Honey and Milk

 

    Just as Diane Ackerman writes, surrounded by perfume samples and flowers, I too sit and respond amongst a sea of smells. To my left is my bright yellow coffee cup filled with Cafe Bustelo’s café con leche — of the K-Cup variety. In front of me, rose incense filtering up to the ceiling. And to my right, a package of seaweed chips and an “essential day moisturizer” proclaiming to be made of the finest silt from the Dead Sea (whether or not this is true is irrelevant, as I, personally, cannot verify the smell of the Dead Sea or its precious mud). Yet, each unique scent blends to create a patchwork of stories, memories, and perhaps, most importantly, myself. I am swathed in a perfume of my own creation. Not, obviously, to the level of quality or precision used by a master perfumer, but each item is selected with intention. Pieces of myself, gifts from loved ones, memories of travel surround me, and I remember everything.     

    It seems particularly cruel then, when Ackerman states, “Nothing is more memorable than a smell” (5), only to later counter that despite the emotional tenacity of a scent, we have no language to qualify it. Language. How tragically limiting! Unable to remember names, we grasp blindly for the next best thing: metaphor. My rose incense smells like burning flower fields wrapped in dew. My moisturizer, slightly sterilizing yet firm; milky, and grounded. We use personalization and abstraction interchangeably to attempt to bind smell’s elusiveness into a singular form. And yet, it continues to taunt us with its fragrant intangibility. 

    I think that’s what makes Ackerman’s use of “The Song of Solomon” so visceral. Passion, removed from the tangibility of touch, is slipped through various other senses to create a daringly sensuous love story, awash on the back-drop of prelapsarian delicacy. I feel myself swept alongside the lovers, drenched in honey and milk, marveling at the intimacy a single scent can create. And harmoniously, remembering my own experiences in perfumed love as well. I think it, then, incredibly accurate for Ackerman to emphasize the insoluble correlation between smell and memory. They are entwined together to become the foundations of human experience. Lovers never meant to be apart. Without one another, life is all the more bleak.