Five Brief Remarks About Le Labo Santal 33

Lately I’ve been smelling things, which is true because I always have, and while I suppose that my declared mission in life might revolve around syllables like “love” or “truth,” there is a different purpose I’ve been fulfilling more effectively—that of a person attending to the needs of his nose, inhaling everything possible, gathering the infinitesimal particles thrown off by a rotting tree or an exfoliated face or a damp wad of cotton, assembling them all in memory, such that they’ve formed, in my mind, a database of odors—although the word database isn’t quite right, connoting as it does a congregation of well-groomed data, when in fact it’s a bit more like a marketplace, with vendors hawking goods fragrant or otherwise—brandy left in a cup all night, the golden decay of an attic, bread becoming itself—each essence conjuring another world within that world, the final effect being that of a concatenation of nested impressions only united by the chance-based confines of a single short life—like a piece of disjointed theatre played by thousands of actors who age both backwards and forwards, or, if the Simile Police will allow me to reach for one more nugget of the commodity they control humorlessly, gimlet-eyed and holding crystal machetes, like a convoluted sentence, which might wind briefly around the smell, for example, of Mumbai in the morning (petrol with a hint of chicken liver), which I sampled in 2018, while I was hanging out the open door of one of that city’s trains, seeing shanties and skyscrapers sprawling so far they illustrated the earth’s curvature, a visual thrill that temporarily allowed me to forget that many Indian commuters have been beheaded by a passing utility pole while enjoying similar reveries, whether or not they were going to the little boutique I was going to, where I was surprised and pleased, after I somehow retained my head, to catch the scent of Le Labo Santal 33, a sandalwood-based perfume I’d worn a few years before.

I first encountered its radiance spilling off the neck of a patron at the pasta restaurant I used to work at, where it forcefully announced itself to my olfactory receptors, competing effectively with the formidable scents of that workplace—pig jowl, garlic, inky Sicilian wine—instantly making a memory that juts out now from the undifferentiated mass of hours I spent hustling spaghetti under the stars, memorable for the recognition that I had finally inhaled a scintilla of the Good Life, the smell of an untroubled and various existence—where all sorrows are merely passing aches, where all velvet ropes come unlatched at your approach, where you are escorted obligingly by winding path or private car to every delight you so richly deserve—a smell that explains why sandalwood was one of the things ancient Egyptians reached for when anointing the bodies of royals, or why it was one choice of Japanese worshippers who wished to honor the Buddha—an almost tragic warmth, suggesting both nature’s unity and its dissolution, the fact that we are all united in being crafted by the same unrelenting algorithm that will lead us all to separate and ugly deaths, even these capuchins here, though they play with our hair so fetchingly—which is probably what Justin Bieber thinks about when he wears Santal, as he does, it’s well-documented, although I’d point out to the Biebs, were he in the room with me, saying something similar to what I just said, that sandalwood is not its only significant element, it’s quite a nuanced concoction—its woody core is enclosed in a corona of other elements, among them, according to my nose, cardamom and leather and maybe even dill, together producing a shifting halo which smells something like almost anything, and yet, ultimately, like nothing else at all.

More than anything, it became for me a suit of armor—an invisible layer I could impose between myself and the world, hiding my other odors under a cloud of mind-controlling gas—and I do mean it when I say mind-controlling—its persuasive effects taught me that a spray of perfume really can make you ascend in the ranks of being; one of my romantic relationships began just after I bought my first bottle of Santal, when a remark was made, by a near-stranger, that she couldn’t stop inhaling whatever message I had atomized upon my person, a sentiment shared by people everywhere I went, all throughout that summer and fall, the First Summer of Santal, wherein passers-by would stop me on the street and demand to know what I was doing to their noses, one of whom told me that it reminded him of “forgotten memories,” a description I enjoyed, until I realized that if it reminded him of memories they would not, in fact, be forgotten, just half-forgotten, memories of that clumped and indistinct variety that shoot through you in distracted moments, those of scattered sunlight, and toes in the sand, unanchored by a specific date or place, which makes sense, because it’s this kind of primeval winsomeness, a feeling rootless but yet somehow essential, which Santal 33 inspires, and, which now, I was inspiring, with little to no effort, even/especially in myself—I would, occasionally, put my nose to my wrist and inhale again this little parallel world I’d scattered along my skin.

But this could not continue, this state of affairs in which I blared elegance at the human race with an invisible trumpet, for hordes of somewhat washed others joined me in wearing Santal—it spread as a virus does, by aerosol, from gala to gallery to boulevard, especially contagious because it possesses prodigious amounts of what the perfume people call sillage—the ability to project, to blanket the surrounding area—such that, increasingly, the coastal cognoscenti found themselves, day after day, stepping through the same heady and familiar fog, to the point where, though it remained lovely, Santal became an oppressive force, like a song repeated on the radio until its hooks became barbs, seeming less like a floating portal to a kinder existence and more like an insistent reminder of the way humanity will scrabble after luxury until any given good becomes a token, whether a Rembrandt or a handbag, and, before long, Santal, in the commercial sphere where I reside, became a byword for the easily-led upscale consumer chasing a dead fashion, to the point where one could count on smelling Santal at least three times an hour during a stroll around the more commercially dense areas of Manhattan or Brooklyn—and, unfortunately, the human senses are such that no gorgeousness, however singular, can go undamaged by such repetition.

I mourned this, not just because my vial of charisma lost some of its effect, but because I can’t help but feel like it was my scent for a little while, even though I had no part in Santal’s making, and even though it little resembles my own unfiltered smell—which, I was told once, by someone in a baleful mood, is reminiscent of stale potato chips—and this sense that I have a personal claim on it reflects, I suppose, a larger attitude of mine, which is that I am not interested in some notion of my unfiltered self, even though I live a life, given my profession, that’s devoted to self-expression—I write these things, in the end, for the very sake of filtration, the desire to smush down all of this triviality and distraction (which is to say, my life), as in enfleurage, a classical method of perfume-craft, wherein jasmine petals (or other botanicals) lend their volatile prettiness to a lump of lard into which they are pressed by a pane of glass, for a few days, before being replaced by others, a feast of organic matter fed to a wad of oil until it’s saturated with fragrance, more jasmine than jasmine itself, ready to be smeared appropriately—I would like to make myself smearable, to make of all my days a brief remark, or maybe five—a series of small gifts, maybe, functioning somewhat in the way that perfume, worn in the right quantities, can be a small gift to a stranger or friend, part of an effort to shove away one’s attendant filth, to distract all present parties from the facts of sweat and deterioration, temporarily providing an invisible province large enough only for a few, one perhaps so luscious and lulling in its physical properties that its few inhabitants are made, for a moment, unconcerned with where this is all going, and the terrifying fashion with which it might conclude.