XENITH

1) who decides what smell is unnatural?

1.1) to begin with, we ought to go back to socrates, with the whole essential/ accidental thing. smell can’t be classified as an accidental quality of whatever object to which it belongs. for example, if, tomorrow, I were to make a batch of cookies that didn’t fill my house with the smell of love and happiness, I would be flabbergasted. the smell of a batch of cookies is essential to it being itself. however, if tomorrow I smelled like cookies, I’d be nice and all, I’d probably have a good day, but I’d still be myself. (whatever “being oneself” means in this culture, I’ve never intimated, and I’ve lived in it for, gosh, nineteen years.)

1.2) so we’re not really talking about the smell, but the thing it modifies; not the adjective, but the noun.

1.2a) this is just to observe the interesting grammar thingy that just happened. our discussion of “who decides if a smell is weird?” used to be on the level of “adverb,” in that it affected an adjective. now we are at the level of “adjective,” since we’re now talking about the original “noun”- the thing being modified by the smell. logically, this places us on the same level as any old odor. out of courtesy, I will use pleasant odors from now on.

1.2b) as baked goods are about as culturally universal as ghost stories, jokes and sin eating, I will henceforth use the smell of delicious, fresh-baked cookies as this fundamental good-smelling thing.

1.3) so a single smell isn’t unnatural- only its emanation from a single object. or, roughly, when a smell outside the olfactory “middle-ground” is encountered, the question most often asked isn’t, “what is that smell?” this question is not meant literally.

1.3a) an anecdote: I didn’t spend much of my senior year of high school inside my high school. one of the few times I visited, I was walking with a friend of mine past the bathrooms, when I discovered a smell which I wasn’t entirely sure of. I figured it would be impolite to say, “wow, the bathrooms smell like absolute shit.” this would’ve been far too obvious. it might’ve insulted my friend, who may have had to deal with the smell of the bathrooms every single day. maybe I would’ve been pressing a wound were I to observe the source of his agony without proposing a means to remove it. so I said, “what’s that smell?” believing it would give him the opportunity to tell me about the smell. let him describe to me whatever hardships his life had taken on in response to the bathrooms. that way, I wouldn’t have imposed. to reply, my friend said, “shit, sam. that smell is shit. what else could it be?” he took it as disingenuous. there’s a special, soft part of the human heart designed to implode when its own tact backfires.

1.4) so who, then, decides what a thing should smell like? is that not a socially loaded question?

1.4a) an assessment of what a thing should smell like should be based on an intimate knowledge of what that thing is- the essential qualities over the accidental qualities. we can conclude, then, that any question of the smell is aside from the point.

you know what’s discouraged me? the phrase “intimate knowledge.” the idea that we can know anything intimately. what does it mean to know something intimately? does it mean I have to fuck my Algebra book? my television? my Brothers Karamazov? when did it become no longer sufficient to merely know something? will distance not equal rate over time if I don’t proclaim it with enthusiasm?

intimate knowledge. I doubt I’ll say that phrase again, because I don’t know if the two words belong in the same sentence. and I’m not a fan of the word “enthusiasm,” either, it has shady roots.

what is intimacy? what is it anymore? nobody ever knows. when it does happen, it’s hard to define. I will try to define it: if two kindergarteners playing house decide to get married, then divorce, only when they reconcile and remarry can the word “intimate” be used in a story about them. to my tin ear, that’s the closest I can figure it. now what do those five year-olds know? if anything, could it possibly apply to the game of house they’ve just played? could they apply it, freely, in their own words? christ, no.

that is what love is like now.

Related posts:

1. chapter two: momentous decision

   the idea is, the bigger the dog, the better the english major. when you have fed your dog all it could possibly eat, feed it more. ...

2. chapter one: some kafka, some of the time

   this is what happens when you become to your life what a janitor is to the building he cleans:...

3. chapter one is about christmas

   if ours wasn't a disposable culture, we'd have slightly better music on this month. ...

4. chapter two: give the dog a funny name

   is it a special kind of cap? one that you have to be a handyman to wear? is something wrong with your kneecap? suppose I'm a kid. I notice a guy in a wheelchair. will I be confused if I see he's not wearing a hat on his knee, and isn't a handyman?...

5. chapter three: genuine militant hipster

   on the last day, I would worry that somebody would poison all the hummus and we'd all die Byronic deaths we all secretly wanted....