Memories That Smell like Forgetting
Amorphophallus gigas. Retrieved from Wikipedia.
How do you record a smell? Ingrain it in fabric? Seal it in a sandwich bag? Bombard it with adjectives? Triangulate it between more documentable senses, like vision and sound? Or abandon its original essence altogether, and instead recreate it through chemical trial-and-error? (Perhaps the latter is what Tom Ford was going for with Lost Cherry.)
As I stood in the two-hour line at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with two similarly curious friends on a mercifully sunny January morning, waiting to smell the Amorphophallus gigas, or corpse flower, I thought about the paradox of having a smell. Each of us emits a particular scent, and yet it is detectable only to the other. It is both foreign and deeply familiar, incommunicable and the most elemental mode of communication. gigas’ smell isn’t really her own at all—mimicking the scent of rotting flesh, she draws carrion beetles and other pollinators who feed on decaying organisms toward her butter-yellow spadix.
Approaching the corpse flower, my breath grew shallow, anticipating the onslaught of an ungodly aroma, but it wasn’t until my face was practically enveloped in the bloom that it hit me. Her scent started to drift away the second the greenhouse guards ushered the three of us out the door. We struggled to hold onto it, painfully aware that the flower blooms only once every several years and lasts merely three days before collapsing. When this proved impossible, we tried to translate it into language before it entirely dissipated as we walked past the rows of dead trees and bare trellises—
sickly sweet rotten
when fruit is going bad but still smells fruity. the bottom notes anyway
menstrual blood on the first day
putrid
cinnamon or cardamom or something sweet with a tinge of weird
digested smell. not that it smelled digested but my body took it in and stored its broken down form
burnt pear, no, plum
(two days later) hints of spoiled beer.
Our efforts dredged up a childhood trick lodged in the back of my memory of placing a jar upside-down in boiling water with a pine cone or other object whose scent one wished to preserve. But would boiling water kill her? According to the New York Times article I had skimmed that morning—as I walked out of my apartment and an acrid blend of exhaust and discarded french fries hijacked my frayed nervous system—corpse flowers exist only in ten botanic gardens in the world, and are incredibly rare in the wild. Best not to risk it.
My mind drifted to Adrian Piper’s honey jars of hair, fingernails, and skin at her 2018 MoMA retrospective. Did they still hold her scent? I had read about the series, titled What Will Become of Me, before seeing the show, and the image of hair and nails congealed in globs of honey had crystallized in my brain. To say I was disappointed by an Adrian Piper work feels silly, bordering on sacrilegious, but the abject anticipation of the treacly scent of digested nectar and the sight of human remnants flooding the senses at once holds a certain perverse allure—roughly the inverse of inhaling the aroma of decaying remains from a breathtakingly beautiful bloom—that the scrubbed-clean jars perched in the corner of the gallery did not satisfy.
Adrian Piper, What Will Become of Me. 1985, ongoing. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.
Pushing the nauseating image out of my mind, I wondered if Julia Kristeva had ever witnessed a corpse flower in bloom. Her baseline example of abjection—the human instinct to turn away when faced with the sight of a corpse—certainly seemed to translate to smell. One after another, the visitors in front of us in line leaned over, inhaled, and immediately withdrew. No one approached for a second whiff. Most asked the guard to take a picture of their smiling face a safe distance from the bloom. To shamelessly oversimplify Kristeva, abjection is ambiguity: not embracing that which threatens it, not radically cutting it off, but acknowledging its perpetual nearness.
The act of acknowledgement in itself is a daring act in a city that goes to extreme measures to avoid confrontation with death; amid the glut of noxious smells that proliferate the city, startlingly few stem from natural cycles of birth and decay.
When I first came to New York, I checked David Wojnarowicz’s Memories That Smell Like Gasoline out of the library for the occasion, which I read on the 1/2/3 train every morning. I remember walking around the Meatpacking District for the first time and being mildly disgusted by the scrubbed-clean aroma of scrambled eggs (cage-free, if I had to guess) and fresh flowers wafting from brunch-y cafes, then immediately disgusted at my own disgust. I was living in Harlem at the time and used to take a morning walk past a community garden along Riverside Drive. I came to rely on the saccharine stench of compost as much as the smell of coffee to signal the start of my day, most of which was spent in a temperature-controlled (read: frigid) gallery jarringly devoid of scent. It took me weeks to notice that the garden was essentially situated above a sewage plant.
The next summer I lived across the street from the Green-Wood Cemetery, which turned out to be one of the least pungent parts of the city. Even the cluster of beehives arranged haphazardly on a mound among the gravestones were remarkably odorless. All summer I compulsively replayed in my mind the childhood ritual of holding our breath while passing a cemetery to prevent the spirits from entering our bodies. When we were a little older, we began inhaling deeply in the presence of the dead instead, fantasizing about the altered state of consciousness that we presumed accompanied spirit possession.
Amorphophallus gigas. Courtesy of Emma Fiona Jones.
What transformation was it that the corpse flower’s admirers hoped would occur?
Maybe it is out of vestigial fear that my mind automatically aligns the beautiful and bizarre with queer, but I can’t help claiming the corpse flower as one of us. The shared traits are too numerous to ignore: desire signaled through covert cues; open embrace of the grotesque; scarred organs and fragile flesh, dolled up in faux-satins and scraps of silk; a deep-seated survival instinct to plunge suddenly into hibernation, then reemerge from a carefully curated cavity without warning. The Botanic Garden’s breakout star only arrived in 2018, but she would have been in good company in pre-Giuliani New York, onstage next to Hunter Reynolds’ corseted alter ego or nestled among Greer Lankton’s corpse-like but disarmingly vivacious dolls.
I’m far from the first to note that this garbage heap of a city is unexpectedly fertile ground for endangered specimens. My life here is punctuated by conversations with transplants who try to leave, craving quiet and trees, only to find that their roots now run surprisingly deep; the fungi unfurling from the slow, pungent rot of the forest turn out to have more in common with the sharp-edged eyesores protruding out of cracked concrete like bare bone than the flat, chemical green of suburban sprawl.
Perhaps it is a saving grace that smell, the sense most powerfully linked to memory, is the most fickle and fleeting. The slippery logic of scent enacts a tear in the self’s fragile consciousness, revealing for a split second the impressions that the body holds when the mind cannot.
Sweet dreams, gigas. I’ll be holding my breath until you return.
