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the speed of an animal
On learning to drive later in life
PASSING
“Is this your first time holding a driver’s license?” asked the examiner.
“Yes. First time.” I couldn’t blame him for asking. I’m a balding 45 year old man with grey in my beard. I was wearing a button down shirt and a modest spritz of luxury cologne – in case it made a difference. The other examinees were school kids in baggy shirts, baggy shorts, and begrudgingly worn shoes. I thought about all of the fear that must pass through the motor registry each day, as if fears were coins paid in tax to the state.
I was trying not to cry tears of relief. The examiner had just informed me that I had passed my driving test, and he was giving me the piece of paper that would act as the substitute for a drivers license until the plastic one arrived in the mail. My fingers shook as I took it from him. I thought of framing it and putting it on the wall, like an award or a degree.
I was feeling too many things at once; I couldn’t disentangle them, but I was abstractly cognizant that everything that was happening was good, was life-changing, was irreversible. There would be no more assessment of my driving ability, no more supervision. But, more than this: there would be no more dependency, no more asking for permission, or waiting for invitation, or trying to get places by suggesting, cajoling, planning. No more waiting for the bus in the burning sun or drenching rain. My travel time had suddenly been miniaturised. Even more than this: my anonymity outside the house had been granted to me – I didn’t just have to stand there, or walk there, as the river of chrome vehicles flowed past me, judging me.
~
ROAD RUNNER
I grew up watching American Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons on television. The absurdist desert canyon of those cartoons by artist Maurice Noble would go on to affect my dreams for the rest of my life. The Road Runner landscape was a synthesis of the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, distilling a whole dream of the American Southwest, both its past and its future, to the simplest possible shapes. It was a landscape of vastness, both horizontal vastness and vertical vastness. Part of what made the Road Runner cartoons so delightfully absurdist was that the vast space depicted was no barrier to travel. The Road Runner could cross the desert in a moment. The Coyote could fall from a precipice to the sand of the desert floor in a moment without perishing. It didn’t matter whether the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote were running or falling, they always seemed to shrink rapidly to a tiny dot in the distance, swallowed up by space, silence, and the glissando of a doppler shift. Travel was effortless, and space was effectively divorced from time.
That oneiric desert always seemed so empty and attractive to me. As a white child growing up on stolen land, I interpreted that world as a reassuring fable about colonialism, or to use colonialism’s word for itself, “civilisation.” I interpreted the Road Runner as Indigenous, at home in the open desert, and the Coyote as the invader, using ACME corporation tools and traps. This is to say, I identified very strongly with the Coyote. He had a business card, a middle name, used tools, saw himself as an apex predator, and in the most gorgeous of suburban details, he was a sucker for mail order products. (I loved mail order catalogues and products too, and if you think of the internet as a kind of souped up mail order system, then I still do.) Coyote was, to my eyes, a settler and a suburbanite still living for the thrill of conquest and dominion, still hoping for better weapons.
But even though I identified with him, it still makes sense that I applauded every time he failed. I was personally seeking settler innocence. I needed to hear that the desert and the Road Runner could withstand Coyote’s rapacious appetites and destructive behaviour. I needed to know that as an Australian, that the landscape would be okay. The animals would be okay. The world could withstand me.
But last month when I got my license, I found myself thinking about the Road Runner cartoons, and the ways in which they’re also a fable about roads, cars, and driving, the most powerful tools in the modern colonial arsenal. Because the desert of the Road Runner cartoons wasn’t really empty at all. It was covered in roads, ribboning across the desert, tunnelling through mountains, giving the Road Runner an almost godlike power to conquer the vastness of space and time. The Road Runner’s call “meep meep” is even the sound of a car. The mid-century American world that created the Road Runner cartoons was a world of suburban sprawl in which all of space was being suborned to the logic of the automobile. The road is the colonialist coup de grace: it seems to sever space from place.
I’ve been thinking about Road Runner cartoons because the reassuring absurdity of those cartoons is now echoed in the reassuring absurdity of my own situation. When I want to go up a mountain, I drive up there effortlessly, merely pointing my car at the summit and pressing down the accelerator. When it is raining, I can simply drive across town without getting even slightly wet. When it is hot, I can sit in an armoured air conditioned cocoon that will take me wherever I want to go. When I run out of any kind of food or tool, I can simply drive to a supermarket in the next suburb, and even buy heavy goods without worrying about how much I can carry home. People drive past me and see me laughing at nothing, thinking I must be a crazy person.
I am a crazy person, but my exultation is real.
The reality of driving a car might be normal and ordinary for you but for me it’s like being granted a magic power, like being given wings. Considering I can go just about anywhere now, I might as well be flying.
I feel strangely included in the world now, as if I’m part of its larger project, and not just coping with it. I feel less like the Coyote – using shitty products from some faraway corporation that don’t work, meant to deliver a satisfaction that was never going to come. Now I feel more like the Road Runner. I don’t even have to talk to people anymore; I can just make a beeping sound and shrink to a tiny dot, disappearing over the horizon in a few seconds, because space doesn’t control me anymore.
~
STIGMA
There are a lot of people like me who don’t learn to drive until later in life, usually long after our families have made peace with the prospect of us being pedestrians forever. When other drivers ask us what the change is like, we usually describe it as “liberating” or “empowering,” but people who have had their drivers licenses since their teenage years never seem to fully understand what we’re saying. They often interpret it as us saying “You are free and powerful, and now I am too.” And we forgive them for being self-referential. We’re used to the driving community being self-referential.
But I believe that when a mature learner gets their drivers license and they say they feel “liberated” or “empowered” then we are more often talking about our experience of being without a drivers license as being a state of oppression and disempowerment. We are talking about an experience of stigma, a kind of slow-burn trauma and exclusion that we have all learned to survive.
Marginalisation can be the reason why many of us don’t learn to drive in the first place. Poverty keeps automobiles out of reach – they require not just the downpayment but the regular investment in petrol and repair. A car is a class signifier, and a class barrier too.
Automobiles also have a grim history of being very ableist machines, not built to accommodate the variety of human dis/abilities. It is clear that if we are to achieve an uptake in driverless cars, we are going to have to remind the driving community that dis/ability is everyone’s birthright and destiny as a natural feature of the aging and vulnerable human body. But for now, we are still making automobiles for a narrow spectrum of human bodies, leaving some of us out by design.
My marginalisation had everything to do with being gay in a homophobic world, and the rampant anxiety and dismal self-worth that ensued as a result. For one thing, I simply didn’t expect to survive far beyond my teens, so getting a drivers license seemed like a waste of finite time. For another thing, I simply didn’t have the economic werewithal because I didn’t have the aggressive ambition to pursue any kind of well-paying career. It seemed to me that the world was designed by and for bullies, and that the best thing you could do if you weren’t a bully yourself was to stay out of the way. No future, no money, no confidence. The piece de resistance in keeping me out of the drivers seat was the fact that the world of automobiles seemed like a straight man’s club. Every queer has is well acquainted with the cliches about gay men being unable to drive; that is because driving culture from the racetrack to the repairshop has its own gender order, one that is wildly heteropatriarchal.
When it comes to the ways that inequality is programmed into our society, the automobile is one of most powerful tools of segregation. I would advise all drivers who don’t believe me on this point to spend a week catching cheap public transport – no, not ubers and taxis, but buses and trains – and look at what your community really looks like. You will discover a whole world of ignored old age, humiliated poverty, unsupported dis/ability, fearful gender diversity, persecuted racial diversity, and disaffected youth. But I think that most drivers already know this deep down, and that is why they find the idea of public transport so deeply terrifying. When their cars are getting serviced, they become frantic in organising lifts, taxis, ubers, or even the ridiculous prices associated with car rentals, all to avoid spending time sitting right to the Great Unwashed.
I’ve been the Great Unwashed for most of my life. I was actually really clean the whole time, sitting there on my slashed up and graffitied bus seat. Almost all of us were really clean. But we were still terrifying to the privileged; they locked their doors if they saw us in the distance while they drove delicately over car park speed bumps in their massive freshly-polished SUVs.
I was lucky to have a supportive partner who always encouraged me to have faith that when I was ready, I would learn to drive, and he would be there to help me. He bought me driving lesson vouchers that languished in my office drawer for a decade, but the very moment I was ready to learn, he was there every day for a year to sit beside me in the car while I learned. Getting my license is indeed our achievement.
But many of us older learners were not so lucky. In fact, some of us were attached to abusive partners who either discouraged or flat-out forbad us from learning to drive, keeping us on a leash of anxiety and hesitation in order to control us.
The pedestrian partner literally cannot escape their abuser; they try to escape on foot but the abuser follows them in their car, always pulling into the kerb. Get in the fucking car. If you want to escape, you have to learn the unmapped by-ways and cut-throughs of your local area for all the places they cannot drive. I see a lot of abusive heterosexual relationships like this, where the man drives and keeps his wife on foot. She asks his permission to go out and he says no. She tries to leave him and he follows her wherever she goes. To her, it seems like he is supernatural, inescapable, a vampire who can fly to her, wherever she is.
And in fact, because I’ve lived my whole life under conditions of patriarchy, I’m used to seeing women who can’t drive, and their husbands who discourage them from learning. So she catches the bus. She asks for a lift. She spends a lot of time at home. Her friends are her neighbours. Even when she can drive, he is sure to sit next to her and do everything he can to induce agitation and self-doubt. He encourages her to believe that she really is inept, child-like, a bad driver, a threat to the community. And so she cedes her autonomy, and lets him drive her everywhere. In time, her skills atrophy, her anxiety grows, and soon she has done the opposite of getting her drivers license: she has learned not drive.
This is a big threat to heterosexual seniors, with men who have retired from the workforce but still need to feel useful, handy, capable, necessary. I am watching my parents face this very moment, and am fortunate that my father is flexible and my mother has an independent streak. They do not need to play out the patriarchal pattern, though their peers and siblings might.
When we say “liberated” and “empowered,” we are telling you that our story before the license includes oppression and powerlessness. The places we could not go. The curfew of a bus timetable, the danger of night time travel. The people we couldn’t visit. The contraction of our horizons. The slowness of our lives. We could not move at the speed of machines.
We had to move at the speed of animals.
THE SPEED OF AN ANIMAL
To be a pedestrian walking beside the road is to gaze at a world drivers will only glance at. It is to register details about the way the world is shaped, who lives there, how it looks and sounds and smells. It is to know the animals that live in the world with us – from dragonflies to cats, from magpies to mosquitos. One moves at the speed of an animal. It is to become well acquainted with the privatisation of absolutely everything, everywhere. It is also to become acquainted with the ways that “public space” – parks and footpaths and benches – has been completely denuded in the interests of certain kind of power: low-maintenance and high-surveillance. One gets burned in the sun, gets wet in the rain and snow, gets cold in the wind. Walking is tiring. One sweats.
To be a pedestrian is to know the bodily distance between things, measured in footsteps. It’s to know that not all footsteps are equally easy – some climb hills, some require detours, some require you to be humiliated next to very busy and dangerous roads.
To be a pedestrian is to know that you cannot simply drive somewhere to fetch the thing you might need; you will need to take it with you. You will need to be a traveller everywhere you go. Pedestrians carry totes and satchels, plastic bags and fanny packs and they are full of things that cannot be easily fetched on foot: wallet, keys, phone, cigarettes, lighter, water bottle, shopping bag, hand sanitiser, pen, paper, bandaid, paracetamol, tissues, breath mints, face mask, charging cable, book, snack. One is prepared for the possibility that one might be stranded for some time. One’s choice of outfit and shoes are often functional. Shoes that last are the key.
To be a pedestrian is to be forced into “the environment” without insulation. One feels weather effects keenly. One sees the ground change underfoot, the sky change overhead. One sees the death of plant life, and the disappearance of animals. Weren’t there more small birds once? Weren’t there Christmas beetles? Koalas? Frogs? Step by step, one walks through a dying world, looking at the fossil fuels being burned for frivolous car trips. One looks at the rusting razor wire, the clogged creeks, the new developments that seem old as soon as they appear.
To be a pedestrian is to be acquainted with contemporary dystopia, not as some far off but unlikely possibility, but as the actual condition of modern capitalism. Dystopia is invisible to the community because the community has been accelerated to the point where if anyone starts to notice it, they will crash.
The internet was called, in its earliest days, “the information superhighway.” We thought of the internet as part of an accelerated condition akin to the automobile. We were absolutely correct. The internet is a superhighway; one dare not slow down lest one perish, or worse, inconvenience a stranger we are now scared to encounter. In this way, pedestrianism is analogous to being offline: one is culturally deprived, but also, one is empirically present.
To be a pedestrian is to be forced into an awareness of interdependence. Automobile drivers can have fictions of self-reliance, but a pedestrian must say “excuse me,” “please,” and “thankyou.” To be a pedestrian is to be without the luxury of road rage, the luxury of aggression, the luxury of entitlement. One waits. One is patient. One is philosophical.
And there are joys too. The joy of physical fitness and the loosening of anxiety’s grip. The joy of patting a dog or cat in the neighbourhood. The joy of sunshine. The joy of saying hello, and somebody saying hello back. The joy of gardens, and the scent of the world. The joy of seeing one’s community in its diversity. Sunsets that can be stared at. Looking out a train window and letting one’s mind wander completely. And beyond all this, a strange feeling that you have as a pedestrian of arriving at your destination and feeling that you have earned the distance, that it is something you have accomplished, not just chosen.
INDUCTION
Will I lose these gratitudes now that I’m a driver? I hope not. My acquaintance with other mature learners leads me to believe that I probably won’t. In fact, if I’m anything like my friends who learned to drive later in life, I will keep that socialist and environmentalist flame in my heart alive forever now. And I may even be more free than other drivers, because I do not drive out of an avoidance of public transport. And hopefully I will be as generous to pedestrians as other drivers were to me when I was a pedestrian.
But it’s time for me to learn new philosophies. I am interested in the driving superorganism, the way it organises itself. I am interested in the ways that the driving community compensate for bad drivers – without the bad drivers ever knowing just how many people are making a space for their solipsism. I am interested in whether I will use my freedom for anything significant, to go anywhere new, or whether I will simply use my drivers license to accelerate my existing routines, many of which I have refined to a point of extreme precision: to be a pedestrian is a ritualised sort of life.
I drive out into the sunrise. I am listening to Charli XCX and Carly Rae Jepsen singing a duet. The hills and valleys pass beneath my car like ocean waves passing beneath a boat. The shadows of eucalyptus trees flicker over me in a cool shimmer. I shrink to a tiny dot on the horizon, and am gone.
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reminiScents
I went back to the swamp where I grew up last week, a place of bracken and mangrove, sand and paperbark trees. The scents of that place unlocked memories, and those memories in turn unlocked other scents, the scents of childhood: sunscreen and chlorine, fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, mercurochrome and musk sticks, seagrass matting and rattan peacock chairs, of eucalyptus leaves releasing their oil into the simmering heat of a solstice maxima.
Childhood memories are kaleidoscopic, but I wonder at the utility of that metaphor now. Those of who remember using kaleidoscopes are dwindling in numbers. Maybe beauty was once held inside a kaleidoscope’s twisting cylinder, but for some time now it has been presented on the screen of an infinitely scrolling slate, the smartphone. Optic play is ubiquitous now, but while our capacity for generating beautiful artifice has increased logarithmically, our capacity for creating authentic spectacles has not.
Revisiting the swamp, I remembered my father’s sapoderm soap, my mother’s Anais Anais perfume, my sister’s herbal shampoo, my grandfather’s White Ox Tobacco. I remembered the smell of cannabis at family gatherings with my parents and their friends, all young hippies. Their eyes were red as they passed around the joint but I didn’t know that was a sign of being stoned; I just thought they had all been crying. Now I think: well, they were progressives in the 1980s; they probably had been crying.
Fragrance traps me in its recursions, a perfumed Möbius strip: one side is scent and the other side is memory, but they are both the same side. How am I to tease the original sense apart from the sense of remembering? Memory is another kind of sense, a self-organising after-sense, recombinatorial. The paradox of memory is that it can never generate anything new, but at the same time it is only ever producing new sensations, new experiences. Memory is mythology as process.
I look at the word “adolescent” and I see the word “scent,” the scents of my body changing, my sexuality awakening, my personality spinning into place like a nascent solar system, around that central star, this fragrant world.
What were the scents of adolescence? They were the henna powder that dyed my hair auburn; the small bottle of “Oceanus” from The Body Shop, the cheap Nag Champa incense and the expensive Sandalwood essential oil I bought from the health food store; the green ginger wine, so sticky sweet, and the port royal tobacco, its fragrant filaments rolled into a licorice-paper cylinder.
I remember the taste of smoke, not just the smoke of my own cigarettes, but the smoke of Mayfield, that patina of char and ash and solder that seemed to dust the rumpled lanes and old streets, clouded across from the topaz bright chimneys of an island that was once a swamp, and wanted to be one still.
I walked home on cool Autumn evenings with a bag full of books from the library, many of them fantasy paperbacks. Sunset turned into dusk, and magical fantasy turned into literary fantasy, full of sensual olfactory promises: Jeanette Winterson’s “Sexing The Cherry,” Patrick Süskind’s “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer,” and especially my favourite, Jean Rhys’ “Wide Sargasso Sea”:
“Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thin brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. Twice a year the octopus orchid flowered – then not an inch of tentacle showed It was a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see. The scent was very sweet and strong. I never went near it.“
Literature taught me that the soul should be approached through the senses. The voice of the seasons spoke in a language of flowers: frangipani, rose, jasmine, honeysuckle, geranium. Walking through the laneways in the dark at night, I learned how to identify the flowers by scent alone. I spent a lot of time alone in those days.
Becoming gay at this time felt like a dire but compulsory challenge. I had already understood, after much guidance from my high school peers, that I was ineligible for straight normality. But achieving gay normality would still require prodigious work. I would have to change my shape, change my personality, and I would have to buy the correct signifiers and accessories. Foremost among these was scent: to be a gay man in 1990s Australia was to smell ostentatiously attractively, aggressively lovely.
Exposure revealed to me the Gay Olfactory Universe: the gay male body was spritzed in a fizz of luxury scent, then clouded in the smoke of a nightclub smoke machine and of menthol cigarettes. The corners of that cosmos were variously redolent of amyl nitrate, spilled beer, need, semen, and sweat. On my earliest visits to gay dances, I wore the only perfume I owned: a small hand-blown glass bottle of sandalwood oil from an Indian import shop. I had assumed that when I started going to gay dances I would be propositioned relentlessly because I was homophobic and thought all gay men were predators, but when I wasn’t propositioned at all, I figured it was because I was too poor to afford the right luxury perfume. It was only later when I realised that there were other boys my age who got propositioned all the time and they were too poor to afford luxury perfume too. I decided it must have been the way I looked, and I internalised a condemnation nobody ever spoke but was somehow on the cover of every gay magazine.
Still, I spent my dole cheque and some Christmas money on my first ever bottle of expensive perfume. I chose “Aramis” from the department store in the city. It seemed to promise a rugged individualism that flattered my desires to escape white gay conformism. It had a mature energy that instinctively pleased me. Also, I was a smoker; I needed a perfume that would not be contradicted by cigarettes. Finally, Aramis was within my working class price range – barely. The scents that other gay men wore were wildly unafforable for my budget, no matter how much I earned. Even if I had come into a large amount of money somehow, yet still that money would have been spent on replacing broken things, paying down debts, buying some independence, and there still wouldn’t have been any money left over for a bottle of Dior Fahrenheit to please the other gays.
Gay men were opinionated about brands. We still are. I don’t know why. Maybe we think that being snobs will make us feel less like rejects. Maybe we think that we can pose our way into being rich. Whatever it is, it certainly undermines our political demands for equality.
This irony was most evident in Sydney’s Oxford Street, a kitsch goblin-market that was somehow a sanctuary for queer bodies and the epicentre of gay liberation. The class, race and gender disparities were extreme: jet-setting professional white cisgays with perfect pectorals and Parisian eau-de-parfum stepped over Indigenous transwomen begging in the sticky gutter amongst the cigarette butts and strips of burger lettuce. I found the place emotionally serrated, and I avoided it, but there was a part of me that thought my own gay liberation would come from a gym membership and a bottle of designer perfume.
I might have declined Oxford Street’s invitations to a good time, but I still introjected its dreams of status.
The media regime of those last years of the twentieth century had its own sensuality: the hot buttered popcorn of the theatre; cups of instant coffee steaming in front of fresh newspapers; frozen sausage rolls in front of the television; the crisp plasticky glamour of a magazine; the smell of new books and the smell of second-hand books that were sold in almost every suburb, every day.
This line, from Peter Greenaway’s “The Pillow Book”:
“like Sei Shōnagon, my sense of smell was very strong. I enjoyed the smell of paper of all kinds. It reminded me of the scent of skin.“
I tried to brace myself for the disappearance of paper from my life, knowing that personal computing was just the tip of the internet iceberg. I knew the digital revolution was happening. The science fiction future was arriving. But there was a totality to the way that paper engulfed and expressed culture that meant I even thought in paper back then – in diaries, notebooks, sketchbooks, commonplace books. Stationery was self.
And what of the books? The phone books and address books and recipe books and street directories and atlases and encyclopedias and dictionaries and books of quotes and Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video guide – “Now with more than 19,000 entries!” – or my second hand copy of “Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal”:
“…tell me, which is your favourite scent?’
“‘Heliotrope blanc.’
“Without giving me an answer, he pulled out his handkerchief and gave it to me to smell.“‘All our tastes are exactly the same, are they not?’ And saying this, he looked at me with such a passionate and voluptuous longing, that the carnal hunger depicted in his eyes made me feel faint.
“‘You see, I always wear a bunch of white heliotrope; let me give this to you, that its smell may remind you of me to-night, and perhaps make you dream of me.’”Before internet porn, there was porn on paper. Too poor to afford to buy pornography on VHS or in magazines, and too pretentious to buy one-handed pulp paperbacks from adult shops, I could nonetheless collect literary erotica from the 18th and 19th centuries in the more cosmopolitan second hand bookshops – books like “Memoirs of a Coxcomb” or “My Secret Life.” It never occurred to me that other people might have masturbated while reading my copy of “Teleny.” My intimate attention was focussed almost entirely on the author, who had created the text as a sort of epistemic glory hole. But now that I look back, I guess I do think of that paperback’s previous owners as my metamours. Maybe all books are this way. Regardless, I cherished my copy of “Teleny.” Erotica was harder to find back then, and because of its rarity, it was far less disposable.
Adulthood meant having my own bookcase in a rented flat, and displaying my erotica unashamedly. I also displayed my New Age books of magic spells and ancient wisdoms, all intended to heal me from some mysterious condition which I now recognise as the condition of having money. I consulted dream dictionaries, divination guides, and aromatherapy manuals. I soaked up their knowledge, and collected my own apothecary of tiny cobalt glass bottles filled with essential oils: rosemary for viruses, neroli for desire, frankincense for spiritual protection, rosewood for panic attacks, orange to stimulate conversation, myrrh for centering. I was the only one of my New Age friends who really liked the smell of myrrh, its rubber-resin primality. There were many nights when thunderstorms would tear the trees in the garden to shreds, and I would take a candelit oil bath and watch the myrrh-steam rise around me in lazy loops and whorls. The smell stayed on my skin for the best part of a day afterwards.
Adulthood also meant choosing the scent profile of my own house. I was sedulously clean, and my house smelled like methylated spirit, detergent, eucalyptus oil, orange blossom incense, pillar candles that required fire to release their paradoxically aquatic scents: “ocean mist”, “moss garden,” “morning dew,” “summer rain.”
At University, I became infatuated with the large University library that seemed to contain all the knowledge in the world. I found myself in that small selection of clothbound queer books in the Dewey 820s, early modern British literature: Suckling, Marlowe, Shakespeare. Early modern literature, classical mythology, and fantasy literature were the shape of my future imagination. In a course on fairytales I read Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber,” and its sensuality set me on fire:
“His voice buzzed like a hive of distant bees. My husband. My husband, who, with so much love, filled my bedroom with lilies until it looked like an embalming parlour. Those somnolent lilies, that wave their heavy heads, distributing their lush, insolent incense reminscent of pampered flesh.”
I had already been acquainted with the strange caustic smell of my own semen; but it was around the Millennium that I became best acquainted with the smell of other men’s semen. I would rub it into the fur of my belly and wear it around all day at work, the tight tugging of its crystals a reminder of the sex I’d had that morning. The scent of other men would be trapped in the stubble of my chin too: some of them smelled like expensive perfume, but many of them just smelled like their own skin – not luxe, but clean, and complex.
I started to understand that scent had more influence over my arousal and my emotions than sight. In fact, I realised that I had been forming opinions about men based strongly on the way they smelled, then pretending I had ideological or ethical reasons for liking or disliking them. The positive side to this was that I was a lot less Lookist than the culture around me. But the overwhelming negative side was that I was bigoted and didn’t know it, and so couldn’t mitigate against it. People do not choose the way they smell, and they do not smell the same way twice – I probably missed out on some good connections, but my nose did at least lead me to some other men who were far sexier than they looked or sounded.
I appreciated the irony of my historical situation. Here I was, living through a digital revolution based entirely on the circulation of images amongst millions of private screens. Everyone’s life was becoming subject to the copia of the screen: its copiousness and its copying. The Renaissance might have ushered in a Revolution by finding a way to disseminate thousands of identical pages over time, but that paled in comparison to the Internet’s ability to distribute millions and millions of copies simultaneously around the world. I was living at the dawn of a time of continuously ultraviral imagery, and it was in that world that I realised that it was in fact fragrance, not appearance, that captivated me most deeply.
That feeling has only intensified in time, especially as culture becomes more and more dependent on, and expressed through, image based apps. We are encouraged to base so many of our day to day decisions on images that the image itself has become a sort of decision making architecture for us. But here I am presented with a universal kaleidoscope, and all I want to do is close my eyes and inhale.
But the point of this piece is not to suggest that fragrance speaks the truth where images tell lies. Only that fragrance’s offline influence has, at least for me, intensified as the image economy begins to numb us with its glut.
But we should all hold the world of fragrance in deep suspicion. It is not exempt from the power structures of this world, but has at every turn reinforced them, allocating credit to the tyrants and blame to the downtrodden. And if I see one overarching narrative in the world of fragrance around me, it is racist colonialism.
I wish I could write a memoir and claim that I was always awake to other people’s suffering, but I really wasn’t. I was bigoted, and I wanted my fragrances to be as bigoted as I was, to flatter my bigotries instead of challenging them. The marketing guff that was attached to Essential Oils marketing – “exotic spices” from “distant lands” – centered my white perspective relentlessly. Part of what I was buying was that centering. After all, sandalwood is exotic to whom? Distant from whom?
There was a component of the New Age movement that was and remains, I think, sincerely anti-racist and racially curious in ways that are both scholarly and sensitive. But there is a larger component of that movement that steals from non-white cultures for the purpose of white adornment and white self-image. Corporations in Australia sold New Age products to white customers, capitalising on their racism. I may have told myself that I was somehow spiritually magnified by buying scents from the outback, from North Africa, from the silk road, from India – always India – but I wasn’t really being subversive of capitalism at all. I was buying some new traditions so I could have a new me.
In buying essential oils, my white spirit felt somehow cleansed of the guilt of my ill-gotten advantages in life. I felt exonerated for massacres somehow. I wasn’t like those other whites anymore. I was one of the good ones. I told myself that the incense I burned somehow banished a British blandness out of my suburban bungalow. I felt inside like adopting the decor and aesthetic of the East might exempt me from being complicit in Westernness, but I eventually came to understand that stealing from the East is the very definition of Westernness. I look very differently at those New Age books I used to buy that would “distil” (another perfume word) Eastern wisdom into nugget-sized quotes, just one bite, for the edification of Western consumers. Enlightenment was effortless, as long as you could pay the entry fee.
Today, when I look at the marketing for Essential Oil blends, I can’t help but see how these products promise an escape or exemption from contemporary whiteness. Consider three of the most popular blends from one of Australia’s top producers of Essential Oils. I will show the advertising description in full, and highlight the deployment of concepts of reminiscence and transportation that I believe are meant to flatter white memory and white longing for dominion:
Reminiscent of faraway lands, here the jungle creeps across moss-covered stone temples, monkeys howl and dense clouds hang in the humid valleys below. Let the aromas of Jasmine, Patchouli, Rose and Sandalwood transport you to a distant hammock and swing with the rhythm of the forest that surrounds you. 19° North of the equator the golden spire of mountainside temple, Wat Tham Pha Plong is seen rising our of lust jungle surrounds.
Reminiscent of ancient bazaars, here colourful, sand strewn tiles line the floor and walls. Glints of gold shimmer in the hot afternoon sun and wooden looms creak with the weight of their colourful fabrics. The heady scents of Frankincense, Sandalwood, Ceadrwood, Orange and Rose will transport you to this place, where camels rest under the shade of plam trees and dunes rise over the bygone city. 41° North of the equator lies the bustling 17th Century Spice Bazaar of Istanbul.
Reminiscent of long forgotten coastlines, here the sound of waves lapping at the shore is accompanied by the rustle of palm fronds waving in the breeze. Spices were once traded here in the stone-walled city. Allow the sweet and spicy Vanilla, Clove and Cinnamon aromas to transport you to this place where the sun warms your back and the ocean twinkles its deepest blue. 6° South of the equator lies an exotic oasis, the traditional spice island of Zanzibar.
The writing is beautiful, and I have bought each blend multiple times. After all, I wanted to be transported to a faraway place and a faraway time. I want to be taken out of this moment with its grim power relations and endlessly warring identities.
The New Age movement’s infatuation with old European trading routes and historical encounters with non-European cultures is evident in this advertising copy. The Irish singer Enya, probably the New Age’s greatest musical luminary, made her name with songs like “Orinoco Flow”, “Storms in Africa,” “Caribbean Blue,” “The Longships,” and “On Your Shore” with painterly cover art that looked like something retrieved from a sunken Spanish galleon.
This infatuation with early modern exploration and travel is very deeply ingrained in whiteness, especially emblematised by a love of early modern European cartography. There is an antique map in my room on the box of a luxury perfume, Penhaligon’s “Lothair,” part of the “trade routes” collection. The description of the scent reads:
“…the smoky heart of black tea is softened by fig milk and magnolia, sailing into an ambergris, cedar and wenge woods base, reminiscent of the varnished decks of these elegant ships.”
For whom is this nautical tradition elegant and evocative of pleasant reminiscences? For the white consumer.
I adore the smell of “Lothair” – I wear it every day, but nobody has commented that it smelled nautical or historical.
In fact, nobody has ever commented on it at all, no matter how close they get to my body, even soon after I spray it on and the smell is at its brightest. I suppose this underscores the fact that most of us do not know what we are smelling at any given moment, or even that we are smelling something at all. The wearing of a perfume is a subtle magic, if not subliminal then at least sublinguistic, affecting us whether we know it or not. Nothing that can be articulated. Nothing that can be resisted.
The overlay of language onto scent is very similar to the overlay of language onto food: full of racial specificities.
When I look at the description for my favourite perfume, Goldfield & Banks’ “Pacific Rock Moss,” I see a list that seems to promise more than merely factual information about the sourcing of ingredients:
Australian coastal moss
Lemon Italy
Sage France
Geranium Egypt
Cedar Wood Virginia USAIt reads as much like an itinerary as it does a recipe. I see this denotation of countries of origin a lot in the world of fragrance. The ethnic fantasies of the consumer are piqued: you can not only escape your racial allocation, but assert your racial ownership of other cultures including past cultures: buy your piece of the sea, your piece of the desert, your piece of history. Be transported.
The very name of this Australian perfume house, “Goldfield & Banks” is blatantly colonialist. The name refers to Australia’s gold rush – the flood of migrants who came to Australia to extract treasure – and to the Enlightenment titan Sir Joseph Banks, who visited Australia to “discover” its native flora. The romance of the perfume house is defiantly aligned with the European discovery of Australia. The website provides this paragraph about its founder:
The Goldfield & Banks story actually begins on the other side of the world when the French-Belgian Dimitri Weber – like so many voyagers before him – set out on a journey to discover the curious, enigmatic land that lay far beyond the horizon.
European history, European sailing, European memory. Perhaps this has everything to do with the Eurocentric and Imperial concept of “luxury”; after all, luxury brands seem so contemptuously anti-Indigenous. I find myself wondering: does luxury mean the promise of high pleasure or high status? But then I find myself tracing around another Möbius strip. I cannot tell the two apart. I want the status to have the pleasure, and the pleasure to have the status.
Above all, I want something exotic, something that can make me feel exotic too. I want the edges of myself to supple so I can change shape into something better than the sad violent culture that engulfs me. When I purchase a fragrance, I want to gain purchase on the past and its repetitions, on my transporting memories. My love of fragrance has taken me through an ugly revelation of racist capitalism to find that I am trying to be the owner of my own life, and to hurry up and spend the money that by rights, historically, shouldn’t even be mine.
My future of fragrance looms ahead of me with dark intimidation. As I continue to age, my stock of scent-memories will only grow, until my whole psyche is an almost suffocating garden in bloom. When I smell fragrances that remind me of the people who have gone, or of the times that will never return, how will I withstand the nostalgia then? I suppose I will not. My older partner keeps his late mother’s blanket solely for the purpose of smelling it. I wonder if I will keep his blanket in time too, if it will be my only way back to him then. There’s nothing I can do to shield myself from that pain, and I choose it willingly.
But then I also think of my hopes for the world after I am gone too someday, that its own wetlands will be restored, bursting with life, and its seas will be restored, flourishing with creatures, and the open cut mines will be turned into gardens full of trees and flowers that will smell like paradise. My body will be molecules too, dispersed and atomised, undiscoverable, incorporated into the soil, its minerals, its vegetal life, faint and non-human by then. That artificial division between self and environment will be a needless strut by then; I will be the environment. And it occurs to me as I finish this piece, that maybe when I inhale a scent, I am being the environment, mingling with its molecules, taking the outside in, and letting life tell its story through me.
x
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Interrupting images
There was a new minimalism that arrived with the digital revolution in the late 2000s. I noticed it in a certain stripped back / unvarnished / undemanding look that we would come to know as hipster decor. The exposed beams and cables. The unadorned and blocky furniture. The thick, simple sans serif fonts with wide kerning. Very few colours – preferably only off-white, wood, and black. A pot plant here or there – preferably a plant with broad, uncomplicated leaves like a philodendron or a monstera.
This decor became the necessary backdrop for our instagrammable lives, the images with which we would populate the already overstuffed internet, providing visual rest and calm between advertisements.
We understood intuitively that we had already been exposed to too many images, too often, in too many places, with almost no visual rest except for when we were sleeping or when we were posing for images themselves. We wanted simple, restful, undistracting environments in which we could binge on images until it made us feel sick.
The internet seemed to be maximalist by default.
Sure, it adorned itself with images of minimalism, but then ironically made us look at tens of thousands of them. It made minimalist songs available, but then encouraged you to listen to sprawling incomprehensible playlists of them. It promoted quiet and reflective movies and then showbagged them into streaming services for strictly limited time only. Culture itself seemed to be burying us relentlessly like a game of Tetris.
It all felt so inevitable, that culture would form something as mercilessly encyclopedic as this.
It was in this era that webpages disappeared and feeds took over, chronological feeds with infinite scrolling. I did my best to keep up with the avalanche of images on Tumblr; I certainly felt like I owed it to my Tumblr friends to look at all of their posts and react to as many of them as I could. But I already knew that my attention span was finite.
I devoted years on social media feeds trying to catch up to the present, but even when I did catch up, I only fell behind faster and faster. The present started to seem unattainable, but it was where we all needed to be in order to know that we were included in the world. Logging off and taking a screen holiday – even for a moment – was like turning your back on the ocean. Culture became a site of hypervigilance.
I was really conscientious in these years, looking at social media on my desktop PC. During the book era I had been assessed as being erudite and smart. I was determined to export this status to the digital world. So I worked hard to absorb as much new information as I could.
I tried to become knowledgeable through bingeing.
~
It was also around this time that I became aware of the concept of “Maximizers” and “Satisficers” from Barry Schwartz’s 2004 book The Paradox of Choice. Schwartz looked at the ways people made choices when faced with plenitude: some evaluated all the available options and selected the best one relative to the others (Maximizers) while others started with set criteria in mind and selected the first option that satisfied those criteria (Satisficers). Schwartz revealed that Satisficers were not only less tormented and exhausted during decision making, but they also tended to be happier with their choices subsequently.
I’m glad I read the book, and I’m glad I took its advice to heart when it came to most of my life decisions. But knowing the theory of Maximizers and Satisficers couldn’t protect me against the relentless plenitude of images that was about to flood my retinas every day from my screenworld.
In theory, I could have articulated my desires in advance of looking at the screen, and then limited my looktime strictly until those desires were fulfilled. But the curious thing was that I was increasingly looking at the screen to find out what my desires were – or what they should be.
I never really knew what I wanted from the internet until I got it – or didn’t get it.
I still don’t know.
My ability to make decisions was enfeebled in another way. Flooded with a spectacle that renewed itself in realtime, I could never seem to stay conscious of my options for more than a second or two without being interrupted. Every single thought I had was interrupted by some new trivial image, some ephemeral hashtag, some urgent discourse. I started to experience the internet as an irresistible interruptor of thoughts and feelings.
Of course, like anyone from the analogue era, I remember a time before notifications, before interruption, before infinite scrolling. The quietness of paper. The preciousness of images.
I must remain alert to my historical situation though, and remember that this nostalgia is itself a digital artifact. I am minimising and simplifying my memories so they can act as a refuge from the unattainable maximalism of the present.
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I’m especially implicated in the visual regime of the internet because I’m a visual artist myself. Most of my work is black and white ink drawings of fauna, especially Australian birds, but I’ve dabbled in drawing erotica, architecture, fantasy. I go through phases of using photoshop to paint, but most of my work is on pieces of paper, painstakingly rendered over many hours.
This past year I found myself trying to change my art to fit in with an Instagram ecology. I understood implicitly that there was a trade off here: Instagram would give me exposure if I would assist Instagram with its imperial ambition to conquer and colonise the entire globe’s attention span. I started making images that were quick to produce, quick to consume, and arresting. When I say “arresting,” I mean interrupting. My most successful pictures were the ones that interrupted the viewer, thus attaining noticeability, that first step towards virality.
I uploaded a new picture each day.
Even though that may seem like a trifling addition to the 95 million new pictures and videos that are uploaded to Instagram every day, it still represented a prodigious spike in output for me. I could only keep it up for so long before I burned out, needlessly. It only took a year.
After I deleted my Instagram account, abandoning the attempt to achieve viral fame, I got pretty down on myself about the failure. I rebuked myself for not trying hard enough, for giving up too soon. In my most depressed moments, I told myself that Instagram was meritocratic, and that if I hadn’t gone viral it was only because I didn’t deserve it. I didn’t have what it takes as an artist.
This is part of internet ideology: the things you look at deserve to be looked at. The people you look at deserve to be looked at.
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Over the past couple of months, I have read a few discussions about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on images. This is not in regard to the Artificial Intelligence systems that already curate images, microtarget us with them, repeat them, refine them, ask us to classify them in Captchas. That is invisible but important work, analogous to the management of an art gallery: concerned with images, but attentive to economics, demography, and ideology.
No, the current discussion isn’t about the way that AI is changing the infrastructure of seeing itself. Rather, the discussions probe the way that Artificial Intelligence is for the first time producing images of its own, remixing and finessing images by mapping textual data onto image stock. This is the world of Midjourney, Dall-e, and Lensa AI.
Suddenly Artificial Intelligence has a face, something we can look at. Something we can judge.
For now, most of the images produced by AI have a certain taste and texture that betrays their artificiality. These tells are temporary. We can conjecture that we have probably already seen and accepted plenty of artificial images as genuine. We know from the history of artistic production that every new medium brings with it opportunity for counterfeit, imposture, for infiltration, for copying. Technologies of copying and reproduction are not new: they are the very essence of human art.
Like many artists, I have wondered whether the cultural advent of AI-produced art casts me in the role of obsolete artisan, replaced by automation. I’ve certainly stopped doing portraits altogether. It’s hard not to get depressed when I see the kinds of instantaneous fantasy portraiture that Lensa AI can generate from facebook data, especially how culturally “sexy” these images are – the way they can take ordinary facebook photos and apply digital prosthetics, digital make-up, and digital constume to turn those photos into glamour shots, full of erotic cultural promise. I wonder why I ought to bother striving for that perfect blend of flattering fantasy and technical verisimilitude that people seek in portraiture when there’s a machine that does it in a matter of clicks.
But then, I remember that AI is also colonising the world of text, and that whole convincing blog posts and Academic essays can now be generated from a textual prompt. I can tell you that I wrote this essay myself, but I can’t prove it to you. So if I’m doomed as a visual artist, I’m doubly doomed as writer. The very credibility of my voice and my handiwork is under threat from “copia” – a term meaning both reproduction and copiousness. Never before has my art been less distinguishable from simulacra that somehow pre-exist my labour before I’ve even done it.
I find myself wondering: is there still power in images? Is there still power in text? Is there any point in saying things or showing things when each word, each picture, is just a single drop in a wave of content that is itself part of a tsunami that won’t just continue for the rest of our lives, but will grow in speed and magnitude?
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This is the new mode of censorship: relentless interrupting plenitude. It prevents a complete thought from forming. It prevents a complete emotion from taking control. And as our screens intrude closer and closer upon the perimeter of our bodies, attaching themselves to our skin and our eyes, these interruptions will become a part of our experience of embodiment itself.
Bingeing on images, our modern condition of overdisplay and hyperspectatorship is not lying, but it might as well be lying.
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But we can take a strange consolation from the fact that censorship is still happening.
For all the advances in creating fantasy images, there is still intensive and well-funded censorship when it comes to the depiction of the real world.
I have seen more images of mining operations on the planet Pandora than I have of mining operations of my own region, the Hunter Valley. I have seen more images of aliens being killed than I have of lambs, cows, chickens, or fish being killed. In fact, I am a veritable expert on the killing of aliens, but I can’t say I know what an abattoir looks like. The images are simply not in front of me. I don’t know what factories look like. I don’t know where my garbage goes. I don’t know where my water comes from. I don’t know where my fish was caught. I know more about what Hogwarts looks like than I know about what a stock exchange looks like. I know more about the court of King Viserys than I do about China, where almost everything I own was made.
The infinite – and increasingly curated – plenitude of our screen lives is so far from a comprehensive or proportionate visual depiction of how we really live.
I am not trying to encourage conspiracist thinking here. If anything, conspiracism is the purest expression of our visual fantasia, the idea that there is enough information in front of us to form something like a paradigm. All of the conspiracists I know have been profoundly trusting of their charismatic teachers, the one who will tell the truth while the others lie. And they use the same techniques of distraction through overwhelm and censorship through interruption. Conspiracism may be information rich, but it is context averse.
Rather, what I’m trying to underscore is that the current visual regime isn’t just epistemologically limited.
It’s epistemologically limiting.
And I suspect that arguing with the visual regime on its own terms is not an effective strategy. I suspect this because I tried. I don’t think we’re going to upload our way out of this interrupting plenitude; we’re not going to catch up to the present. Not ever.
And I wonder if maybe it isn’t better to stop trying to catch up to this ransomed present, and to move instead straight to afterwards, to the future. After all, the future isn’t out of reach. We create it all the time. If you think about it, that’s all we do.
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CODA:
On this page, I write about digital horror, and share my struggle in coming to terms with digitised reality. I have witnessed in the last twenty years an explosion in the field of representation enabled by networked hand-held computers, now practically grafted onto our bodies, penetrating our minds with interrupting notifications.
The internet has become a kind of affective overseer, a corporate informant, a psychological technician. And it has garbed itself in a never ending exhibition of interrupting images. The message of this exhibition is clear: you must keep your eyes glazed onto the screen if you are to achieve liberation.
But the internet has not delivered on this promise of liberation. ushered in utopia. It hasn’t ushered in any kind of utopia, but it has confused us into mistaking conflict for progress. I am aware that for all the progressive efflorescence of discourse and image on the internet, there has been no commensurate change in the way that money, land, nutrition, security, or healthcare are allocated to the people looking at their screens. Visual richness is just another part of poverty now.
I feel that for all the time and attention we have paid to our feeds, there should have already been some kind of lasting benefit to offset the exhaustion. But from my perspective, I can hardly remember what I was even looking at on my phone this morning, last week, last month, last year. I can’t remember if it was important. Was I looking at flashcards as an important mode of revision, or was I just flipping through a magazine because my mind needed a rest?
A rest from what?
xc