The Smell Of Memory

The most peculiar smell I’ve experienced in life is the smell of the screen door on my parent’s house in Minneapolis when I was a kid and it was summer and raining outside, that combination of odors, the metal of the screen combined with the smell of summer rain. I don’t know how to describe it. It swirled in my brain without a name. Turpentine is easy to describe. Its fumes are powerful, penetrating, dangerous like bulldozers and tanks and Virginia Woolf’s birthday. Things to be taken seriously. And not with a grain of salt. I know the taste of salt. Who doesn’t? It’s fundamental. It’s stimulating. It’s parenthetical. It’s diplomatic. It’s salt. Screen doors are a midwestern phenomenon. Because of the mosquitos. Flippers and fisticuffs. The stuff of summer. When the blood runs hot. And odors hang low with the threat of tornado.

My dad was a painter. He liked watercolor. I don’t know why. Acrylics and oil seem easier. Watercolor is hard to master. I may have asked. If I did, I can’t remember his answer. And now he’s gone. But he left me with the smooth unearthly snow of the Turtle Mountains. A ghostly band of cirrostratus and a copse of quaking aspen.

It’s amazing what paint can do. It can unfurl a salmon salvation in champagne pink. It can explode subject matter to smithereens of risk. Shave the night with a razor of gold. Color deepens the mythology of circumstance. Paul Gaugin in Polynesia. Wassily Kandinsky in the Alps, just south of Munich, where the road from Salzburg meets the Isar River, and the sycamores turn neon green in late afternoon. The intensity of the light produced by a failing sun turns a drab Bavarian studio into a palatial chorus of tangerine and imperial red. Huge canvas. Sable brush. Broad swaths of color and refractory forms. The clash of pigments. The hues of seclusion. Black whacked with a sliver of blue. Metamorphosis. Tremors of semantic confusion. Gunshot wound. Medical indelicacies lead a circus of glaze up and down a leg of pale copper. If this proves anything, it proves the difficulty of milking nirvana from a headlight. If nerves are thoughts do worms have thoughts? Neurology on the molecular level is pretty mind-blowing. Ants on a wall near Alamogordo following a nuclear blast can draw their own conclusion. What can one make of this world? A cup of tea. A tuft of cowslips. The potent charm of an empty room.

The best smell of all earthy and unearthly things is dirt. Rich black dirt. Full of worms and microbes. The smell of memory is the smell of dirt. Hard to get it out of your mind. Because you don’t want it out of your mind. You want what everyone wants: a dirty mind. A mind of dirt is a fertile mind in fertile dirt. The French word for word is mot. The French word for a compact clump of dirt is motte. Very similar words. Suggesting what? Suggesting that a word – say the word suggest – suggests dirt. With everything in it, and on it, and under it, and around it. A big clump of dirt. Full of fungi and grubs. Histories and arthropods. Nouns and nematodes. Roots and nutrients. It takes an exceptionally dirty mind to farm a single sentence. Plant it with seeds and semiotics. The semen of thought. The ovaries of ovation. Sous les toits de paris by Henry Miller. Fertilizers like Fanny Fern, Flaubert, and Philip José Farmer. Bone meal. Bat guano. Trials. Testaments. 45 minutes in a quiet corner with Anaïs Nin and a nimble imagination.