The scent of fear
I read this article and found it fascinating. As a quick overview: Sissell Tolaas is a chemist and a professional nose, only rather than working for a perfumer she is more of a scent artist. Allow me to quote from the article:
"Tolaas created a small device that collected the sweat of twenty-one men with severe phobias during their panic attacks (she found her volunteers through a network of therapists). After synthesizing their scents, she created a special paint that encapsulated the scent in micro-bubbles. The resulting exhibition featured a blank white wall labeled simply “Guy #01,” “Guy #02,” and so on. To release the scent, visitors had to touch and rub the wall.
Reactions were diverse. One woman fell in love with one “Guy” and visited him daily, leaving lip prints on the wall. A war veteran wept - the scent of male sweat and fear brought him back to the closeness of wartime sleeping quarters - a lost intimacy he mourned.
It is exactly the project’s ghostly intimacy that makes it impossible for me to forget. I never got the chance to attend the exhibit, but I think often about that white wall, and that seemingly empty room filled with the presence of an emotion that most of us work to conceal, even from those who are close to us."
The visual of the man smelling the fear and breaking down because it reminded him of lost intimacy... is sticking with me. When we are vulnerable... when we witness other's vulnerability, we feel closer to them. I know times when people talk about their fears on LJ are some of my favorite posts. They are the posts that are _real_, that makes the person more vibrant to me. People are their strengths and their vulnerabilities together, although we do a lot to tout our strengths while minimizing that we are vulnerable at all.
I certainly attempt to hide my fear. There is something too intimate with sharing it with the wider world. Will people think me weak? Will people think that I over-react? Does sharing my fear reveal too much about me? Does it break through my invisible barrier of privacy? Or is attempting to hide it irrelevant? Is it just plain obvious I am terrified? Do I smell terrified?
Relatively recently there was someone I did share my fear with, in person over a series of months, and that relationship took a nose dive. No matter what I do I can not (now) separate my sharing of those fears with the vulnerable, and ultimately subservient, place it put me into in my relationship with that person.
Why didn't it work in this case? Why did it divide us rather than heal? What about my fear made this person (or me?) put me into the inferior position between the two of us? Did this person not share their own fears in return, and I didn't notice? Was it the scent of my fear that made us take those ultimately destructive roles with each other?
What other invisible or subtle factors influence us, create barriers or create intimacies without our consciously knowing? What else do we react to when we don't even know we are reacting?
"Tolaas created a small device that collected the sweat of twenty-one men with severe phobias during their panic attacks (she found her volunteers through a network of therapists). After synthesizing their scents, she created a special paint that encapsulated the scent in micro-bubbles. The resulting exhibition featured a blank white wall labeled simply “Guy #01,” “Guy #02,” and so on. To release the scent, visitors had to touch and rub the wall.
Reactions were diverse. One woman fell in love with one “Guy” and visited him daily, leaving lip prints on the wall. A war veteran wept - the scent of male sweat and fear brought him back to the closeness of wartime sleeping quarters - a lost intimacy he mourned.
It is exactly the project’s ghostly intimacy that makes it impossible for me to forget. I never got the chance to attend the exhibit, but I think often about that white wall, and that seemingly empty room filled with the presence of an emotion that most of us work to conceal, even from those who are close to us."
The visual of the man smelling the fear and breaking down because it reminded him of lost intimacy... is sticking with me. When we are vulnerable... when we witness other's vulnerability, we feel closer to them. I know times when people talk about their fears on LJ are some of my favorite posts. They are the posts that are _real_, that makes the person more vibrant to me. People are their strengths and their vulnerabilities together, although we do a lot to tout our strengths while minimizing that we are vulnerable at all.
I certainly attempt to hide my fear. There is something too intimate with sharing it with the wider world. Will people think me weak? Will people think that I over-react? Does sharing my fear reveal too much about me? Does it break through my invisible barrier of privacy? Or is attempting to hide it irrelevant? Is it just plain obvious I am terrified? Do I smell terrified?
Relatively recently there was someone I did share my fear with, in person over a series of months, and that relationship took a nose dive. No matter what I do I can not (now) separate my sharing of those fears with the vulnerable, and ultimately subservient, place it put me into in my relationship with that person.
Why didn't it work in this case? Why did it divide us rather than heal? What about my fear made this person (or me?) put me into the inferior position between the two of us? Did this person not share their own fears in return, and I didn't notice? Was it the scent of my fear that made us take those ultimately destructive roles with each other?
What other invisible or subtle factors influence us, create barriers or create intimacies without our consciously knowing? What else do we react to when we don't even know we are reacting?