The Senses
Tiffany Tsao • 11 March 2022
This issue of The Circular is organised around the five senses, as traditionally defined: touch, taste, hearing, sight, and smell. We’ve chosen a non-fiction piece representative of each sense. But we’ve also selected works that broaden perceptions of sensory perception – that deviate from what one might expect of an essay on music, on vision, on delicious food.
Jessica White addresses 'the erroneous assumption that deafness means zero hearing...Many of us can hear sound and most of us can feel it.' Verity Borthwick’s essay lays bare just how little of the universe the human eye actually perceives. Many culinary essays are paeans to food and cooking. MJ Bakewell recounts instead how the daily grind of work left her too drained to develop a taste for either.
Hassan Kalam Abul’s exploration of memory and its mediation requires you to reach out and touch someone...with the help of your keyboard. Ben O’Mara shares his wealth of research into the fragrant and pungent world of smells.
A heartfelt thank you to Kill Your Darlings for granting open access to White’s and Bakewell’s essays! They'll be free to read for the next two weeks.
One last note before we let you dive in: our search for (paid) guest editors is ongoing and will remain so through 1 April. For the full details, please head to our website. And spread the word!
How Deafness Shaped My Love of Music
Jessica White shares how being deaf has influenced her lifelong love of music, and how changing technology has shifted the way she engages with music.
As children we had hung over the tape deck, listening to Elaine Paige’s rendition of 'Memory' from Cats. No matter how many times I played the song, I couldn’t make out all the words, so I recruited my brother, gave him a pen and paper and asked him to write them down...This time I pulled the laptop towards me and searched for the lyrics on the internet to make sense of the tits on the radio.
Hyperstitial Objects
When you’re typing or scrolling on your laptop or mobile phone, you're liable to forget you’re using your sense of touch. This game by Hassan Kalam Abul – an exploration of the nature of memory and knowledge – makes it harder to forget.
I guess sometimes the body can get it wrong, too. The door is clearly over there. It must have always been.
(Note on access: the game is controlled using your keyboard. Works best on a computer.)
'A lot of nonfiction about smells'
This aromatic assortment of olfaction-related reads and facts comes to us courtesy of Ben O’Mara.
The 'evil-smelling' liquid, developed by a gadget man in the British Intelligence and available in gelatine capsules and a brass spritzing device, was to be squirted on the enemy and make them smell of 'personal uncleanliness'. It was hoped the smell would be demoralising and alienating.
Coming Back to Cooking
My relationship with food has been clouded by my experiences of the service industry and the structural imbalances it represents. It’s the capitalist crunch – the massive time suck of work, the commodification of the things that make you feel alive and connected in the world, the difficulty in telling these things apart. But now, with this new disruption, maybe I can make a new start.
MJ Bakewell reflects on how the pandemic afforded her the time and space she needed to enjoy cooking and reconnect with her culinary inheritance.
Beyond Sight: A Personal History of Imaging
This essay takes us into the landscapes that lie beyond the power of the naked eye, made visible through microscopes and telescopes, ultrasounds and x-rays, SEMs and MRIs.
The taut skin of my belly becomes see-through as sound ripples through my body and the echoes make shapes appear in the gloom. One day this geometry will reveal the thrum of a tiny heartbeat appearing as a white flicker. There will be another day in another year when there is no such heartbeat, and the monitor shows something that looks like a cocoon but is actually a shroud.