The Brilliant Smells of Zygon

I cradled the football in my left arm and sprinted down the lit field. Cars provided sidelines; headlights cast jagged, horizontal shadows across the players, across the soccer-turned-football field. Our annual co-ed football game; the Night Game. My friend Peter, the farmer’s son, caught up to me. He always tackled like a girl—never with his shoulders, but with slapping, flailing hands. His left arm swept around me like a frightened cat. He clung for a moment, allowing his right hand to swing in—a stupid, frantic tree branch. He caught the bridge of my nose, the septum, and blood rushed to meet him.

My friends kept playing; I blazed a trail of blood—a rich red—off the field, on my dad’s car door, and then out to the lit barn. Peter came with me, and we assessed the damage. There was no pain, or very little at least—more like the dull soreness of being hit in the head, and less like the sting of like splitting skin. Peter advised pinching the nose; I refrained though—I’d heard reports of drownings.

I hung my nose over a trash can, trying to stop it, trying to drain it. Soaking tissues and napkins began to accumulate, the faucet stayed on. Peter and I made small talk—the barn was new, and nice; the sweet new four-wheeler; the impending second year of high school. He grabbed a few Cokes from the barn’s stocked fridge. Drinking and bleeding proved difficult. Outside, the game continued. Inside, my nose clogged and shut.

The doctors didn’t tell me anything because I stopped the bleeding and decided not to go see them. It bled one more time, thick mucous blood that seemed like it came straight from my brain. After that, I was fine.

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The philosophy department at our school is a one man band; Steve Horst; The Big Show. There are thirty of us, his young and eager and budding philosophers. We own our philosophy—and take our futures lightly. We are not well respected. We do not get into big programs. Our future is a tooth tied to a doorknob and we love it. Some left our group, and we hated them, dismissed them, and gathered back to ourselves, muttering about turning back, about not having it. I love philosophy. Philosophy answers questions. Or at least, it asks sharper, pointier ones that prick and poke until you have to wrap them into different questions. We love our philosophy major because we find out what and who is wrong, and because we become sensitive, finally and above all, to truth.

We went to Chicago last weekend. Five of us attended a lecture series at the University of Chicago honoring Arthur Peacocke, a pioneer in the dialogue between modern theology and modern science. He spent his life arguing that Religion and Science could be friends again. The Zygon Center for Religion and Science hosted the event. The Zygon Center. I was half-expecting (and fully hoping for) aluminum foil helmets and Kumbaya. I was only slight disappointed. Philosophers and scientists—brilliant ones, in particular—have earned their stereotypes. To be charitable, “tousled.”

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Five years after the night football game, my nose still cracks like a knuckle. The sound is a mix between a light switch and the click of joints popping. Most people don’t believe me. My uncle does a very convincing nose-pop rendition with his thumb and teeth. Mine is real; it really pops, cracks, or snaps—whichever sound I think is most appropriate to a particular setting. Most people cannot deal with my nose. I asked my Aunt Elaine, an RN of twenty-five years, for advice. She shrieked “Eww! Eww! Eww!” as she ran out of her kitchen. Anyone who knows me well has heard my nose—and most hate it. I find myself playing with it a lot. Not on purpose, but often. The bridge of my nose can be maneuvered to the right or left; I do this to take a deep breath, or smell.

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The University of Chicago houses the Center and acts as a beacon for the big names in the field. We took the biggest name we had—our school’s resident genius, Dr. Willem Van De Merwe—a first-rate physicist, and an aspiring philosopher. The Defense Department ships him to Washington, D.C. a few times a year for debriefing and things. He was the sail of our ship, and the recipient of a $10,000 grant from the Templeton Foundation. In the field of Religion and Science, “Templeton,” is a big name. Sir John Templeton began giving his money away in 1972, encouraging the dialogue between science and faith. As we scrolled down the accolades of the conference’s presenters, we realized that our ship and sail were undersized; many of the people present had received Templeton prizes up to the $1,400,000 award for the best overall contribution to Religion and Science. Two of the girls in our group had their picture taken with a little reptile-looking old man who wrote their textbook. At the Zygon Center, smarts are cash; only brilliance earns celebrity. The five of us meandered through the crowd of giants: little old men, and a few spunky women with big brains and self-confidence. We gawked at them, wanting to know how they learned, how they found out—how they knew.

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Noses, especially human ones, are not imaginative. The senses are not good with “what could be.” They only do “what is.” Imagine a person whose sight is slightly underdeveloped at birth, so that green is never more than dull gray. Their brain will never understand rich Amazonian hues, no matter how long they try. It’s something about categories and possibilities; everything our senses detect must fit into a drawer in our mind. Our minds sort out our senses efficiently, but if there is no drawer for a sensation, the mind discards it.

I’ve learned that drawers can be locked, too—and if enough time passes, drawers can be forgotten altogether. My nose forgot what it was like to breathe. A few months ago, I was fidgeting with it, probably in a class, maybe in church—I pressed firmly on the malleable cartilage, squishing it down and slightly left. I took a breath—mouth closed—and air spilled through my nostrils like an open dam. Exhilaration. I did it again. It worked again. Inhale. Exhale. So that’s how it is supposed to work—and a drawer swung open.

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The people who gathered at the Zygon Center did not wear tall hats made of aluminum foil. The second day they did sing a few hymns together, though we skipped out for a quick tour of downtown Chicago; so technically, the hats could’ve come out then. It seemed more likely, though, that deep down, they were just normal people. At one point, they were just like the five of us, now changed by years of study and immersion, made less sensitive to some things (like whether plaid shirts match striped ties), and more sensitive to others (what truth smells like).

I think that truth has a stink to it. It’s slight, but it’s there. Truth is kind of the ultimate drawer—everyone has some sense of what it smells like. I don’t know how so many conflicting reports about truth emerge, why people can look at the same information and come up with such different answers, or why there are always traces of the smells that never seem to lead us to the things in themselves. Some get closer than others, but we never quite get there.

Those brilliant, crazy people at the Zygon Center spent their lives acclimating themselves to the smells, pinching and pushing their noses into place, breathing deeply to catch the tiny particulate matter that is truth. For decades, they tinkered in their respective fields, learning what to look for and how to learn, and as for the five of us, we listened intently, straining not to miss the smells, straining air through our clogged and shut noses.