Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

Bunny: “Scent is the last sense to leave a dying person. After sight, hearing, and even touch are gone, the dying hold on to their sense of smell. Does that sharpen your appreciation of the arena in which we perfumers perform? “Fragrance is a conduit for our earliest memories, on the one hand; on the other, it may accompany us as we enter the next life. In between, it creates mood, stimulates fantasy, shapes thought, and modifies behavior. It is our strongest link to the past, our closest fellow traveler to the future. Prehistory, history, and the afterworld, all are its domain. Fragrance may well be the signature of eternity.”

“I have spoken to you this afternoon of poetry and of sexual magic. Not too many years ago, the names of our perfumes bore testimony to such things. There was a popular scent called Tabu, there was Sorcery, My Sin, Vampire, Voodoo, Evening in Paris, Jungle Gardenia, Bandit, Shocking, Intimate, Love Potion, and L'Heure Bleue—The Blue Hour. Nowadays what do we find? Vanderbilt, Miss Dior, Lauren, and Armani, perfumes named after glorified tailors"—there were murmurs and gasps in the audience—"names that evoke not the poetic, the erotic, the magic, but economic status, social snobbery, and the egomania of designers. Perfumes that confuse the essence of creation with the essence of money. How much sustenance can the soul receive from a scent entitled Bill Blass? “Vanderbilt and Bill Blass are what the 'marketing people' have given us.”

“Perfuming is most unlike manufacture. And perfumers should be proud to assume our historic roles as enchanters, soul feeders, sacred pimps, and alchemists. 'Marketing people' are fine enough when it comes to peddling wares, but let us remember always that it is the perfumer, the flowermaster, the guardian of the Blue Hour, who can charm the birds and bees in the human spirit—and destroy its dinosaurs.”

“Maybe not.” “Myths explain the world.” He cleared his throat in a pedagogic manner. “Both the psychic and physical world. The world past, present, and future. When your ancient Celts spoke o' fairies, they were describin' the photon. Not the unintelligent pulse o' light that is the basis, the creator, o' all matter, but the pulse o' light charged with consciousness, the new photon that is evolvin' out o' matter. Faith, don't be gettin' me started on quantum physics and the wisdom o' the Irish. Alobar, for all his age, was no bloody fairy.”

I have an interest in smell. That is, I have an interest in the evolution o' consciousness. Smell is the only sense to communicate directly with the neocortex. It bypasses the thalamus and the other middlemen and goes direct. Smell is the language the brain speaks. Hunger, thirst, aggression, fear, lust: your brain interprets these urges with a vocabulary o' smell. The neocortex speaks this language, and if we can learn to speak it, why we may be able to manipulate the cortex through the nose.” “For what?” “For expeditin' the evolution o' consciousness.” “For what?” “So's we can be happy and live a long, long time and not be bloody blowin' each other to bits.”

There was plenty of time for contemplation, however, and Dr. Dannyboy used it to review what had been accomplished in the sixties, by himself and like-minded others. Then, he placed those accomplishments within the context of history, not merely the official history, with its emphasis on politics and economics, or the more pertinent history of the various ways that we have lived our daily lives since we first crawled out of the ooze or swung down from the foliage, but also the higher, more complex history of how our thought patterns, our nervous systems, our spiritual selfhoods have developed and changed.

illumination, like it or not, is an elitist condition; in every era and in almost every area, there have resided tiny minorities of enlightened individuals, living their lives upon the threshold, at the gateway of the next evolutionary phase, a phase whose actualization is probably still hundreds of years down the line. In certain key periods of history, one or another of these elitist minorities has become sufficiently large and resonant to affect the culture as a whole, thereby laying a significant patch of brick in the evolutionary road. He thought of the age of Akhenaton in ancient Egypt, the reign of Zoroaster in Persia, the golden ages of Greece and Islam, the several great periods of Chinese culture, and the European Renaissance.

Maybe it was sentimental, if not actually stupid, to romanticize the sixties as an embryonic golden age, Wiggs admitted. Certainly, this fetal age of enlightenment aborted. Nevertheless, the sixties were special; not only did they differ from the twenties, the fifties, the seventies, etc., they were superior to them. Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realized its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.

Even though, in social terms, the sixties had failed, in evolutionary terms they were a landmark, a milestone, and Wiggs was proud that he had been able to lend a helping hand in ushering in that dizzy period of transcendence and awareness (transcendence of obsolete value systems, awareness of the enormity and richness of inner reality).

We, each of us, have a ticket to ride, and if the trip be interesting (if it's dull, we have only ourselves to blame), then we relish the landscape (how quickly it whizzes by!), interact with our fellow travelers, pay frequent visits to the washrooms and concession stands, and hardly ever hold up the ticket to the light where we can read its plainly stated destination: The Abyss. Yet, ignore it though we might in our daily toss and tussle, the fact of our impending death is always there, just behind the draperies, or, more accurately, inside our sock, like a burr that we can never quite extract. If one has a religious life, one can rationalize one's slide into the abyss; if one has a sense of humor (and a sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised), one can minimalize it through irony and wit. Ah, but the specter is there, night and day, day in and day out, coloring with its chalk of gray almost everything we do. And a lot of what we do is done, subconsciously, indirectly, to avoid the thought of death, or to make ourselves so unexpendable through our accomplishments that death will hesitate to take us, or, when the scimitar finally falls, to insure that we “live on” in the memory of the lucky ones still kicking.

“The universe does not have laws. “It has habits. “And habits can be broken.

first plangent, then lambent, then plangent again,

“Agin' is a disease. Maybe disease is natural, but health is natural, too, and a hell of a heap more desirable. Rust is natural, wouldn't you say? But rust can be prevented. And if you don't be preventin' it, it will ruin your machinery. 'Tis the same with agin'. Your man ages because he lets his body rust.” “Rust? I don't—” “I'm talkin' about the degeneration o' cells. I'm talkin' about the gumming up o' cells with superoxide free radicals and toxins, I'm talkin' about the gradual breakdown o' healthy cell reproduction due to progressive deterioration o' nucleic acids. 'Tis all a form o' rustin'.” “And it can be prevented?” “It can.” “Why don't doctors know about it then?” “You might as well ask why didn't mariners in the Middle Ages know the world was round?” “A few did.” “Sure and a few doctors today know the truth of agin'.”

AIR “We relate to air through the breath. Most of us don't breathe properly, which is to say, we take in too little or too much and fail to consume it efficiently. Alobar and Kudra developed a method o' breathin' whereby the inhale and exhale were connected in an uninterrupted rhythm, a continuous, circular, flywheel pattern like a serpent swallowin' its own tail. Their breathin' was deep and smooth and regular. When they brought air into their bodies, they visualized suckin' in as much energy and vitality as possible; when they expelled air, they visualized blowin' out all the staleness and flatness inside o' them. “Simple, 'tis true, but hardly simplistic when we understand that much o' the cellular damage that leads to tissue breakdown—agin', in other words—is caused by the accumulation in our bodies o' the toxic by-products o' metabolizin' oxygen. Superoxide free radicals, which is what these garbage molecules are called, combine with fatty acids to produce lipofuscin, which is an unstable, repulsive gunk that clogs up a cell like grease clogs a drain. The more goop ye have gummin' up your cells, the greater the strain on your metabolism, and the more taxed the metabolism the easier 'tis for still more poisons to accumulate. “Biological studies have proven that the animals with the longest life spans are those with the lowest rates per body weight of oxygen consumption, apparently because they dump fewer superoxide free radicals in their cells. Since we're stuck with h...

“Proper breathin', in addition, reduces stress, and stress is a major contributor to agin', disease, and death. Alobar had been introduced to the virtues o' slow, relaxed breathin' at Samye lamasery. 'The lungs are not plow yaks,' the lamas said, 'so do not drive them. Neither are they potting sheds, so keep them free of cobwebs.' What the Bandaloop 'told' him, on the other hand, is impossible to translate, but 'tis obvious, 'tisn't it, darlin', that if a serpent of air is to swallow its tail—thereby perpetuatin' the circle o' life—it must be flexible, not tense.” WATER “Water, too, is helpful in alleviatin' stress. How many bloomin' times have ye heard, 'Why don't ye get into a nice hot bath and relax?' Sure, but relaxation may not o' been the primary result of Alobar and Kudra's bathin' rituals, nor was the psychological benefit o' ceremonial purification the main thing, although neither should be underestimated for their effect in promotin' salubrious longevity. O' greater benefit may have been the ability o' the bathin' ceremony to lower blood temperature. “Research at Purdue University, the UCLA Medical Center, and other lovely places has demonstrated that agin' can be forced into the slow lane, if not off the road altogether, by decreasin' the body's temperature. Hypothermia not only slows down the metabolic pump, allowin' it to coast a bit and refresh itself, it puts a lid on the autoimmune reactions that contribute to an organism's deterioration.

Their procedure was to soak for a half-hour or so, then withdraw to shade for a quarter-hour, repeatin' the process four or five times. The hot water caused their blood to rise to the skin surface, where, once they left the tub, it was in a position to be rapidly cooled. Ye understand? Over a period of centuries, this regular cooling down o' the blood may well have reset their internal thermostats—their hypothalamuses—so that they registered permanently two or three degrees below borin'—and debilitatin'—old ninety-eight point six.

EARTH “Trees and houses and diamond mines may attach themselves like lice to this element, but ye know that soil itself is fastened to the belly. Dirt is the mother o' lunch. “There's probably no subject with quite so many conflictin' opinions about it as there are about food, and 'tis better to swap bubble gum with a rabid bulldog than challenge a single one o' the varyin' beliefs your average human holds about nutrition, but 'tis obvious that diet must've played an important role in Alobar and Kudra's long-run performance. “By now, even congenital idiots shut up in cellars in Saskatchewan grain towns are aware that excess body fat promotes infirmity and shortens life expectancy, but are ye familiar with the experiments at Cornell, Montesano Laboratories, the University of California, and the Nebraska Medical School? Severely reduced calorie intake and restricted ingestion o' certain amino acids by laboratory animals drastically altered the process of agin'. There was an unfortunate side effect: your animals who were deprived of amino acids suffered from weakened immune systems. However, ye might recall that Alobar and his woman were, in perfect bloomin' counterbalance, strengthenin' their immunological effectiveness by coolin' their blood. “Your man and his wife ate simply, but apparently they ate with gusto. They consumed small amounts o' food at a time, and let me impress somethin' upon ye, darlin', 'tis the best kept secret o' nutrition that 'tis healthier to eat smal...

FIRE “With the element o' fire, sex enters the picture.”

“Now we know that sex can ease stress, and we know that stress wears out the rubber on the wheel o' life. But sexual fire, like the breath of air and the bath o' water, makes other contributions to the immortalist program. “The human organism is designed by DNA to maintain an optimum of strength and health to sexual maturity—and just a few years beyond. Once it has presumedly done its procreative duty, (and the perpetuation o' the species may be the only thing DNA really cares about) 'tis kissed off, abandoned to steadily deteriorate. What Alobar and Kudra did was to keep their sexual fires so hotly stoked that DNA was fooled into believin' that they were just entering into sexual maturity. The fact that, despite their adolescently high hormone levels, they never actually produced a pregnancy, only contributed to the ruse.

Your man programs himself to die. Almost with our first breath, we're taught to expect our last. The power o' suggestion will pack you up if nothin' else does. Check the statistics sometime on how many people die at the same age that their parents died, the parent whom they most identified with. Your man Elvis Presley not only packed it up at the same age as his mum, but the very same day o' the year. The body is the servant o' the mind, and if we keep tellin' our bodies that they're probably goin' to croak, age seventy-two, then come seventy-two, croak they will. Maybe the main reason your Alobar lived on was because he believed he could. It doesn't matter how ye take care o' yourself, beets and baths and breaths and whatever, if ye think that your death is inevitable, it will be. Attitude, attitude. 'Tis the death wish that nails 'em, every bleedin' time.”

“'Tis their religion. To a man, your leaders believe that life on this ball o' clay is merely a test. An entrance exam for eternity. 'Tis the next life they're interested in, a life spent swappin' tales o' power with God, sittin' around the lobby o' the Paradise Hotel. That's why they're so dangerous, those righteous old farts. If they pushed the button and furnaced the Earth, they'd say the Earth had it comin'. Sin and immortality and all. Most o' them are secretly wishin' for it. Fry those of us who are at ease with Nature and enjoyin' ourselves, then harpsichord off to their reward. No wonder people are scared silly. Most o' them won't let it show, but they're scared.

'Twas intuition led me there. Intuition being the most reliable instrument in science.”

there were many different realities, and to a certain extent, with the proper focus of energy, one could choose which reality one wished to live. One might even outwit the harshest reality of all.

“As a grandiose self-deception, war is o' the same magnitude as religion. We embrace war or religion—usually both at the same time—as a means o' defeatin' death, but neither o' them do a blinkin' thing but sanction dyin'. Throughout history, Death's best friend has been a priest with a knife.”

Reincarnation—or the transmigration o' souls—was an idea spawned in one o' the most rigid social systems humanity has ever devised. Your ancient Hindu was stuck like a gnat in amber. Durin' his lifetime, he was obliged to live in a prescribed place with a prescribed family and practice a prescribed occupation. The possibility o' mobility did not exist. The hand you were dealt at birth was the hand you played. Everythin' was predestined, and you couldn't change a bleedin' dot o' it. Since they had no chance o' change in life, 'tis only natural they fantasized about change in the afterlife. Reincarnation was simply a fantasy your Hindu perpetuated to keep his rigid reality model from drivin' him mad.

“Did you hear what you just said? 'Mortified. I could die.' Pris, ye must never use such expressions. They are unconscious manifestations o' the death wish. You're signalin' the universe that death is not only acceptable but deserved.” “Oh, Wiggs!” “And as for your Nobel laureate, 'tis

I'm less scared than resentful. We've got ourselves stuck in a cyclic system that makes true freedom, true growth impossible. In the arts, a period o' classicism is followed by a period o' romanticism. Then 'tis back to the classical again. 'Tis as simpleminded as a bloody pendulum, and for me, at least, it robs art of any real meaning. Same thing in society. A conservative cycle, a liberal cycle, then a conservative cycle again. Action and reaction, back and forth, like the tides. As long as we're trapped in these cycles, we can't expect much in the way o' liberation, we can't even expect fundamental change except the awful slow variety where each step takes a million years or more. For most of our history, we were trapped by the seasonal cycles, the weather cycles. Now, however, we can at least move south for the winter, north for the summer. The seasons still operate cyclically, but we don't have to submit to 'em. All I'm askin' is for that kind o' mobility in life as a whole. I'm askin' for the opportunity to break out o' the birth-death cycle. Ye see what I mean? 'Tis far too rigid and predictable to suit me. Cycles take the meaning out o' life, just as they do in art. Me hope is this: certain individuals have always managed to break out o' the artistic and social cycles—that's why I love and respect your individual more than I love and respect humanity at large. Maybe, maybe, the time is ripe for certain individuals to escape the birth-death cycle, as well. And I don...

People used to die from germs. Now they died from bad habits. That was what Dr. Dannyboy said. Heart disease was caused by bad personal habits, cancer was caused by bad industrial habits, war was caused by bad political habits. Dannyboy believed that even old age was a habit. And habits could be broken.

“The rich are the most discriminated-against minority in the world. Openly or covertly, everybody hates the rich because, openly or covertly, everybody envies the rich. Me, I love the rich. Somebody has to love them. Sure, a lot o' rich people are assholes, but believe me, a lot o' poor people are assholes, too, and an asshole with money can at least pay for his own drinks.”

At birth, we emerge from dream soup. At death, we sink back into dream soup. In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land. Life is a portage.

it might be more complex than that. He went so far as to consider that there might be more than one type of afterlife experience, that there might be several, that there could be, in fact, as many different death-styles as there were life-styles, and “dream soup” was merely one of dozens from which the dead person might actually choose.

“Live by the heart if you would live forever,”

Our political leaders are unenlightened and corrupt, but with rare exception, political leaders have always been unenlightened and corrupt. I stopped taking politics seriously a long, long time ago, therefore it's had practically no effect on the way I've lived my life. In the end, politics is always a depressant, and I've preferred to be stimulated.

what bothers me today is the lack of, well, I guess you'd call it authentic experience. So much is a sham. So much is artificial, synthetic, watered-down, and standardized. You know, less than half a century ago there were sixty-three varieties of lettuce in California alone. Today, there are four. And they are not the four best lettuces, either; not the most tasty or nutritious. They are the hybrid lettuces with built-in shelf life, the ones that have a safe, clean, consistent look in the supermarket. It's that way with so many things. We're even standardizing people, their goals, their ideas. The sham is everywhere. “But wait, now. Don't let me spoil the party. Things will change, eventually, believe me. You can count on change. Even now, I'm curious about what's going to happen next. And I'll be back, if I can get back. The perfume will guide me back, I feel that it will. “So make our perfume, my friends. Make it well. Breathe properly. Stay curious. And eat your beets.”

DANNYBOY'S THEORY (Where We Are Going and Why It Smells the Way It Does) To put it simply, humankind is about to enter the floral stage of its evolutionary development. On the mythological level, which is to say, on the psychic/symbolic level (no less real than the physical level), this event is signaled by the death of Pan. Pan, of course, represents animal consciousness. Pan embodies mammalian consciousness, although there are aspects of reptilian consciousness in his personality, as well. Reptilian consciousness did not disappear when our brains entered their mammalian stage. Mammalian consciousness was simply laid over the top of reptilian consciousness, and in many unenlightened—underevolved, underdeveloped—individuals, the mammalian layer was thin and porous, and much reptile energy has continued to seep through. When our remote ancestors crawled out of the sea, they no doubt had the minds of fish. Smarter, more adventurous and curious than their fellows who remained underwater, but fish-minded, nonetheless. On the long swampy road to a primate configuration, however, we developed a reptile mind. After all, in those tens of millions of years, reptile energy dominated the planet. It culminated in the dinosaurs. As Marcel LeFever suggested in his address to the perfumers' convention, reptile consciousness is cold, aggressive, self-preserving, angry, greedy, and paranoid. Paul McLean was the first neurophysicist to point out that we still carry a reptilian brain—functio...

Material things anchor one in life much more firmly than purists would like to believe. We seem to face an enemy who, no matter how many times we win, will best us in the end. He has so many allies: time, disease, boredom, stupidity, religious quackery, and bad habits. Maybe, as Dr. Dannyboy has postulated, all these things, including disease and our relationship with time, are merely bad habits. If so, an ultimate victory is possible. For individuals, if not for the mass. And maybe evolution—playful, adventurous, unpredictable, infuriatingly slow (by our standards of time) evolution—will rescue us eventually, according to a master plan.

Instead of shrinking, the hero moves ever toward life. Life is largely material, and there is no small heroism in the full and open enjoyment of material things. The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine.

I cannot help you understand. In the realm of the ultimate, each person must figure out things for themselves. Remember that, when you return to Your Side. Teachers who offer you the ultimate answers do not possess the ultimate answers, for if they did, they would know that the ultimate answers cannot be given, they can only be received."

a ghost is but a dead person who has not completely lost his ability to smell? Smell is the sister of light, it is the left hand of the ultimate. It fastens the eternal to the temporal, This Side to That Side, and thus is highly sensitive; volatile, if not dangerous.

At birth we are red-faced, round, intense, pure. The crimson fire of universal consciousness burns in us. Gradually, however, we are devoured by parents, gulped by schools, chewed up by peers, swallowed by social institutions, wolfed by bad habits, and gnawed by age; and by the time we have been digested, cow style, in those six stomachs, we emerge a single disgusting shade of brown. The lesson of the beet, then, is this: hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you're brown, you'll find that you're blue.