Notes: How should an extremist smell?
◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨ [MODERN POLITICAL EXTREMISM / FRAGRANCE]
▧ In The Samurai, Julia Kristeva describes the young women at the Rosebud in 1968 as wearing “spicy perfumes,” strong enough to overpower the cigarette smoke and pine polish on the leather seats. “They hated flowery scents, of course, and drenched themselves in Vetiver.” ▧ Are the scents of 1968 misremembered as patchouli and amber picked up from import shop? Kristeva has women wearing musk, too, or something like it, “bought in one of those kitschy little Indian shops so popular now.” ▧ Was verveine only employed to rhyme with “grenade lacrymogène”?
▩▩ ▧ I think I am recalling correctly a story from a memoir written by a dropout from American high society about her trip to Cambodia on a Students for a Democratic Society junket… Rumbling down a dirt road somewhere between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, her interpreter from the Vietnamese mission, a bespectacled true believer from an aristocratic background, embarrassed her by putting a finger to his upper lip, sniffing the air a few times, and asking, “Is that Mitsouko?” She blushed, even more aware than usual of the distance between her lifestyle and those of the people under aerial bombardment. She picked it up on the layover in Paris. She does not mention whether or not she wore it during the acts of modest political violence committed at the climax of the book. ▧ Am I misremembering? Maybe he guessed it was Mitsouko, when it was in fact just patchouli oil.
▩▩ ▩▩ ▧ In the instructions Abdulaziz al-Omari wrote for the hijackers, his first commandment is: “Embrace the will to die.” His second is: "Wear cologne." But when we imagine the gate agent glancing up at Mohamed Atta after catching in the still air of the terminal the scent of his cologne, should we imagine musk and oud, or duty free Paco Rabanne? ▧ The indictment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claims that cologne, along with cigarettes, “each of which is generally forbidden in Islamic culture,” were part of a Western camouflage. That’s not correct. But then what was its purpose? ▧ A United States Department of Homeland Security pamphlet from 2004 includes this note on recognizing terrorists in a crowd: "May smell of herbal or flower water (most likely flower water), as they may have sprayed perfume on themselves, their clothing, and weapons to prepare for Paradise."
▩▩ ▩▩ ▩▩ ▧ Terry Nichols’ wife said that she knew it was Timothy McVeigh at her door a few days before the attack because of his signature aftershave. Was it Old Spice, Brut, or Aqua Velva?
▩▩ ▩▩ ▩▩ ▧ What scent did the hijackers of the Japanese Red Army wear? ▧ It is hard to imagine. ▧ Did Okamoto Kozo splash on Shiseido Bravas before entering the terminal? That seems probable. It tells us nothing. ▧ Given the movement’s identification of bodily cleanliness with bourgeois contentedness, and filth with the revolutionary ideal, the young women caught in the web of Mori Tsuneo would have smelled nothing like their peers in Montparnasse. Body odor grown under layers of rugs, stale cigarette smoke in long hair—are the smells that signal fervor for the revolution.
▩▩ ▩▩ ▧ A few commonalities begin to appear, which could be summed up perhaps as the rejection of the bourgeois smells (floral scents, Mitsouko, soap) to embrace either the supposedly natural (vetiver or patchouli) or the filthy (this was what the United Red Army was going for), but also fragrances as a purifying agent (this is what Abdulaziz al-Omari has in mind, I imagine, and it might also explain the American radical’s embrace of patchouli oil). ▧ Maybe we can divide these based on utopian ideals expressed in scent preference, and whether it is for the natural (in opposition to industrial society), the communal (requiring an acceptance of human proximity and its aromas, rejecting hygienic modernity), or the religious (coming when the filth of the world is also spiritually disinfected and perfumed). Sometimes we see holdovers of habits established before descent into extremism.
▩▩ ▧ This is not enough. Roy Porter: "Today's history comes deodorized” (from an introductory essay to the English translation of The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination by Alain Corbin). This means that we don’t have enough information. It is also a limited kind of information, since it does not come along with any statements about the purpose of these scents. ▧ History is deodorized because the present is deodorized. These examples above, except for Abdulaziz al-Omari’s instructions, the potentially discriminatory description of Mohamed Atta drenched in Paco Rabanne, and Timothy McVeigh’s Old Spice are from midcentury.
▧ But this doesn’t actually answer the question: How should the extremist smell? But asking this question is at least an acknowledgement that the extremist must smell.
◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨◧◨ [RESISTING DEODORIZATION]
▧ And so it seems clear that attention to this aspect of political extremism has declined. The extremist reeking of Mitsouko, vetiver, patchouli, or body odor is deodorized.
▩▩ ▧ A few lines from the beginning of a story by Italo Calvino: But the phials, the ampules, the jars with their spire-like or cut-glass stoppers will weave in vain from shelf to shelf their network of harmonies, assonances, dissonances, counterpoints, modulations, cadenzas: our deaf nostrils will no longer catch the notes of their scale. We will not distinguish musk from verbena: amber and mignonette, bergamot and bitter-almond will remain mute, sealed in the calm slumber of their bottles. When the olfactory alphabet, which made them so many words in a precious lexicon, is forgotten, perfumes will be left speechless, inarticulate, illegible.
▩▩ ▩▩ ▧ In my youth, I pursued austerity in all things. The only cologne I ever wore was Old Spice, which I received as a gift from an older woman that lived across the hall from me when I rented a room in a house off Number Three Road. The bottle of cologne came from a holiday gift basket sold at a deep discount in January. That summer, I worked at an auto parts store in Steveston and walked home every night with a girl that told me once, as we approached my house, and she stopped me and tried to convince me to let her come inside, that my scent reminded her of a man she always stood behind in church. It is startling to think, looking back so many years, that part of the reason why I was attractive to her was because I was older. It is true that eight or ten years separated us, but I was too young to perceive what that meant or to imagine what was going through her head. ▧ When it ran out I still did not perfume myself, but I started to enjoy going into department stores to seek out women’s perfume. From the beginning—a bottle of Chance, from Holt Renfrew in Vancouver—I preferred Chanel. Maybe it is because the girls at the counter beckoned me in. Maybe it is from a simplistic understanding of commercial luxury. ▧ I started to collect bottles for myself. It started by choosing fragrances for my lover that I thought I would like to wear myself. The Takashimaya fragrance counter girls began handing me samples of of Bleu de Chanel and Pour Monsieur. ▧ For a long time, like the girls in Montparnasse, I like to wear vetiver. As I finished formatting the quote that will go at the beginning of this entry, I reached down beside my bed, to where I believed a bottle of Carven Vétiver was still stashed. I hoped to describe for you how it reminded me of a summer job I had as a teenager, running a string trimmer around municipal apartment blocks. I carted the machine around in the front seat of my Chevrolet Beretta, filling it with the smell of wet grass and two-stroke oil. Since I can’t remind myself of what the fragrance actually smells like, I find myself stuck imagining a bottle that dispenses spritzes of weedy backlots and gasoline, with middle notes of antiperspirant, Copenhagen Wintergreen, and stale cannabis smoke. Maybe this is still how I would like to smell. ▧ I believe in the power of these natural smells. I am ashamed to admit that I now have a favorite scent. Since I believe it might say something about my temperament, tastes, or politics, I will not name it. ▧ This is a deodorized city. The Japanese preference is for an alcohol-based antiperspirant, either in the form of a roll-on or a fabric spray, only occasionally fortified with a faint lemon or mint scent that recalls urinal pucks. Inside the subway cars, there is only the occasional whiff of body odor, sweaty underarms of the salarymen, cigarettes and coffee on their breath, the foxy smell of teenagers in greasy uniforms, the faint, powdery of a woman’s foundation… Old women wear cologne: on the Hibiya Line, they get on at Mitsukoshimae Station on the Ginza Line, smelling as women have since the subway was dug, aldehydes and lavender breathing out from under collars, bergamot and galbanum under their pearls… Foreigners wear cologne: these are the salesmen whose cologne competes with the house scent pumped into the lobby lounges of luxury hotels, or the Persian men that seem to be the sole patrons of the Ueno shops that sell replica Tom Ford. ▧ To smell is to stand out. This is a sort of extremism.
▩▩ ▧ And so, simply, the answer for the extremist now is that they must resist deodorization. Any scent is now extreme, whether the stink of the body or the stink of perfume.
▧ This is because utopia has a smell. Paradise is fragrant. ▧ In Pyongyang, the shopgirls smell as sweet as their colleagues at Takashimaya. Kim Jong-il built the perfume industry for them. ▧ Octogenarians in Dushanbe and Kiev and Tallinn lament the fact that they had to find a French replacement for their Soviet perfume. ▧ Jiang Qing’s revolution failed because her attempts to make everyone look good failed. The Jiang Qing dress was resisted. She should have turned to perfume next. She cared about this, too. Her face appeared alongside perfume ads in Shanghai movie magazines. What did Jiang Qing smell like? We don’t know. A 1977 article in the Beijing Daily—"Jiang Qing is a Bloodsucking Ghoul"—says that her perfume was "high quality." A 1976 article in the Southern Daily—"Expose the Counterrevolutionary Face of the 'Gang of Four' to Daylight"—notes that it was a foreign brand. Did she wear Vent Vert, like her idol, Greta Garbo? No. I know her tastes. I believe she alternated between N°5 (to meet visiting dignitaries) and Gardénia (for herself). What would her utopia smell like?