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Our sense of scent has a limited vocabulary. Across known languages, anthropologists have found fewer words for our olfactory experience than any other sensation. So, we speak of our olfactory experience in similes and metaphors. We reach for language to describe smells in relation to our other senses. Bright, green, metallic, smoky, floral, fecal, loud, round, sharp, or citrus are words I might use, but these notes can be traced to objects, not the odors themselves. My favorite perfumes are slightly addictive, like the feeling of devouring a book. Perfume language is purple, its prose comfortable for me, it’s as if I revert to sensory language when I forget the performance of writing for a society (a country? a culture?) that loves a bare, spare sentence. I’ve been a devotee of purple anything since childhood: clothes, lipstick—a sentence. I admit that when I write in perfumed language, I feel truer as a writer, wilder and messier, anachronistic or mystic, I feel more embodied, when I write the physical materials I work with, encapsulating a story inside of a vessel. I perfume with materials distilled from the earth, but also aroma chemicals extracted from fossil fuels. This leaves me with more questions than answers, but perhaps that’s how we know there is a future, when we continue seeking answers to eternal questions: What is real, what is false? What is natural, what is artificial? What is necessary, what must be thrown away?
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