THE EROTICISM OF SMELLS

Once in a while I will unexpectedly catch the sharp stink of hot metal: molten bronze, welded iron, a blacksmithy.  It sweeps me back to the high alert of our foundry in the Sixties, the Bighorn Foundry because it had a row of full-curl bighorn skulls along the eaves.  We were always aware that what we were doing, melting bronze and pouring it into a baked plaster mold,  came from the beginning of the Bronze Age when humans squatted by a small hot fire doing the same thing.  The scents of ferric nitrate, copper nitrate, liver of sulphur, and nitric acid are literally deep within me from the days when I stood all day patining by steaming those chemicals into chemical reactions with the bronze surfaces and my alveolar lungs.  The metal acquired patina.  I don't know what happened in my lungs, but the memory is in my brain.

I am in the habit of smudging when I make my morning coffee.  I grow a bed of sweetgrass in order to throw a pinch of it on the hot stove burner after I make my morning coffee,  the brief smoke a sort of fragrant prayer.  I was pleased when Coifan, a powerful writer about perfume, spoke of “. . . smoke, burnt things, caramelized resins, and all the spectrum of notes that share this empyreumatic facet in an oriental or woody context.”   Empyreumatic. Not the smells of holocaust and death-dealing disaster, but rather a daily, homely, human smell.  Sometimes on chilly evenings the scent of neighbors’ woodfires slip under my doors.

When I was a child, my parents went to some event in Pendleton,  OR, probably the roundup, and brought me back a little doll, a kind that has a name I forget.  It’s really just a head with a body like a beanbag, wrapped in a bit of flannel to look like a sitting Indian in a blanket.  It smelled of smoke.  I loved it, so now I love the smell of smoke-tanned buckskin.  The smell of Indian Days was for me cottonwood fires.  The smell of the Bundle Openings was old bird skins and rope tobacco, the big leaves simply twisted and dried, looking almost like dry meat.  You can have your delicate madeleines dipped in elderflower tea.  I crave those old funky alerting smells.  

As an example of Octavian Coifan's perfume writing, consider this review of  "Aesop Mystra", which comes in a small brown bottle as though it were medicine.

  

“. . . Taking inspiration from religion or past is a hard work but Aesop succeeds at it in all ways. It's not the opulent sexy Byzantine perfume that would make you feel attractive .... but a mysterious mixture like a formula from the past that would transport you into another world. The main ingredients are incense, labdanum and mastic, and a lot of other naturals that would make it dark and uneasy to explore. There is an unusual quality I found inside - it’s profoundly animalic and dirty like a sinful woman. It has the combination of jasmin-amber-musk of the old world. . . a whisper of death in a decadent universe. “  

Unafraid of being offensive because he’s in pursuit of deep truths, Coiffan traces the associations of perfume to the preservation of the dead, the attempt to prevent corruption, the need to disinfect, and the original substances used by the Egyptians for mummification.  “Natron” (which is merely sodium bicarbonate to dry the tissues), minerals, bark derivatives, alcohol, acids, salts, resins, oils were all used and became associated with the hope for an afterlife.  Frankincense and myrrh.  All aromatics. 

“A long time ago I "predicted" the appearance of a new direction - smoke, burnt things, caramelized resins, and all the spectrum of notes that share this empyreumatic facet in an oriental or woody context. Metaphorically this will be a return to the first experiences of man with scents, thousands of years ago, when he discovered how some things are smelling pleasant when they are burnt.

Today in Paris I am surrounded by (exotic) fruits, flowers from all around the globe, spices, beautiful perfumes and like any consumer space and time (the seasons) are no more a impediment to enjoy the natural beauty. But this is quite unique in the history of our race.

About 15 000 years ago the climate and the landscape was rather different in Europe. Forget oranges, bananas, vanilla, even rose and jasmine and try to figure out the scents of the "Ice Age". It is said that we cannot mourn what we've never had or knew. All these scents were theoretically unknown here, even if a "glimpse" could be found in some European wild herbs. But we started our journey on this planet in a much different landscape, before the earliest migrations out of Africa, 50,000 years ago, witnessed by the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb. Do we carry an "olfactory souvenir" in our genes and the discovery and use of aromatic plants is our conquest of "the lost paradise"?. . .

I love the smell of smoke-tanned buckskin.  The smell of Indian Days in the Sixties was cottonwood fires (Bob used to smudge cottonwood bark in the evenings), now replaced by propane or electricity.  The smell of the Bundle Openings was old bird skins and rope tobacco, the big leaves simply twisted and dried, looking almost like dry meat.  You can have your delicate madeleines dipped in elderflower tea.  I crave those old funky alerting smells.  

Of all the conventional five senses (as distinguished from the less-considered senses like orientation in space, or internal distention, or non-ocular light sensitivity through the skin) smell is the most primal, since it is the earliest sense, present even in a one-celled animal as the detection of molecules in dispersal, either in fluid or gas where the animal lives.  Those without this perception couldn’t find substances nor avoid substances, nor distinguish whether they are good or bad.   Their kind wouldn’t last long.

In mammals the sense of smell is directly connected to the brain, even more so than the eyes which send impulses through the optic nerves, and link neurally directly to the hippocampus which is the locus of memory sorting for preservation.  Smells and information or incidents linked with smells are remembered longer and more vividly.  (You knew that!)  

Memories connected to “unpleasant” odors (subjective as that may be) are remembered better than those associated with “pleasant” odors.  This makes sense in two ways:  toxins and rot should be remembered so as to avoid them, and the funky smells of intimate bodies associated with intense stimulation (not just pheromones) should not be forgotten for positive reasons, like identifying one’s own group for conjugation. 

This is Coifan’s description of a perfume promotion that involved the creation of a cross between a fountain and an altar.  “The most recent visual metaphor for the sacred dimension of the perfume is offered now at the Venice Biennale 2011 by the installation of Anish Kapoor set in Andrea Palladio's masterpiece. Though not explicitly linked to the perfume, but to the notion of sacred, the art work presents an evanescent column of steam mounting to "Heaven" in a spiral through an ingenious technical device. Set at the heart of San Giorgio Maggiore, this is actually a "scentless" representation of the scent. It suggests not only the concept of ascension and pray, but it is also a concentrated version of the old sacred places where the volutes of incense, burnt in massive quantities during the rituals, were slowly recreating the clouds inside the huge space of Catholic churches.”

Coifan argues that Osiris and orris root share a molecular relationship that is so old that it has become instinctual.  “Besides the typical ionone/irone/methylionone family scent, the orris root smells of earth and human skin as it contains several fatty acids, much like the mysterious violet seeds taken by the ants in their underground world.

“Greeks used to plant iris on the graves of women as Iris would guide the souls to the Elysian Fields. Looking inside the chemical composition of an orris root we find a huge amount of a fatty acid. Orris root is preserved flesh and the beautiful scent develops only a long time after they are desiccated through the action of several bacteria (Pseudomonas and Enterobacter). The "immortality" of a botanic body rich in fatty acids is acquired through scent, opposed to the decomposition of the animal body. It is precisely the same biochemical process that happened inside the body of saints and martyrs said to exhale a violet note, hundreds of years ago when people had no idea about micro organisms or the biosynthesis of irone. Orris is the scent of immortality in nature.”

Alongside the fire art of bronze casting, Scriver Studio practiced the water and fat art of animal preservation.  Tanning skins is a messy odorous process.  First, some means of removing the water in the new skin with salt or other dessicant is necessary; then working out the sub-cutaneous fat, perhaps by diluting it with the fat of brains, well rubbed in; and then removing the glue with a mild acid, maybe vinegar. In Europe elegant leather gloves, still retaining a whiff of these methods, were traditionally scented by keeping them in a sandalwood box.  Where there is wealth, there are aromatic preservatives.  Shawls from India were packed for shipping with patchouli, an aromatic plant that repelled insects.  Tobacco. lavendar and sweetgrass did that, too.  Maybe camphor or menthol.  

The smells of the pest house and various corruptions were fought with vapors of sulphur and solutions of iodine, all the disinfectants like ammonia, pine-sol, lye.  Garlic and mustard were used as poultices.  Even so came creeping the reeks of excrement, vomit and rot.  Skilled doctors used their noses as much as their eyes to understand what was happening.  Not many of us know the smell of blood and sweat as well as they did.  Many diseases have unique odors.

Then the smells of food preservation:  pepper, chili, vinegar, char, cinnamon, dill, clove, various dried substances both animal and vegetable, sometimes mineral.   The smells of distillation and fermentation, baking and roasting, fresh torn greens and newly shucked peas or corn.  These are life-sustaining odors, associated with contentment and energy.  The Christian tradition has chosen bread and wine to celebrate, when they could have chosen dried fish or even burnt flesh, but those were about earlier times before households had the time and stability to grind and leaven flour or ferment grapes.

The smells of the city and of the industrial age are with us now, not so associated with religion though they certainly saturate our understanding of reality.  Hot asphalt, new tires, WD40, gasoline fumes, hot metal, a whiff of clothes drier.   Churches have smells of their own: lemon oil rubbed into the pews, beeswax candles.  Less fortunately, damp and dust.  Even mice.

A commercial perfumerer has named his scents for mind-altering shamanic odors but they are not the actual smells of ayahuesca, peyote or iboganda. Those theogenic substances are actually not that attractive as odors.  I don’t know what opium smells like, but traditionally it was burned in a pipe.  By now most of us recognize marijuana.

Fire and burning.  Smudges.  Incense.   Burnt offerings, not just flesh but feathers, hair, bone.  For those people who maintained household fires for cooking and warming, the collection and uses of different kinds of wood became a vocabulary in themselves: what burns hot, what makes smoke, what holds embers -- each with a distinctive smell.  Ritual cremations of humans at death.  As soon as people understood how to make a fire hot enough to smelt metal, that pungency also became associated with acts so powerful and mysterious as to amount to magic. 

Years ago when I was in the ministry I attended the UUA General Assembly in the east.  It was miserable, too hot and humid.  When I got back, I stepped into the dry wind of the little Helena airport and found that while I had been gone the sweet clover had bloomed, billowing in a yellow cloud everywhere.  Once the jet fuel vapor blew off, which didn’t take long in a stiff Montana breeze, I was saturated by the honeyed smell of those weeds.  It was so healing that I sat down on the curb a long time.  Sure, I know that the “sweet” smell of sweetgrass and sweetclover and even sweetpine (balsam fir) is coumadin, which is the blood thinner many people take as medicine.  It’s the effective ingredient in rat poison (renamed warfarin).  But my blood needed thinning.

One can posit a difference between "natural" and "manufactured" smells.  Coifan describes a perfume that is a visual metaphor with no smell at all.  "The most recent visual metaphor for the sacred dimension of the perfume is offered now at the Venice Biennale 2011 by the installation of Anish Kapoor set in Andrea Palladio's masterpiece. Though not explicitly linked to the perfume, but to the notion of sacred, the art work presents an evanescent column of steam mounting to "Heaven" in a spiral through an ingenious technical device. Set at the heart of San Giorgio Maggiore, this is actually a "scentless" representation of the scent. It suggests not only the concept of ascension and pray, but it is also a concentrated version of the old sacred places where the volutes of incense, burnt in massive quantities during the rituals, were slowly recreating the clouds inside the huge space of Catholic churches."

Coifan also speaks about the little known realm of Osiris.

"Curiously, orris and incense share a geographic area that has not been enough explored by archaeologists. The violet note is in our "genes" in the most unexpected way. Several attributes associated with this note have a fundamental biological value and the highly unusual and unrelated contexts where this note was found (from Himalaya Mountains to Egypt and monastic legends) are about to explain what exactly this family of molecules represent for us. . . . 

"Besides the typical ionone/irone/methylionone family scent, the orris root smells of earth and human skin as it contains several fatty acids, much like the mysterious violet seeds taken by the ants in their underground world.

Greeks used to plant iris on the grave of women as Iris would guide the souls to the Elysian Fields. Looking inside the chemical composition of an orris root we find a huge amount of a fatty acid. Orris root is preserved flesh and the beautiful scent develops only a long time after they are desiccated through the action of several bacteria (Pseudomonas and Enterobacter). The "immortality" of a botanic body rich in fatty acids is acquired through scent, opposed to the decomposition of the animal body. It is precisely the same biochemical process that happened inside the body of saints and martyrs said to exhale a violet note, hundreds of years ago when people had no idea about micro organisms or the biosynthesis of irone. Orris is the scent of immortality in nature."

The anthropecene era smells different.  We didn't like those old primitive reeks.  Too much like animals, even if we do put musk and civet cat in our perfumes. Will we ever come to love human sweat?

"Today in Paris I am surrounded by (exotic) fruits, flowers from all around the globe, spices, beautiful perfumes and like any consumer space and time (the seasons) are no more a impediment to enjoy the natural beauty. But this is quite unique in the history of our race.

"About 15 000 years ago the climate and the landscape was rather different in Europe. Forget oranges, bananas, vanilla, even rose and jasmine and try to figure out the scents of the "Ice Age". It is said that we cannot mourn what we've never had or knew. All these scents were theoretically unknown here, even if a "glimpse" could be found in some European wild herbs. But we started our journey on this planet in a much different landscape, before the earliest migrations out of Africa, 50,000 years ago, witnessed by the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb. Do we carry an "olfactory souvenir" in our genes and the discovery and use of aromatic plants is our conquest of "the lost paradise"?. . .