Time Machine Poem by gershon hepner

With a smell we disinter
the past, as with a madeleine
Marcel, notorious pasticheur,
once did. Words never can explain
a smell as they describe the sights
and sounds we barely can recall,
for they evoke the days and nights
that vanish with a dying fall,
revived by evanescent scents
mucosal cells within our noses
can recognize. To bring past tense
alive as on a couch of roses,
the past becomes a dream that we
recapture without help of shrink,
in ways that sometimes poetry
can do, revealing what we think
without the help of vision or
the words that, in our brains confined,
cannot unlock the hidden door
imprisoning within our mind
our memories. Time machine, the nose
brings back the past, so we, like Proust,
recall fresh coffee and warm toast,
like madeleines he used to boost,
when unexpectedly smells bring
the past back, and become decoders
of messages that make them sing,
delivered to the nose by odors.


Natalie Angier, writing about olfaction in the NYT on August 5,2008 (“The Human Nose, an Emotional Time Machine”) , states:
On the one hand, said Jay A. Gottfried of Northwestern University, olfaction is our slow sense, for it depends on messages carried not at the speed of light or of sound, but at the far statelier pace of a bypassing breeze, a pocket of air enriched with the sort of small, volatile molecules that our nasal-based odor receptors can read. Yet olfaction is our quickest sense. Whereas new signals detected by our eyes and our ears must first be assimilated by a structural way station called the thalamus before reaching the brain’s interpretive regions, odiferous messages barrel along dedicated pathways straight from the nose and right into the brain’s olfactory cortex, for instant processing. Importantly, the olfactory cortex is embedded within the brain’s limbic system and amygdala, where emotions are born and emotional memories stored. That’s why smells, feelings and memories become so easily and intimately entangled, and why the simple act of washing dishes recently made Dr. Herz’s cousin break down and cry. “The smell of the dish soap reminded her of her grandmother, ” said Dr. Herz, author of “The Scent of Desire.” Many mammals are clearly nosier than we. Consider that our olfactory epithelium, the yellowish mass of mucous membrane located some three inches up from our nostrils, holds about 20 million smell receptors designed to detect odor molecules delivered either frontally, when we, say, sniff a rose, or via the rear, the volatile aromas that come up through the back of the mouth and give each jelly bean meaning. The nasal membranes of a bloodhound, by contrast, sustain an olfactory army 220 million receptors strong.


8/5/08