honeysuckle future
It wafts out of my past, through lawngrass mornings and minnowed creeks, between the fingertips that pinched off calyx after calyx to taste the small drops of nectar. In that Southeastern spring-and-summer, the smell might as well have been coming out of the ground.
Sure, that was one state over. But here in Tennessee, running through the same humidity, my body goes wet with memory and my mind all slack and porous, like a membrane through which some ancient equilibrium adjusts itself. It’s hard not to get mythic, struggling to breathe in all that deep and fragrant green.
Honeysuckle, after all, is already part of the mythology. In Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, it’s a tragic odor. For Quentin Compson, it is a “twilight-colored smell” that is at once the fragrance of desire and the fetor of shame (and thus of those shameful desires, incest and suicide). For me, the smell has always been lighter, more Southern than Gothic; regardless, the odiferous otherworlds of Southern summers beg to be mythologized. Rainforests of American ruin, reeking of the earth, the past.
But which past, how past? Mythologizing a place, though unavoidable, is often incorrect. This primal smell of Southernness, for instance, has only existed in North America for about 150 years. Japanese honeysuckle was planted on the banks of the Potomac in 1862, to prevent erosion, and quickly marched South. There are native honeysuckles, but mine—and Faulkner’s—is the vining Asian variety. For poor Quentin, in addition to the obvious symbolism, the plant smells “twilight-colored” because it is more pungent at dusk.
I’m running around a public golf course that was built by the WPA in the 1930s on a former airfield. Everywhere there are starlings, their petrolean feathers slick like skinks. The birds were brought to the Continent from Europe, thirty years after the Japanese honeysuckle. In addition to other birdcalls, they mimic the sounds of our machines, screeching back renditions of car alarms and sirens from the trees.
The South. The past. The atavistic swampiness of its landscape belies its recency. This is a manufactured, imported, post-postbellum place. No less real, of course, no less mine. Though conflating one’s own past with the world’s, or a region’s history with its myths, can codify its absences. Thirty percent of North American birds have disappeared since 1970, just a couple decades before I was born. Silences and extinct smells are much harder to mythologize, let alone imagine.
Later, I sit in an enormous coffee shop, looking out on the unbearably hot day. If there is a South that is mine, it is this wide blue windowview of heat from an air-conditioned room. It is not a conjuration but a premonition. My South is less like someone’s past than everyone’s future.
And what does that future smell like? Japanese honeysuckle, which is impossible to eradicate. And rotting wood, car exhaust, lawn clippings, dog shit, fertilizer, magnolia, gasoline. Bitumen and xylene. Running past the driving range, I pick up another smell beneath the honeysuckle: ozone. It smells like coming thunder.
ben tapeworm