The Future Will Be Like Perfume

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

• Cherry chapstick

• Post-Fragrantica Manifesto

• Worldly things

• Dowsing

• My Beautiful Dark Twisted Carcinogenic Fantasy 

• Ephemeral cities 

Today, Alphonse F on perfume and erasure poetry.

When I think of perfume, I think of an accumulation of absences—absolutes, processes of reduction—materials rendered more potent by their extraction. I think of layering, of dry down, and of the formulas that give form to fantasy. I think of erasure poetry. 

Erasure poetry as a form began as a simultaneous exploration of imagination and memory, with interpreters attempting to “translate” poets of antiquity into the present. Weathered stone carvings, decomposed papyrus scrolls, and eroded inscriptions were pieced together, collected and recollected, discovered and reassembled by scholars throughout time in acts of preservation. Yet in each, there are errant fragments, intimate mysteries, and unresolved ideas. We are presented with only notes of their presence, distilled through the passage of time. 

In the digital age, cultural artifacts are eroded by abundance. Timelines layer and compress artwork, images, and artifacts into corners of the internet. In my corner, I stumbled across a speech entitled “Perfume, Defense and David Bowie’s Wedding” delivered by Brian Eno in 1992 at the Sadler Wells Theatre in London. In it, Eno predicted the nonlinear, disembodied, relativism of contemporary culture. In Eno’s future, the top-down, empirical cultural arbitration of the past falls away, and a relational, directionless landscape ruled by the logic of scent and sound emerges. “The future will be like perfume,” he prophesied, and it is. 

At the heart of his talk, Eno describes the importance of a new kind of cultural storyteller: the connective thinkers who rely on intuition and contextualize artifacts in a personal logic, form, and voice. So after listening to his Sadler Wells lecture, I decided to make an erasure poem from it. I downloaded the YouTube transcript of the video, which was riddled with misnomers and [foreign] interference, and combed through it line by line, noting the timestamps down the left-hand side—that’s now Layer 1. I then found the official transcript of the lecture in Brian Eno: Visual Music by Christopher Scoates, which became the basis of the erasure poem (Layer 2), finding my own voice within Eno’s text to extract the sentiments of his talk. These selections interact with Layer 1 by removing the timestamps for parts of the speech. I added the sensory notes absent in my experience of reading it, as sourced from an earlier version of the lecture printed in Details Magazine, which sometimes coincides and sometimes repeats with the Sadler Wells re-print, and made that Layer 3. The poem below is a composite of all three layers and an erasure poem of Eno’s speech.