Search Results for: Medium

The Dead End on My Record Shelf

Steven Errico / Getty

Christopher C. King | An excerpt from Lament from Epirus: An Odyssey into Europe’s Oldest Surviving Folk Music | W.W. Norton & Company | May 2018 | 16 minutes (4,346 words)

A time-traveler, a person from the twenty-first century, stands on a cliff overlooking a mountain pass in southern Europe, in northwestern Greece, a few thousand years after the end of the last Ice Age, having traveled back in time by way of some technology unknown to us. This traveler is observing human beings while they interact with one another in this challenging, remote environment.

Something is happening among these proto-Europeans. One person places a long wooden shaft, holes bored along the side, to his lips, producing sound. Other sounds exit the mouths of the surrounding people. The collective sound appears fragmented to the listener — the time-traveler — standing above. At times the voices and the flute notes appear smooth, mellifluous, but then disjointed and abrupt. During this flood of sound, members of this group move in cryptic yet intentional ways. When this lush cacophony ceases, so too do the movements of the people.

What is going on down there?

Any of us could be this time-traveler. And any of us would realize — based on our observations — that these people are communicating. We perceive sound and movement, assuming cause and effect. The question that should linger in our minds is this: are we observing a use of language, a use of music, or something else — an alien and impenetrable behavior? Read more…

The Miracle of the Mundane

Sheet music discovered in 2009 identified as part of a childhood creation by Mozart, Kerstin Joensson / AP. Penguin Random House.

Heather Havrilesky | What If This Were Enough? | September 2018 | 16 minutes (3,976 words)

 

On a good day, all of humanity’s accomplishments feel personal: the soaring violins of the second allegretto movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7, the intractable painted stare of Frida Kahlo, the enormous curving spans of the Golden Gate Bridge, the high wail of PJ Harvey’s voice on “Victory,” the last melancholy pages of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. These works remind us that we’re connected to the past and our lives have limitless potential. We were built to touch the divine.

On a bad day, all of humanity’s failures feel unbearably personal: coyotes wandering city streets due to encroaching wildfires, American citizens in Puerto Rico enduring another day without electricity or potable water in the wake of Hurricane Maria, neo-Nazis spouting hatred in American towns, world leaders testing missiles that would bring the deaths of millions of innocent people. We encounter bad news in the intimate glow of our cell phone screens, and then project our worries onto the flawed artifacts of our broken world: the for lease sign on the upper level of the strip mall, the crow picking at a hamburger wrapper in the gutter, the pink stucco walls of the McMansion flanked by enormous square hedges, the blaring TVs on the walls of the local restaurant. On bad days, each moment is haunted by a palpable but private sense of dread. We feel irrelevant at best, damned at worst. Our only hope is to numb and distract ourselves as well as we can on our long, slow march to the grave.

On a good day, humankind’s creations make us feel like we’re here for a reason. Our belief sounds like the fourth molto allegro movement of Mozart’s Symphony no. 41, Jupiter: Our hearts seem to sing along to Mozart’s climbing strings, telling us that if we’re patient, if we work hard, if we believe, if we stay focused, we will continue to feel joy, to do meaningful work, to show up for each other, to grow closer to some sacred ground. We are thrillingly alive and connected to every other living thing, in perfect, effortless accord with the natural world.

But it’s hard to sustain that feeling, even on the best of days — to keep the faith, to stay focused on what matters most—because the world continues to besiege us with messages that we are failing. You’re feeding your baby a bottle and a voice on the TV tells you that your hair should be shinier. You’re reading a book but someone on Twitter wants you to know about a hateful thing a politician said earlier this morning. You are bedraggled and inadequate and running late for something and it’s always this way. You are busy and distracted. You are not here.

It’s even worse on a bad day, when humankind’s creations fill us with the sense that we are failing as a people, as a planet, and nothing can be done about it. The chafing smooth jazz piped into the immaculate coffee joint, the fake cracks painted on the wall at the Cheesecake Factory, the smoke from fires burning thousands of acres of dry tinder, blotting out the sun — they remind us that even though our planet is in peril, we are still being teased and flattered into buying stuff that we don’t need, or coaxed into forgetting the truth about our darkening reality. As the crowd around us watches a fountain dance to Frank Sinatra’s “Somewhere Beyond the Sea” at the outdoor mall, we peek at our phones and discover the bellowed warnings of an erratic foreign leader, threatening to destroy us from thousands of miles away. Everything cheerful seems to have an ominous shadow looming behind it now. The smallest images and bits of news can feel so invasive, so frightening. They erode our belief in what the world can and should be.

As the first total solar eclipse in America in thirty-nine years reveals itself, an email lands in my inbox from ABC that says The Great American Eclipse at the top. People are tweeting and retweeting the same eclipse jokes all morning. As the day grows dimmer, I remember that Bonnie Tyler is going to sing her 1983 hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on an eclipse-themed cruise off the coast of Florida soon.

Even natural wonders aren’t what they used to be, because nothing can be experienced without commentary. In the 1950s, we worried about how TV would affect our culture. Now our entire lives are a terrible talk show that we can’t turn off. It often feels like we’re struggling to find ourselves and each other in a crowded, noisy room. We are plagued, around the clock, by the shouting and confusion and fake intimacy of the global community, mid–nervous breakdown.

Sometimes it feels like our shared breakdown is making us less generous and less focused. On a bad day, the world seems to be filled with bad books and bad buildings and bad songs and bad choices. Worthwhile creations and ego-driven, sloppy works are treated to the same hype and praise; soon it starts to feel as if everything we encounter was designed merely to make some carefully branded human a fortune. Why aren’t we reaching for more than this? Isn’t art supposed to inspire or provoke or make people feel emotions that they don’t necessarily want to feel? Can’t the moon block out the sun without a 1980s pop accompaniment? So much of what is created today seems engineered to numb or distract us, keeping us dependent on empty fixes indefinitely.

Such creations feel less like an attempt to capture the divine than a precocious student’s term paper. If any generous spirit shines through, it’s manufactured in the hopes of a signal boost, so that some leisure class end point can be achieved. Our world is glutted with products that exist to help someone seize control of their own life while the rest of the globe falls to ruin. Work (and guidance, and leadership) that comes from such a greedy, uncertain place has more in common with that fountain at the outdoor mall, playing the same songs over and over, every note an imitation of a note played years before.

But human beings are not stupid. We can detect muddled and self-serving intentions in the artifacts we encounter. Even so, such works slowly infect us with their lopsided values. Eventually, we can’t help but imagine that this is the only way to proceed: by peddling your own wares at the expense of the wider world. Can’t we do better than this, reach for more, insist on more? Why does our culture make us feel crazy for trying?

Read more…

Putting a New Stone on the Grave: Sjón Brings the Golem to Iceland

Door to attic of the Old New Synagogue where according to myth the golem rests. Slowcentury / Getty

Adam Morgan | Longreads | September 2018 | 10 minutes (2,560 words)

In the summer of 1990, an Icelandic writer named Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson traveled to Czechoslovakia with his friend, the singer-songwriter Björk. Their alternative rock band, The Sugarcubes, was performing in Prague because of the city’s folk status as the birthplace of the sugar cube. But while they were in town, Sigurðsson made a pilgrimage to the Old Jewish Cemetery, where the legendary creator of the Golem of Prague had been buried more than four centuries earlier. After placing a stone on his grave, Sigurðsson asked the rabbi for help solving a personal problem, and in exchange, promised to bring the golem into Icelandic literature.

Today, Sigurðsson goes by the name Sjón. In 2013, when his surreal novels were first translated into English by Victoria Cribb, critics compared him to Borges, Calvino, and Kafka. Most of his books are less than 200 pages, but this week sees the publication of CoDex 1962, a labyrinthine epic that invites comparison to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. Originally published as three separate novels in Iceland in 1994, 2001, and 2016, CoDex 1962 is Sjón’s fulfillment of the pact he made in the Old Jewish Cemetery almost three decades ago. Read more…

Mega-drought and Me

Sebastien Gabriel / Unsplash, Paul Robert / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Zoe Fenson | Longreads | September 2018 | 18 minutes (3,732 words)

I kick my heels against the end of the exam table, feet dangling as if over the edge of a dock. One hand on the opening of the gown, the other holding the drape to my lap.

First time seeing this new doctor, now that the old practice closed. I’d expected older, brusque, lab coat, but she is warm and cheery in her crisp blue scrubs and gray hijab. Legs splayed on the low wheeled stool, elbows on knees, clipboard. Reading.

It’s all there on the form, in my handwriting. Age: 29. Reason for visit: annual exam. Smokes: No. Drinks: two to three per week. Wears a seat belt: always.

The drape slips off my lap — why does it always do that? I catch it, shift carefully, try not to tear the paper liner under my bare bottom.

Number of sexual partners in the past year: one. Gender of partner: male.

“So, you’re in a relationship?” She looks up from her clipboard. “How long?”

“Six years.”

“Wow, congratulations!” A warm smile. “So, are you thinking about kids?”

The gears in my brain catch and stop turning. My forehead is suddenly jelly. The drape slips and I pull it closer, keenly aware of my nakedness underneath.

“We’re kicking that can down the road,” I say.

She laughs. “Understood. Just wanted to bring it up, because …”

“I know,” I say. It’s all there on the form.

* * *

My first memory. I am standing at the far end of the hallway, square in line with the bedroom door and the four-poster bed beyond it. There are lights in the canopy, three yellow hollows, and they reflect spaceship beams in the mirrored headboard. I am small, and the floor is close, and the lights are high and bright.

The walls and ceiling are dark and distant. I can feel them looming, hear fantastic hissing creatures in the corners. The bed is a spaceship, and I am standing in the dark, my heart beating cold.

She’s there, in the bed. My mother. I can just make out the pink swell of her belly over the rumpled patchwork quilt. Maybe a sliver of pale forehead above it, and a mop of pillow-mussed dark curls above that. Or maybe not. I am 3 years old and will remember this only in gulps and shivers.

Her belly is full of my siblings. A brother and a sister. They will emerge soon, my father keeps saying. In the meantime, she’s not feeling well. She needs to stay in bed. Later. You’ll see her later.

I watch her breathing. This is not my mother, my fluttering mother, always dashing from room to room, picking up this, noticing that. This is not my playful, silly mother, who reads picture books aloud with an actor’s breathlessness and uses her bare hands to crush cornflakes for salmon patties.

This still, barely-breathing, exhausted creature is not my mother. She is resting, not quite asleep, and I am not allowed to go to her, to see for myself what she really is. Or maybe I am allowed, but terror roots me to the floor.

* * *

Growing up in Silicon Valley, we learn the word “drought.” Drought comes in cycles. There’s less and less and less rain, over a year or two or maybe three. We ration our water use, turn off the tap when we brush our teeth, time our showers. Then suddenly the winds shift and the currents change and everything is blessedly watered again.

For years, I assume that “drought” is synonymous with “summer.” The season of no water, ending each year with the autumn rains. I watch the grasses in the hills turn from plump and green to dry and brown.

I know intellectually that droughts can stretch over years, that rain is relative, that brown grass thrives in summer. But still, I breathe a tiny sigh of relief when the first raindrop hits my nose every fall.

* * *

I’m kicking my feet at the end of the exam table. My mother sits in a chair alongside. Age: 13. Reason for visit: Missed periods. Number of sexual partners: zero.

This is the doctor I will see for 15 years before the practice closes. Dark hair, pink lipstick, lab coat, stethoscope. White clipboard. Low stool. Reading.

“So, how long has it been since your last period?”

“Ten months.”

The doctor raises her eyebrows. “It’s good you waited this long before coming in. At your age, menstruation can be extremely irregular. Just … not this irregular.”

“I know,” I say. It’s been over a year since the first streak in my underpants at summer camp, so dark I mistook it for dirt. Since then, I’ve menstruated twice: once in September, once in January. It’s now October. I’ve started wearing red sweatpants on airplanes, just in case. My mother tucks menstrual pads into the pockets of all my jackets and suitcases, a habit I will keep up — unnecessarily — for years.

“Well, there’s a couple things that could be going on. If you’re OK with it, I’ll do a visual assessment here and then send you to Pat down the hall for a blood draw.” She pulls a pair of blue vinyl gloves from a box on the wall. “Do I have your permission to conduct an external pelvic exam?”

I have no idea what an external pelvic exam is. “Sure.”

She pauses, puts her hand gently on my arm. “Oh, one more thing. You’re not pregnant, right?”

My forehead is jelly. “Right.”

“OK, good.” She breaks out in a hearty laugh. I laugh too, as cheerily as I can manage.

* * *

Throughout my childhood, there are galloping fires in the mountains each summer. We hear about them on the news: ignited by a lightning strike or a smoldering campfire or a cigarette butt, fattened on the sticks and straw left from months of waning water. Sometimes, on road trips, we see the aftermath of a smaller fire: a swath of black hillside, pierced by naked trees.

Each fire is a renewal, I’m told, a violent stripping of the old to make way for the new and green. There are some plants in the California chaparral that reproduce only after the intense heat of a wildfire. Pine cones release seeds; oak trees sprout fresh stems from burnt trunks; wildflowers germinate and bloom.

Her belly is full of my siblings. A brother and a sister. They will emerge soon, my father keeps saying. In the meantime, she’s not feeling well. She needs to stay in bed. Later. You’ll see her later.


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* * *

“You see these two numbers here? The ones labeled FSH and LH?”

The lab sheet is dense with text. I follow the doctor’s pen as it traces around the two numbers. I am 13, and last week I had my feet in stirrups for the first time and needles sipping blood from my veins.

She explains, scratching diagrams and doodles on the back of the lab sheet. Hormone ratios, triglycerides, body mass index (I press my hands together between my chubby, chafing thighs). She draws a little ovary studded with cysts — a string of pearls winding around a grape.

Polycystic ovarian syndrome, she says. It’ll keep me from menstruating, make it hard to keep off the weight I’m already gaining. The most urgent thing now is to make sure I’m shedding the uterine lining each month; if it sits undisturbed for too long, it could grow cancerous.

She hands my mother a prescription for progesterone. “Just to get things started, and then we’ll switch to oral contraceptives for the long term.” And to me, “When you want to get pregnant, we’ll need to talk.”

I nod. My siblings and I were conceived via fertility treatments when my mother was in her 30s. I have time.

* * *

The progesterone makes me sob furiously. My hormones swell and peak each time I take a pill. When I switch to birth control, the crying eases. In its place I feel a growing restlessness, an urge to move out of my body and find a new one.

Over time, I get used to the routine. Every year, a pelvic exam, a panel of tests. I learn to grit my teeth and look away during the blood draw, waiting for the deep sting of needle meeting vein. Sometimes the phlebotomist misses — my veins are slim and deep — and I walk away with bruises.

I stay on birth control throughout high school and college. Twice a month, I get vicious cramps; once a month, I bleed. Each time, it becomes easier to pretend it’s the real thing.

* * *

I am 3 years old, standing in the hall, and there are things I do not understand. I do not understand that my mother is small too, only five feet tall, and that my siblings are straining her body to its limit. That the contractions began in month five — before the babies could survive outside her body — and start up again every time she stands. That she is lying in bed because her body is in revolt, and bed rest is what’s keeping my siblings alive.

I do not yet understand that she has been through this before. A fraught end to her first pregnancy with me, a first bodily revolt. In her seventh month she began having trouble removing her wedding ring. The vision in her left eye slowly dulled, until she couldn’t see out of it.

I was due in March; her water broke on New Year’s Eve. When she arrived at the hospital, the doctors diagnosed preeclampsia, a dangerous spike in blood pressure that had inflated her fingers and muted her vision. The only cure was to birth me. But I was too small to be safely born.

The philosophy behind bed rest is simple: Counteract gravity. My mother was laid flat for a week in the hospital, kept in a state of suspension while the doctors carefully dosed me with steroids and waited until my tiny lungs could pump air on their own. Then they let her contrary body take over, pushing me into the stark hospital light, scrawny and wide-eyed and — fortunately — screaming.

‘Polycystic ovarian syndrome,’ she says. It’ll keep me from menstruating, make it hard to keep off the weight I’m already gaining. The most urgent thing now is to make sure I’m shedding the uterine lining each month; if it sits undisturbed for too long, it could grow cancerous.

* * *

As I grow older, I can feel the summers getting longer, hotter. The rain takes longer to arrive each fall. The hills dry up faster, turning from spring green to summer brown before I can fully register the change.

There are fewer small fires. When the forest ignites — as it inevitably does — the fires leap up hotter and higher. We hear of flames crawling closer to the homes and towns that push into the forest.

* * *

The summer before my senior year of college, I go to Russia for six weeks. Without consulting my doctor, without telling my parents, I decide not to bring my birth control pills with me. I’m 21, single, and curious. Just curious.

Without a complaint, my body simply dries up. No bleeding. No cramps. For a whole summer, no movement in my reproductive tract.

* * *

We’re on our way from Pskov to Nizhny Novgorod. The van bumps and rattles on the rutted road. The other students are asleep or lost at the windows.

I’m chatting with the director of the program, an elegant lady with close-cropped dark hair. We talk about the cold summer rain that lashes St. Petersburg, how I still get startled seeing rain in the summer.

I lift my eyes to the view outside, watch the chilly mist collect on the van windows. “If I ever have kids, I’m going to adopt,” I say, more decisively than I feel.

Her eyes widen. “Good for you,” she says.

* * *

I come home from Russia and start the pills again. My body obediently bleeds.

* * *

Mega-drought. A drought lasting decades instead of years. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the area that we now call California went dry for hundreds of years. We see the evidence in the ring patterns of thousand-year-old tree trunks; the trees grew tall in dry lake beds, then drowned when the rains returned.

In the 1930s, the Dust Bowl — our closest memory of catastrophic drought — scorched the Great Plains for most of a decade. It turned farms into windy wastelands and sent families fleeing west to California. That was an ordinary drought. Mega-droughts last three, four, five times as long. We do not remember what it’s like to live for 50 years without rain.

* * *

“Are you in love with him?”

If the question came from anyone else, I would bristle. But this is my mother’s childhood friend Pam, whom I’ve known all my life. She’s the daughter — adopted — of my grandmother’s best friend, a woman with a raucous laugh and wild storytelling streak. I grew up knowing Pam’s vivaciousness, so like and yet unlike her mother’s. She has a daughter my age who shares her soprano speaking voice, her waterfall of red hair.

I’ve been seeing this guy, the guy who will eventually inspire the new doctor to ask me the question. Pam holds her wine glass with both palms, looks at me expectantly.

“I guess I am,” I say.

* * *

We’re driving in the rain, the two of us. The road is slick, headlight reflections blurring into lane lines. I’m 26, he’s 27, and I’m testing him.

“So, if you end up wanting biological kids, that’s going to be … complicated with me. Because of my health stuff.”

“I mean.” He shrugs. “I’m not opposed to kids, but I’m definitely not ready for them right now. We have time.”

“I understand that. But we’ll need to decide eventually, and it will actually be a decision, you know? We can’t just wing it.”

“That’s fine. I’m happy to take my cues from you.”

“But that’s the thing. I don’t know what I want. And you’ll have equal say in whatever path we decide to follow, so …”

“Now, hold on.” He turns to look at me. “I do not have equal say. It’s your body. We can do exactly as much or as little as you want.”

He’s passed the test. And yet I’m slightly deflated that he’s not throwing me a rope.

* * *

“So, that’s why I’m not eating honey right now. Because of the baby.”

I hear my friend over my shoulder, from the kitchen where I’m pouring myself a drink. At first I think I’ve misheard her, or she’s making a joke. She’s sitting neatly tucked into the table, so I can’t sneak a peek at her belly.

I thought I’d imagined her looking fuller and smoother, though her complexion is of the luminous kind anyway. It all clicks together — the new wedding ring on her finger, the house she and her partner just bought.

“I thought the honey thing is after the baby’s born,” I offer, feebly. We’re all so clueless, the people at this party. Young, urban professionals with cats instead of children.

She’s telling someone the story. It was an accident, a hiccup in birth control. She didn’t realize it for months, until the doctor at her annual exam said, “You didn’t tell me you were pregnant!”

I cup my wine glass in my palm and stare numbly across the room. I can feel the weight of my dry uterus, remember what happened when I played fast and loose with my pills.

When I get back to my boyfriend’s house after the party, I drop onto the couch and sob.

As I grow older, I can feel the summers getting longer, hotter. The rain takes longer to arrive each fall. The hills dry up faster, turning from spring green to summer brown before I can fully register the change.

* * *

There’s a mega-drought coming, scientists say. It’s the swing of a natural cycle, made more violent by the weight of humans on the earth. Dust Bowl refugees sought relief here in the West, and someday we will be seared hotter than they ever were.

I wonder how long California will be livable, how long we’ll be able to drag water into the desert.

* * *

She knew, going in. After me, after the illness, the early birth. She chose to become pregnant again, not easily, with medical help. And in my first memory I am forever 3 years old, standing in the hall, and there are two babies in a body that already fought back against one.

Eventually they, too, will make an early entrance under the hospital lights, screaming. My father will take me to see them in their hospital bassinets, one pink bundle and one blue bundle. One pair of brown eyes and one pair of blue, staring back at me through the nursery window.

They are small, too, but larger than I was, pinker-cheeked and plumper. They will be fine. She will be fine.

* * *

He zips the wedding dress up my back. I step back from the mirror and take myself in. They’re all there, the signs of PCOS, written on my body over the years: the heavy hips and arms and face and belly, the thicket of dark hair above my upper lip, the bald spots in and among my carefully pinned curls.

“You look gorgeous,” he says, and kisses my neck.

During the ceremony, our friends’ surprise son — now nearly 3 — begins shrieking with excitement. I’d expected this, half-hoped for it, and I laugh to see the joy in his eyes. The rabbi gently jokes about being upstaged, and the child’s father whisks him away to run circles on the lawn.

* * *

Every so often, I catch glimpses of imaginary children. Sometimes in our bedroom, standing in a pile of clothes, wriggling tiny arms into jacket sleeves. Sometimes in the kitchen, perched on a stepstool, clutching a wooden spoon in one hand.

They never have faces, these children. All I can see is the backs of their heads, the color of their hair. Sometimes dark brown, like my husband’s and mine. Sometimes blond, sometimes black. I try to turn them around, to paste on facial features, my husband’s full lips, my amber-brown eyes. Is the color of their cheeks lighter than mine? Darker? About the same? I never can tell. They evaporate too quickly.

* * *

I am 30 years old. It rained all winter, and in the spring the wildflowers carpeted the hills so thickly you could see them from space. Now it’s summer, and the temperature has shot up and melted the newly fallen snowpack, dried fresh undergrowth into tinder.

Nature seems especially ferocious this year. I am hearing stories of extremes: too much rain in wet areas, and too much heat in dry ones. Along the crowded coasts, hurricanes are striking with frightening violence. Work colleagues in Houston and Florida are living out of suitcases, their homes flooded. In Puerto Rico, residents are living without power, drinking contaminated water.

And there is fire, too, closer to home. In the Pacific Northwest, whole swaths of the Cascades are ablaze. My friends in Portland and Seattle say the smoke is so thick that it eclipses the sun.

* * *

“I keep thinking about time,” says the man I married. “I already feel like I don’t have enough time to do a good job at all the things I’m currently doing. How will I be able to do all of that, and have a kid?”

He’s curled into himself on the couch, his voice thick with tears. He’s afraid to tell me this. Afraid that he’s somehow saying the wrong thing.

I don’t know how to respond. How to tell him that it’s about time for me, too. Time on my body’s clock. Time ticking down until a switch flips and I can definitively say “I want this” or “I don’t.” Historical time, the Dust Bowl, how we don’t know what it’s like to see our home turned from cozy to crucible. Geologic time, and knowing how soon the earth will reject us altogether.

I don’t know how to say these things to him. Instead, I pull him in for a hug, kiss his eyelids, make soothing noises.

* * *

“Twenty-seven years,” my father says. “Can you believe it?”

My brother grins, and my sister rolls her eyes. It’s a familiar script, one we all act out every year around this time. They lean together, two curly, brown heads, and blow. The candles flicker and extinguish in parallel trails of smoke.

My mother picks a candle out of the cake, pops the unburnt end in her mouth to lick off the chocolate frosting. “Of course,” she adds, “it was a challenge keeping you guys inside long enough.” This is it, the closest she ever comes to a complaint. She gives each twin a one-armed hug, a kiss on the head.

I wonder how sharp her early inklings must have been. She fought to become pregnant, twice, and her body fought back. And when her troublesome babies were born, she told us the stories of our births in her amazed actor-voice, full of warmth and wonder.

I have none of her certainty. I have only faceless glimpses of imaginary children, and they frighten me. But if I imagine a life without them, I feel chilled and unmoored. I think of the kindly new doctor in her gray hijab, and exhaustion washes over me. I’m tired of the needles, the questions, cataloging signs of illness in the mirror.

I think of the mega-drought, and of my mother in bed, and of Pam and her lively mother and red-headed daughter. It occurs to me that these things may never truly coalesce into “want.”

* * *

The day after the twins’ birthday, Sonoma County catches fire. 100 miles to the north of us, towns and vineyards burn to the ground. People tumble out of their cozy homes, grand estates, mobile home parks, and flee. Hundreds are overcome by the smoke, or outrun by the flames. Newspapers publish aerial shots of blasted neighborhoods: orderly rows of flattened houses, shade trees stripped of their leaves.

When the winds shift, a soupy haze blows south over our neighborhood. The street lights blur in the evenings, as if the usual morning fog got its daily route confused. The air tastes like ash and rubber.

My husband and I go out dancing on a Friday night, the night of the thickest smoke. We walk down the street with our sleeves held to our faces. The dance floor is nearly empty; he takes me in his arms and we waltz in sweeping circles.

This is a new ash-cloud, a warning. The planet groans with people, and someday it will become too hostile for more. The mega-drought is looming, and my insides are dry.

The world is burning, and I am 30 years old, and soon I will have to decide.

* * *

Zoe Fenson lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her essays have appeared in Narratively, The New Republic, The Week, SELF, and elsewhere.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

 

This Month in Books: ‘Everything That We Are and Ever Have Been’

Dear Reader,

This month’s books newsletter has a lot to say about identities — mistaken, misunderstood, transformed, false, fictional or as anonymous as the op-ed.

In his interview with Cooper Lee Bombardier, Thomas Page McBee says that when he transitioned, he “just felt so limited, so suddenly afraid of becoming the kind of man I’d grown up in fear of.” Becoming someone you don’t want to be, he realizes, happens when you have not come to terms with who you already have been, or who you’ve failed to be:

I’m of the belief that we all have to face our own rejected parts — what Jung calls our shadows — in order to genuinely make a cultural shift.

When identities shift, cultures will follow; there is political power generated by self-actualization. As Alana Mohamed writes in her review of Michelle Tea’s essay collection Against Memoir, “It’s a forceful thing, to show up in a world that doesn’t expect you to exist, and to say something it doesn’t expect you to say.” But Mohamed also warns of the erasure of triumph, the cleaning-up inherent in actualization:

[Radical queer women who fought for queer visibility in the ’80s and ’90s] were dying not of marriage inequality, but of addiction, trauma, and poverty. If we forget them and their stories, queer history becomes nothing more than a slogan.

She argues for a cacophony of viewpoints and conflicting definitions: a queerness that “seeks to make room for us to name ourselves,” that is “ever-expanding and ever-in-conflict with itself because of this.” Mohamed imagines a hopeful future for queer identity, for all identity, pointing to the powerful potential of memory and community, even as she probes a deep rift that has breached queer culture — the Rashomon-esque inability of people to remember the same stories or to honor the same heroes: “Who threw the first punch, or glass, or heel at Stonewall? Everyone has their version of what happened that night on June 29, 1969.” A huge feud has developed over the identity of who led the charge.

Preoccupied with this same interplay of history, memory and identity, Christian Kracht’s novel The Dead erases beloved heroes of the Golden Age of film and replaces them with ghoulish impostors, rank fascists and bloviating imperialists: Charlie Chaplin is no longer the crusading satirist who created The Great Dictator, but rather he is the dictator. In his review, J.W. McCormack says this restructuring of famous personalities is an incursion of history into identity, the reality of the 1930s reshaping its legacy, its art:

As cultural monuments in any of the arts prosper, the actual culture that produced them so often plummets — into tyranny, a defiant ignorance, and death.

It’s a startling assertion that who we are and the world we will leave behind are two not-particularly-connected things. Identity can look suddenly like nothing more than another peril in a life full of them, a treacherous path in a dangerous world. “A big part of toxic masculinity is to not question anything about being a man,” McBee says. “It felt to me very dangerous to do so, even in writing this book.” Tea reflects on how her warts-and-all approach to documenting her queer contemporaries was just another way of hurting them: “It’s one thing to discuss your family’s trauma with other family; it’s another thing entirely to release their stories to a world that doesn’t love them.” In Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, when a man misstates a murdered woman’s identity, it provokes a mob of online harassers to cast doubt on his:

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And, as Levi Vonk writes in his review of Mario Chard’s poetry collection Land of Fire, identity is a tool of state power, predicated on arbitrary qualities, such as through which entrance you entered a space. And “as soon it is determined that the bird has not entered through the door — the only legitimate entrance — everything unravels”:

How did the bird get inside the house?
Through the door I said.
No. Through a window. Listen they said How did the
bird get inside the house?

The questioning continues until it has abstracted all qualities of the bird:

The bird is nameless. Who named the bird?
I said No one. The bird is nameless.
What is your name? They said.
I am nameless I said.

In her interview with Bridey Heing, Olivia Laing says she wrote her sort-of-autofictional novel Crudo to interrogate such rigid categorizations, to ask “How does one learn to be less selfish? How does one learn to soften one’s borders?” She says:

It’s a personal question, but it’s also a political question. That’s the same force that leads people to say “I don’t want immigrants in my country.”


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On the other hand, in her interview with Ryan Chapman, novelist Ling Ma asks, more or less, what has identity got to do with anything? Her protagonist, she says, became exasperated with her when she wrote an immigration narrative for the character’s family. The character refused to even tell the story, thinking it pointless:

That was really difficult to write because I feel like any time a character is a minority, their narrative is automatically an immigration narrative. Growing up I used to get asked the question where do you come from? I grew up in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas, so you would hear that a lot.

I was just like, Can we just not have a character who needs to explain how she got to the U.S.? I think my difficulty with that came through. With chapter sixteen, there’s no first person. I couldn’t get Candace to talk about it. When I was writing it she was going, This is really cheesy, I’m not a part of this. So I had an omniscient narrator and then let her take over that chapter gradually.

Catherine Lacey, in an interview with Tobias Carroll, doesn’t get into debates with her characters about identity. Instead, she inhabits their identities so thoroughly that she marvels at how she has ended up writing something she would never say herself:

I don’t know. I don’t even remember quite where I was when I wrote that [story] to be honest. I think that one just came like from that character. I’m not sure if I would ever say that. In my life, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t use that description, at least in an honest way. But that character, he just said that….

I feel like when I’m writing in a place that’s really authentic and honest, it does feel a little bit like acting in a way. And then, I’m creating some sort of character, and then I’m just performing that character, and typing what they say.

This slipperiness of self isn’t just for fiction writers; you really never can know quite who you are going to become — you might die before it happens. As Susan Hand Shetterly writes in Seaweed Chronicles: A World at Water’s Edge, the British algae scientist Kathleen Drew-Baker never set foot in Japan, and yet, years after her death, her discoveries “revolutionized the harvest and consumption of seaweed in that country.” Now she is revered in Japan as the Mother of the Sea. You can visit her shrine. In death we become godlike, our small achievements in life having profound, ripple-like effects on the future; we take our exalted place in the grand human story.

(Kracht, of course, takes a different position: “The dead are profoundly lonesome creatures, there is no solidarity among them, they are all born alone, die, and are reborn alone as well.”)

So how to proceed? Be careful, Lacey warns. Remember your identity is porous:

I feel like I’m always making language out of the language that’s around me… I’m very careful. I don’t really watch a lot of series. I pretty much only watch a TV series if I’m on a plane, and I’m like really careful about what I read and when I read it. And I’m careful about who I talk to and who I spend my time around. I think it’s true for everybody, but I can’t really say it for everybody, but for me, it’s definitely true that I’m always writing a story out of the language that I surround myself with.

And as McBee points out, there is one upside to identity — most of who you are is in the past:

I’ve come to realize that everyone passes. Most of us aren’t walking around with our souls out all the time, being everything that we are and ever have been.

Dana Snitzky
Books Editor
@danasnitzky

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A Trip to Tolstoy Farm

Illustration by Giselle Potter

Jordan Michael Smith | Longreads | September 2018 | 29 minutes (7,903 words)

“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”

— Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness

* * *

Huw Williams is not a hermit. Not exactly. For one thing, he answers a telephone while I’m visiting him. The phone connects to a jack somewhere, although I don’t understand how it can function properly; it seems impossible that a cabin so rudimentary and run-down could support something as technologically advanced as a telephone.

The floors are covered with broken power tools, a machete, unmarked VHS tapes, decades-old newspapers and knocked-over litter boxes once filled by the three cats prowling around. Stenches of urine and filth are masked only by the rot on the stove, where the remains of long-ago meals are eating through the pans they were prepared in. And the cabin is so cold that when anyone speaks, breath becomes vapor.

Dried-out orange peels hang from the ceiling. “It’s a way of breaking up the straight lines,” the 76-year-old Williams tells me cryptically. “I’m averse to being inside a box, with all straight lines.” A radio plays environmental talk radio here in Edwall, a tiny community about 35 miles by car from Spokane, Washington. The radio is part of an ’80s-style dual cassette player, but the trays where the cassettes should go are broken off.

When I came upon Williams’ cabin on a wet afternoon last September, I assumed it was empty. My GPS couldn’t locate it, and neighbors were unsure if it was inhabited. Rusted-out trucks and cars surround the house, which is up on a slight hill atop a dirt road that bisects another dirt road that runs off a few other dirt roads.

But for all his isolation, Williams is not hiding. He grew up on this land, which his parents ran as a cattle and wheat farm. He moved back here in the 1970s after his first wife ran off with their friend and took the kids. He also lived here with his second wife, until she too left him for another man. Anybody could find him, if anybody cared to. Maybe that’s the hardest part.

Williams has prostate cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, melanomas, multiple sclerosis, and he thinks he might be bipolar. He speaks slowly and softly, as if he might run out of breath at any second. He looks the Unabomber part, with his long beard and ragged clothing. But then, he was idiosyncratic even when he used to get out more. He hitchhiked across the country to protest nuclear war, got arrested a time or two, and, after going through a brief celibate period, was a swinger who had sex with his wife’s boyfriend’s mother. Most spectacularly, in 1963 he founded a 240-acre farm nearby that is among the longest-lasting remnants of the ‘60s communes that Charles Manson gave a bad name to. And it was based on the teachings of Leo Tolstoy. Read more…

An Immoderate Novel for an Immoderate Season: An Interview with Olivia Laing

The great North American total eclipse of 2017. John Finney / Getty

Bridey Heing | Longreads | September 2018 | 10 minutes (2,761 words)

 

As a non-fiction writer, Olivia Laing has made a name for herself by writing deeply empathic explorations of creativity and the human condition. Her 2011 debut, To The River, situates the River Ouse, in North Yorkshire, within history and culture, from its role in 13th century battles to the death of Virginia Woolf. Her follow-up, 2013’s The Trip to Echo Spring, focused on American writers and alcoholism. Her 2015 book, The Lonely City, interrogated loneliness as a state of being and as a catalyst for art. But with her fiction debut, Laing has pulled back from the closely researched subjects that have been her wheelhouse; instead, she broadly documents a seven-week span of time. And yet her  penchant for research still peaks through — the narrative is written from the perspective of a fictionalized Kathy Acker-esque avatar, whose books Laing kept piled around her for inspiration while she wrote.

Crudo opens with the resignation of Steve Bannon, which Kathy, a soon-to-be newlywed, follows on social media from a Tuscan resort. Her attention ricochets between the rapidly unfolding news cycle playing out online and her private world of friends, her upcoming wedding, and, eventually, adjusting to life with her new husband. As she writes and prepares for her first trip overseas without her husband, Kathy charts the frenetic energy of the summer of 2017, unsure of whether the end of the world is truly approaching.

That sense of confusion was what Laing sought to capture. She wrote the book in real-time, with carefully outlined rules that were designed to ensure she didn’t deviate from the emotional responses to a specific whirlwind moment. Kathy, who is based in part on Kathy Acker, is also based on Laing, who turned forty and got married within the time frame of the novel. Crudo was conceived of as a means of understanding the impossible speed at which the news seemed to move, while also preserving the feeling of instability and uncertainty she saw in herself and those around her. Read more…

Weighing the Costs — and Occasional Benefits — of Ethnic Ambiguity

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Aram Mrjoian | Longreads | September 2018 | 16 minutes (3,949 words)

 

At the beginning of 7th grade, sitting toward the back of a column of brown laminate desks, I was first told I had an emerging unibrow. Michigan still radiated of summer. The September air hugged my skin. I was lanky and undefined, a soon-to-be teenager who’d bought into the culture of extreme sports, so I wore oversized cargo shorts and a baggy t-shirt that hung down to my knees. At the time, skaters like me were prone to wearing clothes that didn’t fit well, as if swimming around in an extra large negated the fragility of our young bodies.

Our German class, an introductory course more focused on the country’s culture than language acquisition, was mostly filled with young men. It had the reputation for being a blow-off, less intellectually strenuous than Spanish or French. Originally from Deutschland, Mr. E liked to play old clips of Michael Schumacher celebrating Formula One racing victories in glamorous locales — Monaco or Barcelona. This pastime lent itself to the underlying masculinity of the classroom.

One morning, while we were supposed to read a conversation from the textbook aloud with a partner, the boy sitting in front of me pivoted around in his desk. “You have to shave that or something,” he goaded, pointing toward my forehead. I spent the next five minutes trying to convince him he was mistaken. We ignored the scripted dialogue in front of us. He didn’t let it go. From then on the shrinking gap between my eyebrows became a daily topic of conversation. He brought other kids in our area of the classroom in on the joke. I worried that if I removed the fuzz I would only set myself up for more ridicule.

A week or so into that school year, the Twin Towers fell. I was in math class, algebra, which was taught by a skeletal man with a thick mustache and ponytail. He wore corduroy pants most days, a mug of burnt-smelling coffee glued to his right hand. He was the type to squat down next to the desk and talk to students face to face. We knew something was wrong when he turned on the television while we scribbled proofs in our workbooks. The class watched the news in stunned silence. By lunchtime, we were sent home. A few days later, my neighbor in German class gave me a new nickname: “Arama bin Laden.”

By the end of the semester, I started plucking the mess of black hairs bridging the space above my nose. I couldn’t tolerate the worms wriggling toward each other across my face, hinting that I was different. I bleached my hair. I found numerous ways to blend in, but nothing could change the five foreign syllables of my full name, the simple alteration of the first that transformed me into a terrorist.

I did have something of an out, need be. My parents, with remarkable foresight, had given me the middle name Joseph so that I could go by AJ. It was a failsafe designed precisely for such circumstances. A last resort for retroactive assimilation. However, I never used my initials. It always felt unnatural to me, having been called by my given name since I was born. Seventh grade was the first time I realized my name could be used against me. I learned that to be an unknown was to be other, that to be difficult to pronounce was to be threatening, and that to be ethnically ambiguous was to be somehow less American.

Read more…

J.R.’s Jook and the Authenticity Mirage

Jose More / VWPics via AP Images

Greg Brownderville | Southwest Review | February 2018 | 23 minutes (4,227 words)

A native of the storied Delta region and a musician from the age of 6, I have met quite a few veteran bluesmen. The one who towers tallest in my memory is J.R. Hamilton. When I met J.R., in 2005, he was a slender, sturdy man in his 60s with the spark of a 20-something. Six days a week, he worked on a 4,500-acre farm near Marvell (pronounced marvel), a small town on the Arkansas side of the Delta. Sundays, he played the blues. In the years between 2005 and 2008, I played guitar and harmonica regularly at his Sunday parties. Shortly thereafter, J.R. moved to Memphis, I to Missouri, and my days as a member of his band came to an end.

I met J. R. the way folks meet folks in the Delta. The first part of this story, I warn you, sounds rather cartoonishly Southern, but is nevertheless true: One evening, just before dark, I stopped for pulled pork at a place in Marvell called Shadden’s Barbecue. A woman I had never met, named Pudding, sat down next to me at the communal table where diners dig in. We fell immediately into lively conversation. Toward the end of the meal, when I mentioned in passing that I played music, Pudding said if I wasn’t in a hurry, I should follow her out to “J.R.’s jook house” and sit in with the local blues band. I didn’t know exactly what I was in for, but it’s a matter of principle with me that when a delightful stranger named Pudding says to follow her to a jook, I say yes, ma’am. Read more…

The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Perfume

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | September 2018 | 15 minutes (3,859 words)

If given the choice to smell like whale excrement or delicate white flowers, few people would chose the first option. Bile, feces, vomit, and animal oils sound as though they would smell repulsive. The words conjure up scent memories of that time your dog released his anal glands on the duvet, or that summer you worked by the wharf and the August air was thick with the miasma of oily herring heads. Jasmine, on the other hand, sounds like a love song, a Disneyfied dream. Try, right now, to imagine the smell of blooming jasmine. Your memory, ill-equipped to locate scents in its baroque filing system, might pull up something syrupy sweet or softly floral. Is that how you want your body to smell?

Too bad: if you choose door number two, you’ll walk away reeking of sharp vegetal tones tempered by a slightly earthy, foul scent. Jasmine absolute is an oily, semi-viscid, dark amber fluid that is denser and more concentrated than jasmine essential oil. Essential oils come from distilled, boiled, or pressed plant matter, while absolutes are traditionally made through a processed called enfleurage, which involves submerging the delicate blossoms or spices in fat before extracting their fragrance molecules into a tincture of ethyl alcohol. While it’s a common ingredient in a natural perfumer’s tool kit, jasmine absolute smells strange: complicated, beautiful, not entirely pleasurable. It reeks of indole (rhymes with “enroll”), an organic chemical compound also found in coal tar, human feces, and decomposing bodies.

If you choose door number one, you’ll be blessed with the kiss of ambergris, a highly desirable natural substance that smells sweet yet rather marine, like vanilla and unrefined sugar mixed with seawater. The scent reminds me a little of the smell of my dog’s paws — pink and light and animal. It smells like cashmere feels. Smelling ambergris is an innate pleasure, one that even an infant would recognize as enjoyable, like the first sip of sweet milk.

For more than a thousand years, humans have been adorning our bodies with animal products like ambergris and putrid-smelling plant derivatives like jasmine absolute. We apply off-putting materials to our bodies to enhance and mask our natural scents. Like dogs that roll in deer carcasses, humans seek to change our olfactory emissions by borrowing from other creatures. It’s not always about simply smelling good: We want to smell complex, so that others will be compelled to keep coming back, like bees to a flower, to sniff us again and again, to revel in our scents, and draw ever closer to our warm, damp parts.

According to natural perfumer Charna Ethier, ambergris can smell like “golden light” or a “flannel shirt that has been dried on a clothes line on a warm summer day.” Although there are several types of ambergris (including gray, gold, and white), Ethier is referring to her own personal sample, which she characterizes as “soft, fresh, and ozonic.” Ethier is the owner of Providence Perfume Company in Rhode Island, and inside her well-stocked cabinet of olfactory curiosities, she keeps a single bottle of the precious stuff. Next to her 100-year-old cade oil (a foul-smelling liquid made from juniper trees, purchased at an estate sale) and below her collection of floral absolutes and herbal essences, she has stashed a bit of ambergris tincture. The clear glass vial contains a mixture of ambergris and alcohol that includes just 5 percent whale matter. In its pure form, this substance is a waxy gray ball of animal secretion, a floating fat-berg that is “more expensive than gold.” Unlike jasmine absolute, which plays a role in many of her perfumes, real ambergris is simply too expensive to use in a commercial product. “It’s considered the miracle ingredient for perfumes,” she says. “It makes everything better.”

It’s not always simply about smelling good: We want to smell complex, so that others will be compelled to keep coming back, like bees to a flower, to sniff us again and again, to revel in our scents, and draw ever closer to our warm, damp parts.

Ethier doesn’t use any synthetics in her perfume, nor does she use animal products, though animal scents are a traditional ingredient in perfumery. Not only are these compounds expensive, but true mammalian products like musk, civet, and ambergris often come at a cruel cost. Whales have been murdered for their oily blubber and concealed stomach bile, civets are caged and prodded for their fear-induced anal gland secretions, and musk is harvested from the glands of slaughtered deer. Many people know that perfumers build their trade on the graves of millions of tiny white flowers, but fewer people realize they also bottle and sell the byproducts of animal pain and suffering. Perfumers who use synthetic materials are exempt, in a sense, as are those who use found or vintage materials. Ethier’s ambergris is “quite old” and reportedly  beach-found (“I hope it is,” she says). But even perfumes that use synthetic compounds or salvaged bile carry the whiff of death; the history of the industry is seeped in it, and that smell doesn’t wash out easily.

There’s a reason perfumers use these notes. They enhance the floral scents, undercutting lightness with a reminder of darkness. Animal products are the antiheroes in this drama — even when you hate them, you still, just a little, love them. That’s how siren songs work, and ambergris sings the loudest. Once, Ethier made a perfume using her most prized ingredients. She mixed 100-year-old sandalwood essence with ambergris tincture and frangipane and boronia absolutes, two flowers native to Central America and Tasmania, respectively. It was the first time she’d used ambergris, and this one-off perfume was so lovely that “it was like gold-washing something.” She remembers wistfully, “It was so beautiful.”

* * *

Smell is the most underrated and mysterious sense. In her 1908 autobiography, The World I Live In, Helen Keller called scent the “fallen angel.” “For some inexplicable reason, smell does not hold the high position it deserves amongst its sisters,” she wrote. Keller mapped her world by smell — she could smell a coming storm hours before it arrived and knew when lumber had been harvested from her favorite copse of trees by the sharp scent of pine. In contrast to touch, which she called “permanent and definite,” Keller experienced odors as “fugitive” sensations. Touch guided her; scent fed her. Without smell, Keller imagined her world would be lacking “light, color, and the Protean spark. The sensuous reality which interthreads and supports all the gropings of my imagination would be shattered.”

We don’t often think in terms of color and light when it comes to smell, perhaps because we have so few words for scent that we borrow from the lexicons of our other senses. Despite the fact that smell is our most ancient sense — our so-called “lizard brain” is also sometimes termed the rhinencephalon, literally the “nose brain” — it is also one that seems to elude language. “Smell is the mute sense, the one without words,” wrote Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses. “Lacking a vocabulary, we are left tongue-tied, groping for words in a sea of inarticulate pleasures and exaltation.” We’ve had eons to come up with words for the precise smell of fresh-turned earth or the exact scent of a blazing beach fire, and still the best we can do is earthy and smoky.

Perfumers have their own language, but their words have only recently begun to trickle down into popular culture through beauty magazines and blogs. Not only do perfumers and their superfans speak of absolutes, oils, and tinctures, but they can also rattle off compounds like coumarin and eugenol. A trained master perfumer (or “nose”) can pick out precise scents within a layered perfume. They don’t just call something foul — they can pick out the pungency of musk or the reek of tobacco, ingredients that are delicious in small doses but overwhelming when used out of balance.

In my quest to understand the appeal of seemingly repugnant ingredients, I spoke with doctors who study the nose, perfumers who feed the organ, and even a zookeeper who spends her days breathing in the pure, undiluted scent of civet discharge. While they had various theories as to why darkness seems to be an essential element of beauty, they all agreed on one thing: It’s all about context. In the right context, even the smell of death can be appealing. In the right context, vomit can be more desirable than gold. In the right context, with the right music playing in the background, you begin to root for the glamorous hit woman or the sardonic drug dealer.

They also agreed that sex is part of this equation, and it’s the easiest explanation to trot out. But perfumery is also about more than just smelling nice and attracting a mate. It’s about aesthetics, taste, and desire in a more general sense. We want to smell intoxicating, and truly intoxicating things are often a little bit nasty — they have an edge that cuts deeper than simple sensory pleasure. And despite how it may seem, encounters with the beautiful are rarely entirely enjoyable. If that were the case, Thomas Kinkade’s light-dappled cottages would be considered the height of fine art, and we would all walk around misted lightly with synthetic jasmine and fake orange blossom. Instead, we adore the luscious gore of Caravaggio’s canvases and dab our pulse points with concoctions containing the miasma of swamp rot, the cloying smell of feces, and the pungent, tonsil-kicking fetor of death. Beauty is sharp, it is intense, and it comes at a cost. Just as desire and repulsion walk through the same corridors of our minds, so too do beauty and destruction move hand in hand. Whenever you find something unbearably beautiful, look closer and you’ll see the familiar shadow of decay.

* * *

One of the first known perfumers in history was a woman named Tapputi-Belatekallim. According to clay cuneiform tablets dating back to 1200 BCE, Tapputi lived in ancient Babylon and likely worked for a king. The second part of her name, “Belatekallim,” indicates that she was head of her own household, in addition to holding a valued position at court. Thousands of years before the advent of the “SheEO,” Tapputi was leaning in and bossing around underlings. She was a master of her craft, and recognized as such by her peers. Much of what we know about her comes from secondary sources, but the process of distilling and refining ingredients to produce a fragrant balm — oil, flowers, water, and calamus, a reed-like plant similar to lemongrass — is described on surviving clay tablets. It’s miraculous how modern her scents seem — or rather, it’s surprising how little has changed. Tapputi used scent-extracting techniques like distillation, cold enfleurage, and tincture that natural perfumers still use today. She also mixed grain alcohol with her scents, creating perfumes that were brighter, lighter, and had more staying power than anything else available at the time. These scents may have played a religious role in ancient culture, but they may have simply been another way to prettify the body and please the senses.

Beauty is sharp, it is intense, and it comes at a cost.

Unfortunately, Tapputi’s story is a fragmented one — she’s possibly the first female chemist, and yet she’s been lost to history. There is much more evidence available about the perfumes of ancient Egypt, Persia, and Rome. In 2003, archeologists unearthed the world’s oldest known perfume factory in Cyprus. Archaeologists theorize that this mud-brick building and the perfumes it produced caused Greek worshippers to begin associating the island with Aphrodite, the goddess of sex and love. (Born from the magical remnants of the sky god’s testicles, which had been separated from his body and cast into the sea by Cronos, the Titan god of harvest, Aphrodite supposedly walked from the foaming waters of the sea and onto the beach at Paphos, an ancient settlement located on the southern coast of the island.) Analysis of the material found on-site revealed that these ancient perfumers were using plant-based ingredients like pine, coriander, bergamot, almond, and parsley, among others.

These perfumes all sound rather pleasant, don’t they? I can imagine dabbing almond oil mixed with a bit of bergamot on my wrists, catching a botanical draft of scent here and there as I move. It seems terribly obvious that people may want to smell like plants. Some of the earliest pieces of art represent flowers, leaves, and trees. Studies have shown that we crave symmetry on an unconscious level, and we’re drawn to color, so it makes perfect sense that flowers would hold our attention with their Fibonacci spirals and vivid hues. I can even understand why curiosity might compel someone walking along a beach to pick up a chunk of marine fat and sniff it. It’s a bit harder to understand the moment when medieval perfumers made the conceptual leap from smelling the glandular sacs of dead musk deer to dabbing it on their pulse points. Yet at some point, this must have happened, for starting after the Crusades, Europeans became obsessed with musk.


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Like many prized spices, fabrics, and luxury items, musk came to Europe from the Far East. Derived from the Sanskrit word for testicle, “musk” refers to the glandular products of small male Asian deer. These little sacs of animal juice were harvested from the bodies of slain deer and left to dry in the sun. In its raw form, musk smells like urine, pungent and sharp. But after being left to dry, musk develops a softer scent. The reek of ammonia fades, and it becomes mellow and leathery. It stops smelling like piss and begins to smell like fresh sweat, or the downy crown of a baby’s head. It gained a reputation as an aphrodisiac; according to some legends, Cleopatra used musk oils to seduce Mark Anthony into her bed. The size of musk molecules also contribute to its perfume popularity: Larger molecules oxidize slower, so musk’s comparatively large molecules last longer than other odors and allow it to extend the life of other scents. Its fixative property means musk is a base note in many perfumes, even ones that don’t smell overtly musky.

In 1979, musk deer were listed as an endangered species by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), so it’s no longer legal to use natural musk in commercial perfumes. However, Tibetian musk deer are still killed for their glands, and a brisk trade in poaching has resulted in some illegal musk showing up online. Musk is also used in some traditional Chinese and Korean remedies, which helps the substance remain one of the most valuable animal products on earth. In his book The Fly in the Ointment, Joe Schwarcz, director of the McGill University Office for Science and Society, points out that musk is “more valuable than gold.”

Civet is a more unknown fragrance, though it also appears frequently in perfumes. Made from the glands of a mammal that shares the name of the scent, civet is similar in structure to musk on a molecular level but smells even more animalistic, according to people who have actually sniffed it. “They have a general odor about them that is very pungent,” says Jacqueline Menish, curator of behavioral husbandry at the Nashville Zoo. Civets are uncommon zoo creatures. They are neither felines nor rodents, though they’re commonly mistaken for both. Although few visit the zoo just to glimpse these odd little nocturnal creatures, the Nashville Zoo has several banded palm civets because the zoo director “just loves them.” (You may have heard of civet coffee, a product made by force-feeding Asian palm civets coffee beans, then harvesting them from their poop. Society, it seems, has come up with several odd ways to make money from civet asses.) When they are startled, frightened, or excited, civets “express” their anal glands, and the greasy liquid “shoots right out.” The scent hangs in the air for days. “I guess I could see if it was diluted it might not smell as offensive,” Menish concedes. “But it can be really bad if it hits you.”

Unlike musk, civet can be collected without killing the animal, but it’s not a cruelty-free process. Civets are kept in tiny cages and poked with sticks or frightened with loud noises until they react and spray out their valuable secretions. Commercial perfumers no longer use genuine civet in their fragrances, but James Peterson, a perfumer based in Brooklyn, owns a very small vial of civet tincture. “It smells terrible when you first smell it,” he says. “But I have some that is five years old, and it gets this fruity quality as it ages. In a tincture, it gets this rich scent that works wonderful with florals.” On a few occasions, Peterson has used genuine musk or civet to make “tiny amounts” of specialty perfumes, and the resulting blends have an “intensely erotic draw.” Customers report that these dark and dirty smells are potent aphrodisiacs. “When it’s below the level of consciousness, that’s when it works best,” he adds.

The reek of ammonia fades, and it becomes mellow and leathery. It stops smelling like piss and begins to smell like fresh sweat, or the downy crown of a baby’s head.

Like musk and civet, ambergris comes from an animal, but making it doesn’t necessarily involve murdering whales. Whales have historically been killed for their bodily products, including their oil, spermaceti, and their stomach contents, but it’s more likely now that ambergris is beach-found since it is only produced by an endangered species, sperm whales. The waxy substance forms in the hindgut of a sperm whale to protect their soft interiors from hard, spiky squid beaks. According to Christopher Kemp, author of Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris, ambergris begins as a mass of claw-shaped horns that irritate the whale’s digestive systems. As the mass gets pushed through the whale’s hindgut, it grows and slowly becomes “a tangled indigestible solid, saturated with feces, which begins to obstruct the rectum.” Once it passes into the ocean, it begins to slowly mellow out. The black, tar-like wad is bleached by the ocean until it becomes smooth, pale, and fragrant. It ranges in color from butter to charcoal. The most valuable ambergris is white, then silver, and finally moon-gray and waxy. It’s believed that only 1 percent of the world’s sperm whale population produces ambergris. It’s very rare, very bizarre, and very valuable.

The human appetite for ambergris dates back to ancient times. The Chinese believed it was dragon spit that had fallen into the ocean and hardened, and the ancient Greeks liked to add powdered ambergris to drinks for an extra kick. King Charles II of England liked to eat ambergris with eggs, which was apparently a fairly common practice among the aristocracy in England and the Netherlands. It shouldn’t be surprising that people engaged in some light coprophagia — smell and taste are so deeply linked, and while I can’t attest to the taste of ambergris, I can say that it smells beguiling. Given the chance, I would sprinkle some silvery whale powder on my eggs, just to see what it was like. (It’s certainly no stranger than eating gold-coated chicken wings — another practice seemingly designed to destroy value by passing the desired object through a series of rectums until it reaches the inevitable white bowl.)

In perfume, ambergris is often used to boost other scents. It plays a supporting role rather than a starring one, for although the smell is fascinating, it isn’t very strong. It has an unearthly fragrance. It smells like the sea, but also like sweet grasses and fresh rain. It’s amazing that something made in the bowels of the whale could smell so pure. If you found fresh ambergris, midnight black and sticky and stinking, perhaps you wouldn’t want to eat it. But with distance and dilution, ambergris is transformed from animal garbage to human ambrosia.

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Schwarcz’s book offers one reason why we’re drawn to these scents, citing studies that suggest people with ovaries be more sensitive to musk, particularly around ovulation. He cautiously speculates that musk might resemble chemicals produced in humans to attract potential mates.

Over the phone, he is even more wary of speculating about a possible evolutionary explanation for our fragrance preferences. “The sense of smell has been studied thoroughly with surprisingly little results in terms of what we actually know. It’s such a complicated business,” he said. “We don’t know why musk is more attractive to some people than others. We don’t know why it smells differently when it’s diluted, but we know that it does.” When I asked whether we like musk because we’re programmed to enjoy the smells of bodies, he was quick to turn our talk toward the “issue of pheromones, which “may not actually even exist at all” in humans, despite our desire to attribute various observed phenomenon to the invisible messengers. According to Schwarcz, much of what the general population knows about pheromones only applies to certain nonhuman species. For instance, boar pheromones are well understood, easy to replicate, and used by farmers to increase the farrowing rate amongst their stock. Some of the perfumes that boast “real pheromones,” like Jovan Musk and Paris Hilton’s eponymously named scent, may contain pheromone molecules — ones that pigs would find very enticing.

But where science fails to offer a satisfactory explanation, artists can step in, providing an illuminating tool to help understanding our relationship to desire and aesthetics. For perfumer Anne McClain, co-owner of MCMC Fragrances in Brooklyn, it is the tension between foul and sweet that elevates a fragrance from consumer product into the realm of art. This is key when it comes to repugnant ingredients, from indolic florals to musky secretions. The indecent element becomes a secret of sorts, a gruesome piece of marginalia scribbled alongside the recipe, visible to only those in the know but appreciated by all. The foulness whispers below the prettiness, and combined, these various elements create a scent that smells paradoxically clean and dirty, light and dark.

“Indole is what makes the scent of jasmine interesting,” she says. “It makes you want to come back and smell it again — it has an addictive quality to it.” Unlike citrus scents, which are one-note and rather simplistic, florals have an element of decay, a whiff of putridity. McClain rightfully points out that this is part of what makes flowers themselves attractive to bees and other pollinators. Corpse flowers famously smell like dead bodies, but so do many other blossoms, just to a lesser extent.

Plus, humans are by nature “just a little bit gross,” McClain says. Like civets, musk deer, and whales, we shit, we secrete, we mate, and sometimes we vomit. But we also give birth and create beauty, and for McClain, it’s this life-giving ability that links blossoms and humans. “I think there is a depth to anything that is made of life and creates life. There’s something inherently sexual in that,” she says. “Even though something like civet will smell gross on its own, it adds an element of reality.” When layered properly with other olfactory delights, this can create an evocative smell, one that you want to return to, to interrogate with your nostrils the same way you might pore over a painting. Through layering pleasure on top of disgust, perfumers can create something that resembles life — exquisite, fleeting, and mysterious.

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Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine whose work has appeared in Art New England, Boston magazine, The Paris Review, The Hairpin, Eater, Jezebel, and The New York Times Magazine. She’s also the author of the book Handcrafted Maine.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Matt Giles
Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross