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001 - jean-baptiste grenouille - memory
Mar. 6th, 2013 07:54 pmThere is a world in Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's olfactory bulb, and some nights he walks through it. It is a world that was, perfected by time like the bouquet of a fine wine, filtered and aged, enhanced and sweetened by the paring down of all sensory information but that of scent.
In that one regard it is unsentimentally merciless, utterly perfect in recall, down to the smallest component parts. It is alchemy, molecules once inhaled transformed to the pure energy of a neuronal burst, it is the lightning strike at the beginning of creation – such is the grandiosity of drifting through this place away from time, tugged along by sulphurs and the bacterial acridity of human sweat, by sun-warmed bread carrying the subtle fungal undertone of an aspergillus bloom.
Left down a street that smells of ammoniac urine, of a thousand different kinds of mud, and left again to an open square that smells of slowly rotting fruits, of the press of a hundred bodies, each with its own unique scent. Like this they're beautiful, when he can breathe them in and make them his, keep them, every last one.
They are still as he weaves amongst them, passes through them like the smoke they are, down darker routes, petrichor from gardens and wet stone courtesy the ivy that slithers and digs its chlorophyll-scented claws into decaying mortar; down the way there is a madame in fine clothes who smells of illicit sex.
Grenouille passes her. He passes them all, passes these people he knows so well because memory is a forest and the people in it are undergrowth; he is the hound, il chasse, even the memory of the stone under his feet is cast aside for the pitter-patter scent of filthy water rising in splashes, it rains, he sucks it all down, greedy, but it's just a game and the end is plums and warm-cooling skin, smells to bury himself in, to suck greedily up.
That vial will one day run dry. And what then?
In that one regard it is unsentimentally merciless, utterly perfect in recall, down to the smallest component parts. It is alchemy, molecules once inhaled transformed to the pure energy of a neuronal burst, it is the lightning strike at the beginning of creation – such is the grandiosity of drifting through this place away from time, tugged along by sulphurs and the bacterial acridity of human sweat, by sun-warmed bread carrying the subtle fungal undertone of an aspergillus bloom.
Left down a street that smells of ammoniac urine, of a thousand different kinds of mud, and left again to an open square that smells of slowly rotting fruits, of the press of a hundred bodies, each with its own unique scent. Like this they're beautiful, when he can breathe them in and make them his, keep them, every last one.
They are still as he weaves amongst them, passes through them like the smoke they are, down darker routes, petrichor from gardens and wet stone courtesy the ivy that slithers and digs its chlorophyll-scented claws into decaying mortar; down the way there is a madame in fine clothes who smells of illicit sex.
Grenouille passes her. He passes them all, passes these people he knows so well because memory is a forest and the people in it are undergrowth; he is the hound, il chasse, even the memory of the stone under his feet is cast aside for the pitter-patter scent of filthy water rising in splashes, it rains, he sucks it all down, greedy, but it's just a game and the end is plums and warm-cooling skin, smells to bury himself in, to suck greedily up.
That vial will one day run dry. And what then?