Love and Reverence In Quiet Times of Crisis

I went to a museum of smells the other day. It was precisely what you’d expect from a museum of smells: wild and weird, somewhat beautiful. It turned out to be less a museum of smells than a museum of perfumes and their essences, a history lesson of the particular way in which European people have attempted to capture and categorize the essence of the earth, extract it, draw pictures of it, obsess over it, sorted, classify and, specify it, place it in beautiful bottles, charge money for it, build an industry around it, mechanize the industry around it into something unrecognizable, reflect wistfully on the earlier simpler days in which the industry was not mechanized into unrecognizability, dedicate a museum to remembering those earlier days, and then sell access to that museum.

It was a small room, basically someone’s home, beautifully kept and curated. Appointments are made, you can stay for an hour, there is no smelling indoors, and you are provided with a paper nose cone for when you smell the outdoor essences. In addition to all the colonizer stuff of which there was a lot, I also experienced the amazement of moving slowly enough through an hour of my life that I could process and contemplate each smell. Essences I’d never heard of or known anything about described in words that I went to sleep replaying in my head like the lyrics to a new song. Vetiver, Oud, Amyris, Hyraceum, Styrax, Alpha Ionone, Orrs, Boronia, Heliotropin, Hyraceum, Courmarin, Oakmoss, Shiso, Yuzu. It was also, I now realize, a museum of sounds.