The soft, messy end of winter
On dreams, perfume, and Iris Murdoch
I have not been “firing on all cylinders.”
My comportment has suffered in small and various ways. I haven’t been reading as much. I haven’t been keeping up with housekeeping. I haven’t resumed strength training after some weeks of spiritual, physical, terrestrial weather.
Winter is long! But today it is warm with birdsong, and it feels right to name some of the good things and questions that have been getting me through.
Reading too much Iris Murdoch
What is it about this wild, brilliant, polyamorous philosopher? I have been buying used paperbacks of her novels with a feverish urgency, as if I’m afraid I’m going to run out or there will be a book ban. My to-read shelf is about 40% Murdoch. And I will not apologize for this.
Granted, the stories all start merge, but I can’t get enough of her “amatory gavottes,” as one critic put it, her conscientious curiosity about human motivation, her abiding interest in love. I should probably come up for air, should probably read something else, but I’m not familiar with anything quite as intelligent and compelling in fiction.
It feels vital to read a novelist who says things like this about her art form:
“Good art, whatever its style, has qualities of hardness, firmness, realism, clarity, detachment, justice, truth. It is the work of a free, unfettered, uncorrupted imagination. Whereas bad art is the soft, messy self-indulgent work of an enslaved fantasy. Pornography is at one end of that scale, great art at the other end.”1
And so here we are.
The Murdoch I’ve read, ranked
The Bell
The Sea, The Sea
A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Under the Net
A Severed Head
The Murdoch on my shelf to read next
The Sandcastle
Existentialists and Mystic: Writings on Philosophy and Literature
The Black Prince
An Accidental Man
Having vivid dreams
What’s the point of dreams? Why do I remember them so well? Why do particular dreams stick with me all day, sometimes for days on end, whereas others fade after a few hours? Why are my dreams often organized into chapters, with identifiable climaxes and dénouements? What is the point of all of this narrative specificity?
Thinking about clothes (again)
On one side: What people (like my dad) mean when they say they don’t care about clothes is: I don’t care about fashion.
I get that. I don’t care about fashion either. I’d like to define my own personal style, but I am not interested in the trends of the rich and famous (or the hot and young). Fashion is fleeting. Style is at least modestly more enduring.
My dad, despite what he says, cares deeply about clothes.
He’s extremely opinionated about having eight pairs of identical khaki cargo shorts, to fill the pockets with nails and sawdust and Skittles, and roughly 150 “dri-fit” T-shirts that smell like the mats in a gym. I speak from ~*lived experience*~, having once tried and failed to Marie-Kondo his closet. The man is obsessed with his very particular clothes.
On the other side: A particular brand of woman (and it’s mostly women) who spend a lot of money and time on their clothes and their appearance who are heard saying, whether on Instagram or in person, “I dress myself for ME” or some variation therein.
This justification is often trotted out when someone questions an online shopping habit or a closet full of barely worn heels. It’s often a way to justify extreme fashion expenses or an undue focus on appearance. I’m very interested in clothes and knowing about clothes and thus read an eye-watering number of fashion Substacks. I see this kind of defense time and time again. I own thousands of dollars of exploitive, overpriced luxury handbags because it’s my form of self-expression! Sure: Like anything could be. But at what point does this defense slide into an unsustainable abuse of people and the planet?
Fashionable women say things like this because they want to feel free in what they wear, which is a good and right feeling, but I think it often masks a particular bent toward vanity, toward wanting to be looked at and envied, which requires a good deal of time and money.
These two perspectives ultimately express the same value—I care deeply about clothes—albeit in very different ways. More on this later.
Related
Developing language for a sense
In an illogical way, I feel that I could make up for my hearing loss by developing a strong sense of smell. So what if I can’t hear? I can SMELL you so well.
This belief ignores the fact that being able to smell—what, accurately? Efficiently?—is not useful. Of all the senses, it’s the one you could most easily live without. This perceived lack of importance contributes to the poverty of language for scent, at least in English. I have been intrigued by this scarcity for a while now.
What might it be like to be great at smelling? And what might you say about it if you had the words?
This grasping for language is a large part of why I find scent so fascinating. The lack of words paired with the strong mnemonic power of scent makes it deeply intriguing territory. Smells evoke nostalgia, disgust, longing—and yet we can barely talk about them. We’ve only a handful of intelligible words at our disposal.
As an experiment, I’ve dipped into the very strange world of scentheads and perfume geniuses. For Christmas, I bought a sampler of fifteen “introductory” perfumes across a range of accords, from various houses, and from differing time periods (some modern, some vintage, almost all French, because apparently no one else cares about perfume like the French care about perfume).
And as suggested, I’ve been taking notes on each vial, in the little notebook I took to Vienna, and trying to write about what I smell. It’s been an exercise in frustration and in the futility of language, identifying how much I don’t know about what I am smelling and how I can’t even begin to talk about it.
It’s perhaps because of this failure that I delight in reading perfume reviews. The writing about perfumes is outrageous. It’s so entertaining and mind-opening to read people try to write about something for which we have no universal vocabulary. It’s like the best creative writing prompt.
For example, in a review for an indie perfume gaining in popularity, two different reviewers described it thusly:
Like young moss in a dark forest in the Pacific Northwest mixed with your high school girlfriend’s station wagon
AND
Smells like two old people doing it
And they are both right! (These two reviewers both gave the perfume five out of five stars.)
If anything, the best outcome of this brief experiment has been this discovery of a whole subculture of creative writing on the internet. Try writing about what you smell. The results might surprise you.
Favorites, so far, from the sampler
Guerlain Mistuoko: Heady vintage perfume with a masculine edge, like Greta Garbo’s smoking jacket; the tiniest spray will last forever
Ormonde Jayne Ormonde Woman: Mysterious, woody, faint floral edge
Frédéric Malle Lys Méditerranée: Like you rubbed the pollen off a fat white lily on your wrists and then sat baking in the sun
Dior Dune: Your grandmother’s old coat but not in a bad way; a comforting, nostalgic, familiar scent
Thinking about what I have tried and failed to write about
Should it matter at all how we dress? What’s the moral component to presentation and dressing?
Toxic femininity in purity culture
Siblings, the importance of having them
What’s the point in me hating musicals so much (the performative, saccharine emotions; feeling like it’s for children and yet marketed to adults, etc.), why should I let this bother me?
How sweet the children are, how tender and vibrant at these particular ages
Currently reading
Babel Tower, A.S. Byatt
Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, Dan Wang
The Wisdom of Your Body, Hillary McBride
Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, Catherine Pakaluk
Iris Murdoch, The Art of Fiction, no. 117, Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2313/the-art-of-fiction-no-117-iris-murdoch
Living with a German Shepherd means I think about the sense of smell on a daily basis. I wish I could experience the world through the sense of smell like our dogs do for just one day. Shelby often knows when someone is in the next room before I do because she smells them first. Living in the land of snow has been so interesting to be able to see the animal prints on the ground and actually have an idea of what she is smelling and tracking. Scent is her most powerful sense, and it is fascinating to observe.