Notes

NOTES NOTES

for Joanne

HEAD

ALMOND

The most impressive, when you think about it, is this: You can take an almond and crush it with the power of a thousand wronged fists, but it will still make milk, not blood.

BLACKCURRANT In the dream the one you love opens his mouth and lets all of his teeth fall out in sequence, as if loosely glued. They form a pile of ivory on his tongue, which he extended to do the catching. You think, this is not a nightmare.

He rolls them around in his mouth like marbles and swallows them whole. Black tar begins to drip from the cavities, and he waits. Finally, he says: it’s sweet. Like spoiled molasses. You wake up and his breath smells like morning, but it’s warm and familiar and far less sticky.

Later you ask him to tell you again. It’s far now, having left nothing but a faint taste in the back of your mouth, a dirty sweetness. Tell me about the black stuff, you push and push, as if he knew it better. He runs his tongue over his teeth.

Have you ever folded flesh into your fist until it became pulp? Watched something ripen until it rot? Crushed a beetle into a urine-paved sidewalk and thirsted, as its body cracked and burst open, for the taste?

LEMON Take off your clothes and get in. Run the water hot, then hotter, then go in with both feet so you can’t back out. It takes a few minutes to get used to it, but you stand underneath a scalding shower for long enough, you forget that the reddening body you see is yours. At a very lucid moment, the dimensions of pain separate from the person and sentience becomes awareness, as the condemned at the stake watches the flames rise. They can always sense the heat rise first, but it never feels as real until the licking flames. Imagine the flicks as demons, tongues. When skin is overheated it feels like it could be scraped off, that by shedding all will be new. At the tattoo parlour, your nails dig deep into your thigh as the needle goes in, then start scratching with intensifying force.

The desire for self-punishment comes from control. As it is with trading pain for pain, it feels good to choose your means of suffering, as if in the process of pinpointing the exact location of your guilt, you can extricate it with a swift pluck. A self-appointed sin will pop right off, or so I’d imagine. People will make use of all sorts of methods to punish themselves, but of the common ones I prefer burning.

With water there’s always a chance you’ll drown. Plus, sometimes

what you want to wash off will not dissolve in water, and it’s for the best.

There are places in the world where they wash their hands with lemon, and it comes with a few flower petals in a warm, copper bowl.

The temptation is to drink, to consider the aromatics of the fruit a cure for any ailment. But do you feel clean? If you slice the fruit in half and rub down your body with it, as an ointment, you’ll find that somewhere on your body, it will start stinging in a very real way. Your body says go on. Take a bite. Try not to make a face.

FIG For some there is life before figs and life after, and for some there is no life at all.

When our hero and heroine first met they took a walk in the garden and took in the effervescence, a breeze crawling inside their shirts, the dirt getting deep into their nails. During a walk like this the truth surfaces: if any color should have a smell it should be green, because there is nothing nauseating about green, nothing one could have too much of without really trying to poison themselves. Our hero and heroine kept along and there was the lingering weights of love, a lot of it, but only a little that was detectable to their senses at the time.

In that courtyard he picked a fruit off a tree and she tasted fig for the first time and for something out of character she thought she would never eat another fruit again. The sexuality of the fruit did not escape her, but rather excited, in a way akin to scientific observation but not nearly enough to truly be. As a compliment to the fig she split the ripe skin with her nails and watched the milk drip from the tiny red filaments, then licked.

The flesh was soft, then sweet, but soft came first, as one would observe of the mouth of somebody they kissed for the first time. She liked first times, and not in that Biblical sense, but sometimes. And starting from the fig, she never wanted anything else.

Then came the candles, the oils, the preserved and the spread, the leaves, the trees, the shades, the dusty earthy linear way it lifted off her skin. In essence, figs are better than themselves. Greener, fresher, more symbolic of the eternal, unrelenting, cruel summer. They make you delirious, dreaming only of more.

Anyone clinging on to something perfect for too long will eventually lose it in a way that ruins them. When drunk with Plato you know nothing about grief and absence, and Plato, too, loved figs. Those are the laws of loss and perfection. If a fruit becomes a person, does that person crawl inside the fruit to die?

But a fig lover will tell you to be suspicious of anything that evokes both birth and death, as it were, which it does. The garden, the leaf, the fruit. The silk and the milk. The flesh and the nectar. A troubling

conjunction of metaphors, frankly. A fig lover knows, but will suffer the loss when it comes, and until then they will simply be.

If we look back, what they took a bite of in the garden was not an apple, but a fig that got away with it.

violet The wallpaper of the public library only remains attractive for a small, certain pocket of time: the age when secrecy is merely about being alone, especially alone with another person who wants to be alone, too. The one they chose was old and badly taken care of, multiple aisles lacking any sort of light, a profitable time in which little spiders scuddled around the encyclopedias without a sound, their legs sometimes catching the glow from the street lamp outside.

This time she pushed her back against one of the shelves and pulled her hair around, and he could see the small hairs on her neck stand up for a brief moment, but just long enough for him to remember it for most of his life. He watched as she pulled out a book and in her typically disinterested manner flipped through it, looking for the right pictures. He was mesmerized by the dust particles flying up at them, fairy dust from another universe. Leaves, branches, twigs and flowers were pressed into the slight emboss of the type, like prints themselves. She was bored. He liked the way her hair looked against a browned fern, curling off the page.

To show off, he extended his tongue. She accepted the dare and

found the perfect specimen, then deposited a thin, purple petal in the middle of it. He closed his mouth and pressed his tongue against his palate, and a vivid image came to her—the colors of the flower immediately returning, as if reawakened by a small blushing.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “It’s just like when you bite your tongue and it bleeds.” She was enthralled by the idea of a flower bleeding and kissed him immediately, curious for a taste of the secret. The kiss did not last long, and he was disappointed. There was no blood, and she was disappointed.

They often lied to their parents and went to the library just to look at the spiders, because nothing at the library was the same. After hours, the room sinks into an uneasy silence, the kind editors splice into horror movies just so that it could be filled with something shrill.

They were interested in books but could not admit it to one another yet and at that point it was easier to be into spiders. This was an anomaly.

MINT The breeze drifting in from the window facing the dark red beach says Stop. You are getting flustered but here is what you need, a cool hand pressing against your forehead like glass saying stop. Let the palpitations seize and the breathing resume and we shall continue.

When the heat dies down the crabs crawl out of the sand and if you walk carefully they might walk alongside you. There are little ones that reflect the light from the moon and they are more beautiful than diamonds. Have you ever seen a diamond walk across the sand?

The night shows you the beauty that the sun will never see, the impermanence that is burnt away by daylight. It says, hold your mouth open by clenching your teeth, then inhale. It says, we’ve all misunderstood. When the sun sets it is not about love, but about luck. How lucky we were.

CARDAMOM When the hard rain slowed to a mist the garden began to lift in layers, starting with the scorched earth, as though it knows. Something has to shed before something else can emerge.

Once upon a time you thought scorch and scorn meant the same, then knew better. And yet: try doing either to a woman.

They say forgiveness is a scent left on the heel by the crushed flower. Sometimes it is also the jeweled palette of a fading bruise, summoning attention in its own quiet way. Look, it says without saying.

You’ve hurt me. It takes a day for a bruise to rise to the surface but weeks to sink back in. You don’t want to forget but your body does.

There are things the rain does not wash away, only releases. When the hard rain slowed to a mist the garden began to lift, and you yearned for something green beyond the dirt. Where things go to die new things are born.

All this you thought of from the porch, which was wet but not unbearable. The porch was wet but you sat very still, clothes damp but

not unbearable, the white of your shirt shrinking with the first signs of blood. The blood was not unbearable but the white was. You see the first signs of blood and you hold your hand up to your nostrils.

You see the first signs and rub the edge of your lip with a knuckle, holding your head up, looking straight ahead, while the garden lifted and dried.

HEART

TOBACCO I have found it hard to begin when I know that it will end with dust.

And by it I mean I and end I mean soon, most likely now. Click, click. When they leave the dead behind they will start with me, because there will be no body, and no goodbyes. It is my fate to be scattered not gathered and that’s something I have found hard to accept, that your entire existence can be both solid and gaseous at once. For a brief moment I ask you to carry me on the rounded curves of your shoulders in the stitching of your clothes in the treads of your soul.

For a brief moment bring a part of me into your lungs and carry it, make me yours. Remember me as I am leaving. I am finding it hard to leave because I am waiting to start and the waiting is the thing that kills you, not the killing or the leaving. I am keeping all of my secrets for the five minutes I have to tell them before I’m gone. I am letting you bring a flame closer to me, I am glowing red and orange against your teeth, my secrets unraveling as you breathe in. I am telling you the stories now, I am hoping you hear them and remember them and tell them again to someone who will not have the pleasure or loss of knowing. I am rising in the dark now, and yes, now I am not afraid, yes now I am crisping and breaking, now I begin.

JASMINE A winter blossom is not one you believe holy, but in another life it may well be spring: a vivid day. The humidity in the air is a potent carrier, and even better seal. At the edge of the sun, they sit. On a concrete balcony of a derelict Changsha high-rise, they sit. Small white flowers in an invisible bell jar of their own fragrance, perched like bows.

The light is not crucial to the survival of the memory, but the temperature is—an exhalation coming to an end, right before it’s swallowed by the atmosphere. Like the smell of jasmine, the air is of a different dimension than skin, but close. Palpable, but not quite so.

Before nostalgia, there was this. The homesick to clutch the details, and that is precisely how it goes.

The flowers are visible only in periphery, their petals rounded by bokeh. We lose focus. Sharp, a grimacing boy pulls at a long, matted beard, getting his fingers deep into the hairs. Your grandfather is laughing, his teeth bulging. (Was the beard white with wisdom, grief, or survival? These are questions you’ll ask when it’s too late).

It’s Newton’s third law again, pull for pull, each to their own gravity.

By these laws your heart falls, plump and flooded. The photograph stays in the envelope so as to not collect dust, but you check once in a while to make sure it exists. Here. Hear. Those are not hairs pulled taut you see, but minute strings.

LEATHER That it is derived from someone or something else’s skin is not a thought that crosses our minds, at least not often, which is a relief.

Most of us will agree that leather is objectively sexual, if not attractive to our own bodies, because it clings to our skin. It’s skin on skin.

No one ever thinks about the other meaning.

SALT If the ocean wants you back, that is exactly what it’ll get. Like a gum receding with time it will come and take you, even if it’s piece by piece and hardly fair. You get acclimated to the sting. It will take you even if you love it, not knowing that somewhere down the line it will have you. Even if you wanted to love without wanting to be had.

It’s no coincidence that we cry the way we do—is it bait? An engineered sense of belonging, an implanted deja vu. Little salmon bodies swimming upstream to reproduce and die. We emote what we came from, and where we’re headed.

When you think about air, as in really take a breath and consider the atoms in the atmosphere, it’s not nearly as covert about it. Without air you will die, and it knows. But the sea is still the one to push open the door and come inside and take the life away from you.

You never miss air until it’s leaving, but in some parts of the world you miss the ocean every day. In some parts of the world you resign yourself to approximates—large lakes, aquariums, scented epsom salts in a bathtub, big prints of waves crashing over your couch.

The cure for anything is salt water, it is said. Sweat, tears, or the sea.

For me, it has always been the sea.

But it’s water, it can be argued. Except we can argue too that freshwater is hardly comparable, merely a shadow of an existence, like a Vegas replica. There is awe in the power, size, immense mythology of seas, awe that cannot be replicated, even though the great lakes seemed impressive the first time.

Beings that made a name for themselves crawling then walking away from the sea can only confess that they always desire to return to it. It’s within them, inextricably and without exception. Why else would we long to go back? We learn to build our first homes away from the sea, but not the ones where we go to die.

ROSE Is a rose by any other name, but sometimes confused with the tuberose, which it isn’t.

Is petal by petal, made bigger than its whole.

Is a placebo against aging, a beauty in a jar, a microcosm of affections that do not transcend.

Is a liability.

Is an alibi and a crime with no real distinctions.

Is the answer, but also the clue.

Is sorry, but not ready to apologize.

Is not a means to an end, but often understood as such.

Is a rose?

Is of course a rose.

Is sure of itself, more than any other flower

(even more than the narcissus, who still had to look).

Is never looking, only looked at.

Is blushing.

Is fine alone, but better in company.

Is easy to take care of, if that is your intention.

Is sure to project its thorns, in case you forget.

Is by any other name a rose a rose?

Is by a fine line intoxication or toxic.

Is not here to hold any hands.

Is getting her way.

Is making you give in.

Is a handkerchief pushed up against a helpless mouth.

Is a woman tied to the stake.

Is her hair against the flame, and you can’t look away.

Is a witch, who has no other name.

HONEY When we say sweet, it comes as a sharp sound, swiftly at us and then terminated. A quick finger across the throat—an arrow dulled by the soft entrance to flesh.

Swee-t.

If it can be helped, the last part is masked, rolled away by the tongue.

Defer the thud. Defer the ending.

Something sweet does not sound true. It’s a threat—the very real possibility that it can turn into something that it is currently not, which is the perfect thing. Too much sweet is saccharine, which looks beautiful but has an excess of letters, as true to form. Not enough sweet, and we miss it. It is a weapon and it is a drug. We have withdrawal. We yearn.

(Once we thought of sweet as a thing to complement salts, sours and bitters, but it is actually a poison we’ve learned to dilute. The fear of having too much, and having to do without the thing entirely.)

But sweetness is a lesson that we never learn. It is good until it isn’t.

It is all you want until you want nothing to do with it. It says to you, like sap to insects, Come closer. I am exactly what you are looking for. That’s it. And then you’re stuck, and then you’re drowning.

Perhaps this is also what we should be saying about desire.

AMBER The beetle stares at you without blinking as you imagine what sweetness drew him in. There is no sign of struggle. Remember the photograph of the girl who jumped to her death in Manhattan. She wore a glove.

Was this beetle so consumed by the resin that he gave up to be there with it, or was he caught by surprise? Is that the fate that awaited boats at the siren’s call? We have coined an expression for a sailor’s death but we have never heard these songs, and that is just what the cautionary do.

We have given a name to the essence of amber that evokes its sweet, familiar warmth, but in reality it has no smell. We will never know if this was true for the insects. We can attribute it to hunger, or to lust, or any emotion of which they are capable. But when he stares at you from his golden coffin, you stare back, and his eyes are glossy with love.

SOUL

VETIVER Sooner or later it’ll happen to you. There’s no point holding your breath, which sounds like a reaction but is, and you’ll come to agree, a resource. One days the light hitting the brownstone will cease to press against your ribcage as it did and the smells of the different neighbourhood will stratify into the very wrong and the very unaffordable and soon the beautiful gray pollution of the city will have infiltrated your body, left a thin lining in your lungs. If you don’t keep scrubbing it away, writing with your fingertips, etching names and nouns over and over into the very granular air you breathe, then you have to stop and start saying goodbye.

If you picked the right city the first years are very much like falling in love, fast and delirious. Summer nights bleed into each other and there is magic in the way your body becomes the air, your dazed limbs carrying you home like a draft. Those are the days you miss, even though the sun sets very late and sometimes you’re up to see it when it comes back, and you wonder where the night went, or if it was just a very slow blink. The right city will hold you in the warm pocket of its mouth and let you get used to it, let you get drunk on it, and then spit you right back out. Montreal eats its young but New

York knows better. New York waits for the ripening, and then drinks the wine.

It’s best not to leave city while you’re still drunk on it, but rather feeling the rhythms of a sobering headache. It’s best to leave seeking lucidity, and whether that’s in the mountains or the ocean or somewhere extending across the two is unspoken, but you know. You know it’s not between the ridges and grooves of concrete and steel.

It takes heartbreak to leave that, and I’ve never seen it as anything human.

Say you choose the fields, giving up one sharpness for another. You walk into the heart of it at night, and in the absence of streetlamps and neon signs you can only make out its pulse, a thick, languid beat. If you look out into this density there is tall grass and there is a congealing darkness, and someone you once knew called these dips and ripples a quilt and was not wrong. It felt comforting at the time, but now suffocating, and so it feels as you stop recognizing the people you love. So it feels as you mourn, whether a city or a body or an idea. Jack Gilbert said it first, Letting the rain after all the dry

months have me. But you think no. You think, close but not the rain, not today. Today you will lay yourself down in the cool damp earth, tucked by the brittle crisp greens, and the roots will wrap themselves around your body and take you in.

CEDAR The neck is rarely celebrated as an site for memory but if you learn to speak its language, it will do most of the telling. Press your face into someone’s neck and tell me if they don’t desire you or despise you upon contact. Hold someone by the neck and you’ve got them. The hairs on the neck will raise for arousal—whether excitement or fear is to be determined, but as with love, the boundaries are close. The first person you kiss smells like faint cedar at the small point where his ears became his neck. I dare you to forget either.

OUD* You were wrong: Sweetness can come from death.

I am the proof.

If there is a light we will look keep looking, whether for the illumination or the extinction. If there is a tunnel, we will wait for it to finish. And the truth about endings is this: there is no such thing as a real understanding. How could there be? While in motion, the shark has no concept of death. It is only when he is out of air that he understands, sinking like lead, little crawling critters scrambling to get out of the way. (If a shark falls to the depths of the sea, does his body cast a shadow, warn of his arrival?)

We’ve gathered an archive and repertoire of death, or something to its image. A sudden darkness, ashes, fading from a photograph until the body is entirely—athletes visualize to brace themselves, and we prepare ourselves for the final moment. Death is the most visual concept because it has no body to seize, and that is precisely what makes it death. What is it that we think we’ll see? A bleached white light?

A crimson lava pool? The faces of the ones we’ve let to lose, but know

we will one day? There is no bracing: a knife will slice right through two plates of armour.

Yet when we talk about death we rarely come around to talking about the tangible, visible, everyday face of it. The woman who puts her dead husband’s shoes by the doorway in case he comes back and needs them. The man who looks for his wife’s hair in the shower drain, and finds it in the garden. The rooms left untouched after a person leaves them for the last time; the dog who lays daily by his owner’s grave. The ones who continue to live without quite knowing how—are we forgetting to look at them? What about they, who look death in the eye, and keeps dreaming of life?

* Heartwood is a spontaneous transformation of wood as becomes as a means of resistance to decay - the wood darkens, densifies and becomes heartwood, and then it is considered dead. Agarwood, also known as agar and oud, is a dark, aromatic resinous heartwood that forms in Aquilaria and Gyrinops trees when they become infected with a type of mold.

SANDALWOOD The conditions for remembering are this: the presence of ritual, and desire. For the palace to stand and not sway there have to be rules.

The geometries of the space, of course, but also the inlays, the rigor, the brick by brick pillar by pillar, the careful arrangement of objects in which we instill these memories: dappled sun across a hallway, curtains waltzing back and forth in a long-lost bathroom, the lineage of craft soaps brought back every summer from another country, pressed neatly against others of its kind.

We’re so used to visual patterns that we forget about the rituals of experience, which are often the most indelible. Try summoning a childhood home without the odor you get when you first walk through the door. Try recalling a kitchen without tasting the meals, or a backyard without the way the sun sets over the roof of the house.

Try to walk into the bathroom in your mind without missing your mother’s perfume, the bars of soap by the sink, sandalwood, sandalwood, sandalwood. Saying the word leaves a round sensation in your mouth, like someone just deposited a smoothed piece of glass on your tongue and you are mulling it over. Saying it outloud you are breathing it in.

Eleanor Catton said, The ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have. Sometimes it is not a pattern but a wave. We could say the same for memory, or we could say that they are different recollections of the same thing. Every time you remember you forget. De Montaigne: Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it. And so we try.

VANILLA Home is not: Where the heart is. Do not make the fatal mistake. The heart is built to travel. It is engineered to be inside a ribcage and portable, to go where you go, and keep up. It can be taken out, worked on, exchanged, and for that reason you cannot make it a home. The heart, even your own heart, is picky. It will always choose human beings over anything else and the hardest truth about human beings is that they will eventually leave you, and not always because they wanted to. Then where is your home? Then where is your heart?

Home is not: Wherever I’m with you. Some love songs will be timelessly anthemic and some love songs will, like a quick shot of sugar or the smell of something fried, make us instantly crave the brand of love they convey. That specific emotion, crafted by one person for another person and maybe a fictional person, is hard to fully conceptualize and even harder to replicate, though for years we are not aware of the fact that

we are trying. The effort is of course wasted on the approximation of the emotion, when it should be on the differentiation. The beauty here is when you think about “you” as you (yes, you.) Let’s start here: home is where I’m with me.

Home is not: Where the memories are. It’s hard to not consider this reductive, a tupperware of salt water ebbing and flowing with the sea. Also: see the previous point about the heart’s portability. There are areas of the brain where memories seem to be stored and yet, where do they after the lights go out? Just into the mind of another person, remembering.

Home is not: Where your story begins. It is where it ends, if you’re lucky.

Home is not: Where you think you’ll find it. Please don’t listen to me if this does not speak to you. I am still searching for it between the vowels, branches and layers of everything. But what I’ve learned to be true is this: she who looks for a sense of home in a room will find it, inevitably, in the smell.