Michael Jackson, 12 years following your voice #13
"The perfume of the soul is the memory. It is the most delicate, the most suave part of the heart, which detaches itself to embrace another heart and follow it everywhere. The affection of an absent person is no more than a perfume, but how sweet it is. George Sand
I have told you about those events that happened to me in a totally incredible way: I have told you about the synchronization of my phone call with Bruce's arrival; I have told you about that sudden intuition during a ceremony with that 7 that was planted above my head on the pediment of the chapel while I was suddenly wondering about the possibility of doing a thesis on him and that inspired me to dare to call the University the following day. Some of them may seem so anecdotal to me as to you, that many of us don't even dare to talk about them, for fear of ridicule: indeed, who hasn't been surprised, while getting into his car, to come across a Michael song at a moment when he or she was thinking about him? To find oneself in front of a license plate on which it was noted 777-MJ while one was asking an existential question hoping to find an answer? and so on...
I would like to come back to two events which, along my journey, have marked me a lot. Both happened in Nice, one in 2010, the other in 2011. I had learned of Michael's passion for perfume, and expensive perfumes in particular. I had never been interested in them myself, not having the budget and not seeing the point of paying for expensive perfumes when standard eaux de toilette were just fine. So I wrote down a list of the perfumes he used to soak his clothes, rinse his clothes, perfume the rooms he was in or simply soak himself in, because, by dint of putting them on, he didn't smell anymore, like everyone else in this situation, and he used them in large doses. He had been wearing it for 30 years. A good old French perfume that smelled, I think, "old bourgeoisie", another one, more spicy, that he had worn during the rehearsals of This Is It in particular, another one, which was used for his laundry, others more occasional... I learned, thanks to him, what perfume represented... An extension of oneself. A form of aura, made sensitive... A presence which survives you when you are not there anymore... A fragment of your soul, which says a lot about you, through its fragrances, spicy or sweet, heady or light...
I went into a famous shop in Nice to ask about their mythical fragrances… 😊
I thought I would pass it off as a gift for my husband, who was accompanying me... It was bad luck, it was only women's perfumes! Holy Michael, should we be surprised? Again, this will not to compartmentalize anything... During my visit of this store, my ear was suddenly challenged by a familiar music... The loudspeakers of the store began to play a cover version of "Man in the Mirror" that I had never heard before, in a salsa mode. Already there, I was seized... It was funny!
As I couldn't find the old French perfume that he had supposedly been using for over 30 years, I asked a saleswoman if she had any. She explained to me that this perfume had not been manufactured for 10 years but that she was going to see if she had any left in stock. So I waited for a few long minutes, listening with a smile to this musical cover that seemed to beckon me... But what was my surprise when the saleswoman came back to me and said: "Did you order it from us some time ago? I told her no, it wasn't me. She explained to me that she had one bottle left in stock, which had been ordered a few months ago by a person who had never come to pick it up... She was about to return it to the supplier. So she was going to sell it to me. Unbelievable! I was stunned...
I was going to find this same perfume a few weeks later in New York on 42nd Avenue, in a Duty Free perfume shop... It was in the window, and again, when I asked the salesman if he had several bottles, he told me that it was the last one, that this perfume had not existed for 10 years. Anecdotal, you may say... But still incredible, isn't it?
So why would the Universe bother with these details?... A song on the radio, a perfume waiting for you, a fetish number that appears, an hour, on your watch, 7:07... I don't know. I am a human being, like you, like him. But I know how good these points of conjunction are. How much they give hope. How much they open a flower in the chest and give you suddenly the impression to breathe, to open wide your lungs, to lighten your heart... How much they seem to indicate a road, a presence, a connection. How much wanting to "prove" at all costs, scientifically, that they have a meaning or not, an origin or not, "tires" (to use Braque's terms that I quoted in a previous post) their totally inexplicable value... Whether we perceive them and find them because we are absolutely looking for them, whether it is our impregnation of the moment that gives us such a reading, it doesn't really matter. All this is not totally true either. It's not because I want to see a helicopter appear in my living room or a crocodile in my bathtub that it's going to happen, no matter how hard I concentrate... Nor that a maple samara (you know those little leaves that fall down spinning like propellers) is going to fall on my window or that my purse (even if it's not a crocodile) will have been forgotten in my bathroom... So what? I don't know. That's just the way it is. But the aftermath of this event, which I'll tell you about in my next post, overwhelmed me even more…