PECHORIN'S PAINTBOX

What is it about smell that induces nostalgia so effectively? I often wonder about how effective a form of cinema would be which could create a fabric of smell to accompany image. A form which could effect a total recall of the 'good-times'.

I wish there were some way of capturing smell, in order to induce memories of a certain time or place. If such a device were to exist, (a small glass vacuumed bottle, with a cork stopper, which could suck in perfumes and fragrances, immortalising a period of time, a date, an event in a few cubic centimeters), I would code the olfactory present, and preserve the olfactory past, for the benefit of my olfactory future.

I find myself manufacturing this kind of nostalgia through music, something which is far less potent in conjuring that crashing feeling of 'long-lost' kitsch which smell can evoke so well. On the occasion that in the present, I am able to forecast a nostalgia: a nostalgia which will only make itself evident after a certain amount of time leaves me detached from it (childishly self-conscious, I know); I find myself faced with an overwhelming desire to code that moment with a particular album, or song. For example, Black Mirror by Arcade Fire reminds me of travelling from Newark through to central Manhattan on the train, whereas Maria by Blondie will always carry memories of childhood - sitting in the back of my father's car and driving to the beach in the evening. 

I live in perpetual fear of the day that hearing a particular song reminds me of the time when I self-consciously sought to immortalise a piece of the past in the future. It is at that precise, horrifically meta moment, that I will have failed. It is also at that precise moment, that the nature of nostalgia will have shifted.

Nonetheless, if a contraption existed for preserving smells, I would cultivate a shelf full of quaint identical bottles, all containing their own memory. They would be locked in a small room, for me to indulge in. The bottles would be labelled, not with time, or place, or even a description of the contained smell, but rather, names, or events, to which those smells pertained. 

I feel like the creepy guy from that John Fowles novel The Collector.  

Excuse me.