The smell of Nothing

When you smell something without reason, do not analyse, run...

— Kenzo

When graffiti triggered mural constructions implode, one doesn't hear any explosion besides the noise of the many tons of collapsing iron-armored concrete.

But one can smell it. Not the dust. Not the fire. But the smell of the void this implosion has left behind: the smell of nothing, the smell of the temporary total absence of any molecule that normally would trigger our smelling receptors. Some called it the stink of the universe.

Synapses that have never ever experienced a nanosecond without olfactory input, will just go mad, firing random impulses and with that generating absolutely unimaginable new "smell" perceptions nobody has ever experienced before.

Science assumes that the absence of olfactory input will cause the brain to generate neuro-measurable waves in panic mode: random, erratic, high-amplitude hallucinations giving the impression one is going crazy, especially when - depending on mental constitution and unhealed trauma - such phantom-smells are not just about sweet roses or the cozy smell of a starting summer rain but may go for rotten meat, the vomit and feces of shadow-streets, or an overdose of CHANEL N°5.

And it's really brutal to see smell-deprived people doing crazy things that go from performing euphoric, hyper-motivated crazy stunts to the deepest, black hole depressions one can imagine - both with sometimes deadly endings. In general, from an outsider's perspective, such behavior looks like people on an LSD trip, where, of course, the inner neuro-hormonal chain reaction works differently.

The actual problem currently is that all this is just a hypothesis because it has never been analyzed and measured in real-time due to the random occurrence of this new phenomenon and its short duration. But it seems that temporarily smell-deprived people, even when getting back to normal again, have experienced deep trauma that will change their lives forever in a sense that everything olfactory is now measured against the feeling of what the void has caused. And because this experience is random, it is absolutely impossible to predict the long-term consequences.