Sense Gates: Smell with Erik Davis and Nicholas Paul

The second in an occasional series of workshops devoted to the five senses, Sense Gates: Smell takes up perhaps the funkiest sensory modality, and the one most magically linked to our moods and memories. For this evening’s exploration of scent, Erik Davis will be joined by Nicholas Paul, a trans-disciplinary thinker, mover, and shaker who also happens to be a fragrance freak. We will begin the evening with some banter and bruhaha about the Path of Scent, including drops about amygdalas, rot, musk, angiosperms, Eno, and a certain famous French sponge cake. Then we will get down to business with smells at once sublime, nostalgic, and a bit nasty. We will check out unusual perfumes, pungent local plants, and more than a few surprises. Brief bouts of meditation will serve as palette cleansers and launching pads. Particular attention will be paid to the role that language plays in shaping and expressing our nebulous nasal experiences.

Erik Davis, , PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on alternative religion, media culture, the popular imagination, and the psychedelic underground. He is the author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019); Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010); The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), which remains in print. Davis’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015. He writes the online publication the Burning Shore (www.burningshore.com), and his next book is Blotter: the Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024).www.techgnosis.com

Nicholas Paul thinks about thinking. He is currently researching and realizing a new project focused on the ‘thinking’ part of ‘long-term thinking’. Before this, Nicholas helped run The Long Now Foundation — the storied nonprofit fostering long-term thinking at the timescale of 10,000 years — where he served as both Director of Development and Director of Strategy, for nearly a decade. His background spans systems engineering and philosophy. He occasionally tours as a guitarist with Tōsh. He is currently a fellow at The Institute in San Francisco, California.

Host or Publisher The Berkeley Alembic Foundation