awake, opened, breathing

now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened

This is a line I like very much from a poem I like very much by e.e.cummings.

And now, the nose of my nose is breathing.

I went to see the film Perfume this evening. I don’t remember the book (by Patrick Süskind) very well, but I remember that it made my sense of smell awaken; it made me want to smell things, and seek out beautiful scents. He wrote brilliantly about smells; he made you dizzy with them and longing for them, a sense coming alive that you hadn’t realised was dead.

The film probably isn’t as good as the book, they never are, but nonetheless it is very good indeed. Strange, disturbing, and powerfully sensual. Now, afterwards, I want to smell things again, to breathe deeply and fill myself with air, and smell upon it the breathings and the whispers and the sloughed souls of things.

Walking from the car to my apartment, the night was cool and airy, scented with pines. I like the scent of this place—in the day it often smells of warm grain from the fields, like a cross between bread and cut grass. Or, stepping out of the building there is the tang of chlorine from the fountain, like a super-concentrated slap of fresh air.

Now in my apartment I smell guavas—they fill the place with their smell—sharp and richly sweet at the same time, like peardrops except not really like them, plus an edge that is faintly disgusting, cabbagey. And I smell tiny peaches the size and colour of apricots, golden, intensely fruity.

Now I’m thinking about the other things in my apartment. Brittle sticks of cinnamon; soap; my hamsters’ fur; the pages of an old paperback…

Smells awaken instant joy or revulsion without reference to our powers of thought. Smells take us back to past times and places more intensely, more shockingly suddenly and completely than any other sense. You can conjure up the smell of a thousand familiar things—warm milk, oranges, wet paint, roses—in an instant, as if they were there. And yet if I, at least, try to remember at will the smell of a particular place or thing I’ve once experienced, I can’t. You can’t describe smells; you can allude to them in words or pictures but never capture them.

I suppose it is that smells master us, but we can’t master them. They are guerrillas and gypsy-roses, elusive and unfetterable.

Unless, of course, you are the world’s greatest parfumier—and perhaps not even then…

But read/see Perfume, and tell me what you think.

Oh, and another book which I think everyone should read and which revolves around smell is Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. Brilliant.