"Perfume and the Memory of War -Erin Solaro
Having arrived (inevitably yet somewhat unexpectedly) on the high side of 40, and never having been a glamour queen, I've concluded that most makeup is a waste of time and money. The only exceptions are a few flattering lipstick shades, which will of course vary from woman to woman, and perfume.
For many of us, scent is powerfully linked to erotic memories: first kiss, first penetration, a particular lover or lover's gift or request. There are also other experiences, often less fondly remembered. Scent can trigger everything from afterglow to PTSD. For me, whenever I smell Prescriptives' fruity, mossy Calyx, I think of heavy armor. I was a freshly minted Army second lieutenant, wearing Calyx the first time I ever saw an M-1 tank move, and what a revelation that was: the perfect balance of mobility, armor and firepower.
And therein lies a larger connection.
Scent is, or should be, part of more than individual memory. Like wine, scent is part of cultural memory. And of historical memory. People sometimes have the opportunity to drink very old wine. Imagine pouring a vintage made from grapes picked by men who went off to die in the Great War, better known to us as World War I, and by the women who had no choice but to watch them go. Almost instinctively, we feel a bond. Almost instinctively, we want to drink to them.
Yet we do not think of perfume this way. Cultural memory is intellectual and bound up with the wars and other great events that have shaped Western civilization. Wine is part of culture, part of history, however tangential. Perfume is merely part of fashion. Fashion--couture--may be an important industry, but it is mainly associated with women and the men who dress them: a significant endeavor, sometimes of interest to historians, but hardly on a par with war and the memory of war. Or so we think. We know we drink to the long-ago dead but we rarely perfume ourselves in their honor.
I recently purchased off Ebay some old (at least 50 years) Chanel No. 5, still sealed. It was an unusual purchase. Back in the 80s, when I was studying tanks and poetry and kindred matters, I never liked Chanel No.5. I found it far too commercial, and far too subtle, compared to my favorite young woman's scents, such as Yves Saint Laurent's Opium and Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men, or for that matter Guerlain's Shalimar, which I still love. A few months ago, however, I tried Chanel No. 5 and liked it. Perhaps they've tweaked the composition; more likely, my tastes have evolved. Thus my purchase.
With scent like this, who needs makeup?
Please do not think of me as some educated nose who can intone, "Ahh, top notes of aldehydes and base notes of sandalwood, suffused throughout with jasmine" (which is in fact true of Chanel No. 5). I simply hold that Chanel No. 5 in parfum strength is a beautiful scent, drying down to some Platonic ideal of baby powder and the very softest kidskin, with, at least on my skin, just a hint of cool sweetness. I smell it and I connect to poetry. Not lovesong or commercial tripe, but lines from a Russian poet beloved since high school, a connection as unlikely, yet also as evocative, as smelling Calyx and thinking of tanks.
Rummaging in your black memory you findgloves up to the elbow,and the Petersburg night. And in the dark of the theater boxest hat stifling sweet smell. Wind from the gulf. And there between the lines, shunning the 'ahs' and the 'ohs,'Blok will smile at you contemptuously--the tragic tenor of the age.
If you love scent, two of the great houses are Guerlain and Caron. My introduction to Guerlain was Shalimar as a girl; my introduction to Caron as a woman was Nuit de Noel. Two very beautiful scents that I almost instinctively related to military history, as I have Guerlain's Djedi, which I have never smelled.
To smell the scents of the great perfume houses of Guerlain and Caron from say, 1910 all the way through the middle of the century, is to smell sorrow upon sorrow. Sometimes that sorrow is anticipated, in a perfume such as L'Heure Bleue, the blue hour of Parisian evenings. Sometimes it is as fresh as blood, as in N'Aimez Que Moi ("Love Only Me"). The poilus, French soldiers traveling such routes as the Voie Sacrée to Verdun, gave this scent to women they hoped would remain faithful to them. The women hoped that if they wore it and their lovers survived, they would return to them in a land more and more bereft of its young men. And sometimes that sorrow is remembered, as in Nuit de Noel, when the men who died should have been with their parents and sisters, the women they never married and the children they never raised. It is sorrow for the fair and the brave, ruined and broken and bereft before their time, the dead and their survivors.
Often the sorrow is for the young men slaughtered. Sometimes, as in Shalimar, it is for women. The scent is named after the Shalimar Gardens of Lahore, which Shah Jahan created for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their thirteenth child. Until well into the 20th century, childbirth was to women what war was to men. With one exception. For men, war was an episodic horror. For women, it was routine decimation. Do the phrases strike you as odd? Isn't war supposed to be the routine decimation, childbirth the episodic horror? Think again. I did, after returning from Afghanistan in 2005 and discovering that, statistically, a modern Afghan woman has a greater chance of dying in childbirth than a World War II American infantryman did of dying in battle. How many of those men, I wonder, brought back French perfume for their women, or died with bottles in their packs, perhaps broken open by enemy fire.
Then there is Jacques Guerlain's masterpiece, Djedi, from 1927.
Djedi was the legendary magician of ancient Egypt. Pharaoh Khufu, the god-king, had brought Djedi to court to entertain his courtiers. Pharaoh wanted to see if Djedi could rejoin a severed human head to its body. Djedi said he could, and Pharaoh commanded a prisoner be brought in and decapitated for his amusement. But Djedi refused, saying, "Do not do this to a human being, my sovereign lord: surely it is not permitted to do such a thing to one of the noble herd of God." Pharaoh agreed and permitted Djedi to rejoin the head of a duck to its body instead.
For those who have been lucky enough to smell it, Djedi is the strangest perfume ever created, and often the most beautiful.
It opens with scents of stone and mineral. One might think of camel thorn bleaching in the desert sun, or smoke rising into the desert sky. Then it opens into rose and iris, vetiver and spice, beautiful and brief, before melding into leather and bitter herbs, and musk that is both animal and powdery and that to some people smells of roasting meat. One might, if one is so inclined, think of burning tanks and what happens to the crew inside, or of dead infantrymen. Indeed, some people note a scent of putrefaction, even of feces.
The overwhelming impressions of Djedi are of a regal beauty that is conquered by terrible grief, a beauty that does not stoop to weeping or pleading, but is broken to standing ruins like a shattered sword.
To name a perfume for women--wealthy, cultured, aristocratic women--after a mythical Egyptian magician who is remembered to us for upholding the human dignity of a condemned prisoner was the act of a great perfumer who understood that he was living in a civilization that had no serious defenders.
We live now as they did in 1912 (L'Heure Bleue) and 1922 (Nuit de Noel), or 1925 (Shalimar) and in 1927 (Djedi). We are living through the beginning of the ending of our world. Our civilization is slipping away, perhaps also towards some dreadful cataclysm. Everyone knows the catalogue of perils, from terrorism and climate change to lunatic wars and the lunatic debt that funds our wars. And how long can we pretend that reality will conform to our fantasies, so long as we keep up the pretense?
We talk now of failed states, but Europe of the first half of the 20th century was a failed continent, a failed civilization. And the great scents of those decades, the Guerlains and the Chanels and the Carons are suffused with mourning for that civilization, every bit as much as they were also suffused with, for example, the images of Jazz Age flappers daringly smoking in public, as Tabac Blond is.
When those of us who will survive the coming decades look back, what will be the scent we associate with these last ephemeral years?
Fantasy and Curious "by" Britney Spears, perhaps. And Heiress and Paris Hilton "by" Paris Hilton, perhaps also. Fruity, sweet, without staying power, "girly."
Unserious.
Unwomanly.
Uncivilized."
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What a way to start 2009!! But what a fragrant way.........we also have hope now with our new President, Barack Obama. This young lady has a very interesting and considered opinion on the world as well a very refined sense of smell......
HAPPY NEW YEAR
At last, new beginnings, new hope for this country!
