What the Nose Knows - Avery Gilbert [66]
The answer is that Emily Dickinson didn’t inhale fragrance like a normal person—she drank it. In her poems, the scent of flowers is nourishment. Describing the scent of spring, she calls herself “a drinker of Delight.” She gets drunk on fragrance: “Inebriate of Air—am I—/ and Debauchee of Dew.” She and the bee “live by the quaffing,” she on Burgundy, the bee on clover nectar. She raises flowers in order to consume their fragrance, which fuels her creative powers. There’s no denying it: Emily Dickinson was a fragrance vampire.
In Amherst one day, Miss Dickinson cut some bee balm and put a pot of jasmine out in the rain. Purely innocent actions had anybody noticed them. But inside the S&M hothouse of her imagination, these become: “Kill your Balm—and its Odors bless you / Bare your Jessamine—to the storm / And she will fling her maddest perfume / Haply—your Summer night to Charm.” In other words, death and violent exposure lead to blessings and nocturnal ecstasy. Dickinson’s flowers yield up their scent in the act of dying: “And even when it dies—to pass / In Odors so divine / Like Lowly spices, lain to sleep / Or Spikenards, perishing.” Dickinson sucks the scent-soul out of a dying blossom and begins scribbling lines of verse. “They have a little Odor…spiciest at fading.” To the ghoulish Belle of Amherst, the fragrance extracted at the moment of death was the tastiest.
I now think Camille Paglia got it right: our poet had an appetite for murder and mayhem. “Essential Oils—are wrung / The Attar from the Rose / Be not expressed by Suns—alone—/ It is the gift of screws.” Ouch! Dickinson tortured the perfume out of flowers.
This casts a sinister new light on the poet’s album of pressed flowers, lovingly preserved in the Emily Dickinson Room of the Houghton Rare Book Library at Harvard. Scholars celebrate it as a beautiful record of her passion for flowers. I think the album is a creepy thing—it houses the trophies of a serial killer.
THE COMPOSER Richard Wagner was another fragrance freak. He used mass quantities of scent in his daily bath and dusted his outrageous silken and fur outfits with aromatic powders. His personal letters are filled with discussions of perfume. The scholar Marc Weiner points out that Wagner’s “fetishistic fascination with odor” carried over into his operas. When the word Duft (fragrance) appears in a libretto, the context is almost always titillating, dangerous, and erotic. Beautiful Duft scents the air at every disguised suggestion of sibling incest, as in the first encounter between Sieglinde and Siegmund in Die Walküre. Noticeably Duft-less are socially acceptable unions such as the bourgeois marriage of Eva and Walther von Stolzing in Die Meistersinger. To lesser beings such as the dwarves Alberich and Mime in the Ring cycle, or the cobbler Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, Wagner assigns unpleasant smells. (Beckmesser stinks of the pitch he uses as shoe-black, which tags him with a satanic theme.) In Siegfried, a trilled theme on the piccolo serves Mime (in Weiner’s refined phrase) as “a leitmotif for abdominal wind.”
Me Smell Sexy
The night is cool. I feel a slight chill. The atmosphere is heavy with the odor of flowers and of the forest. It intoxicates.
—LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH, Venus in Furs
Regular smells can become eroticized.