Lately I have been smelling a lot.
I read this book by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, entitled Rant. An aural biography of Buster Casey. The main protagonist lives in the ordinary town Middleton, but he is not an ordinary boy. When a storm hits the town and the trash buckets in the streets get kicked over, a fence of barbed wire catches condoms, tampons and sanitary napkins. Since it is a very small town, everybody is too embarrassed to walk up and clean the fence – so Rant Casey does it. Every condom he picks up, he smells and then can tell who in town used it. He can even tell, what the people ate or if they are on medication.
Rant is an outstanding book that gets more and more intriguing, but still – it’s fiction. When I read it, I also thought of a book that I had read before: Andy Warhol’s Philosophy from A to B and back by Andy Warhol. Indeed, it is not an autobiography, it is rather a collection of rambles and anecdotes on everything that moved his mind. By times, it is witty, other times it is extremely simplistic. It is definitely a shallow book of a shallow character who did shallow art. Anyhow, there is a passage called „perfume space“ in which he rambles about smells and fragrances.
„I switch perfumes all the time. If I’ve been wearing one perfume for three months, I force myself to give it up, even if I still feel like wearing it, so whenever I smell it again it will always remind me of those three months. I never go back to wearing it again; it becomes part of my permanent smell collection.“
Everybody has a permanent smell collection. But not everybody is aware of it. There is so many things that you are not aware of everyday. Think about showering. I am sure that you usually take your clothes off in the same order, wash your hair and body in the same order and dry yourself off in the same order every day. There are some things that you just get used to. Like smell.
When was the last time you walked down the street and consciously smelled? The laundromat, the Indian food, the grocery store, the trees, the dog shit, the broken beer bottle, the bus exaust fumes, the rain on hot pavement? Once you concentrate on your smell perception, you can discover unbelievable things. When I got out of the plane, out of the airport and smelled New York City from afar, do you know what it smelled like? All those millions of smells melted together, but there was one which dominated the others – New York City smells like Chinese food.
I had this theory that I would be blindfolded and led into any of my friends’ houses and apartments and I could tell from the smell where I was. I still hold onto that but what happened to me coincidently was even weirder. You can only perceive a room’s smell when you enter. Once you’re in, it only takes half a minute and you got used to it. It’s just like feeding a snake. If the snake does not eat the mouse right away, you have to take it out because it adapts the smell of the cage and the snake can not locate it anymore.
A little while ago, I was entering a house of a friend for the first time. Her house seemed really familiar and reminded me of an architect who is an old family friend of mine. Later on, we somehow talked about her house and found out that it was actually built by that architect, who knew both of our families really well. And I said „That’s funny because when I entered your house, it even smelled like his house when we visited him.“ She gave me a funny look, maybe a little embarrassed, and said „Well, his dog and our dog are siblings.“
OK, what the hell happened here? I could not stop thinking about this incidence. It had been years since we had visited this architect at his place. He does not even live there any more. Still, the smell had been in my passive smell collection. Think of it as your vocabulary. There is an active vocabulary which you use when you speak, and there is the passive one which consists of words that you know and understand but do not actively use yourself. The house had been in the latter one. The craziest thing was still that I thought I was making the smell up because I connected it with the architecture and the brick stones and marble floor. In reality, you never smell a house but all the persons who live there – even the dogs.
I like perfumes. I think I never bought one myself but I still like them. Thinking of the Andy Warhol quote above, I, as a matter of fact, do have an almost empty perfume bottle on my desktop. It is called Waterlove by Méxx. I used to wear it everyday when I lived in New Zealand. I put it on everyday after I showered before I went to school. Every time I pick up the bottle and smell it, I get a flashback and see the way I walked to school everyday. Through the jungle in the backyard by the creek; up the wooden stairs which smelled like moss when it had rained; across the street kicking the pebbles on the sidewalk; past the dairy, down the hill underneath the bottlebrush trees to the front gate. Interestingly, the thoughts that come to my mind immediately when I smell the perfume are all memories of the morning, when the perfume was still fresh and I was still smelling it. It’s sitting in my form class everyday. I don’t even remember all the other people that well, only those ones I met every morning.
These are the more pleasing flasbacks. I recall my social service when I had to help lift a very old woman into the bathtub every Monday morning. I wore vinyl gloves but no matter how many times I washed my hands and arms, the smell would stay on them all day. When I held my hands under my friend and co-worker’s nose, he grimaced and knew exactly what I had been doing. Even thinking about it now makes recall the smell and makes me feel unwell.
Has is ever happened to you that you met a person who wore the same perfume as you or somebody you know? It is the worst. First, you are reminded that not even beautiful people smell good naturally, but that fragrance is a lie that everybody can articulate. The absolute worst is still to meet someone who smells like somebody you once were very close to – like your ex-girlfriend. Try out what happens when you see her signature. Do you think of a letter she wrote you? Speak her name out loud. Do you think of a particular situation when you called her name? Now you smell her perfume on somebody else but you are reminded of her so much, of how you were so close to her, of her room, of her bed, of the inscents on her drawer, of her hair, of her neck, of her perfume.
You notice how tying experiences to smells rather than to visual perception leaves a much more intimate picture in your mind, which vividly brings back connected perceptions and emotions, that is much more alive than from looking at a photo.
Think of my words when it happens to you.
