Nosey

Spring in Laramie is literally a time of coming out of hibernation–only what was hibernating was not my whole body, but the sensory apparatus lodged in it. Laramie’s winters are monochrome–gray trees, gray grass, gray sky. The biting cold turns skin to crinkled paper. Indoor air gets stale.

Spring, which comes in fitful gusts starting about now, heralds color (you’ve no idea how I’ve physically ached for green!), warmth and its attendant moisture (bye bye living mummification), and smell (grasses! earth! anything!). So, fair-weather athlete (I use that term very loosely) that I am, I’m once again out-of-doors dragged by the leash by 16-year Zuki, who has also been sensorily deprived. Deaf and largely blind he may be, but man does he still enjoy his morning o(for olfactory)-mail. So much so that we spend more time with our limbs planted while his nose gets a workout than actually walking.

He sniffs; I sniff. Just enjoying our full corporeality. Only he is so much better at it than I am. While I’m like, “ah… the smell of fresh grass…” he’s like “nice male puppy who just got neutered; dominant middle-aged female; old cranky male whose kidneys are giving out (wait, that’s me!); rabbit!”

Weirdly, this is a thing I love love love: the feeling of his alienness, his possession of an intelligence and a mode of experiencing the world so far removed from mine that I can’t even picture what it looks like in his brain when he reads that pile of dead leaves and separates out the detailed tindr profiles of each player in that social scene. There are no words certainly; does he form mental images? Do smells form a language of their own with a kind of set of phonemes and morphemes but in smell-form? Are they vague impressions without any particular kind of corollary? No idea. And I love that I have no idea. I love the thought that he’s so much smarter than me in this way. I love that this is a thing that humans can’t really know.

I’m the first to be like, ooh, let’s fiction it – let’s play around with access. And I do think that’s a fun project, but I also love holding on to the wonder of inaccessibility and respecting that this being who has his own total lifeworld experiences it in a way completely foreign to me. What would he put the name “beauty” to? Bacon, yes, that’s a given. But I have a feeling his way of ordering his world and assigning meaning and value look vastly different than mine. We’re quick to anthropomorphize dogs because they adapt so easily to our lifeways, but I think we forget to everyone’s detriment that they are not fuzzy people (I mean, we all love bacon, right?). I think in our coziness with our quadripedal roommates we forget to appreciate just how wonder-ful they are and just how much we need to nurture that sense of wonder so our ethical selves don’t also hibernate. Huzzah for limits to the human and the existence of beauties beyond us!