Depending on the era and the location, we occasionally bathed our bodies before scenting them. But humans have consistently lobbed on perfume to overwhelm our body’s odors. Wearing perfume wasn’t just about fooling others about our own stink. Humans have also worn perfume as protection, as a scented distraction from the malodor of others and also as a prophylactic barrier from disease, which was long thought to be spread by bad air. Perfume kept in jeweled rings and pendants could be brought to the nose when accosted by unpleasant smells; it formed an aromatic wall.
Philosophers of science are fascinated by such situations, and it is easy to see why. The traditional way of assessing the truth or falsity of a theory is by testing its predictions. If a prediction is confirmed, we tend to believe the theory; if it is refuted, we tend not to believe it. And so, if two theories are equally capable of explaining the observations, there would seem to be no way to decide between them.
What is a poor scientist to do? How is she to decide? It turns out that the philosophers have some suggestions.
Oh, Venus. What’s going on with you?
I am referring, of course, to Venus the planet, second from the sun, right next door to Earth. The planet with a furnace-like surface and clouds made of sulfuric acid, the one that shows up in our night sky as a golden jewel, and that helped prove the theory that the sun, not Earth, was at the center of the solar system. Although Venus has captivated observers for centuries, the planet remains a bit of a mystery, its particularities hidden. There’s still so much scientists want to know about our planetary neighbor. Especially now. Talk to us, Venus!
Many readers OF poetry will have come to Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) first through her extraordinary sequence The Book of the Dead. These poems, published in 1938 as part of the larger collection U.S. 1, are Rukeyser’s response to the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel tragedy in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, in which approximately 800 men — most of them Black migrant workers — lost their lives to silicosis. This horrific industrial disaster, born entirely of corporate greed and corruption, remains one of the worst in American history; Rukeyser’s poetic response is one of the most affecting and important works of modern poetry written in English, and what Philip Metres has called the “touchstone” of documentary poetics.
Perhaps it is no great surprise, then, that extracts from The Book of the Dead make up over a quarter of this new book of Rukeyser’s poems, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. In her introduction, Trethewey recalls her earliest encounter with Rukeyser’s work: reading The Book of the Dead aloud in a graduate school seminar, Trethewey “felt the resonant power of her living voice,” jolting the class with the force of a thunderclap. What Rukeyser exposed and explored in the ’30s was still painfully pertinent in Trethewey’s 1990 classroom, and remains a reality in America today, thrown into even starker relief during the COVID-19 pandemic: Black Americans are more likely to be provided unsafe working and living conditions than white Americans, and are more likely to die prematurely as a result.