L'important c'est d'aimer (Andrzej Zulawski, 1975)
"I love you means nothing."
Recently I've been getting very much into scents. I mean, I've long had an obsession/ sensitivity to smell, and an absolute mania for being clean, so really this is just something of a logical conclusion. No one should be surprised.
But it's been interesting all the same. A lot of new vocabulary for me. Discovering terms like 'accord', 'sillage', 'dry down', and so on leaves you with the feeling that you've been living alongside another world all this time, unaware of its presence. Crazy. What's that? You want to learn a term? Why sure, we can do that. Let's go with 'sillage'. First of all stop saying 'sill-itch', and start saying 'see-yazh'. Secondly, what it means is something we all know: it's how far a scent spreads on the air. We've all walked behind someone with extreme sillage at one time or another. It's that wake of a scent that gets left behind them, that's a strong sillage. A scent with a weak sillage holds close to the skin.
Now that's all kind of interesting, but where things get really interesting is with the idea of personal chemistry.
Personal chemistry, when we're talking about scent, is the combination of oils and whatnot on *your* skin that ends up creating a particular smell. What's interesting about this is that when you put a scent (perfume/cologne/etc) onto your skin you can expect it to smell radically different to how it would on someone else's skin. How crazy is that? Years and years spent researching and building a scent, but it all comes down to individual body chemistry.
Not only that, but everyone's sense of smell is different too. What is aromatic to one nose is obnoxious to another. There are simply no scents that are going to appeal to everyone.
Let's look at me, for a practical example. To date one of the best scents (aka, personal favourites, aka, signature scents) I've found for my skin is Serge Noire. But look this up online and you'll find a large number of people speaking out against it. They're saying things like 'onions' and 'armpits' and 'tikka masala,' and so on. Another is Rien, and look this up online and you'll find a similar series of divergent opinions about this one too. But the reason they're saying this is that both Serge Noire and Rien walk a high-wire act of personal chemistry. Trust me, I don't want to smell unpleasant. And I don't. But if you put either of them on, it could be very different. We all have to be ready for this.
What's also interesting is that the term personal chemistry can refer not just to the smell of your own skin, but to the accord (or lack of) between you and another living person. Sometimes you can find yourself at a party in the company of the worst human being you've ever met. And yet later you'll mention this to someone else, and then they'll regale you with tales of the wonderful times they've spent with this person. 'Astonishing,' you think to yourself, 'can they possibly be talking about the same person?'
Then there are special people. I've spoken about this before, but I'll mention it again. Haruki Murakami has often mentioned the 'just for you' phenomena: referring to people who seem almost specifically designed to appeal to you. If you don't like Murakami then you might like Plato. In Symposium Plato put forward a story about men and women being originally one creature that was separated by Zeus, and this then left everyone roaming the landscape in search for their other half. It's a lovely idea, but few of us experience this story nowadays.
Instead, what happens to most of us is a corridor of people: some good, some bad, some divine, some demonic, but mostly somewhere in-between these poles. You wander down this corridor, introducing yourself to everyone, spending varying amounts of time with each person, depending on the state of your unique personal chemistry.
Every once in a while there's a nightmare. A person who initially seems to be exactly what you're looking for, but turns out to be wearing a mask of some kind, or maybe they put on a mask later in the game, it can be difficult to distinguish these two things, both at the time, and later when you look back on it all.
And then, if you're lucky, these nightmares are counter-balanced by… can we say Angels? Maybe that's too religious. Let's just say that occasionally you get to meet people who seem to have stepped into everything from another time period. They seem… different. They don't act like they know everything, but at the same time they seem to know everything. Not the kind of knowledge that you would acquire to do well in a quiz, but the kind of knowledge that you would acquire to do well at life, to understand what it is that you want and what it is that you offer by being alive. Or maybe it's something less esoteric than this.
Maybe it's you, with your hand over the button of an elevator, there's a voice, someone calling out for you to hold the door, and you look up, and someone taken directly out of your head, out of your mind, out of your dreams, is running towards you, and everything slows, and for a moment you're not sure if all the air has suddenly disappeared, or whether you're simply forgetting how to breathe.