Asyndeton (a-syn’-de-ton): The omission of conjunctions between clauses, often resulting in a hurried rhythm or vehement effect. [Compare brachylogia. Opposite of polysyndeton.]
I was big, tall, blond, and soaked in cologne. I was the perfect man. I smelled like a whorehouse in high gear.
This cologne had taken years to perfect: “Twilight of the Idols” named after Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous book. Its sweet odor smashes Christian morality with one whiff and surmounts rationality with four-wheel drive passions reaching almost straight up to night’s first twinkling stars. The nose, not reason, knows which way to go in the body’s quest for divine guidance in its nasal awakening to infinite wafting on one of my carefully prepared smells.
I had been in the smell business ever since I first smelled death in the Endless War, going on somewhere all time as a cornerstone of the human condition. Its stench put it on an even keel with all that is flesh, uniting all sentient beings in the One Big Stink, marking at once our demise and our unity as meat-laden creatures.
I prepared an odor replicating putrefaction so the faint-hearted wouldn’t have to go to war, or go sniffing roadkills, to imbibe its shocking, yet enlightening, smell. It comes in a green bottle with a wick. I named it “Stinking Truth” to highlight the nose’s role in the quest for certainty, and its achievement of Its sensing in the unremitting stench of rotting flesh.
But I have discerned in my own experiments that even stench waxes and wanes if left to it’s own biodegradable devices—that there is a higher order of truth that is evident in decay: it has an end, a telos of transformation, an incarnation—as “all flesh is grass.” So I added a note of sweetness to “Stinking Truth” to allow for truth’s transformation as a contingent smell, that may necessitate changing its name while it changes its odor, yet still retaining its generic name, which is not of it, but about it. In the cases of the nose and its sensing of odors: the nose sniffs and the mind names, and we all know, the name is not the thing. So we are stuck—all of our senses stick it to us with words. If we haven’t seen, smelled heard or tasted it ourselves, our words act as surrogates for passion giving us the linguistically fabricated illusion that we have “sensed” something other than a word or words chained by grammatical and logical conventions constituting different languages. English cats say “meow.” Japanese cats say “nyaa.”
Anyway, if you’re “starting to smell something fishy,” you’re right. Like Shakespeare said (to paraphrase) “A rose by any other name would still smell like a rose.” Words comport with the world by convention. If we’re going to communicate with each other, we must use them and experience them together by sharing meanings for the noises they make together as tenants in the “house of language” (Hegel?)—an abode we build that may act as a fortress against brute experience and its projection like smoke rising from the remnants of a fire, it is both a symbol and a sign: a “sigbol” sorted one from the other by acts of interpretation, like the naming of a fart.
