence, of going into the world, of being brave, being afraid of being away from my parents, even if only for a weekend; and a memory of one of my grandmother’s boarders—whose room was right next to the bathroom. Max. He was an artist and would let me sit in his room and watch him paint, talk to me about painting, about how wonderful it was to make something beautiful. The rose-scented soap is the memory of a whole new world opening up for me.

Memory, of course, is a mystery. It always has been—and still is. For the ancients, particularly in cultures whose literature was still transmitted orally, memory was considered a gift of the gods. The Greeks even personified it as the goddess Mnemosyne, whose blessing was invoked before the recitation of an epic poem. (Long before it was written down, the Iliad was memorized by itinerant poets who recited it village-by-village throughout Greece.) Her power was also considered to be one of the essential building blocks of civilization. Nothing could hold together without memory. Zeus himself, so the myths tell us, fearful that his deeds as King of the Gods might be forgotten, slept with Mnemosyne for nine nights, after which she gave birth to the Muses, establishing a primal and cosmic interplay among divinity, memory, and the arts.

Memory is also a mystery to science. Scientists know some things about it; some things they don’t. They know that the brain may have as many as 100 billion neurons. They know that each of those neurons connects with about 10,000 of its fellow neurons. They know that the resulting synapses, the connection points among neurons, may well number over 100 trillion. And they know that somewhere in all that, somewhere in all those electric impulses flowing from neuron to neuron, somewhere in that conversation, memory happens. They just don’t know why. Turning, as is their wont, to evolution, they say that memories are forged sets of neurons to help us remember things essential to our survival, which explains why I remember my first severe electrical shock (fork down a toaster—doh!) but not why I remember my older brother reading me The Telltale Heart (though it’s arguable that Edgar Allen Poe has helped me survive).

Studies have shown that we remember actions better than thoughts. We always remember how to brush our teeth, but when we run out of toothpaste, we need to write it down. On the one hand, it seems we have no power over memory; on the other, there are times when we seem able to exert extraordinary control over it. I can think of any number of times, starting in college lecture halls and carrying over into professional meetings, where, faced with fairly large chunks of material, I’ve thought, “I don’t need to remember this”—and haven’t. Memory seems to have its personalized strengths and weaknesses. I had a dear friend who could never where things happened. For my part, I can never remember when things happened. Between the two of us, we could usually piece things together. And memory can be strangely selective. I remember any number of Christmas presents I received as a child, but not a single birthday present. There’s no particular trauma here. I certainly had birthday parties—cake, ice cream, the whole thing—and I was certainly given presents. I just don’t remember any of them. The only birthday-party memory I have is of playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey. I thought the game itself was kind of stupid, but thought the blindfolding part was terrific. Whatever memory is, however it works, whether it’s determined by a goddess or a clump of neurons, mystery seems to be a constitutive element of it. But it’s not by any means shrouded in mystery. It sparkles with it.

So maybe the real question isn’t “What’s the fragrance of Christ?” but “What’s the memory the fragrance of Christ is trying to connect us to?” It’s quite possible that St. John Henry Newman was opening his prayer with a reference to 2 Corinthians 2:14-15—“But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ and manifests through us the aroma of the knowledge of him in every place. For we are the fragrance of Christ for God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing,”—and scholars think that when St. Paul coined the phrase he may have had in mind processions to the Temple in Jerusalem, whose rich pageantry included abundant clouds of incense. As the procession approached the Temple Mount, the fragrance of the incense would make its way among worshiping crowd, uniting it, connecting it to the movement of the procession, the movement toward the Presence of God. Incense was thought to carry prayers to God, and in the procession experience, those who were enveloped by it, one with it, may well have felt themselves becoming prayer.

The fragrance of Christ, then, is connected to the memory of moving toward God, relentlessly, longingly, to the very heart of Him. It’s the shining memory of transcendence, the cedared smell of eternity, an endless procession and we’re the incense, sweetly reeking of lilies at the door of an empty tomb.