Sweet dreams are made of this (Everybody’s looking for something.)
Happiness lies round the corner, they say. Which may, in fact, be a bit of a problem…
Not that we trust the future to be kind, of course. We’d like the seconds that await us to resemble the very best of times that we already had - or imagined that we had.
For even that most reliable of time machines, smell, is subject to change. Listen to A.A. Gill:
Smells come and go, pervade our lives and then disappear on the wind. You can’t recreate a smell, but neither can you quite forget it. I still remember the odour of London fog, coal gas, steaming King’s Cross, Bronco toilet paper, Vim, Gumption, beeswax polish, fishbone glue, Silvo, shoebox brushes, wax crayons, typewriter ribbon, mackintosh, paraffin, linseed oil, Vicks, burnt feathers, butcher’s sawdust, puncture-repair kits, iodine and woolly plasters, lily of the valley on licked hankies, and patchouli on cheesecloth. All rare to extinct now and nobody to save them.
And what we can’t keep, we change – mostly for the worse:
We’ve tidied up the olfactory landscape, sprayed it with the pervasive squawk of lemon and pine, grass and pulped fruit. At the moment, I’m being nose-raped by some sort of detergent or fabric softener or skid-mark shifter: a sweet, ersatz smell that pretends to be a Swiss meadow humping a fruit salad. It’s truly unpleasant, like being interrupted by a loony Ophelia on the bus.
In other words, we can’t trust the future, or truly know the past – and what’s left is the strangest of comforts:
As part of his research into how light influences reproduction in birds, Prof. Grégoy Bédécarrats discovered that a genetically blind strain of White Leghorn birds called Smoky Joes start reproduction earlier and produce more eggs than the average chicken.
So, that’s about the best that we can do: humbly accept that blindness, at times, seems to work - and that maybe, since love is also wearing those Stevie Wonder glasses, there might be hope for our fool hearts: that love might work for us as well, however clumsily we go about it:
Two female tortoises needed life-saving operations after their shells cracked up through years of a violent mating ritual.
Old-timer Phoebe, 100, and Grandma, 50, had to have parts of their shells replaced with fibreglass.
A vet treating them described their condition as, “the most severe I have ever seen”.
During the “bashing” ritual, randy male tortoises smash their shells against the females forcing them into submission.
Or, if not for some uncertain future or a forgotten past – and if not for love, or other forms of blindness - maybe, like Jane Hirshfield wrote, we just go on until we open
to the dark that comes to take us – embrace
that should be brutal, yet somehow not. No, intimate,
almost a kindness, the quick taking.
And then that too is faithfully stripped from our arms.
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