The senses are overrated. It’s natural we should rate their authority so highly. What else do we know? Still, a corrective is long overdue. The human retina can perceive only a narrow spectrum of light, the visible wavelengths between 300 and 700 nanometers. Everything below it is infrared, invisible; everything above it, ultraviolet, likewise invisible. As a radiologist, I work, daily, with ultrasound—essentially, sound frequencies my tympanic membranes can’t actually process. My inner ear’s tiny ossicles aren’t shirred into motion by these frequencies. So there is sound we are deaf to, and light we are blind to; yet our empiricists demand the testimony of eyes and ears when it comes to matters of the spirit. And this in spite of the existence of dark matter, which suggests there is far more to the physical universe that eludes empirical study and the keenest observer. No dark-night-of-the-soul anguisher ever longs to smell or taste the divine; we privilege these senses less because we rely on them less to navigate the physical world. No one complains about God’s unsmellability, mind you, because the compounds susceptible to human olfaction are very few. If evolution derived us from dogs instead of monkeys, and we breathed our surroundings with a canine intricacy, religious doubt might complain how it was denied even a whiff of divinity.
Which brings us to the question why, if “God” (a Judaeo-Christian word I use for the sake of argument) “made” us (whether by degrees of shaping, like a Darwinian sculptor; or in a single minting, like that limited-edition coin stamped in Genesis with God’s Adamic profile), why “God” would stand to one side, and give us only these limited apertures of perception by which to blunder our way through earth and heaven. It may be the game being played here is hide-and-seek; that the seeking is all the pleasure of the game, as it is in the best of poems; and that the pleasure vanishes, as it does in a poem, when we get the idea there is nothing hiding here, only obscurity for its own sake, a cloud of words giving way to no mountain peak, and hence no shrine atop that peak, and hence no god inside that shrine: That all this climbing has dead-ended us at a mere nothing, a poem without a meaning, “a sphinx without a secret,” mere air, cold and blank and too thin to breathe.
