The Catalog of Human Memories by Celia Cummiskey
In her flash-length essay “The Catalog of Human Memories,” Celia Cummiskey examines the sense of smell and its potent ability to trigger memories and their associative emotions. Cummiskey began the piece during a workshop exercise, a journal listing observations about “whatever we’d noticed that week.” Hers centered increasingly on smell. “In some ways, this essay became its own kind of observation log detailing the spiral of this momentary obsession with scent,” she writes in her author’s note. Alternating memoir with research, Cummiskey swerves in unexpected directions, from a lover in London to an ancient Egyptian tomb, to the aisles of TJ Maxx during her adolescence, to a convent in sixteenth-century Florence, to the comments section on a website of perfume reviews, to a New Year’s night when she was a teenager. Her descriptions are notably sensory. She recalls the “warm tingle of my exposed skin in the icy air” during a kiss and “how…the scent of his cigarettes mingled with the powdery marshmallow of my perfume.”
Cummiskey produces a literary “catalog” in praise of the power of scents to inspire memories. According to Maggie Queeney’s definition of the genre for the Poetry Foundation, catalogs in poetry list “linked items,” often making space for “description, digression, and thematic development of both the individual items and what binds the individual items into a whole.” Cummiskey uses smell both to connect readers with some of her formative memories, and to link disparate experiences under the umbrella of shared human experience. The emotional power of scent becomes a link to our ancestors, an effect undiminished by the movement of time or place. Grounded in personal memories, “The Catalog of Human Memories” moves backward in time to historical examples and forward to the present and future when Cummiskey concludes her essay in the second person, pulling the reader in with “you”—a reference to the author herself, or a universal truth, or the reader, or all three. How would you describe the emotional lives of human beings through smell? —CRAFT
When I was in college, a lover came to visit me in London. He’d been traveling through the Balkans and staying in hostels where he’d needed to furnish his own towel and toiletries. When he arrived at my cubelike dorm, he brought with him a cheap bodywash he’d purchased in Croatia and had been using all summer. The liquid inside was fluorescent blue, the bottle emblazoned with text in a language we couldn’t read, but whose font, we joked, implied some kind of masculine insecurity.
When he flew home, he left the bodywash in my shower. I washed my sheets, my clothes, my skin, but I kept the bright blue bottle. When I couldn’t sleep, I crept to the bathroom and clicked open the lid. In the dark, I brought the bottle to my nose and inhaled its sharp menthol scent; the smell heady and intoxicating, like an embrace.
Ancient Egyptians adorned their bodies with oils and burned fragrant smoke to perfume their hair and skin. They favored myrrh, jasmine, precious woods, roses, juniper, animal musks; all ingredients still found in modern perfumes. How strange it is to think we gravitate toward the same scents, that so much has changed but not the way we want to smell. In 1897, when archaeologists uncovered the tomb of Neithhotep, queen consort to Pharaoh Narmer, they discovered the perfumes she’d been buried with still smelled sweet.
Recently, in a crowded hallway, I caught a whiff of One Direction’s Our Moment. A fragrance that was instantly recognizable to me, because I wore it every day of the ninth and tenth grades. I’d bought it with my mother in TJ Maxx, and smelling it on someone else was disorientating, like stepping through a sugary pink time machine. It conjured up images of Bunsen burners in my high school chemistry class, and the blood rush of asking my crush for a piece of gum.
I stopped walking, hoping to catch another whiff, but whoever had been wearing it was gone. As the scent faded, I found myself thinking of a New Year’s night when I was seventeen. The cool of a brick wall at my back, as a dark-haired boy fumbled for my bra. The warm tingle of my exposed skin in the icy air. How when we kissed, the scent of his cigarettes mingled with the powdery marshmallow of my perfume.
When a teenage Catherine de’ Medici was betrothed to King Henry II of France in 1533, she gifted him a bergamot perfume crafted by her personal perfumer René le Florentin. René had been raised by Dominican friars at Santa Maria Novella, a convent known for alchemizing the scents that had been used to cover the odor of sickness that presided over Florence during the years of the Black Death. When Catherine settled in France, her first order of business was to call for her favored René. His laboratory was connected to her rooms by a hidden passageway, so that none might steal and reproduce his secret techniques. Still sold by Santa Maria Novella in Italy, Catherine de’ Medici’s gift is perhaps the oldest known purchasable perfume.
There is a website perfume obsessives use called Fragrantica. The site allows you to search a fragrance and see it broken down into top, middle, and bottom notes. Users can rate a scent by its longevity, sillage, and price. But I like to scroll down to the comments. I’m always surprised by how different the same scent can smell to many noses, and how often our language fails us. How when lacking the words we resort to association. Each comment reads like an entry in a catalog of human memories.
If I were tasked with explaining all the emotion in the world to an alien, some being far from our world and our customs, I think I would show them that comment section. I would explain to them the animalic tang of fear, the wet-earth smell of heartbreak, the acrid metallic edge of loneliness. How for some gardenia recalls a grandmother’s neatly folded sweaters, and others a bridal bouquet. That new love can smell like fresh grass.
I would say there will be moments on this green Earth that are so immediate, so exquisite in their feeling, you think they must happen only to you, and you alone. You think you could never forget them, but of course in time you will. Until, for an instant, something in the air reminds you.
CELIA CUMMISKEY is a recent graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University’s MFA program. Her work has appeared in Post Road, phoebe, and The Missouri Review. Her essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Los Angeles, California. Find her on Instagram at @Ccelia.rose.
Featured image by 21 Swan, courtesy of Unsplash.
