The Memory of Scent

Each of us has our own aromatic memory.

The romantic French writer, Gustave Flaubert describes smelling his lover’s slippers, which he kept nearby in his desk drawer. While my olfactory memories of lover’s shoes are considerably less evocative, it is impossible to ignore the vast amounts of literature that is laden with scent; the memories it evokes are emotional ones, bringing us back in time. Our sense of smell is the most primitive of our senses and remains the most mysterious. Scent is closely linked to recognizance and remembrance, and we are able to store some 10,000 multifarious ones in our "scent memory."

I have my own recollections of sitting in a synagogue during a particularly long Bar Mitzvah service and discovering the poem, ‘The Song of Solomon’ in the Book of Psalms. It is a sensual love story crafted in the desert around perfumes and body scents; one can feel the parched landscape of the Middle East where this story is revealed,  “…the fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.”

This would make those Saturday services bearable, and it would get a bit warm at my end of the sanctuary. It supposes that the most persuasive evidence for the effects of aroma on us is key in our choice of potential mates, not unlike the bees beguiled into trying to mate with flowers, by a pheromone-charged scent. Nowhere is this more evident that in Michael Ondaatje’s stirring poem chronicling the unrequited love of a man, who is a cinnamon peeler in India,

     “You touched

       your belly to my hands

      in the dry air and said

      I am the cinnamon

      peeler’s wife. Smell me.”

My jaw dropped. Smell me indeed! Leading perfume expert Roja Dove states, ‘A photograph is cold, two dimensional, and in time will fade; a perfume brings back moments in our lives in vivid, glorious technicolor. Nothing but perfume is able to transport us in this way – a single drop of scent can take us from the mundane to a temporal world of fantasy and escapism.’

As women, we can all recall our own ‘coming-of-age’ perfume. Our first voyages into love, that sexy but oh-so-wrong boy we rolled under the covers with (who is still beneath our bed) brought back to life by a whiff of that perfume and a smile. Our choice of fragrance changes with that messy relationship we stayed in for way too long and finally, the one who captures our hearts and loves the way we smell. Or in my case, the olfactory accompaniment that reminds me of my strength and sensuality; although currently loverless, swaddled in the scent of my perfume with my daughter lying like a starfish in my bed.

Original Draft of a story commissioned by Thierry Mugler.

Photography: The immensely talented Chris Cramer http://www.chriscraymer.com/

Becoming Carmen: A Journey of a Mezzo Soprano to the Metropolitan Opera

  Becoming Carmen

She was the heroine of the Grimm Brother’s ‘Red Riding Hood’. Clad in red, at the age of four, she sang the room silent. Her perfect pitch at this young age astonished her teachers and her mother. Eventually, she even astonished herself as she forged a career, which led her to the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. In 2009, in her native Poland, clad again in scarlet, she inhabited the role of a different heroine; the eponymous Carmen. This achievement was a testament not only to her talent, but also to her ability to face a multitude of wolves with courage and resolve.

Edyta Kulczak has the face of an angel and the heart of a lioness. Her childhood in Poland was framed by a mother’s support and the sound of her father singing from his pew at church. Edyta sang with a band in her church, a defiant act of a visibly political anti-communist during martial law; one of the bleakest periods in Poland’s history. She was a teenager when Solidarność heralded the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe; the walls would come tumbling down, and the story of Edyta’s ascent began.

Becoming an opera singer was not a life long dream or strategic plan. She thought seriously about auditions, but failed entrance exams for intermediate music school in Warsaw. Disappointed, she auditioned for a singing group where an eminent teacher took notice of her. It was the perfect storm. Together they journeyed through the mysteries of vocal style. This time, she would be accepted into vocal studies. While in Warsaw, Edyta was mentored by a prominent contralto who encouraged her unwaveringly and identified her as a mezzo-soprano.

In the true spirit of the self-driven and fiery Carmen, Edyta asked a gypsy fortuneteller about her future in singing. She stated emphatically that Edyta would be traveling the world. After successful throat surgery to remove a polyp, she arrived in Chicago to sing at a friend’s wedding and stayed. Edyta never imagined that she would eventually be preparing for her debut performance as Flora in La Traviata and simultaneously learning parts for Parsifal with Placido Domingo. It is too simple to assume she arrived for a wedding and ended up at the MET, as there is much more to her journey: ferocious competition, financial strain and rejection. Edyta is resilient and optimistic. She laughs when she was cited as the best-dressed woman at a concert:

     “Her concert dress inspired many women in the audience. Red,

       closely fitted, tulip-draped …”

There are still wolves in the forest. Hundreds of thousands of her fellow Polish citizens mourn the death of their president as glassified silica ash drift through the skies. But the heart of the woman in the red dress is not far from the Baltic Sea as she  prepares for her next aria.

Originally published in 'Womanity', a blog by French fashion icon Thierry Mugler.

portrait of a diary of a woman

i had forgotten how beautiful it was.

12 dècembre

george sand once said, i felt suffocated when i was married, and now my freedom frightens me more.

i had come home and written him a letter. what’s in my head. my fears, my anxieties, my hopes. there was a christmas when i wished him the bubonic plague. there was a time i would sit in the bath surrounded by candles and tea leaves, reading erotica while he was on the other side of the door.

i wished him a life of purple roses and oversized tubs in oversized rooms.

27 dècembre

i spend my first christmas alone. the boats in the harbour are lit up with carolers. i miss those blue blue dusks and wide open skies; white days that melt deliciously into each other. snow is falling still. silent.

hush.

i peel off layers of clothing, murmuring. wondering aloud how i am feeling today.

3 mars

i spend the week taking photographs. my sister has her second child. i am love with the baby. i visit the fortuneteller and have a particularly enlightening session with her. who would guess that 90.00 could afford such calm and absolution? i whitewash the walls and walk the seawall every day. we all decide to take a trip to the island. our entourage of eleven left in the pouring rain; we stood and sang our anthem crossing the waves, soaked through and spend the next two hours drying out at the pub. simon keeps imitating the man who stood near us, taking off his hat and trying in vain to rearrange his hair. stealing glances. later on the boys do cannonballs into the freezing water. the hat man gives them a baleful stare.

the rest of the days were full of wine and too many late nights, catching up on each other’s lives in the kitchen with just the light from the stove. later we draw straws for rooms and i sleep in the boathouse where i lift my head in the morning and can gaze at the ocean. i take the fishing rod and make my way to the dock. near the pacific, the air is crisp and salty and my mind is quiet. there is no one waiting for me and this coastal life might just be the thing. but i’m never completely free, i realize, casting, badly into the sea.

on the ocean

in the fall

the shadows stretch long

gold light

blur of umber and sienna your

chalk blue eyes

making a

seafarer of me

in my boat of solitude

i rest my oars

26 mai

the bolsheviks are running amok.

today i want a companion to fix me supper, hold my hand, wash my back and curl into me while the skies explode. today i miss having a lover. i want to run, but i don’t know which way to go.

i end up in the east end and pull the cord that is hanging three stories down outside the abandoned building. benjamin’s doorbell. he runs down and opens the door. he takes off my boots and washes my feet.

he has been collecting, and has created a massive chandelier from thousands of keys. watch this he says intently. a switch is flipped and it starts to gently, rhythmically shake. i smile.

it sounds like metal rain.

he drinks water from a plastic bottle. ‘glacial water’. likely tap water chilling under false pretenses he scoffs. the blinds make light zebras on the walls.

farthest kiss

fragile will

into morning

sweet standstill

breath defies

empires end

silence breaks

i

descend

14 septembre

i have coffee every morning with anne. what a day it was, spent digging vegetables out of the soil with her. rows of purple concorde grapes and raspberries. the dinner party is sublime. a peculiar and eccentric array of people. they are here because we are parting for the winter. laughter peals out of the windows and the wax has melted onto the tables. anne reads us the song of solomon in her slip. i get up to take a photograph as stanley plays the piano. the morning after brings us to the bank, bedraggled and in need of sleep. jeremy is dancing in the queue, overtired and we laugh at everything.

later on, we pack up the last of our things. anne and i walk backwards up the hill, home, to see the orange purple pink blue black sky.

she drives a citroen

through rolling fields of artichokes

opens the window

to smell the sea

and stops at the crest of a hill.

a town of stone

built on the shore

where the monks gathered salt

and bowed their heads to get through

the impossibly small doors.

she is looking for the castle on the

twinkling sea

where she will bathe alone.

originally published in 'Womanity' a blog by French fashion designer Thierry Mugler, and subsequently through Grape Press, New York.