It is almost impossible to get away from bad smells in a city. On a day-to-day basis in New York, I am most filled by the smells of trash piled high, waiting to be taken away; other people; and various types of tobacco and weed smoke. I smell painfully on the subway, where the air is closed in. I’m most distressed by the clouds of cologne I smell there, bringing sharp headaches, always chemical, bitter, vibrating. Car freshener is awful too– I stick my head out the window like a dog and gasp, thinking, “you went too far, you compensated wrong.”
When a smell comes upon me, unbidden, I feel myself move out of myself in an urge to get away or go toward. My mind is in my stomach, my taste buds in my throat. It’s not about touch but it is about a kind of contact. If a smell is disgusting, the corners of my mouth turn down and my upper lip curls. I become a tragedy mask, showing my displeasure in exaggerated gestures, tucking my face into my shoulder or pulling my shirt over my nose if I’m passing a construction site reeking of chemicals. All the information moves me.
I set out to write about instinct on the inhale and control on the exhale, as I’ve been concerned with smelling since I started making my own body odor. The strength of a bad smell shows the extent of the danger a substance or object poses, with rotten milk increasing in intensity until it can clear a room, and we quickly lose the ability to smell ourselves fresh each day. It always feels new, the shock, the reaction, a smell taking you out of the stasis of smelling nothing in particular. I cough when I bike around the city; it’s instinct that tells me exhaust shouldn’t be getting inside me.
Smelling is a degraded teacher, like your dog taking the leash to tell you what is and isn’t a problem to worry about. The act of smelling is receptive and passive, and always makes you look around for a smell’s origin. What, or who, is that? All things have their smell like they have their bodies. Smells are perpetually tied to what produces them, a material truth. I have never been able to block new smells out, and I know of no prosthetics to help us change our ability to experience it. Disability in smell is largely undefined, and is hard to recognize without other people’s input (“Here, smell this? What does that smell like to you?”); smell is so taken for granted that it’s often best when we don’t think to smell anything at all, back to neutral before the next scent– or odor, rather–catches your attention. Smelling, my body is filled with infant and animal reactions, immediate and unthinking. Headaches or retching. Sweat or hunger. Creature comfort or revulsion. Smell does not live in my head, or my heart, but deep in a version of me that doesn't know language, reminding me that I am vulnerable to a very real lack of control over my environment. The baby I held last year knew I wasn’t his mother before it knew it was screaming.
I worked for a while in mobile syringe exchange, with people who used drugs now systemically forced to live on the street as a matter of policy. When I worked with people experiencing deep suffering, I decided almost immediately that I wouldn’t refuse to touch them if asked and that I wouldn’t clean my hands in their sightline unless I got visibly dirty. It was such a useless, symbolic gesture, but felt necessary. People were already so distressed that they couldn’t clean themselves the way they wanted to – and if they weren’t distressed, a kind of suffering had taken hold bigger than I could think about. Disgust is characterized by the desire to get away. When I would catch myself shying away from an unclean person – or worse, catch their eye while doing it, I wanted to cut myself in two. My self-disgust overrode my instincts.
As Wayne Kostenbaum writes, “One needn’t be a mass murderer to be a humiliator.” To dehumanize people, by taking them out of the kingdom of touch, and putting them into the category of contagion, kills us both just a little.
Frequently, the people I worked with smelled. They smelled like what they were; people who could not change their clothes, wash their clothes, bathe, or access clean water. It’s a smell that’s terrifying and vulnerable but mostly, deeply, instinctively, unfairly disgusting. They smell(ed) like organic decay– piss and shit and often open wounds that have been untreated and wrapped in bandages that they couldn’t clean. They smell like everything our bodies produce, left out in the sun. It’s hard to even say “they”; “they” smell just like “me” to excess. Something universal that I’ve been able to forget.
I would ask the affective machine of my body if it thinks pity is dehumanizing if I thought I'd get an answer.
When an unwashed person is on the subway with the washed masses, closed in with no new air to mediate our encounters, I watch how people are desperate to look away. Their eyelids try to protect them, but they can’t close down the smell of human decay. In New York, smell on the subway reminds everyone of our interclass exchange. Le Labo sits primly next to shit. Good smells require closeness and intimacy, usually, with beloved friends holding their perfume and their cooking up to my face, close to where I could kiss their hands. Bad smells, however– did you ever think the edges of a person went so far?
Bad smells are talked about like they’re the same as morals, aggression, and choices. Something is an assault on the senses, an intrusive odor, an overpowering perfume, or an aggressive cologne. At the rec center in Crown Heights, our instructor notes that putting on deodorant is part of respect for your classmates; to have B.O. is an insult to those that have to get close to you. On the subway, I see ads for full body deodorant brand “Lumé.” So desperate are we to not be caught “smelling bad” that we’ll seal ourselves in wax and oil, deathless and sweatless, keeping a rigid boundary. Bad smell is a violation and a contagion, because even after plugging our noses, our taste buds still hold some scent receptors, and we cannot live without air. We can be blinded and struck mute and suffer in all kinds of sensory ways, but can’t live without drawing in scent-information. Bad smells can’t be shut out without taking us closer to the grave. You just have to wait long enough to see if you can get used to them.
To animals, the senses are facts given to their bodies to move them to security and reproduction. Dogs smell like dogs without trying. How would you describe the smell of people? The smell of an unwashed person– the smell of sweat and blood and shit and all the other substances of the body, all at once– is not inhuman, but it does rupture a person’s understanding of their own edges. It’s actually more human than human, more human than me with my carefully maintained absence of presence. The smell of human decay might smell like the kidneys, the blood, the heart, the colon, the mucus membrane, bacteria, and trash, but despite all this, somehow, it is not the product of a single body’s function. The smell is the difference between something being produced– something made by hundreds and hundreds of hands, many without knowing what they’re making– and something being exuded, like breath into the air.
Something has been done to make this happen and make this person-smell; something has taken a body away from the river and the commons and the public watering hole, taken them away from the washing machines and a safe place to be naked and a field to hunt for food in. They appear as alienated from their context, as a rupture, a displacement of physical comfort, the nauseous sensation of bad smells ruining the fantasy-mirage that has been put there for the rest of us to suppress reality; not just that this person in all their odor doesn’t exist, but that the conditions of their life don’t either, and that you’re not stuck here with a vulnerable body just like theirs. The smell of a person suffering is, actually, a fact and a warning that you’re in danger; it’s just that the beast you’re in danger of falling prey to is not the person in front of you in all their contagion. The beast has no smell because it doesn’t have a body.
You have to be very close to suffering to notice it. Yet proximity can also dull the tragedy. I’ve watched loved ones strip their empathy raw after working hours in the ER, I’ve logged out of certain media accounts to not be paralyzed by overwhelming mass death. Closeness to suffering insists on carving out internal distance, keeping your insides far away from the outside truth. You didn’t stop breathing in the air; you just made your peace with the smell going through it.
In the language of the senses, a smell is produced by an origin object. I am produced; I am brought back through smell to the means of production and to origins. I flee a reeking superstructure but I can’t help but take it inside me on the inhale to grow.
On a good day, you’re made of yeast and paychecks and staph bacteria; multiplying gardens that make up hair forests, fingernails, fungi, nerve signals, acupuncture, tea tree oil, and breath. I love to smell you; smelling you is a love story in soft wet hair. A person’s smell is their regeneration, the confirmation of the life that they give without even trying. I can remember you as a baby, the smell of your new skin always being remade telling me you’re something to care for, close enough to smell where you started and how. I won’t try and describe it– to describe a smell is to say its origin, and you have no start. Or where you start is every beginning, every opening.
It is animal to smell, not human, and I want to follow it.
Art by Jorin Bossen
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Essays & fiction from Cusper Issue 3 “Treasure & Trash” will be published weekly on our substack. If you want to read everything together, all in one place, get your copy of the physical magazine today.
The first time I remember thinking much about other people smells was watching Parasite. I had never before consciously realized how we used it to separate ourselves by class; domesticated and wild… in theory, but in reality, it is just as this piece points out: either perfectly invisible, offensively artificial, tastefully artificial, or disgustingly “natural.” But of course, being natural and or wild within a domesticated society is a recipe disaster, dehumanization, and neglect.