Perfume (Pt. II)
Chapter 17: More very long walks, the saddest scene in the world, icing on mud cakes, cherry blossoms in soda pop, the Jolly Rancher, a bit of neuroanatomy, the perfume that lingered
Dear reader,
So much has happened, and I’ve made some new music since I got home. For the first time in a few months I have new songs in my head. Who knows, I don’t know! We’ll see. In the meantime here are some happy accidents I caught on my synth’s sequencer while I was trying to do something else. I mostly play a 1983 Roland JX-3P, which is a beautiful machine. Anyway, a busy week and spring’s almost here, xo.
As I’ve said before, I like to go on very long walks alone. This week I walked to the place in the park where I used to listen to the MacArthur Park Suite. The day was cold, and because of this the park was empty, which is my favourite way to see it. I walked up the winding path, up the biggest hill in the park, and suddenly I smelled a strong perfume. It was high, juicy and artificial, like a Jolly Rancher in the trees. It hung along the path for a while. I imagined someone must have walked ahead of me, far enough to be out of sight, but close enough that I could smell their perfume. I knew that I was smelling it, but it didn’t feel real. There was no one in the park, and the scent shouldn’t have lingered. The air was too cold and too dry to hold a smell for that long. It reminded me of perfumes I would have liked when I was small, the nameless chaotic candy smells you could buy from the pharmacy next to bright eyeshadow and sparkly lipgloss, the things I wasn’t allowed to wear. The perfume from the path stayed in my mouth for a long time, and the air was so cold that the smell felt solid.
When I was six years old there was a field at my school that felt huge, but I imagine now that it was a reasonable size. Sometimes we’d go to the far edge of the field near the fence that separated our school from everything else, a place that felt both dangerous and special. If the bell rang when we were that far out we’d have to run as fast as we could to make it back in time, and we’d be out of breath, we’d take breaks. Our games were most interesting at the edge of the field. There was a day we tried eating leaves, and there were many days we made mud cakes. I remember it was spring and the city would get very damp in March and April, and so our field was filled with mud. Sometimes our rubber boots would get stuck in the mud, and we’d scream at our sinking belongings, the same way the child Atreyu screamed at his dying horse in The Neverending Story (1984). I think this is the saddest scene in the world. In it, the beloved horse Artax drowns in the Swamp of Sadness because he is too sad to fight against the mud, and becomes engulfed by his own despair. As a kid I loved the scene because of the music: It was made by Giorgio Moroder, who also made MacArthur Park. I would cry uncontrollably at this scene, but I kept watching it over and over because I liked the music so much.
Whenever we made mud cakes we’d look for the mud with the best texture. We wanted our cakes to look like real chocolate cake, which is moist and held together. One day at the edge of the field we dug deeper than we’d ever dug before. We were looking for the best mud, but instead we found an earthly deposit of bright blue cream. I remember the colour was electric blue, something we’d never seen in nature before. To us it looked like icing, so naturally we used it for the cakes. That day the cakes were beautiful. At first I was afraid to touch the blue, but it looked so good on top of our little patties of mud that eventually I did. When the bell rang our fingers were covered in it. Looking back I still don’t know what we dug up. I can’t imagine what an electric blue semi-solid was doing buried in the mud. Maybe it really was icing, maybe it came from a child’s forgotten birthday cake, melted and buried at the edge of our field. (The chorus of MacArthur Park goes: ‘All the sweet green icing flowing down / Someone left the cake out in the rain’).
When I was very young, maybe four or five, my beliefs were very strange. I know everyone had these. I believed that if a hair dryer touched my head while it was on, I would immediately die. I also believed that if I swallowed something very quickly I would equally die. In the 1990s we heard so much about children choking. There was a day once where I swallowed a whole Jolly Rancher very quickly: the candy unintentionally slipped down my throat while I was playing in my room. I still somehow remember the feeling of the shocked epiglottis, the involuntarily flexing of my small esophagus. I can feel it even now. For a few moments I didn’t do anything, I was frozen. My throat felt sore because the hard square of the Jolly Rancher was slightly sharp, and I imagined this was what it was like to choke. After a few moments I found my mother to tell her the terrible news. By then I was crying because I thought that very soon the Jolly Rancher would kill me. I didn’t think it could be stopped; I was resigned, like Artax in the mud. My mother smiled and reassured me, and asked me calmly if I could breathe. I thought about this, and I said yes, and so she told me I’d survive.
A neuroscientist once told me it’s impossible to relive the experience of smell in our minds. I can’t recreate the smell of the mysterious perfume in my nose when I think of it now. But I can feel the Jolly Rancher forcing past my epiglottis; I can imagine an image and I can see it; I can think of a song and I can hear the sound. It’s the mental time travel our brains allow for: when we remember the scenes of our lives, we relive the scenes themselves. It’s only our sense of smell that’s connected differently in the brain. Our other senses pass first through the thalamus, which is the relay station linking sensory inputs to everything else — memory, emotion, cognition. But smell bypasses the thalamus and links directly to the olfactory bulb, the structure that perceives and interprets smell, and then travels straight to the limbic system, the centre of emotion itself. It’s the most direct path to memory and feeling, which is why scent triggers memory in such powerful ways. But at the same time we can’t conjure up a smell to relive it. I can’t feel the perfume in my nose just by thinking of it. But if I smell the thing again I’ll know immediately where I smelled it before.
After the park I walked home with the sun behind me. I walked back along the path where I’d first smelled the perfume, and this time the scent was even stronger. I knew this was physically impossible, unless the source of the smell was right there. I ran through theories in my head: maybe someone had sprayed the Jolly Rancher perfume onto the trees themselves. Maybe there was a perfumed person lying in the snow close to the path, somehow out of sight. At first I imagined the person alive, but then I wondered if they were dead, frozen and covered in perfume. I didn’t see anyone in the park. Our theories can be so strange, even when we grow up. The smell lingered in my nose even after I left, like a ghost’s perfume following me, fizzy, sweet, and bright.
Sometimes I wonder if the memory of the blue icing wasn’t fully real. Maybe the blue wasn’t so impressive and unnatural, and maybe we’d just covered our hands in mold. Memories collect and fuse together the more we relive them. In early childhood I remember gazing longingly at the baking aisle of the grocery store, a place where I was often bored, apart from that one aisle. Every time we walked past it I deeply desired a tube of icing, because as children these were the parts of cakes we looked forward to. One day I finally asked my parents to buy a tube — it felt like I’d waited months to ask them. The icing we bought was a bright electric blue; I don’t know if the colour was their choice or mine. I don’t know if it happened before or after the mud cakes. When we got home I asked if I could taste it, and I did. It was sweet and artificial, and I didn’t like the taste. Even so I ate half the tube. I felt so sick after that I never asked my parents for icing again.
Love,
E
P.S. Here’s that meandering little sequence I recorded by accident, but which I kind of like.