There’s the Smell of Something Foul
I suppose it was bound to happen. I don’t know why I’m so surprised and disappointed by it. Really, it should have been expected. The day the first digital watch appeared I had a feeling of dread. Sure, it was cool to have a black face, blankly staring from your wrist until you called upon it for the time. But it lacked something; movement, involvement. This simple watch of the digital future appeared detached, cool, indifferent to the very thing it was created to measure.
I, as the aesthete Stephen Bayley says, am an Analog Person. I lament the days when watches didn’t come with an instruction manual, when things were built by people who acquired and utilized skills to shape materials, mold objects, and assemble things, and the craftsmanship to beautifully finish them into objets d’art.
As everything transitions into some form of millions of diodes and transistors microscopically laid on a silica chip, I look ever more longingly for things that evoke the senses – tactile, visceral, ethereal. Things should be sensual. Sound, touch, smell, the sight of their mechanisms in motion. The flipping of switches, turning of knobs, and pushing of buttons. There’s a romantic satisfaction of involvement with a thing doing a job for us, invented by us, created by us, maintained by us. Not by robots or algorithms or artificial intelligence. Not by computers that self-analyze and self-repair, that are as much detached from us as we are from them.
Cars are going this way. They are a perfect, if complex, example. The world is so excited about getting self-driving cars, of being relieved of the duty to pay attention to where we are headed. Doesn’t that seem, well, dangerous? Shouldn’t we want to know where we are going and how we’re getting there? Shouldn’t we want to see the scenery, to notice what’s passing by, to enjoy the journey?
I’m at a loss as to why we want to relieve ourselves not only of the joy of the journey, but of the wonder of operating the vehicle empowered with getting us to wherever it is we are headed. Why do we not want to experience the faint, sweet smell of oil and gasoline, of the mellifluous rumble of the exhaust, and the tactile pleasure of shifting gears, of acceleration and retardation of progress. We have command! We are the masters of our fate! How is that not exciting and satisfying?
It’s the same with creating and using all other things. Yes, some things are drudgery and I will gladly cede those to a robot or software program somewhere in the depths and banks of a battallion of computer farms. But at the same time we are losing touch. I mean literally losing touch, with everything.
As Stephen laments about sensual involvement in his latest column in Octane magazine, “Rivets, castings, carvings, brick, stone, wood, trees. Let’s not forget flesh. Garlic cooked in good oil. A rattling train. The texture of a book, the rustle of an old newspaper. A jet engine spooling down with that distinctive clanking sound from the fan blades. Pen and paper. Whittling a stick. The basket-weave of an old chair. Stonemasons. The nose of good wine.”
Trees. That brings to mind the old Christmas tree. How many of you still bring the smell of an odiferous evergreen into your homes each holiday season? How grand they are. Nothing speaks quite like winter and Christmas than the scent of a beautiful evergreen in the corner of the living room.
Bayley continues, “And, of course, the sound of a loud exhaust. There is nothing quite like a rapid sequence of imperfectly insulated explosions to make the imagination soar. In contrast, that sublime quietness of a cathedral nave… with an almost tangible echo of the lost centuries. Real stuff with meaning.”
“Respect for the material world we once knew is vanishing… what many will never enjoy is that ‘new car smell’, an olfactory sensation that promises to disappear, not least because, I am told, it offends the Chinese who are working to eliminate it.”
“Very rarely does one experience something as close to perfection as a brand new car. Even if its associated smell is comprised of gases given off by volatile organic compounds….”
Still, for many it was and remains the smell of a transitory perfection: like most forms of perfection, new car smell degrades rapidly, following a curve of consumer behavior as ‘the novelty wears off.’ “
So there you have it. We are losing it. Slowly, inexorably , permanently. The senses are analogue, not digital. We are analogue. Anything digital conflicts with our essential being, leaving out the most important part of being human – senses and the emotions that follow from them.
The older I get the more I treasure moments of sensual interactions. Sights, sounds, tactile involvement in executing a process, a skill. Interacting with more than a keyboard and a screen. The smell, the doing, the building, the fixing. Analyzing what’s wrong with a machine by listening to it – it’s all very satisfying, even if there’s some inconvenience and unpleasantness getting there.
So that Hamilton Pulsar with its sexy black face and red LED display you had to have back in 1972 for $2,100? You can have it. I’ll take that self-winding job that doesn’t require a battery, has hour, watch and second hands for me to track on an analog face, that required me to learn how to tell time on a clock when I was five but hasn’t demanded anything new from me since. It’s simple, reliable, repairable. “Simplicity,” as Leonardo de Vinci said, “is (and will always be) the ultimate sophistication.”
If we only took that to heart. Until then, I will remain the curmudgeon who clings to his books, his manual 6-speed, the smell of a woman’s perfume and anything in well-worn leather.
