In Dodie’s class this past week (after reading Megan Milk’s Slug & Carmen Maria Machado’s My Body, Herself) we were tasked with writing about “non-human Eros”. I had two clients last year who wanted to take me shopping. It was erotic to them to own some small piece of my life, beyond the brief time and labor of my body they could afford to access. And so: I asked to be taken perfume shopping. Perfume, particularly perfume of a certain tier or prestige, is an item defined by the ephemeral and intangible. I think the thing that’s valuable about it is that it doesn’t last. It fades. I like that it goes away. Doesn’t take up residence on my skin forever but leaves when its time is up. So here is my homework. A similar slow burn. But this time, in language. Inspired by the incredibly long sentences found in Gary Indiana’s Three Month Fever, which I’m savoring my time with. Enjoy.

Stretching out in a dark jade bar, far past “woody”, “amber”, and “floral”, those endlessly boring and knowable categories of scent – scent, from Old French sentir, and that from the Latin scentire, meaning “to perceive”, and maybe it’s worth noting here at the beginning an uncanny visual similarity in the Old French with another word, probably gleaned because of the dropped ‘c’, and after the briefest etymological research the theory is proven right; sentient has the same root, is of the same branch, one of scent’s primary usages being in reference to trained dogs given a scent in order to track something, smell a way for animals to navigate and pierce the world, so why then is smell relegated to such a paucity of language for those non-canines, reduced to language like aroma, and fragrance, and bouquet (and this last word is such a cheap addition because only people with a nasal palette – or those who convince themself they are not stupefied winos, because the liquid in the glass is orange, not some basic red, or that it once rested on its own skin, or if was held in a dank cave, or it was sold to them by a genderless person with tattoos – only those people think about anything other than flowers), when the very act of scent is perception of the most foundational magnitude, being a cousin to the core sensory analysis by which we know ourselves to be alive and separable from single celled organisms – okay, please forgive this total buzzkill of a digression, as if word origin holds more relevance than feeling, because feeling is really at the heart of this matter, like that feeling of bemused disgust felt toward the detestably banal category of “floral”, the kind of scent category abounding and readily found in the shopping mall candle company, those lowest objects, insultingly crude, derivative manifestations of an odor; ugly globs of smell housed in dense glass containers with romanticized pastoral imagery cheaply glued across one side of the vessel, a place where abominable candles clutter every inch of the brightly painted walls and every surface on a overfull display table, miserable candles designed to keep the modern housewife company, this housewife being the sort of woman who is chicly contemporary enough to work from home, doing some career whose labor could be interchangeably performed by a trained crow, work like “advertising” or “digital receptionist”, a category of work which only really requires one to have their eyes open, heart beating, and a vague sense of time management, thus the role’s functional accessibility for the bird-brained amongst us, that sort of modern housewife has her shopping mall candles placed neatly on her desk or in the hallway beside her office space, often abutting pictures of her identical children or a garish piece of store bought big box strip mall art, art like a hunk of faux driftwood with a grim aphorism that implicitly names the desperation of the modern nuclear huddle splayed across it, phrases like “I only have a kitchen because it came with the house”, near that sort of sign would be one of those dull amphoras of stench oozing out “desert mist” or “winter pine” or “mom’s sultry island vacation, during the brief window when the kids are being watched by an older cousin and her husband is taking surfing lessons, so she goes down to the hotel bar to have what she calls Me Time but what is really just functional alcoholism, when a strikingly handsome stranger orders her another round because he’s here on a business trip and just as mind numbingly bored as she is, in this tropical environment advertised to the non-indigenous as paradise, so they go back to his room and have largely unfulfilling sex but the transgression of it all makes the 24 minutes they spend hustling their damp, once-toned bodies against each other feel electric with passion, because she will take it to her grave that he came inside of her – she had her tubes tied after Olivia was born, obviously – and then immediately dropped to his knees to perform cunnilingus on her still drooling cunt, which, more than the literal effect of his tongue, was enough to send a thrill up her spine because her husband would never, so on her return walk back to her own hotel room, misted in a fine layer of perspiration – some of hers and some of his, with base notes of musk, well rum, trade winds, and licked metal – her hair askew in a way that only communicates one thing, she felt as if she was floating all the way through the long air conditioned hallways, her life a miracle of possibility for five brief minutes before the reality of it all sank in”, those kind of scents, the ones that communicate only the most well-trod, blasé fantasies, fantasies which allow the housewife to exist blissfully in a reprieve from the morbid scope of her life, fantasies like those found in the romance novels disguised as genre literature which she reads, their plots sending the housewife lazing across a cloud of cheap melting soy wax buoyed by just a hint of airheadedness from the carbon monoxide being thrown off the dense cluster of white florals from the three wicks burning near here – no, this feeling is different, and here on this website for reviewing perfume, far above the quotidian and commonplace “woody”, the only note so many men go through their lives smelling something like, there is a slash of pine or emerald; rich and jewel and recherché even in its unnamable color, and that bar which indicates a perfumes overall tone or composition is labeled “aromatic”, which simply communicates everything and nothing, because it is a kind of genderless tabula rasa of refinement functioning as a map and mirror upon which anyone can throw the trace of their own want, scrying the way sand is blown or light is warped, as if to say to the person wearing this perfume that they have taste for choosing abstraction, because it is a perfume by a well known fashion brand (one owned, through a sort of corporately acceptable shell company that does “distribution”, by the heinous likes of LVMH and its billionaire owner and his investments in Israeli surveillance technology, the financially connective tissue unknown at the point of purchase and now smoldering like a brief regret every time it’s worn, followed by a promise to redouble any effort made towards a free Palestine, an unoccupied Palestine, efforts intended to atone for or balance the moral scales of this $149.99 purchase before tax, even though it is impossible to do so, the only way was not to spend money in the first place, and now that money has been spent, funneled like so many small particles, into a larger mass of death), a perfume “made” by a fashion brand with a reclusive eighty-something year old founder – made here is in quotes because rarely, if ever, does a clothing designer do the raw action of scent design as well, they usually hire an outside agency before doing final approval, as this perfume was really designed by an English man who trained in Hamburg but lives in Paris, and describes himself on his website as “above all, a hedonist” – this sort of perfume has heady and obscure top notes of “aldehydes” middle notes of “caraway”, and a base of “labdanum”, this perfume tells a person that their oddity will be completely understood and embraced, that it will be a companion upon which their most bizarre desires aerosolize and percolate, it will be spritzed along their wrist and neck and navel before they text a person who they know will have sex with them if they just do so much as ask, or post a benignly desperate picture in which they look decent, and this whole thing is just such a contemporary arrangement – an unwillingness to participate in the tragedy of the domestic and yet a desire to reap its comforts – and that person who is obsessively desperate for them will come over, already engorged or psychically prepared to be, and the two of them will spritz the perfume along paper test strips, commenting on the scent and agreeing that this is the abstract feeling to lose oneself in tonight, before prying their tongues up toward the roof of their mouths, and placing one (okay, probably two, just to see what happens) full spritz on the veiny underside of that pink oral muscle, and they will wait thirty minutes or so and discuss a new art show they both have seen or want to or pretend to want to just to impress the other, and one person goes to get water before sitting much closer to the other one on the couch, the gray wisp of their finely lined tattoos barely grazing the gray wisp of their finely lined tattoos, brushing their ink arm across a mouth the sudden movement melts into sensation, tap water and saliva and now this person’s saliva a coriander puddle filling and filling inside a West Indian Bay, here is placed a thick trace of wiggling, freshly pedicured magnolia entering a certain cinnamon softness entering into tea and nutmeg like an inside out coriander orifice, both swallowed and penetrated – they’re not quite sure which, the notes are beginning to run together, it would take years to peel back the layers where this bouquet starts and stops – as bristling, energetic maté flows across their separate and twined amber selves; but what’s a self when you’re cedar and angelica, it’s impossible to not feel cedar and angelica all at once, absorbed in this moment, being taken apart and apart and a part of them is ink but when touched soaks the aldehyde and loves the experience, if only they had the vetiver to mandarin it all orange, but if they fixate on vetiver the ride will quickly turn existential, so flowing back toward orange they arrive again only to notice that incense is there, incense has always been right there in the center of it all, and there, in scents, they are shattered into fragments which float, glisten, spinning around as if suspended.