“Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of map: the grid and the story. Grid maps tell us where things are. Story maps tell us how they were found.” — Robert Macfarlane (paraphrased from his discussion of grid maps and story maps in The Wild Places.) When I first walked into Sebastian’s fragrance atelier in San […]
cologne
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Motion
Part 4: Motion By the fourth pair of fragrances, I thought I understood where this project was going. First, fragrances became places. Then they became people. Apparently, I assumed that was enough. It wasn’t. The next discovery wasn’t about where a fragrance took me. Or who I met there. It was about what happened next. […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Characters
Part 3: Characters Until this point, the project had been behaving itself. Fragrances became places. Moods. Tea houses. Libraries. Rainy mornings. Comfort. Curiosity. That all seemed perfectly reasonable. Then one of them became a person. Actually, two of them did. And that’s when things started getting weird. L’Eau des Immortels arrived with notes that sounded […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Places
Part 2: Places My spreadsheet lasted exactly five minutes. The original plan seemed perfectly sensible. Brand. Fragrance. Notes. Rating. Done. Instead, I found myself writing things like: Tea House. Rainy Afternoon. Silk Road Library. At first I thought I was simply being whimsical. I wasn’t. I was discovering that “fragrance notes” answered the wrong question. […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Background
Part 1: The Inventory That Escaped Some projects begin with grand ambitions. This wasn’t one of them. My goal was embarrassingly practical. Figure out what I owned. Figure out what I liked. Stop buying duplicates. That was it. Instead, I accidentally started writing a series about memory, travel, identity, emotional geography . . . and […]