In a dark time, I am in love with something frivolous.
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In a dark time, I distract myself with fragrance, this one named for an exotic rose. Wrist to nose. Any collector would recognize the gesture. I am taking in the smell I have added to my own. I keep looking for that moment—no, not looking but breathing—when the scent shifts from red petal to shadowed underside. This perfume is a problem that wants solution.
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And by perfume I mean the composed kind, a pairing of natural and synthetic molecules—linalool, Iso E Super, the glittering aldehyde, the musk of ambroxan—that becomes the skin’s companion.
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From the OED: “An odour, savour, air, or suggestion (of something).” So much of modern perfumery is the suggestion it makes. I dab a few drops of this blend of iris, oak moss, vetiver. The fragrance suggests a flower frozen in a sudden frost.
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And this: “Originally: a substance which emits a pleasant smell when burned; incense. The word for perfume begins with sacred places, churches and temples. Then, later usually: “a fragrant liquid, usually consisting of aromatic ingredients (natural or synthetic) in a base of alcohol, used to impart a pleasant smell to the body, clothes, etc.” Then the body becomes a site for incense and burning. Then cinders are replaced by orchids and irises, abstracted through smoke. Becomes petals and leaves.
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Pine needles. Smoke. Dried plums. I spray this perfume on my arms—suddenly, immediately, I am back in Poland, a little girl again. A horse-drawn sleigh is sliding across snow, pulling several rickety sledges behind it. I hang on, as the little sled I ride skitters from side to side, and whoever sits behind me (my mother? my father? who is it?) puts an arm around my middle. The forest surrounds us. I hear the jingling of harness bells up ahead. How fast we’re all moving, the trees a green-brown blur. And, somewhere, deeper in the countryside, is a warm dacha, wood-paneled, where we will eat a kompot of stewed fruit and sit beneath blankets near an aromatic fire.
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I have been lying under the gray sheet of depression for weeks now. A man who sees the world as a shiny surface in which to study himself has won the election. He will be President. When I dress for work in the mornings, I often forget to spray myself with anything, although the bottles are right there on the vanity. Scent has become an unnecessary fog. I keep phoning my mother and asking her when we will know it is time to leave this place called America. When did Oma know, I ask her, that it was time to escape Germany? Was it the Nuremberg Laws? Her father dying because no hospital would treat a Jew sick with food poisoning? No, my mother says, it was when the government prohibited her from accepting a fellowship to train in haute couture in Paris. That was when she knew.
I think of the clothing my grandmother made. Each outfit began with a pattern she drew on the flattened paper of brown grocery sacks. She cut the pieces with a pair of silvery shears, precise and sharp. She stitched by hand and also with a machine she could take down to its separate components, when something was jammed in the metal teeth. Many of the things she made could be described as frivolous, dresses for parties, blouses—pleated or frocked—too delicate for everyday. But the beautiful and decorative were what mattered to her. And, when she was no longer permitted the pleasure of custom-fit, of needlework and beading stitched by hand, she left the country of her birth for a new citizenship. When will I know, I ask myself. When will be my Paris?
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Perhaps, tomorrow or years from now, the fear will seem hyperbolic. But, today, it feels as immediate as a bottle of milk I open to find spoiled, the rottenness rising in my throat.
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In addition to his steaks and vodka and golf courses, the new President sells a line of perfumes. The one named for him contains notes of cucumber, pepper, wood. Another captures the spirit of the driven man. A third is meant to be worn by those who aspire to create their own empire.
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The daughter of the new President sells her own eponymous perfume. A symbol of strength in grace and beauty, says the website that sells it. Notes of pineapple and peach blossom.
In a late night comedy sketch, the daughter of the new President is played by a movie star, slinking through a ballroom in a golden gown. A voice purrs: And a woman like her deserves a fragrance all her own, a scent made just for her. Because she’s beautiful. She’s powerful. She’s complicit…Complicit. The fragrance for the woman who could stop all this, but won’t.
Both the real perfume and the satire of the scent remind us that smell is a presence. It is atmosphere. The anodyne blonde may be judged for her symmetry, the shape of her legs when she walks in three-inch heels. But she may also be assessed by the air that follows her, the pineapple and peach of her complicity.
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The new President is everywhere. On the radio, the television—his voice, his face. Once, he is heard saying of women, “Grab them by the pussy.” He brags, that “when you’re a star, they let you do it.” Sometimes I wake from a shuddering dream. I can smell my own fear-sweat on his groping, grasping hands.
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During a dark time, I remember that smells have rescued me before—lavender oil an answer to betrayal, roses and saffron an assertion that there is something against tyranny. Perhaps for every grief or trauma there is a scent in response. Keep breathing, the body says. And it does.
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Scent too is tyrannical. It can’t be shut out in the quick manner of closing our eyes against a disturbing picture. We must hold our breaths or pinch our noses if we wish to stop it. In his novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Süskind explains that “[o]dors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.” The rhetorical force of fragrance. The argument it makes.
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Aristotle divides argument into three possible modes: ethos, pathos, and logos. If perfume is an effort at persuasion, then it must certainly be an appeal to feeling, how scent travels into us, often unlocking the little place where memory is stored. I smell pine needles and am returned to the Polish forests of my childhood. I smell mothballs mixed with silk flowers and am suddenly in Miami in the house of my maternal grandmother, whose name was Rose. And can memory ever be split from feeling? The forest, the dusty petals—I remember and am compelled to feel something, nostalgia, comfort, even grief.
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In fourth grade, a classmate tells me I stink. Get some deodorant, she hisses at me from a few desks away, during a spelling quiz. M-E-M-O-R-Y. A few years later, my classmates leave a note in my locker. You’re a monster, it says, Shave your fucking legs. You disgust us. R-E-J-E-C-T. I am never unclean. But, somehow I have missed the moment in puberty when everyone else decides it is time to disinfect armpits or pluck, wax, shave dark hairs from the body. B-R-O-K-E-N. Once my peers tell me that skin is the place where disgust begins, I feel the appropriate shame.
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My first semester of college, our seminar discusses Plato’s notion of forms: εἶδος. Perhaps, I say, we can understand Platonic forms as distillations, things reduced to the purest versions of themselves. They are like perfumes, I say, concentrated to something true and volatile. One of the professors turns to stare at me, as if metaphor has made him notice my mind for the first time. Later, he will forget again. I will become one of those abstracted, female bodies placed among the male intelligences.
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“Smell,” Diane Ackerman insists, “is the mute sense, the one without words. Lacking a vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasure and exaltation.” Was that why I fell in love with scent? Because it went beyond the words my classmates and professors used up, extinguished, sucking all the air from the room? The literature of fragrance speaks to the smallness of our vocabulary, a constraint I love to struggle against. Rachel Herz explains: “[i]n all languages that have been studied, there are fewer words that refer exclusively to the experience of fragrance than there are for any other sensation. In English, stench, stink, redolent, aromatic, pungent, fragrant, smelly, odiferous, and scented exhaust the dictionary of words that specifically describe odor experiences.” Perhaps.
But we do have a vocabulary made of words from the other senses, the synesthetic, that fragrances are loud or muted, that they taste (sometimes like berries or the nectar stems of honeysuckle), that they move and have voices, that even before they are sprayed on the body, they are embodied, taking shape in the air.
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On the television: a commercial for scented markers, each color a different fruit, red cherry, yellow lemon, green mint, orange orange. An animated blueberry sits on a white chair in the center of white laboratory. Suddenly, the fruit makes a tiny squeak (phht!), a berry-scented fart. A funnel in the ceiling sucks up the blue flatus, blue mist traveling through a tangle of glass tubes, until it reaches the felt tip of a new blue marker. For a moment, there is no darkness, only the story this advertisement tells—color and fragrance born of the same laughing, rebellious body.
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Perfume wants us to be lyrical. It wants descriptive phrases adorned with gold curlicues. I am trying to resist the lyre, the stringed language. Let the scent—its bottled smoke and wounded violets—be enough.
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At some point, fragrance begins to drift through my poems. About my husband’s departure for another naval deployment, I write—“and then the quick surprise of waking, alone / except for the citrus ghost of his cologne.” In a villanelle about his long absences—“For weeks, I breathe his body in the sheet / and pillow. I lift a blanket to my face. / There’s bitter incense paired with something sweet.” And, elsewhere, in a poem about a scent I remember from my Eastern Bloc childhood—“Praise the shop girl, / spraying a wrist // with pickled beets / and turpentine.” Years earlier, in a poem written in the voice of an imaginary poet—“My neck betrays itself / with the smell of dying / roses.” I flip through the pages of my first book, and am surprised to find aroma even here, in these poems about the Holocaust—“the soot / that stained the sky to gray, / the dull smell of December.” Long before I know I love perfume, I have been infused by it.
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I love to name the tools of the trade. The atomizer. The bottle. The bulb. The vial. The sprayer and can. The funnel. The dropper. The cap. The roll-on. The oil. The absolut. The attar.
And more, I love the ingredients. Basil. Bergamot. Calamus. Cardamom. Cedar. Champaka. Cypriol. Frankincense. Ginger. Jasmine Sambac. Juniperberry. Lavender. Lotus. Myrrh. Patchouli. Pettigrain. Rose. Sandalwood. Tuberose. Vetiver. I could go on.
I love to imagine what is possible in the marriage of technical implements, expertise, and scent.
~
In a file on my computer, I discover fifty or sixty messages that my husband sent five years ago during a deployment. In one, he writes during a short liberty in Spain. “What an unbelievable week. I went for an hour run after it was over and finally felt myself breathe for the first time since Sunday night. The roads were dark; I could smell the sea and the thorn trees. I saw bunnies in the moonlight. It felt like flying.” In another email, this one reminiscing about his home state of New Mexico, my husband says, “Out there, we have ‘vanilla pines’—giant pine trees with puzzle piece bark and sap that smells of vanilla.”
And about our dog, Argos, he writes: “I miss the smell of wet Wheaten. I could fill my stateroom with wet mop heads to try and recreate it, but I do not think it would be the same. I miss having the fuzzy guy around. He better remember me when I get home.” I am surprised by how scent functions in these dispatches. The angular world of military life is so different from my messy civilian spheres of home and grocery store and creative writing classroom. And yet smell means almost the same thing to my husband as it does to me. Joy. Nostalgia. Longing.
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Because it brings me joy. Because it is only glass and water and aromatic oil. Because still I want it. So what if it’s nothing more than liquid misted in the air? Why should we have to defend what we desire?
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I spend two years co-editing an anthology. Each contributor receives an individually selected vial of perfume—church incense for the spiritualist, a scent like tobacco for the reformed smoker—writing a poem that engages with the fragrance. Some of the poets wear their samples or dab them on paper, on a pillowcase, on a piece of clothing. In my introduction to the book, I write: “Months later, as poems arrived from across the country and we started organizing the anthology, certain themes emerged: pungent ars poeticas, poems about the sense of smell and the act of sniffing, poems that used scent to meditate on the philosophical and the spiritual, poems about the relationship between fragrance and place, Proustian poems about childhood, poems about the musks of the body (particularly of the female body), and finally poems about love, desire, and the redolence of longing.” When the anthology is published, I think I’m done with this obsession of mine. But within a few weeks, I am writing these little paragraphs. Notes, I call them. Distillations, I say.
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I am visiting friends. One has brought out her small collection of perfumes from the bedroom, a modest row of bottles that makes me feel nostalgia for that time before I became a collector, when I too could fit all my favorite smells on a single tray. Why perfume, someone asks me. I remember a moment from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets: “At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my CV it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue…One of the men asks Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.” Did perfume choose me?
I try to explain that I came to fragrance first through words—the literature of scent, the books and reviews—and later through the smells themselves, by discovering the space between the description of a perfume and the fact of its presence on my skin. The answer sounds too cerebral. Love is in the mind, but it is somewhere else as well. Consider Pascal: The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing (Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point).
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I write to four poets—Elisa, Kathleen, Jeannine, Moira—who, like me, are collectors. Somehow, there seems a connection between a lover of language and a lover of scent. I’m hoping they can help me understand.
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Elisa tells me, I’ve liked perfume since I was a little girl. I've always enjoyed stereotypically “girly” things like makeup, fashion, jewelry, dance movies, whatever. Part of the appeal when you're tiny is that it's all beyond you, it's part of your future fantasy life. Yes, perfume as script for the feminine fantasy, Electra walking the lilied path.
Elisa says she didn't really fall hard, though, until I read Luca Turin's perfume reviews. He just takes it so seriously as an art form, while still having fun with it. That opened perfume up to me as an intellectual experience, not just an aesthetic one. Also, I've realized I'm a grown-up now and I can do whatever I want with my money. Perfume as female agency, the fantasy enacted.
I think, rather, I feel the influence of poetry in my perfume reviews. It helps me map language to sensations.
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As a little girl, I collect doll houses. My first is a three-story home with a convenience store on the ground floor. I like to place the miniature apples and bananas in my palm, the shopping basket, the cartons of cereal and tea, the one-inch-tall cash register with its working drawer that slides open to show its contents: a dollar bill the length of fingernail. In this world of tiny things, I am a giant; interiors are arranged by my hands. But, despite these impulses to make groupings of like objects, I don’t think of myself as a collector until, one day, I open a closet door and stare at the shelves of plastic boxes, each one containing an accumulation of scents.
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The box is decorated with a pink lily; it reads Ages 10 and Up. For $53.90 plus shipping, children can learn how the “nose and brain work together to perceive smells.” They can “discover the history of perfumes” and “play games with smell and taste.” The kit includes an atomizer and pipettes, stirrers and funnels, oils named “MUSKY,” “WOODY,” and “TROPICA.” The experiment manual recommends purchasing fragrant rose petals, lavender, dried herbs, dried lemon peel. On page 16, there are instructions in enfleurage, the ancient technique of using fat to extract fragrances from flowers. On another page, I find a chart listing the parts of plants from which perfume is derived: iris and angelica from the root, narcissus and jasmine from the petal, geranium from the leaf and stem. Somewhere, I imagine, a fifth grader has turned her bedroom into a laboratory. She holds a vial to her teddy bear’s black nose. Smell it, she says. Or, perhaps, a little boy is trying to duplicate the soft comfort of his mother’s perfume—like a hug, he thinks, like vanilla and lilacs.
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I read about a scholar who has published an “ephemeral history of perfume” in early modern England. Her work focuses on important scents of the era: incense, rose, sassafras, rosemary, ambergris, and jasmine. Using archival research, she reconstructs the everyday air of the Renaissance, the profane and holy aromas that surrounded people as they met for commerce, worship, pleasure. Here, the meaning of the word “ephemera” is doubled, taking in both the scholarly notion of ephemeral texts—letters, pamphlets, broadsides—and the idea of perfume itself, as barely without weight, a thing of ether.
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I own a number of scarves from a great fashion house, iconic squares of silk measuring thirty-six by thirty-six inches, screen printed in bright colors, the hems rolled and stitched by hand. My mother begins this collection when she gives me a scarf that my father once gave her—a scene of Monet’s gardens at Giverny, rendered in pink and turquoise. I wear it to my first academic job interview at a conference in Chicago. The stiff fabric around my neck makes me sit taller in the chair. After I am offered a position at a small liberal arts college, I buy a second scarf, this one featuring a pattern of swirling dresses seen from above so that the skirts appear as a row of patterned circles. I keep the scarves in a dresser drawer, folded inside their orange boxes and tissue paper wrappings.
I own a number of glass insulators, the kind that used to perch on every telephone pole in America. My favorites are the ones tinged purple. They’re displayed on a bookshelf, squat domes that no longer contain electricity, whose only purpose is their shape and hue.
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On my television, an actor delivers a monologue about scent: “We can smell fear. We can smell revulsion. We can smell desire. Now this perfume does not smell like desire. It smells like a bow-kay of fresh flowers, which is telling us what exactly? The only thing this perfume is telling us is that it smells nice. I’m not very interested in nice. I’m interested in a fragrance that says I want you. Go to bed with me. You can’t live without me.” It's a period drama about Masters and Johnson—the research duo made famous for their study of human sexual response. Of course.
It seems I’ve become a collector, not only of perfumes but also of the ephemeral, little wisps of fragrant video or audio. After the show ends, I find on the internet this same scene, replaying the actor’s lines until I have transcribed the entire speech, word-for-exact-word. The collector searches for texts that will help her to understand.
Why perfume, why an obsession that begins in the laboratory but ends with the undisciplined workshop of skin.
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“Perfume is not a weapon of seduction but rather a shape-shifter seducer,” writes Denyse Beaulieu in The Perfume Lover. We are wooed by perfume. It vexes us. The fleeting habits of fragrance charm and irritate—What is that delicious smell? What does it make me remember? What does it make me taste?
Why does it disappear just when I begin to feel it is part of me?
~
Addict. Alien. Allure. Angel. Bandit. Baudelaire. Beautiful. Black Cashmere. Black Orchid. Black Tourmaline. Bronze Goddess. Candy. Carnal Flower. Chance. China White. Coco. Dark Rose. Declaration. Dune. Envy. Fahrenheit. Fate. Forget Me Not. Fracas.
~
As an adult, I return to Poland many times. Once, after a month in Prague, I take the train to Kraków and stay, for a week, in the university dormitories for Jesuit priests in-training. My room is a few feet larger than the dimensions of a single bed. There’s a crucifix hanging halfway up the wall, directly above my flattened pillow. Every morning, I walk to the center of town to buy a paper bag full of cherries or, from my favorite bakery, a square of plum cake. I return to the rectangle of my room, revise poems, eat my small purchases, my fingers leaving purple marks on the pages of my notebook. Each night, as I start to fall asleep, I tilt back my head until I can see Jesus, his carved wooden toes, the perfect detail of a nail driven through the tops of his feet. My sheets smell of the sugars of fruit and cake, juice and caramelized sweetness.