Excerpt from Crust (P5)
The sun had just begun to filter through the blinds on the eastern window opposite our bed. Bathed in it, spread like a lattice on the pillow, Sara’s hair was luminous, darker it seemed than I’d ever known it to be. She was snoring softly, as often when about to wake, or because, as Nathan Meeker suggests in his wonderful review of The Complete Book of Nasalism[44] (which begins, as my readers may know, with a brief description of that morning’s events) in The New York Review of Books,[45] a crust of her own was developing. Much to my surprise, the sound, which usually irritated me, evoked a tenderness which, as often, made me feel that I did not appreciate her enough. Needless to say, however, such emotion did nothing to interrupt the near fanatic concentration I had focused on my nose. I sat erect with determination, my back straight and hard against the headboard. Indeed, without realizing it, I had assumed the posture which neurophysiologist Joanna Lethem[46] has ascribed to the effects of deep-rooted - or what she calls “neuronasal” - crusts on the central nervous system. My spine was straight without being rigid, the small of my back pressed slightly forward, my chin tucked, my head so high that my neck seemed longer and stronger than I had ever known it to be. As Lethem writes, “Every Nasalist knows that certain crusts, at certain moments of one’s life, can actually effect fundamental changes in one’s relation to one’s body.”[47] For the first time in my life (but certainly not the last), the equipoise between longing to pick and fear of doing so had generated an erection. Lethem, of course, has much to say about this response as well, but if you want to explore the whole spectrum of chemistry and physiology I had just begun to experience, the book to read is Andrea Bench’s Genital Nasalism.[48]
Sara yawned and stretched and - a sure sign she’d slept well - planted a tender, lingering kiss on my right shoulder. I smelled her hair and felt her cheek on my upper arm. Like many Nasalists at this moment, which Klondyke calls “first awakening,”[49] I noted as if for the first time, almost with alarm, the ambiguous relationship between a deep-rooted crust and the membrane in which it is rooted.[50] One moment it seemed external, tickling and itching, nagging like a spoiled child whose only purpose in life is to monopolize one’s attention, the next it seemed internal, beneath the skin, pressing against its surface, increasing in volume and density as if struggling to escape. My erection, of course, persisted. Despite the fact that it seemed to be increasing in size, it was oddly asexual. The whole spectrum of my sensory awareness, after all, was concentrated in my nose. All desire was focused on the crust - to locate and extract it, to be free as soon as possible of the irritation it produced. Bench suggests a commonality between this sort of desire and that which we call sexual,[51] but despite the fact that her CAT and PET scans produce incontrovertible evidence of the motor and neurological connections between nose and genitalia, otolaryngologist Pietro Magnali rejects her views as “superficial”[52] and even “anti-nasal.”[53]
Extreme vacillation between calm and excitement was my dominant state of mind. The crust, it seemed to me, was vibrating. Intense, almost electrical sensations radiated outward from it - to my cheeks, my forehead, even my ears - and inward, all the way, it seemed, to the center of my head. Most amazing of all, however, was my intellectual condition. My thoughts were not only clear and preternaturally articulate but full-blown visual phenomena, moving through my brain like words on a computer screen. I’d known such moments in my work, of course, but they’d been limited in their production - single words, short phrases, or, at best, uncomplicated sentences. The full paragraph that came to me now was my first indication that the process which had begun with the crust was not just nasal but - as Robert Fawck, more than anyone else, has made us appreciate[54] - neurological. Fortunately my laptop, on the table beside the bed, was as usual booted and open to a blank screen on my word processor. I took it on my lap and typed as if taking dictation:
“A ‘clean nostril’ is not just an empty cavity but a non-existent one, a crust which pollutes it so integral and conjoined that there is between them no boundary where one stops and the other begins or, for that matter, no clearly perceived moment in time when this coagulated mass, so recently secreted by the sinus passages, ceased to be part of them.”
Anyone familiar with the literature of Nasalism will probably recognize these sentences. Later that day, they appeared on the first of my nasal blogs[55] and two days after that, they became the first paragraph of my first article on this subject, “Nasal Revelation,” which appeared four months later in Psychology Today.[56] Finally, two months after the day of which I speak, when I began the preface to The Complete Book of Nasalism,[57] they became its opening paragraph. Perhaps too you are familiar with the homage paid to them by Robert Fawck himself, four days later, when he discussed my blog on his own:
“To read Linchak is to understand that the urgency and even the physical irritations of crusts derive from one’s intolerance for their spatial and temporal contradictions. So urgent is the mind’s yearning for distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ or, more precisely, ‘me’ and ‘not me,’ that such yearning may well serve as the root cause of the habit we used to call nose-picking. It is no exaggeration to say that, since every crust is an active, even aggressive defiance of such distinction, each of our nasal secretions is an opportunity to confront the essential ambiguities of self and identity.”[58]
[44] Linchak, The Complete Book of Nasalism, op. cit.
[45] Meeker, Nathan. The New York Review of Books, August 15, 2012.
[46] Lethem, Joanna. “The Neurophysiology of Nasalism,” Neurorhinological Perspectives Vol. 14 (Summer 2007). “Such is the effect of crusts on posture and energy that we have to postulate a direct connection between the nasal membrane and the motor regions of the forebrain.”
[47] Ibid., 165.
[48] Bench, Andrea. Genital Nasalism (New York: Harper Collins, 2011).
[49] Klondyke, Rhinotillexis, op cit., 5-27.
[50] Bloch calls this “The definitive mark of a neuro-nasal.”
[51] Bench, op cit., 217-235.
[52] Magnali, Pietro. The Eros of Nasalism (New York: Random House, 2014) 176.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Fawck, Robert. Nasal Neurology (New York: Murgate, 2010).
[55] Linchak, Walker. Linchakblog.com, December 5, 2010.
[56] Linchak, Walker. “Nasal Revelation,” Psychology Today April 13, 2011: 52-55.
[57] Linchak, The Complete Book of Nasalism, op. cit., 1.
[58] Fawck, Robert. Rfawck.com, August 15, 2011.