Ambergris

Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet it is so… (Ahab)

Lore comes from the deep: We hear of the kings and emperors there and are afraid. They are large and strange. Take, for example, the Giant Squid, lurking on the continental slopes, 1400 pounds, just off land, where our ocean craft may carry us. They have large eyes and complex brains; they have two tentacles with which to trap their prey; chitin-lined suction cups to cut in deep; a most powerful beak and radial tongue with small, file-like teeth to grind up suppers of deep-sea fish and smaller, weaker, squid. And yet, there is a bigger fish.

As the Squid eats Squid is eaten by the Sperm Whale: mammoth, our largest carnivores, with massive teeth, blowholes, flukes, total weight: in the neighborhood of 150, 000 lbs. He takes a breath and dives: 1,000 feet, 2,000 feet, 4,000 feet, 7,000 feet down to the where the Squid is eating squid. Their battles are muffled by the sea, finished in the dark, and won by weight. Squid, like other mollusks have soft bodies and no bones and so, once subdued, go down easy for our Sperm Whale, excepting that fearsome beak. Satiated, the Sperm Whale returns to the surface from the Squids lair, a bit dyspeptic, bearing the sucker-scars of his latest meal.

But as the body softens in the whale’s cavernous stomach, the beak remains. It becomes lodged in the large intestine. You can imagine that the Sperm whale feels this subtle pain, perhaps he cries out, bloats, groans. The beak has its revenge, it excoriates the gentle lining, probes, irritates, and scrapes the poor whale’s bowels until, as a clam makes from a grain of sand a pearl, the Sperm whale wraps it in a pale silk, fatty and smooth, and with one tremendous whale cough, expunges it back into the sea. Slimy, white, stinking of squid, this pearl of a hairball floats, perhaps for many years. And this is the beginning of the making of our valuable Ambergris…

The French compound for grey amber is loosely metaphorical in name at best. For amber and ambergris (as Captain Ahab reminds us) have very little in common:

For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads to ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy… (chapter 92)

Even a small amount of the pseudo-digested whale spew, aged properly in the ocean’s brine, will fetch a price, but a larger specimen (say, 100lbs or so) will fetch a fortune. It begins as an anonymous bead, pale, and it ripens as in the sun, oxidizing, degrading in the sun, turns black and waxen and begins to smell “sweet, marine, and animalic.” It is said that the Ancient Egyptians burned it as incense, that King Charles II liked to eat it with his eggs. It is said that it is a most powerful aphrodisiac dissolved in wine, that it increases virility and cures the heart. It has been used to treat headaches, colds, and Epilepsy. Elizabeth I used it to perfume her gloves.

But in the world of perfume, ambergris is the base of all basenotes: It is a fixative and the slowest of all perfuming elements to evaporate. It is the least ephemeral of these ephemeral olfactory pleasures. For this and its rarity, it is priced at $20 to the gram. And because even his squid-induced excrement is fragrant, should we not hail the mythic Sperm whale as most noble among beasts of the sea?

As Ahab adulates:

I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale’s flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian town to do honor to Alexander the Great?

A note: Since the use of animal products in cosmetics and perfume is no longer considered ethical in the United States, a variety of synthetics have been developed to replace it, including Ambrox and Grisalva, although none of these is said to have the subtlety and smoothness of natural ambergris. Fragrances with strong ambergris notes include: Davidoff Cool Water, Drakkar Noir, and Zino Davidoff.

Känna det här

The year:2001. I am seventeen. It is summer. The Baltic: Late evening light, calm waters, cool air. I am sitting by the lake next to Peter, with whom I am by now a little bit in love, and we are very quiet. Not the way we used to be, up to our knees in swamp water, hunting for tadpoles, scooping up shrimp in tidepools, fishing with sticks. We have already been swimming and are just waiting to dry off before meeting Martin and Johan and the others for dinner, towels draped over our shoulders, bare toes gripping the moss and rocks. They are awkward, these bodies, and they speak to us in strange new ways and he comments on things like the smell of my hair after showering or my small ears–things he would never have taken notice of when we were six… And I am often surprised to find myself thinking, in his presence, that he is a saint, which another part of myself knows, he most certainly is not. Here, he says. Now you are really going to know something, and he uses the word for know that also means to feel and my eyes get very wide and I am still. Do you smell that? He asks, and with that sly quiet smile of his, Follow me. Keeping the towel around my waist with one hand, I follow him away from the lake and into the woods. There.

Nature is often astonishing. That smell, the smell in the woods, the one that Peter and I felt together in the summer of 2001 was the smell of rotting meat. It is cliche to invoke Proust, and virtually empty to say that smells transport us in memory. And yet, when this does happen, it is so immediate and striking, that we say it again and again. Recently, in Harlem, in springtime, as I caught a whiff of someone’s garbage rotting on Broadway, I found myself in memory kneeling on the damp forest floor smelling that rotten smell, wrinkling my nose in astonishment, my friend Peter laughing with amusement and delight. But our rotten meat smell was not produced by a rancid carcass or an outdated beefsteak. Our rotten smell was produced by a singularly pornographic mushroom, which excretes this foul-smelling sticky mass to attract flies, which carry the spores and allow it to multiply.

This is a common stinkhorn, which was named by Linnaeus, in the Latin, Phallus impudicus (a shameless and immodest member, indeed). It is one of nature’s jokes– a play on imitation that, even while it disgusts us, we cannot help but find captivating, amusing, delightful. To the joy of young boys, this impudent fungus has the audacity to begin life as a cluster of egg-shaped white balls, from which it bursts forth to a full, mature height of about seven inches and, in a matter of days, begins to stink.  Even as we wrinkle our noses, we love this olfactory weirdness.

A pipe is not always a pipe, friends; just because you smell a rat, doesn’t mean there isn’t a snake in the grass. And if your Phallus smells like carrion, cheer up. It’s probably a mushroom.

Imagine: anosmia

The first condition to understanding a foreign country is to smell it. –Rudyard Kipling

A rigorous study of smell has been delayed in the academy by a pervasive “objectivist” bias that took hold in the early modern period (Age of Reason) and reached its climax in the positivism of the 1950’s. Although now, in very recent years, smell has finally achieved a place among the other senses as worthy of real study, scientific investigation, and philosophical consideration, our sense of smell spent years undiscovered in the academic dark. It was dangerous. And “subjective”. And perhaps most condemning, it was … animalistic. No sense as much as our sense of smell, places us so clearly in the natural, animal world–a world we were historically trying desperately, by our systematic cultivation of a life of the mind, to escape. The smell of our own bodies was the worst, most consistent reminder of our mammalian embodiment, and so perfume was made (at least in certain eras) not to make us smell delightful, but to make us smell unlike ourselves –unrecognizably other. The pursuit of enlightenment across cultures and centuries involved denying our weak, mortal, physical selves in favor of the eternal, virtuous mind: Plato, Buddha, the Stoics, Christ. In each case our bodies were demonized as deterrents to knowledge and stumbling blocks on the path to immortality. Our sense of smell, so visceral in its reminders that our bodies do exist, was, therefore, problematic. Vision was taken to be enlightening and illuminating by its seemingly clear, direct representation of the natural world (a process we have more recently found to be far more complicated and far less “direct representation” than neurological interpretation) and was therefore, puzzled over by A.J. Ayer and leaders in fields of science and psychology, whereas smell could not be trusted. The look of a thing was generally taken to be credible evidence attesting to the way that thing really is, objectively, out in the world apart from us. Olfaction, on the other hand, was elusive and more personal. It was hard to believe smells, in part, because we couldn’t see what was going on. The Microscope, for example, simply did us no good when it came to figuring out why or how a thing smelled a certain way. And so, it was easier to ignore this invisible sense.

In fact, the dismissal of smell as evidence in the scientific community is still more or less in practice. As Chandler Burr reported in his 2002 narrative “The Emperor of Scent”, Luca Turin, in presenting the most basic evidence of a theory of smell (the smells themselves), consistently encountered resistance from people in the field who would ask how the smells he was talking about could be objectively defined–the “what you smell isn’t necessarily what I smell–but smell isn’t really real, is it?” line of thinking. Not only is smell real, I would argue that it is the most real of the senses. Unlike sight, hearing, and touch, smell is a chemical sense, and unlike taste, smell receptors seem to be highly specialized: whereas tastebuds lump chemicals into 6 (or so) basic categories and produces only as many precepts, smell receptors respond to thousands of molecules and produce individualized precepts for each one. Humans, we now believe, are able to respond to and distinguish between 10,000 or so individual molecular smells, and (amazingly) we are also able to smell smells as they are invented–brand new smells that we have not only never smelled before, but that have never existed in the world before.

But perhaps to fully come to terms with just how amazing smell really is, this material detector we too often take for granted, we should listen to those who have lost the incredible, invisible sense. Oliver Sacks gives us such an account in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat: Referring to a patient who has lost his sense of smell after a head injury, he says the following:

“He has been startled and distressed by the effects of this: ‘Sense of smell?’ he says. ‘I never gave it a thought. You don’t normally give it a thought. But when I lost it–it was like being struck blind. Life lost a good deal of its savour–one doesn’t realize how much ’savour’ is smell. You smell people, you smell books, you smell the city, you smell the spring–maybe not consciously, but as a rich unconscious background to everything else. My whole world was suddenly radically poorer…’ There was an acute sense of loss, and an acute sense of yearning, a veritable osmalgia: a desire to remember the smell-world to which he had paid no conscious attention, but which, he now felt, had formed the very ground base of life.” (159)

And smell is, in more than just a metaphorical way, the ground base of life: we live in a world of matter, a world of chemistry, a world made up of molecules. Our sense of smell is the sense that allows us to know where we are in such a chemical world. Navigating without it would be like trying to walk without being able to feel the ground. Losing one’s sense of smell is, in fact, a kind of blindness that brings with it a sense of profound loss. Rachel Herz (a psychologist at Brown) goes so far as to argue that the loss felt in cases of acquired anosmia can be so profound as to cause the individual to become profoundly depressed and even suicidal. Because of its physiological relationship to our limbic system, she says, “The derailing of our olfactory system caused by anosmia can have a progressively negative downstream effect on the healthy functioning of our emotional system” (The Scent of Desire, 8).

Conversely, individuals who have experienced an enhanced sense of smell, even for a brief period of time recall that state of extreme olfaction with nostalgia. Stephen D, 16 years after a three-week period of amphetamine-induced super-smelling, said the following: ‘That smell-world, that world of redolence! So vivid, so real! It was like a visit to another world, a world of pure perception, rich, alive, self-sufficient, and full. If only I could go back sometimes and be a dog again.” During that time, each experience of smell had a compelling immediacy. The world for him had been saturated in a way that was super-real and infinitely interesting. Good smells and bad smells had a whole new aesthetic significance. “Somewhat intellectual before, and inclined to reflection and abstraction, he now found thought, abstraction and categorisation, somewhat difficult and unreal, in view of the compelling immediacy of each experience.” (157)

Imagine, if you can, a world without smell. It is impossible. It is like trying to imagine a world without gravity, or light. Such a world would be utterly foreign. And until we smell an utterly foreign world, we cannot claim to know it (says Rudyard Kipling). Olfaction, in its immediacy and specificity, is of first epistemological importance, and rather than covering it up, ignoring it, or simply pretending smell is meaningless and void, the time has come to lend it credence, to expand our olfactory palettes, to put our noses to the grindstone, and the bookbinding, and the workglove, and the street; the time has come to enlighten ourselves as to just how much we can know by our noses.

Eau du LABO

If perfume, or anything called perfume, is true to its etymology, then it should be smoky like incense in the high church–dense and magical, as though in the time it takes for the sillage to waft past us, radical transformations might take place. Perfume in that sense, we would expect to find at Versailles three centuries ago in the grande age of tightly-curled wigs when high heels and tights were popular among men, not, for example, in the AmericanProtestantClean Bushian White House. The kind of perfume I’m talking about, real perfume, should be thick and amber-colored and come in crystal bottles with gilded tops, and the shop should be stacked to the ceilings and the armchairs should be low and the tinkle of an old bell should alert the perfumer, who is also the clerk, of the ladies and gentlemen who have just come in to poke their powdered noses into the vials of rose and lavender and musk… right?

Luckily, this is a new age, and just because we have dropped the heavy aesthetic of real perfume doesn’t mean that we have to trim down the big smell. And although Le LABO is not shrouded in mystery by curtains and smoke, their line of perfumes is nothing short of the real thing. On Elizabeth street you will find the SoHo shop: hygienic, with its white tile and bare wood floorboards and stainless steel counters. The employees here wear lab coats, not monacles, and the packaging is simple–brown cardstock with black stamps; the clear bottles with (your name!) on the label look like curealls from the apothecary. The 10, excuse me 11, Le LABO perfumes are displayed on five open tables with pre-sprayed scent strips: 3 for women, 3 for men, 3 unisex, 1 for babies, and one exclusively New York. The natural essences come from Grasse, and the numbers in each name represent the number of ingredients the formula has.

But even though I have read many good things about the Le LABO line of fragrances, I admit I was wary. It looked too clean. The mystic in me distrusted such transparency, and I half expected to find a bunch of scent-sketches trying to sell themselves as something more. I mean, isn’t it the inexplicable that we find most interesting? –That lends perfume its true seductive powers? Le LABO certainly doesn’t think so. In fact, for a notable fee, they will provide perfume enthusiasts with the OLFACTIONARY, a kind of beginners dictionary of smells with 40 vials of important natural essences, so that we can all begin to develop our olfactory palettes and liberate ourselves from the “herd of consumers manipulated by the latest in advertising, fashion trends and gadgetry…” The passionate founders of Le LABO know perfume in the Biblical sense–intimately, by love–and they want the people who wear their perfumes to appreciate them in the same way. Paramount, however, are the perfumes themselves, which are certainly respectable. All of them have a rather strange edge in the top notes and warm up as they dry. I particularly liked Neroli 36, Fleur d’Oranger 27 and Rose 31 (with lots of wood); In the end I tried Iris 39 on skin and loved the results as the earthier moss and wood notes came through in drydown. Although the first two of those were labeled unisex, and the Rose is supposed to be for men, those distinctions seem to me to be for marketing purposes; all the fragrances could work for both men and women.

At the end of the day, the Le LABO lineup is still not as dirty as I like, but worth checking out (as their press attests) on a rainy day in SoHo, or anytime via interweb.

Odeur de Lune: moon smell

Everything they say about this place is true: Aedes de Venustas on Christopher Street is an aesthetically foreign, old-world paradise for the senses. As I was told I must, I walked East on the north side of the street toward Greenwich Ave., admiring the cobbles and lettering on signs, buzzed at number 9, and stepped inside. It is carpeted. Crystal bottles are locked behind glass. The drapes are heavy, the lighting low, atmosphere: Rose. The men behind the counter are bronzed, blonde, and effortlessly tasteful. When the trio of French customers and their manicured pets exit, Robin turns her attention to me: Do you know what you like?

First thought: Dark forest, with mushrooms and leaves. The result: She leads me over to the Diptyque collection (already, I am excited) and sprays a scent strip with the 1988 release Eau D’Elide. I love it: lavender and moss and (perhaps I am only imagining this) out of season violets under the brown debris of a deciduous fall, dry on the surface, damp underneath. The next 30 minutes are a whirl; I lose track of the scent strips somewhere between Serge Lutens and Montale filling my lungs with long, slow inhalations and trying to pair words with each inflected sensation. Some of them are events in space and time (first haying in Idaho), some of them are tagged more loosely in memory (a very certain kind of bonbon I had in Gothenburg as a child–no it isn’t the anise), and others are coded for truly weird synesthetic associations: heat, moisture, dry and still. My sniffing partner loves Diptyque’s Eau de Lierre: Ivy. I ask her where she is from: California. And yes, they had it in the back yard.

As I am about to leave, sample in hand, Robin says, “Well since you’re here…” To my left, by the door, is a table with candles in array. I’ve read about this Cire Trudon, true to their process those French. The long-awaited candles have just come in, and my guide loves to show them with their hand-scripted labels, displayed on old wood. Twelve interpretations, without patience for prettiness. Revolution is bread and gunsmoke, Carmelite is convent stone, DADA is expansive tea meant to disorient. And finally, this one, she tells me, is based on chemical analyses from NASA. Lift the glass bell; smell the moon.

Oudh

Life in the natural world is combat: Organization willing itself to be for a small moment in the landscape of eternity, chaos reclaiming it. Deep in the wet tropics of Asia, the battle rages on with new allies, new enemies, plot-twists, evolving complexes. Since before human history, the regal Aquilaria has had to fight for its life against a particularly malicious threat: Phialophora parasitica. Having survived the sapling years by luck, evading grazing predators, reaching out of the undergrowth for a share of sun, the Aquilaria must, in its mature years, fend off the fungus that attacks from within.

The effects of Phialophora parasitica are anthropomorphically gruesome, but the tree’s response is no less than miraculous. To ward off this fungal decay, Aquilaria produces a precious aromatic resin. Tragically, the amber panacea is only enough to slow the infection’s progress; once Phialophora has taken its hold, the tree will die. But the resin–sometimes formed in the tree over hundreds of years–remains in the heartwood, is very valuable (c. $50,000 per kilo), is thought to have myriad medicinal qualities, and most importantly smells, in the words of others, honey, ambergris, earth, woodnotes, fresh tobacco, jasmine, cream. It is a fragrance that is eccentric, acquired, sophisticated. Or so I have heard. Few city-dwelling Westerners have had the pleasure of experiencing pure aromatic oudh. Instead, we must sniff it out in composition: take a fragrance and learn to parse out oudh’s singular qualities juxtaposed against kumquat, leather, spices, rose.

For a sniff tutorial in oudh, I recommend trying Arabian-inspired French perfume house Montale’s Aoud collection. Fragrances range from desert market to ionized atmosphere, with oudh at the heart of all. According to some afficionados, the smell of oudh takes a full 12 hours to ripen on the skin and can linger for days; on clothes and textiles it can last for months. Alas, to know oudh, allow time.