The
heavy rain faded away leaving a thick curtain of humidity hanging in
the air. It suddenly dawned on me: could water [or eau de toilette]
alone explain this steamy effect? Would it not be more accurate to
say that the hot and the dry gave way to the cool and the wet, and
then as the heat returned, it transformed the wet into this muggy
blanket of moisture now tinging the world rather gray and making me
feel as though I were in a permanently decaffeinated state?
My
thoughts are running slow; my speech is slightly slurred, but this
much I believe, albeit foggily, that I know: Does not reality, my
exquisitely scented friends, ultimately comprise pairs of contrary
things: the hot and the cold, the wet and the dry, the black and the
white, the scented and the unscented?
As
a matter of fact, there was a pre-Socratic philosopher, Anaximander,
who appears to have believed precisely that. This theory is ascribed
to Anaximander by historians, all of whom write about other
historians' writings, leading back to the sole extant phrase said to
have been authored by this man:
They
give justice and reparation to one another
for their injustice
in
accordance with the arrangement of time.
Now,
the historians who interpret this cryptic phrase pregnant with
possibility understand it to mean anything but an assertion of the
profound philosophical importance of perfume, and I am confident that
no one has ever before ended the list of contraries ascribed to
Anaximander with the all-important pair “the scented and the
unscented.” Yet it seems obvious that such an exclusion cannot be
rationally justified, given the abundance of smells found naturally
in the world and of which Anaximander was undoubtedly aware.
Could
Anaximander really have been anosmic? I think not. Instead, what has
happened is that historians over more than two thousand years have
dogmatically re-penned the same old interpretations over and over
again, the very interpretations in which they were steeped as
students. All too eager to please their mentors, these thinkers have
never really made any progress at all. Trapped in what they have been
told by equally ignorant others was the worldview of the ancient
Greeks, scholars continue to this day to neglect the central role
played by perfume in the history of Western philosophy. Let's look
now more closely at what Anaximander, clearly an avid
perfumista—whether closet or not—really thought.
Anaximander
is said to have believed that all of these contraries emerge from an
enormous “Indefinite-Infinite,” what he termed the apeiron.
The existence of the apeiron would seem to be the only possible
explanation, too, for the fact that perfumers still today, more than
two millennia after Anaximander reflected upon the nature of reality,
continue to make radically disparate, even antithetical perfumes.
Translating the terms of the question and its answer to a modern
context, how would Anaximander have aligned the opposites in
perfumery?
We perfumistas all know that sharp, soapy floral aldehydes such as Hermès Calèche and Amouage Dia bear next to no resemblance to a sweet floral oriental such as Tom Ford Black Orchid Voile de Fleur or Bond no 9 Chinatown.
But all of these perfumes are closer to one another than any of them is to a flowerless fragrance such as Prada Infusion de Vétiver or Annick Goutal Mandragore.
How to explain the seemingly endless ability of perfumers to continue to come up with new creations, using a finite palette of scents in the world?
Indeed, perfume would seem to offer the clearest illustration of what are said to be Anaximander's own views. This philosopher's metaphysical theory has the added virtue of having prophetically predicted what would happen in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the world of perfume.
Anaximenes,
Air and the Accordion Effect
Anaximander's
thought has been admired by many, but another pre-Socratic
philosopher, Anaximenes, refined the theory of the
indefinite-infinite apeiron, whose generation of opposites was left
unexplained by Anaximander himself. In a brilliant anticipation of
modern theories of physical chemistry, Anaximenes reasoned that the
qualitative differences observed in nature were brought about by
quantitative changes.
To give a simple example: think of water at very different temperatures. Water which is frozen has the properties of a solid thing. Water which is heated up acquires the properties of a gaseous thing. On analogy to this case, throughout nature, Anaximenes reasoned, it is through quantitative changes that qualititative differences emerge.
To give a simple example: think of water at very different temperatures. Water which is frozen has the properties of a solid thing. Water which is heated up acquires the properties of a gaseous thing. On analogy to this case, throughout nature, Anaximenes reasoned, it is through quantitative changes that qualititative differences emerge.
However,
Anaximenes did not embrace water as the ultimate substrate, as Thales
had. Instead, Anaximenes hypothesized that pneuma or air was the most
basic substance, the underlying foundation of the universe. He
reasoned that air becomes denser and denser as it undergoes
condensation, to produce all of the other apparently disparate types
of matter in a series looking something like this:
air
→ fire → wind → cloud
→ water → earth → stone
In
tandem, dense matter becomes lighter through the reverse process, of
rarefaction:
stone
→ earth → water → cloud
→ wind → fire → air
In
other words, air is the beginning and the end of all things. It goes
perhaps without saying, then, that given his explicit focus on air,
Anaximenes would have been very, very conversant with the perfumes of
his time, and with only a bit of interpolation, we can derive
important implications of his theory for the modern world of perfume.
give rise to the house of Clean?
In
some ways, what Anaximenes was suggesting held sway was the
proverbial “pendulum” or “accordion” effect, which obviously
applies directly to perfume. Among other phenomena, the 1980s
excesses of super-potent or scent-ful perfumes which filled entire
public spaces could only have been followed by the pendulum—or, if
you prefer, the accordion—effect of the apeiron. If asked to
explain what transpired, Anaximenes would surely have replied that an
expansion to the upper limits of scentedness had to be followed by a
contraction back to unscentedness.
So
there you have it my fragrant friends: the ultimate explanation of
the anti-perfume backlash and the mass of perfumes being marketed
today which offer no more and no less than the scent which should be
expected upon one's emergence from the shower or bath.
Hair
conditioner and shampoo florals, sweet laundry scents, and “not a
perfume” perfumes all emerged from the inexorable oscillatory
expansion and contraction of the apeiron. The “not a perfume”
perfumes such as Escentric Molecules Molecule
01 and Juliette has a gun Not
a Perfume may represent the limit to
which the contraction of the apeiron can still be capitalized upon in
persuading consumers to pay for less complexly scented liquids. Or
are people also prepared to pay niche perfumery prices for a
completely unscented liquid? Only time will tell.
For
now, we have Anaximander and Anaximenes to thank for providing us
with the explanation so many of us have been grasping for in
attempting to make sense of recent developments in the world of
perfume, a microcosm of the vast universe which these wise
philosophers undertook to explain. Clearly these thinkers, like
Heraclitus and Thales, were inspired and enlightened by their
experiences of perfume.
A
House of Mirrors
What
is it, then, which unites all of these pre-Socratic philosophers? No,
my fragrant friends, it was not just that they preceded Socrates, nor
that they indulged in metaphysical speculation. Nor that they had far
too much free time on their hands, as non-philosophers may be tempted
to jest. In reality, although their views have been rendered
scent-free by olfactorily challenged historians throughout many centuries, all of
these monistic thinkers recognized that, far from being a mere
cosmetic item, perfume holds within it the key to the deepest
mysteries of the universe.
Our
memories elicited by scent reflect an infinite kaleidoscope of
experiences unique to individuals yet still binding them together as
one. When we disagree about perfumes, proving yet again that “One
perfumista's treasure is another's trash,” we reveal that each one
of us, like Thales, Heraclitus, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, have
grasped different facets of Reality. We may lose sight of this truth,
under sway of lists of fictitious and metaphorical names given in the
note hierarchies for perfumes.
Cotton
Candy: Aquolina Pink Sugar
and MOR Marshmallow MOR
Popcorn:
Dior Miss Dior [Chérie]
and Memo SIWA
Vodka:
Bvlgari BLV Notte Pour Femme and Parfum d'Empire Ambre Russe
Earth:
Tokyomilk Crushed and
Tauer Perfumes Pentachords Verdant
Seawater:
Comptoir Sud Pacifique Aqua Motu and L'Artisan Parfumeur Fleur de
Liane
Suede: Keiko Mecheri Cuir Cordoba and Tangeri; Serge Lutens Daim Blond
Ozone: Bond no 9 Fire Island and Linari Vista sul Mare
In reality, cotton candy, popcorn, vodka, earth, seawater, suede and ozone are found in no perfume. These are names given to the intended evocations of the perfumes in which they are said to figure. People with no prior experience of cotton candy, popcorn, vodka, or suede will not be reminded of those objects when they smell a perfume which its creator intended to call to mind those things. But even less obviously metaphorical notes, such as rose, jasmine, ambergris, and many other naturally occurring things, are also, in truth, metaphorical. There is no rose in a rose perfume. A rose perfume is intended to evoke the effect of a rose on the person who smells the perfume. What is the effect of a rose on a person who comes in contact with it? Depends on the person!
