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newborn baby, the smell of the ocean, of rain after a dry spell – can these
be equaled as triggers for natural ecstasy?
Paradoxically, as Lewis Thomas tells us, the act of smelling is remarkably
like the act of thinking. “At the very moment of perception,” he says, “you
can feel the mind going to work sending the odor around from place to
place, setting of complex repertories throughout the brain, polling one center
after another for signs of recognition, since the cells that do the smelling are
themselves proper brain cells, the only neurons whose axons carry
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information picked up at first hand in the outside world.”

The yawning reflex, closely related to the sense of smell, is another link, as
noted in a recent article by Dr. Oliver Sacks, the man about whom the movie
Awakenings was made: “. . . in some sense the fish is still in us,” he says,
“and I love knowing that – to feel that the whole of life, the whole of history,
the whole of evolution is inside. It gives one a kind of depth, a feeling that
one is not just sort of ‘off the top. I like the feeling of biological depth.”

He continues, “For example, when I yawn, it pleases me to think that
yawning is not just human, but that one’s dog yawns, and indeed, one’s fish
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can yawn. In yawning, I have a feeling of an ancient yawnscape.”

The fish is still in us, and so is the wolf and the bear. There exists within the
human a deep yearning to remember those links; to recover wildness, an
intuition that there lies within wildness some genetic knowledge of oneness
that can stay our destructive hand.

Sachs echoes this yearning when he says, “One needs to feel comfortable
with one’s animality because we are animals - one hopes we’re intelligent
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and spiritual animals as well.”

This raises another concern? As we ask if we are genetically coded for
wildness, which would explain the yearning we feel to run free like the
wolves, are we also doomed to the patterns of domination and submission
that we see, not only in our ancestors, the primates, but throughout the
animal kingdom?

7 Thomas, Lewis, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Viking Press, New York,
NY, 1980).
8 Sachs, Oliver, Lessons from the Edge,” The Detroit News/Free Press; U.S.A. Weekend, January 111-13,
1991.

9 Ibid.

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