it nose you know now.

it occurs to me to attempt in some rudimentary way a thought experiment whereby something of our fraught human natures might be exposed for further discussion. and although the themes contained may be familiar, it does seem as if there may be a way to unfold some of these themes into a larger and interlocking manifold. normally i would call that manifold 'the grotesque', but for this synthesis i would eschew that moniker in favor of something less historical and more plain. let's call it 'the local creation'. now 'creation' is a good labrys of a word as it has both materialist and metaphysical connotes, and is used by multiple communities in various and often opposing manners, and of course 'local' operates in a similar fashion. in a view from space, earth alone, or mostly, is our local(e), but often it seems mostly to be used as a synonym for home region, or near environs: local weather, local customs; all self-evidencies present and accounted for.

and so, it is often that i turn my thoughts to the weakness of language, or rather, the paradoxical strength of the weakness of language, and how we not only give ourselves over to language as feeling, but language as reason, and language as faith, but one detail about language often escapes the mind, is that language as a form of apprehending and arranging reality must have a finite set of contours, and of course we do know this. some languages are better than others for discussing certain elements, 80 words for snow makes snow a much more articulate phenomenon, and we could i suppose include mathematics in language.

so to begin the thought experiment, let's say all our human language, our collective human mind is a human nose, or let's even be more generous and say that human language is a canine nose which you must admit is a very discriminating organ, but a dog's nose is still just a dog's nose, good at detecting some things, and perhaps less good at others.

now consider that if the human mind, all of human history really is the product of being a dog's nose, that is really a fairly contrite state of affairs. yes, this music, this art, this social organization, science, it is rather what you'd expect from a dog's nose..

so now i imagine an alien species with a much more advanced nose, not because they're smarter from education (though they are), nor from the construction of their abstractions and their own deployment of those abstractions, or in the way they contextualize those abstractions not as wholly concrete or wholly metaphysical, but something more fundamental. what if in the great organic diversity of the universe, their organs contained something that ours lacked. it could be many things. for instance a dog's nose can detect all kinds of things we cannot, and though a dog cannot name those things or posit their structure, it can be shown that a dog has a great and intuitive capacity for understanding a complex set of stimuli which are completely outside the range of our perception.

now of course i've mixed up some metaphors here on purpose. is a dog's nose our language, or is it our bodies of which i speak? and here is something to consider. our language is a product of our bodies. i don't want to belabor this, but plenty of people have. language as technology extends our bodies' abilities, ie our constructions of abstraction which arise from the construction of our physicality which appends and augments and countermands our bodies, etc..

now if you were a member of that alien species and you came here, and let's say you were from a telepathic species, or rather a chemopathic, or rather an electropathic, or rather a spectropathic species, would our species seem rather deformed to you? you might think something like: these poor creatures can't detect each other's minds and feelings and histories, nor can they detect the processes of their own bodies or the purity of their environment or interlocking structures of all the molecules in their little environment. how sad. well, they've done reasonably well for cripples i suppose, but how hideous it is, i mean it is rather beautiful in its strangeness, but rather awful all the same. i really couldn't bear to tell them how far off they are about everything, how completely blind deaf and dumb their strange little world is.

but i have to wonder, even after we had seen "the great nose" and by some method even gotten an inking of what it could do, how could we be other? could we? would we want to? would we reject the culture of bodies which come from a planet which contains maybe a only a handful of extra molecules, or naturally occuring proteins, or protein-like components? would we worship it? adore it? hate it? be jealous? what would we do if we were confronted by our own fundamental deformity in the face of an other so obviously better off in every way we could even imagine and then some.

would we sniff it?
would it smell good?


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