A Natural History of The Senses

 

A NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SENSES

By Diane Ackerman.   placed a large large Indones Indonesian ian flyin flying g fox in m my y hair, to see if it would g get et entangled, as the old wives' tales warned. Not only did it not tangle, it began to cough gently from the mingling smells of my soap, cologne, saltiness, oils, and other human odors.'' This quotation captures perfectly the mood of ''A  Natural History History of the Senses'' b by y Diane Ac Ackerman. kerman. The scene is b both oth interesting and excessive, excessive, as the book itself is. What the passage shows is Ms. Ackerman's willingness to use herself as a medium. To borrow a phrase from Allen Ginsberg, she is a ''great experiencer,'''' and she is eager to share her experienc experiencer, experiences es with us. Like a marriage counselor bringing a separated husband and wife back together, she  proposes to reintroduc reintroducee us to o our ur neglect neglected ed senses. It It's 's a valua valuable ble projec project, t, and for the most part she does it well. Her book is rather like an ecology of the  body. It fairly fairly buzzes with info information. rmation. A poet, a nature writer and the author of ''On Extended Wings,'' a memoir about flying, Ms. Ackerman is an athlete of the senses. ''Life,'' she writes, ''showers over everything, radiant, gushing,'' and so does she. ''We live on the leash of our senses,'' she says. They ''define the edges of consciousness.'' Yet we haven't treated these voluptuous faculties of ours very well. It seems to be the essence of the modern attitude to distrust the natural, even as we proclaim it. Our senses are callused, covered with the scar tissue of our sophistication. There is a tendency now to condescend to nature. As Marshall McLuhan said, we've begun to prefer artificialit artificiality. y. To think our way back into feeling: this is Ms. Ackerman's mission, and she's very persuasive. On every other page, there's a nice apercu: breath is ''cooked air''; perfume is ''liquid memory''; when astronauts are weightless in their spaceship, they lose their sense of smell; the sweat of schizophrenics smells different from ours; a kiss is like singing into someone's mouth; in a Stradivarius violin, violin, the wood ''remembers'' its past performances. She has very good taste in quotation, too: a musical chord ''is something like an idea . . . an audible idea'' (Victor Zuckerkandl); ''All passionate language does of itself become musical'' (Carlyle); ''All the languages of art have been developed as an attempt to transform the instantaneous into the permanent'' (John Berger); ''The landscape landscape thinks itself in me . . . I am its consciousness'' (Paul Cezanne); Cezanne wanted ''to make visible how the world touches us'' (Maurice Merleau-Ponty). Ms. Ackerman leaves nothe stone (or adjective) unturned in her search for material. We find her in Amazonian rain forest, or she might be gazing at

 

an Antarctic iceberg and musing on its colors for our edificat edification. ion. Her thoughts travel centrifugally to her sensory adventures in Africa, Asia and Europe, and, at one point, we find ourselves being piloted by her in an airplane. Most of this is good stuff, but readers may wonder whether they have to go to all these  places to do justice tto o their se senses. nses. There' There'ss somethin something g very de deluxe, luxe, mo more re sentient than thou, about the book. The author is most interesting when she gives herself up to speculation, when she suggests, for example, that our big brains left our noses very little room, or when she does a long, imaginative riff on music and hearing. But I wish she had speculated more. Anyone can report the facts, but she is a writer, a poet. If, as she says, colors have no purpose, why then do they exist? If we don't need a sense of smell to survive, why do we crave it so, as she puts it? The joy of a book like ''A Natural History of the Senses'' lies to a great extent in the author's improvisations on such themes. Ms. Ackerman could afford a little more sociological spaciousness and a little less effusion. She might have asked - instead of treating us to little hortatory slaps on the wrist - why we seem to be suffering today from sensory anxiety. Why do we stuff our senses, as if we were afraid of losing them? Is it the abstractness of the contemporary world that frightens us? It seems there are cycles in the history of the senses, times when we suppress them and times when we exalt them. Right now - and even more so in the touch-and-feel fads of the 1960's we seem to have suppressed them by exalting them. We have blinded our senses by turning a spotlight on them. But the senses are modest: they do their  best work unobtrusi unobtrusively. vely. Ms. Ackerman is not unobtrusive. When her energy overflows into adjectives, she has a spilling, or a splashing, style. She writes of ''animals, which can smell with beatific grandeur'' and of ''the way deer steal into the yard with their big hearts and fragile dreams.'' Describing a pair of lovers in a restaurant, she says, ''He stares into her eyes, as if filling them with molten lead.'' While scuba diving off the Bahamas, she broods on certain parallels between female anatomy and the ocean's tides until her eyes fill with tears underwater. A poet ought to be more careful. But she works hard for us - talking to a woman who creates some of the leading perfumes, talking to marine biologists, talking even to icebergs in one of her best passages. She includes a wonderful catalogue of the names of the winds in different parts of the world. She goes to the research centers where the senses are being investigated and brings back the latest news. But while her book does everything we might have expected, there's not much in it that one didn't expect.

 

Like most champions, Ms. Ackerman arouses a certain amount of ambivalence in the skeptical sensibility. She may be a bit too proprietary, too much of a hostess, in her attitude toward the senses. (She even takes us into her bubble bath.) There's something unsublimated and Erica Jongish about her, and we sometimes wonder whether this is a book about the five senses or her autobiography - or could they be the same? She finds too many things ravishing. Like the bat in her hair, the reader coughs gently.  Anatole Broyard Broyard is a former eeditor ditor of T The he Book Re Review view