Le Nez (The Nose) and Why We should Protect it.

I've been thinking about the nose. (NB: it has been a topic of controversy here in NoFla).

(Getty Images)

Sensing Scent

When I moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. in my twenties, I was fresh off of a year of teaching in France. I took a job at a small Provençal restaurant on East Main St., across from the train station, in-between the University of Virginia campus and the downtown area. It was called Lavande.

One diner who frequented the restaurant made a major sensorial impact on me. When I placed her plat principal (main course) before her, she would raise her hands over the dish as if to contain and direct the scent flowing from the steaming repast to her nostrils. She would meditate over the fumes, taking in the subtle smells from the mélange of herbs, garlic, olive oil, wine, and other varied ingredients prior to lifting a fork. It was an olfactory meditation, devoted to an engagement with multifarious messages traveling between the diner and her dish. I always took a step back from her before interrupting this sacred moment in time. I now think of her whenever a dish talks to me in such a way that all inner chatter is interrupted, and I surrender to the odor rising up through my nostrils, making its sacred passage to the brain, with all of its stories.

Emma Bovary's narines

Flash forward. One of my many brilliant professors at the University of Virginia graduate program in French is pointing out the number of times Flaubert mentions Emma Bovary's narines (nostrils). I find myself uncomfortable contemplating the cavernous, dark entryways highlighted on the face of this famous protagonist. Throughout the analysis, I'm aware that narines have always on some level contained an element of deep mystery to me. Why had I gone this long without realizing their primary importance to our breathing apparatus, to our energy, to our life itself?

The experience I had with the ENT doctor in Williamsburg, VA, when I had moved on to my first job as Visiting Professor only aggravated my misunderstanding.  I was no doubt driven to this appointment by an allergy of some kind to the local flora in spring causing sensory deprivation and listlessness. He took one look up my nostrils and said I had a "massively deviated septum." This deviation was interfering with the airflow on one side of my nose. It was a really important discovery. I'm just starting to put all of the dots together.

One take-away I have from such a close look inside of my nose is that nose-breathing, and breathing itself, is very personal, (and this is a sensitive area all the more in these times).

Snhorror

As a child, I had been ruthlessly teased by my siblings for a low-level but persistent noise I made while breathing and sleeping (the French noun for "snore" is the onomatopoeic 'ronflement', and the verb is ronfler (to snore). It occurs to me now that I probably suppressed a negative feeling about my own nostrils as a result of this medical issue. Could that have led to my own underuse of the lovely sensory gift of smell? 

Peut-être

Maybe.

Yet it may not entirely be "on me". Smell seems more often tied to taboo than to pleasure in the culture I was born into, where anything overly pungent is often considered abject. Am I wrong?

Smeller

And now, in the era of CV-19, suddenly the sense of smell is at the forefront of our collective consciousness. We are more aware of when and what we can smell well, or the exact opposite. We wonder when our smell will return. We test through the nostrils, realizing how tender they are, wondering what is going on up there. We think about the distance of the nostrils to the brain. We dwell on the traveling of that disease from a cumulative set of societal nostrils to the space we share. All the while we breathe in, we breathe out, of our nostrils (ideally).

So what is a nose? 

I looked into it further, and felt seen by the nose researchers at healthline.com (Feb 1, 2021) who wrote the first line:

"The importance of your nose often goes unnoticed — until you have a bad cold. A stuffed-up nose can reduce your quality of life. It can also affect your ability to sleep well and function in general.

The nose produces nitric oxide, which improves your lungs’ ability to absorb oxygen.

Nitric oxide increases the ability to transport oxygen throughout your body, including inside your heart. It relaxes vascular smooth muscle and allows blood vessels to dilate.

Nitric oxide is also antifungal, antiviral, antiparasitic, and antibacterial. It helps the immune system to fight infections."

This helpful graph pointed out the importance of nose breathing vs. only mouth breathing (normally, people do some of each):

 Advantages of nose breathing

• The nose acts as a filter and retains small particles in the air, including pollen.
• The nose adds moisture to the air to prevent dryness in the lungs and bronchial tubes.
• The nose warms up cold air to body temperature before it gets to your lungs.
• Nose breathing adds resistance to the air stream. This increases oxygen uptake by maintaining the lungs’ elasticity.

My interest in the nose reached a new height prior to the pandemic. I had begun studying Ayurveda, which introduced me to a clarifying product that helped me breathe in a way I didn't know was possible: "Super Nasya." I learned to drop it into my nostrils first thing in the morning, inviting oxygen in:

"Yogis believe the nose is a direct route to the brain and the entrance for the breath, or prana. Having healthy breathing passageways is considered essential for the efficient passage of prana into the body."

 

After using these life-changing drops, I have an entirely different understanding of the sacred nature of these portals to the brain and entire respiratory system.

 

Scent and Memory

As I wind down this meander, I go back to France in 1988. My sister and I are promenading down a street together in Strasbourg when we pass an ivy-covered building and freeze in our footsteps. "Mrs. Oliver's Garage" we say at the same time.

 

Mrs. Oliver was our neighbor at our first childhood home in Urbana, IL when we were growing up. She allowed the neighborhood children to use her garage as a play and dress-up area, and we practically lived there after school. It held a particular odor that, we learned, was forever embedded in our memories, and yet available for instant recall. How magical we should have this all-encompassing moment in the same country where Proust remembered the perfume of madeleines and where Pierre Nora made famous the concept of Lieux de mémoire or memory sites.

I've been thinking about the nose-- and have a lot more to learn and to consider about it.

Here, from Stanford Children's Health website, is the actual answer to what the nose "is":

What is the nose?

Your nose helps you to breathe and to smell. The inner part of the nose is above the roof of the mouth. The nose is made up of:

• External meatus. Triangular-shaped projection in the center of the face.

• External nostrils. Two chambers divided by the septum.

• Septum. Made up mainly of cartilage and bone and covered by mucous membranes. The cartilage also gives shape and support to the outer part of the nose.

• Nasal passages. Passages that are lined with mucous membranes and tiny hairs (cilia) that help to filter the air.

• Sinuses. Four pairs of air-filled cavities, also lined with mucous membranes.

Voilà-- le nez  >  >  >  Hopefully, this entry will convince people to protect their entire breathing apparatus.

<3.

--maggie

                                                                                        ~~~ 

 *If you are interested in Ayurveda, see the work of:

Diane Booth Gilliam-Mary Bradford-Leslie Hanks-The Ayurvedic Institute-Dr. Vasant Lad.