peach pepper milk

Images via treesandempathy (photo credit unknown; painting is "Odette" by Ryan Pickart)

At the moment, I'm finding it difficult to do anything other than read Meg Wolitzer's wonderful The Interestings. I just read this paragraph, and wanted to share:

At night during that weekend in Underhill, Jules and Ash lay together in her bed, with Ash's head against the footboard. Many years later, they would lie across other beds with their children playing all around them, and it was a relief to know that even in getting older and splitting off into couples and starting families, you could still always come together in this way that you'd learned to do when you were young, and which you would have a taste for over your entire life. Ash, up close in Jules's bed in Underhill, having performed a series of elaborate nighttime ablutions in the house's single, peach-colored bathroom, now smelled milky and peppery at once. Maybe the soap she'd brought with her from the city was called Pepper Milk, Jules thought as she grew sleepy. Whatever it was, anyone would want to be around that smell, to drink it in from a girl if they couldn't drink it in from a bottle.

This one small smell moment is such an elegant evocation of some of the concerns of the book: class anxiety (Jules's single bathroom vs. Ash's sophisticated city soap), the overlapping intimacies of teenage friendship and desire, longing in general (to drink another in! to consume someone, in as many ways you can), and beauty (Ash is remarkably beautiful; Jules is not). Even though peach is the color of the bathroom, and not named as a smell, it falls in the olfactory mix for me, perhaps in part because peach--gleamy, smothering, plastic peach--was an important fragrance in my own adolescence, an early smell I remember seeking out, finding sexy and gorgeous and strange. This one choice--peach--makes the passage so much more potent: downy skin, juice & flesh, a mysterious stone. All of this along with the creamy, innocent/nurturing notions we have of milk, and the bracing spice of pepper makes this a standout moment for me in a book brimming with them. I'm not even halfway through and already I find myself slowing down (pausing to write this post, for example), wanting badly for this book, and my time with these characters, not to end.

within sniffing distance

News, unless explicitly smell-related, rarely comes up here on Nosy Girl, but regular readers will know that the link between empathy and smelling is one of the primary concerns of this project, the driving force behind the blog (that and my legitimate nosiness). With each installment in the Nosy Interview series, the heart of this site, I'm struck by what I discover about dear friends and perfect strangers alike, by how the details of their smell-lives enlarge and inform my care for them, and, it is my hope, your care for them as well.  

Regular readers will also know that I live in Cambridge, Boston's neighbor to the north, and my proximity to that city and the appalling act of terrorism during Monday's marathon have me thinking and talking about empathy in an unusually discomfiting way this week, as I struggle with the limitations of my own. Even as I resist the urge towards tribalism ("We're all Bostonians today" vs. We're all humans all of the time), I won't deny the desperate But this is our home! We live here! feeling that comes straight out of fear, that is borne of nearness to calamity, but that, of course, is felt by anyone living under threat of violence, be it infrequent or constant. On the phone, talking about the bombings with worried loved ones living far away, I bristled inwardly at a question I have myself posed in the past and contemplate with some regularity: "God, can you imagine living in a place where this happened all of the time?" No. I haven't the first idea what that would be like, and I acknowledge the sheer dumb luck of that. As my dear and brilliant friend Preeta Samarasan says, “So often we say to each other, ‘I can’t imagine,’ when really what we mean is that we don’t want to, that imagining would be unbearable.” For a moment yesterday, some of us didn't have to do quite as much of the imagining. 

That is the work of empathy, that distance to whatever vividness we are able, or willing, to imagine. The feeling is—while easy is the wrong word, automatic fits. We know the urgency of grief or fear when it is our own, the strange shock of people driving their cars to the grocery store, the disbelief that any of these things—food, vehicles, other humans and their daily lives—should still exist in the face of our loss. But I was surprised by the degree to which I felt the social-media version of this dizziness on Monday, staggered that other people were still wrapping things in bacon, winning Pulitzers, and, most importantly, asking me to remember this feeling when next I read about a drone strike. Thomas Page McBee, writing for the Rumpus, explains why the animal in me wanted comfort first:

The first step in containing the potential for trauma is safety. The second is to welcome the injured and fearful, the grief-stricken and the shocked back into the fold. This is animal logic—trauma research has found that prey animals, upon escape, need to rejoin the group and discharge their nervous energy, the stress hormones that kept them alive.

Once we’ve accounted for our own pack (with the recognition that such violence means this is not possible for everyone), and shed some shock thanks to the warmth of our fellow mammals, then we must do the work of traversing the gap between the urgency of our own feelings and the remove with which we are able to understand a bomb in a far off place, perhaps dropped from a plane bearing our own country’s insignia. The work is holding this version of empathy in our minds—this sick-smelling sweat, these clouds of smoke, these ceaseless sirens—rather than the soft-click brand that is far more typical of my days spent ‘liking’ and ‘sharing,’ engaging even with comments only occasionally, but very rarely calling up this same rage in any of its sensory agony. Glenn Greenwald’s piece in the Guardian is essential reading on the matter: 

[Whatever] rage you're feeling toward the perpetrator of this Boston attack, that's the rage in sustained form that people across the world feel toward the US for killing innocent people in their countries. Whatever sadness you feel for yesterday's victims, the same level of sadness is warranted for the innocent people whose lives are ended by American bombs. However profound a loss you recognize the parents and family members of these victims to have suffered, that's the same loss experienced by victims of US violence. It's natural that it won't be felt as intensely when the victims are far away and mostly invisible, but applying these reactions to those acts of US aggression would go a long way toward better understanding what they are and the outcomes they generate.

But what of the outcomes we may generate not from our acts of aggression, but through our empathy? The Americans who make up my self-selected tribe are people who feel deeply, empathize with their whole hearts, and hate the fact that violence is committed in their name. This pack includes people who stood near enough to smell and hear and feel the terror of Monday’s explosions but who did not hesitate to connect their own feelings of helplessness with the plights of people they have never ridden together with on a train.  What good are their enormous hearts? Is it enough to hope that they nudge a loved one a step further along the spectrum of compassion? That, in their sharing, they might afford a family member a more complicated understanding of words like “evil” and “freedom”? That they try with all they have to stand for one moment inside another's suffering, and let it connect them to, rather than close them off against, other people? I'm grateful to the friends that keep me from stagnating on that spectrum of compassion, who always challenge me to be less myopic in what I allow to break my heart. I thank writers for that, too. One such writer-hero is Zadie Smith, who has this to say about empathy: 

In the end, empathy is a very limited emotion. Here in the West we romanticize its power—especially in literature!—but the truth is empathy gets turned on and off as needs be. My own feeling is you need to legislate for it, to encourage people into its practice—to enforce it, if need be. Perhaps all those Wall Street bankers were perfectly nice people, too, who didn’t mean to hurt us as they did, but we shouldn’t rely on the vagaries of human personalities. Desperation, weakness, vulnerability—these things will always be exploited. You need to protect the weak, ring-fence them, with something far stronger than empathy.

I'm certainly guilty of romanticizing the power of empathy, especially as it is generated by stories. And of course we need to turn it off and on; we can’t walk around shattered all of the time, open empathic wounds. We probably can’t even sustain the bit of extra tenderness towards one another that I noticed in my everyday interactions on Tuesday, and there’s a part of me that will be grateful when my neighbors go back to being gruff, even as it indicates we’ve moved beyond the instinctive empathy generated by our terrible shared experience. But let’s say we could sustain it, enlarge it, actually bottle even just a tiny bit of our rage, despair, and tenderness to take out and get a whiff of when next we read the news. What then? How do we use our empathy? What can it do? These are not rhetorical questions. As a writer, I subscribe wholly to the notion that empathy is our most essential human trait, that the nurturing of it amongst others and within ourselves is one of the best ways we can be of use. Of what use? 

--
reading list: 
"The Boston bombing produces familiar and revealing reactions," Glenn Greenwald 
"Park It," Luke O'Neil  
"After Boston, we have a choice: helpless emoting or meaningful empathy," Steve Almond 
"The Tragedies of Other Places," Rafia Zakaria 
"Into the Fold," Thomas Page McBee 
"Teju Cole on the Empathy Gap and Tweeting Drone Strikes," Sarah Zhang 
"Stunned Silence," Roxane Gay 
"The Random Death of our Sense of Ease," Marjorie Williams
"On Running, Freedom, and the Boston Bombing,"  Kathryn Schulz

smells like 'a particular human consciousness'

[image via New York magazine]

"It turns out that Clive's book smells like literature and looks like literature and maybe even, intermittently, feels like literature, and after a while Clive himself has almost forgotten that strange feeling of untruth, of self-betrayal, that his novel first roused in him." --Zadie Smith, "Fail Better" 

I heard Zadie Smith speak at the Cambridge Public Library last week, and though I didn't stay after to get my book signed and try to see what she smelled like (is such an investigation even creepier than asking?), I have no doubt she smells brilliant. Here are some other lines I love from "Fail Better" and "Read Better," companion pieces published in the Guardian in 2007: 

That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person's truth as far as it can be rendered through language.

...

Fiction confronts you with the awesome fact that you are not the only real thing in this world. 

And here's a fragrant fragment from NW: 

Even the bottle of perfume in her hand was shaped like a woman, a cheap knock-off from the market. He wished he could buy her the things she wanted! There were so many things she wanted. "And if you go past Wilsons on the high road--Fee, listen to me. If you past ask Ricky--you know which one I'm talking about? Little light-skinned boy with the twists. Ask 'im if he can come round and look at that sink. What's the time? Shit--I'm late." He watched her spray herself now in the hollow of her neck, the underside of her wrist, furtively, as if he was never to know she ever smelled of anything but roses and sandalwood.

'in oceans before we had minds'

I'm reading Broken Harbour by Tana French, and last night I came across a passage that cast sea smells in a new light:

The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don't trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilisation, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals. When I was a teenager, that smell used to set me boiling, spark my muscles like electricity, bounce me off the walls of the caravan till my parents sprang me free to obey the call, bounding after whatever tantalising once-in-a-lifetimes it promised. Now I know better. That smell is bad medicine. It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leave behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore.

booknotes

As I may have mentioned twelve or a hundred times, the sweet spot where smells & stories meet is where this website wants to live. So I thought I'd try to get in the habit of sharing striking smell moments from the books I read. You should always feel welcome to e-mail me snippets of scent description from whatever you're reading these days.

I recently read and adored It Chooses You by empathy superhero Miranda July, and it contained this passage:

The address was a giant old apartment building on Hollywood Boulevard, the kind of place where starlets lived in the '30s, but now it was the cheapest sort of flophouse. It's not that my world smells so good--my house, the houses of my friends, Target, my car, the post office--it's just that I know those smells. I tried to pretend this too was a familiar smell, the overly sweet note combined with something burning on a hotplate thirty years ago. I also tried to appreciate small blessings, like that when we pressed 3 on the elevator, it went up and opened on a floor with a corresponding number 3.

Now I'm reading Carol Anshaw's Carry the One and have already encountered some great smell moments, particularly when it comes to Alice, and her consuming desire for Maude: 

...Standing in the shadows between streetlights was a tall blonde who, as she looked up,  revealed herself to be Maude.

Alice got stuck for a moment, then went to buzz her in. This was a completely surprising event. Since the accident Alice had only seen her once, at the baptism of Carmen and Matt's baby, Gabriel. They gave each other a wide berth. Now here she was in some agitated state, in jeans and a sweatshirt turned inside out. Ten feet tall. Hair a tangle, expression feverish, smelling like lilac and biscuits. If Alice believed in a God she would have asked him: Please give me this.

stinky springtime links

image via

Some fresh stinky tidbits to send you into your weekend (May it be fragrant!):

• Hitting right in the sweet spot of Nosy Girl's Smells & Stories Venn diagram is this New York Times piece, "Your Brain on Fiction:" 

"Words like 'lavender,' 'cinnamon' and 'soap,' for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells."

• Also squarely in that sweet spot, a beautiful, pertinent passage from The Art of Fielding, a book I finished yesterday and highly recommend: 

  "He could smell the way Owen's life and habits--weed and gingery cleaners; bookbinding glue, stiff white soap and garlicky tang of his skin; hardly a trace of Henry except for a faint bouquet of ribbed gray sock--had imagined themselves deep in the walls and floorboards of the place."  

• Nosy favorite D.S. & Durga gives New York magazine a peek at their studio. I love the details and the promise of those tiny bottles. Woodyamber! Beaver extract!  

 The makings of East MidEast must be on those shelves somewhere! [photo by Wendy Goodman]

• In a column called "Politics, Odors and Soap," Nicholas Kristof mentions a study that found people "offered harsher, more moralistic views after 'fart spray' had been released in the area."  He also notes that conservatives "secrete more skin moisture when they see disgusting images, such as a person eating worms. Liberals feel disgust, too, but a bit less." Does this make for sour-smelling conservatives who grow harsher and more moralistic in the company of their sour-smelling brethren?
• Do you read the blog Letters of Note? They recently posted a letter of advice, well worth a read, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter. The letter referenced Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 and this couplet burrowed into my brain: "For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds/Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." 
• Thanks to Britta, Beth, & my dad for these last quick links:
• Astronauts lose their sense of smell in outer space (so they crave hot sauce and look like Charlie Brown).  
• Hot on the heels of their story that spicy foods may promote heart health, NPR reported that "intense aromas lead to smaller bites." This story does not address the inverse phenomenon of instantly needing to take a giant bite of anything yummy that you smell.
• The pope gets his own fragrance, and you'll never wear it!

honeysuckle and lilacs both

It was springtime, and the park’s grass was very green and the air suffused with honeysuckle and lilacs both, which was almost too much. --David Foster Wallace, “Good People”

My favorite passage from "Too Much Information," John Jeremiah Sullivan's GQ article on David Foster Wallace and The Pale King, comes when Sullivan describes how Wallace writes not about his characters, but into them:

Imagine walking into a place, say a mega-chain copy shop in a strip mall. It's early morning, and you're the first customer. You stop under the bright fluorescents and let the doors glide closed behind you, look at the employees in their corporate-blue shirts, mouths open, shuffling around sleepily. You take them in as a unified image, with an impenetrable surface of vague boredom and dissatisfaction that you're content to be on the outside of, and you set to your task, to your copying or whatever. That's precisely the moment when Wallace hits pause, that first little turn into inattention, into self-absorption. He reverses back through it, presses play again. Now it's different. You're in a room with a bunch of human beings. Each of them, like you, is broken and has healed in some funny way. Each of them, even the shallowest, has a novel inside. Each is loved by God or deserves to be. They all have something to do with you: When you let the membrane of your consciousness become porous, permit osmosis, you know it to be true, we have something to do with one another, are part of a narrative—but what? Wallace needed very badly to know. And he sensed that the modern world was bombarding us with scenarios, like the inside of the copy shop, where it was easy to forget the question altogether. We "feel lonely in a crowd," he writes in one of his stories, but we "stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being," with the result that "we are, always, faces in a crowd."

It's this ability to get into another person, to put the reader in a small room with another whole human, that can make reading Wallace’s fiction so painful. Empathy, connection, the possibility of true understanding—essential to human kindness, yes, but also terrifying. I thought of S---, whose trauma is retold by the narrator of “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #20.” He explains how she used empathy to save her life, how she had to make what she calls a “soul-connection” with a psychotic rapist to keep him from murdering her. The narrator recounts: