Cherry chapstick

This is part of Scent Access Memory, a collaboration between Dirt and Are.na. Get caught up on the series:

• Mall memories

• Metaphorically speaking

• Notes on Notes

• Death’s signature scent

Today, C.C. on documenting smells in the style of Midwinter Day, a work by the avant-garde language and New York School poet Bernadette Mayer.

I wrote only once about a smell, and it was to say that Avenue U smells like bread. But not delicious bread. I know what that means: delicious bread smells warm, soft, and sour. The Avenue U bread smelled sweet, quick, and tepid, like it lacked passion. For anyone else to understand what I mean, they would need to have smelled the same breads as me or recall what bread even smells like. It can be hard to tell memory apart from imagination in these situations.

A song titled Cherry

Chapstick played in my

headphones as I looked

at the chapstick

selection.

In Midwinter Day, the avant-garde language and New York School poet Bernadette Mayer wrote a mix of prose and poetry to capture dreams, meals, errands, and family life on December 22, 1978, before they turned into memories. Mayer attempted to document memory in real time to avoid the imprecise transformations that happen when adjacent archived moments influence how each gets filtered through storytelling later. Mayer’s actual memories died with her in 2022, but they are kept alive by a cult following of young poets who attend and participate in annual marathon readings of Midwinter Day.

Cherry comes in a pack

of three; I have to

commit to all three if

I want to smell it

again.

Reading Midwinter Day isn’t enough for me to understand it, so every year on December 22, I document my day and the act of rereading the book. The theater director Jacques Lecoq wrote in The Moving Body that “to mime is literally to embody and therefore to understand better” and that miming becomes a form of knowledge. I must insert my body in the work’s space and time to discover who I am and how I’m different within Mayer’s framework. 

Midwinter Day continues to teach me new ways of paying attention to details of life, turning easily forgettable into impossibly unforgettable. I remember the neighbor’s bass-heavy music boring into my bedroom in 2019, the canvas bag a stranger carried as I walked behind them in the rain in 2022, and the large rock I used as a reading chair on a cold beach the following year. I remember listening to a sad song and noticing that everyone nearby walked away from me in a very organized fashion, all in different directions.