Nosing around

The North Country is pretty easy on the eyes these days: lilacs, apple blossoms, trillium, new leaves, tender grass, lots of sun. We take the world in first through the eyes, so much so that the interrogative "See?" is synonymous with "Do you understand?" Nature may have shorted humans in other ways, but a big chunk of our big brain is dedicated to sight. If we were dogs, we'd be gaze hounds. But the brain is an onion--peel away the primate and find the mammal, peel away that and find the reptile, deep within the secret core of us. That part of the brain is only interested in the eyes if they show a fast-moving object, prompting us to hotfoot across the intersection, or shriek at the 3D horror movie dagger. The lambent pastels of spring are wasted on it.

The ancient brain "sees" instead through the nose, which wraps mysteriously around the limbic chemical pumps of our emotions, triggering cascades of long lost memory and association. Compare the impact of watching someone outside the window mow the lawn with the experience of walking out into the sharp-scented grassy air. It recalls to mind every warm day since you were a child. Last weekend, I had the happy occasion to be in the rare book room of the Strand Bookstore in New York City with my daughter Elena. She turned to me and said "It smells like your Dad." I took a deep breath to "see" what she meant and there it was: all the generations the old books in the stacks had steeped in pipe smoke in the libraries of bookish men, still seeping back out decades later into the environmentally-regulated air. His dimming face comes sharp in the mind's eye once more. I see him turning the pages even now. The smell of aftershave.

Be everywhere now

I don't very often get out to big outdoor concerts, but when we heard that Van Morrison would be opening Bluesfest in Ottawa, his first return to the area in 40-odd years, we bought our tickets the first hour they were offered. Certain music heard at certain times in life just burns itself into the bottom of the brain. Van has a little chunk of grey matter all to himself somewhere to the south of my prefrontal cortex. I've changed in the interim, and no doubt Van has too, but the songs remain fresh as a daisy.

But while my attention was otherwise occupied, the outdoor concert seems to have changed, too. While the audience was always wired up--by the proximity of tens of thousands of co-religionists--now they are also wired up in a more technological sense. We bought our tickets online, where once we would have queued up for hours outside some box office, gabbing with fellow fans. Inside the venue, the pre-concert rain remained unchanged, but many were plugged into iPods under their umbrellas, grooving to unknowable music, and many more were texting their beer orders to friends who drew the short straw for standing in line. Others were calling directions into their cell phones, trying to hook up friends with patches of grass held open for their arrival.

Once fan banners were used to conceal microphones to capture bootleg recordings of favorite artists--now people wave aloft their phones, broadcasting the concert direct to friends at home in streaming video. We were 50 yards from stage with a good view, but people around us were often turned away from the stage to watch the video feed on the big screen. Some were even videoing the video screen--the giant cyberhead of Van eclipsing the little Van laboring onstage. Be Here Now used to be the dictum when Van was last in town. The 21st century version is, apparently, Be Everywhere Now.