billie sainwood / essay

Every Garden a Graveyard

I was born without a sense of smell. This has its good and bad days, but every day, I take a small amount of time to meditate on the ways that my faulty nose pulls me from the world. There’s so much panic about the improvement or elimination of bad odors. Deodorants, soaps, candles, air fresheners, perfumes, all these billion dollar solutions to problems that are simply not problems for me. When something goes bad, all I am left with is spectacle. The befouling of the world is a performance I’m not forced to look away from. And so, I see things.

Once, as a kid, my parents took me to the Atlanta Botanical Garden to see a Stinking Corpse Lily. Since the buds take months to develop and last only a couple of days at a time, it was something of an event. All day, I watched people approach the flower and peel away in disgust, scattering like pollen. When I got close, all I saw was a beautiful flower, brilliant red petals. While most flowers use sweet nectar to attract bees or hummingbirds, the lily smells like rotting flesh to draw flies. 

Foulness finds its purpose. It always does.

There's a town in the South of France called Grasse that I've been obsessed with since I read about it in a book. It's the perfume capital of the world. Literal tons of flowers are harvested there. Flowers like jasmine and bitter orange blossom and lavender. Perfume has been the business and pride of Grasse for centuries. But it wasn't always. Grasse first brushed fame with leather gloves. The town was renowned for its tanning and leatherwork, which became the envy of royalty, nobility, and any motherfucker with money and good taste. They were made from fine animal skins, tanned expertly, and formed without flaw, except one:

The smell. 

In the Middle Ages, tanning was a foul enterprise in which animal skins were soaked in dung or lime, then sprayed with urine and left to rot until soft. Since the glovers and tanners of Grasse couldn't very well sell high quality leather that smelled like dogshit, and the people of Grasse couldn't breathe in a constant cloud of noxious chemicals, the town cultivated flowers to perfume their leather. Eventually, the perfume got so good, and taxes on leather got so high, that the tanning died off. The corpse of an industry interred beneath fields of new flowers.

Rot is legacy.

Rot is history. It is the loam of the world, churning with fountains of bugs and worms and chemical processes. Beauty sleeps on a bed of rot. It is a garden of promises, of reasons to sprout and scatter on wings of flies. Things rot to grow new things. Industries to industries, mistakes to lessons. 

The best perfumes carry the lessons of the tannery with them. There's a chemical compound called skatole in luxury perfumes. It's responsible for the odor of shit. When properly proportioned and diluted, skatole can create an evocative undernote, a hint of unplaceable bitterness that elevates the more prominent bouquets swirling in the bottle. 

This is not the elimination of bad odor, this is a eulogy for it. The prodigal dung that brought the rot that brought the flowers that brought centuries of beauty to a town in the south of France come back again. This is a corpse holding lilies. This is a prayer to honor the shit and indignity of skinned animals that rotted to serve us. This is service. This is a miracle.

When Saint Teresa of Avila died, God made a miracle of her corpse, made her skin incorruptible, made her death smell of lilies for years after. According to nuns in her convent the smell was overpowering. This is the promise of life after rot. The rainbow at the end of the flood, a gentle God holding a woman who loved Him close enough to smell her and whispering "even now, you are beautiful." We won’t all be so lucky. Those of us who won’t reach sainthood are destined to smell like a graveyard one day. The milk of our mothers will curdle inside us until we are sour and soft as cheese. That's the good news. 

From perfumes to leathers to servants of God, the truth always embraces and cradles its filth. Each of us a garden, all the lives we could've lived going soft inside us, until every new day sprouts flamboyant from our glorious graves. 

Readers, wherever you are, I beg you. Throw out your deodorant. Tonight. Come to bed reeking of your every past mistake, of your eventual death. Embrace your rot, your foul, your stinking stretched skin. Dare your lovers to look at you like an oil painting spread across soft vellum. Dare them to see the scrimshaw on your already-yellowing bones. Remind them of how we make leather.

We are the saints with corruptible flesh. We are Corpse Lilies spreading our petals. We are all going bad already. Accept this. Make a Grasse of your every remaining day. Rot and rejoice. 

Lift your tanning, stinking palms to the sun.

Your best self is waiting for you.

It’s dying to watch you bloom.

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Billie Sainwood (she/her) is a queer, trans poet and writer from Atlanta. Her work has been featured in Had magazine, Passionfruit Review, and the Atlanta Fringe Festival. Her poetry collection, WHAT WAS EATEN WAS GIVEN, is available now from Kith Books. She keeps a diary of her inspirations and neuroses online at https://billiewritespoems.com/.