The (Pungent) Cloud of Unknowing

I cannot begin to understand the chemistry that gave rise to it, but a bottle whose label has faded, and which thus I cannot look up, smells of bubblegum, mint, and soap. I haven't used anything that smells minty or soapy on its own, and I most definitely do not own anything possessing a bubblegum fragrance...

I don't know. I can't repair it; it's beyond redemption. And I can't even use it to put in the oil soap for the floors, because while the mint might be refreshing (before it started to drive me mad), it's the most muted part. I would be making my house smell like bubblegum.

('And then, in this laborious nowhere,
suddenly the ineffable point where the pure too-little
mysteriously reverses ---, flips round into
the empty too-much.
Where the complex equation
equals zero.' -- Rilke, Fifth Elegy)

A Rabbi, a Priest, and a Blonde Walk into a Bar...

All apologies for being as boring as I am being/have been, but the meaty writing is taking place elsewhere. I hope to integrate it and this blog in time (more on that later) but for now, more on perfume.

--Look, it's riveting for the two of you for whom it's riveting. The other two of you can go practice your Uzbek.

In the meantime: I have a friend who's absolutely in love with Catherine of Siena.

The first coup de foudre took place while she was, unsurprisingly, in Siena. Not being Catholic and not knowing a Dominican from a Double Englishman's at the time, she returned home and went back to work, enjoying the occasional nostalgic Brunello and trying to make sense out of the whole thing while feeling a distinct urge to learn how to make rosaries out of rose petals. (Or something: I totally made that last bit up.)


Go ahead a year. The friend sells her piano so she can go to Siena again, not needing to get to a why or even a how there, but at least a What, God help her, as to the nature of what she is experiencing. She prays, meditates, cries, meets some religious, buys some books, is yet more moved, and the whole time the piano is more than worth it.

Then it's almost time for her to leave, so she asks the bookstore guy, who remembers her from last time, whom she sort of knows halfway enough to feel one-quarter comfortable, if there are any 'Dominicans' near where she lives, which is near Seattle, in Washington, United States. And then Vincenzo, or Bartolomeo, or God help us all, Domenico, tells her that, well, he knows he sends some books to this parish in Seattle, and maybe that could help?


Fast forward to now-ish, and she's in a Dominican parish, still breathing in Catherine with every breath, and still not hungering for the piano now long gone. So for her I made a Catherine of Siena scent. It has a bunch more ingredients than this, but this is the part she will like:

Orris (=Iris rhizome) + Lily of the Valley (= yields no oils naturally, so a synthesized version of the compounds producing the natural scent; see headspace technology): Lily symbol of Catherine and of purity in general, as with other saints; Lilies and Iris considered same thing until 19th C.; now what still grows along the River Lys and was once called Fleur de Lis is actually 'Iris' in our lexicon (and I had to use orris as a fixative, since I'm desperative for fixatives in this, since florals scare me). So, lily + lily. More semantics, etymologies, and fights can be found here, if you're that picky.

Frankincense, Oud, Sandalwood, Benzoin, Patchouli: Very ecclesiastical, obviously; traditional ingredients for incense in many faith traditions for millennia. (Okay, also elements i know how to work with.) Anyway, in this tradition it means: ergo Jesus, and the Church. Very meaningful if one can argue that a scent can possess a narrative, as patently I believe it can, but also a great pragmatic blessing in that I can impart some resonance and richesse, so that the whole thing doesn't sound like Elvira de Hidalgo on a helium rebreather and last for all of a shrill twenty seconds.

Cedar: the Cedars of Lebanon; therefore the Song of Solomon; Divine Love; Deus Caritas Est; Catherine's Holy Bridegroom.

Rose Absolute and Rose Geranium (which has three of the same constituents as rose: linalool, geraniol, and citronellol, but with greater depth, complexity, and tenacity): Kind of obvious, but: Catherine's crown of roses; the Blessed Virgin; the Rosary (the Marion devotion as well as the sacramental - which Dominican friars and nuns wear as part of the habit, and which is likewise important to the Dominican Third Order and laity) and, being a partly kinaesthetic mode of prayer, evokes Dominic's Nine Ways of Prayer. At least to me.

And, lastly, Lotus: Death of the Old Self, Regeneration, New Life -- and Continuity. The lotus simultaneously represents the transitory and the eternal, two realms we as humans are challenged to mediate every day. What dies away will be replaced by something brighter, stronger, deeper. It is born out of mud, , like the first man, , and strives ever upward. As we do.

It sounds super easy. Hit and run, like having 'bezique' staring at you in your Scrabble tray on opening. But I added a bunch of stuff besides this, to try and have it not read as 'rose and religion.' It would be sad if she loved the story and hated the scent!

Update 6/22: I added coriander. The opening had become as vigourous as a tulip stalk in late June. I thought about more citrus (there's hardly any), but the coriander seems a better bet, if it can link up with the frank and patch and cajeput in the prelude. We'll see. But middle and end are quite nice.

Update 6.23: Feeling tempted to add saffron for some reason. But I think logically I should give it a spike with more coriander and boost the cedar. Give me a couple weeks. I know I will...

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

They've been distilled into absolutes, every one.

Okay, all that happened today was too intense and gorgeous to get into cogently right now, so I'll just say that floral #2 (I don't want to hear it, so don't bother; I've already said it to myself, anyway) is turning out just as wearable for me as #1. Why? I don't know. How? How, indeed! Here it is, in random order:

geranium
petitgrain
sandalwood
neroli
cajeput
clary sage
orrisroot
patchouli
benzoin
vanilla
coriander
vetiver
oakmoss

What's different is the proportions, and then the presence of oakmoss, vanilla, and petitgrain, and the lack of frankincense, in the second one. It doesn't come across as spicy at all, just a well-balanced warm floral.

I hope you got to see the full moon!

A Rose by Any Other Name

Well, somehow I made a floral that I actually like. I don't know how, I don't understand it, and I've never succeeded before. And it's not just incompetence on my part; I don't like florals anyone makes. Other than Joy, and that makes no more sense than it should, unless you believe that the exception proves the rule.

At any rate, it still has some curing to go, but at this stage it is already quite nice and balanced. The ingredients, in no particular order are:

benzoin
clary sage
geranium
vetiver
patchouli
coriander
cajeput
sandalwood
neroli
frankincense
and a small amount of Moroccan rose

Most of the rose is coming from the geranium, and not much of the piney aspects of the geranium are present still, even with the other complements. Anyway, even with the tiny amount of patchouli and the not tiny amount of frankincense, it's not headed at all in the ecclesiastical-Oriental zone of most of what I wear. I don't feel any great excitement at succeeding with those scents, even when they are particularly complex, but this feels like a genuine coup! mean, I would actually wear this stuff!

A Little Less Conversation

Some of you will recall my earlier jeremiads about drug ads for potions to stop brittle bones and stave off penile-implant surgery. Those of you who don't, and those of you who for your own unfathomable reasons wish to relive the horror, can click on 'Sally Field' or 'flaccidity' in my Labels list to the right and share in my pain of many months ago.

Let me begin by saying I don't watch television all that much. I have a very small set, and it is hard to see from where I usually am, which is at my computer desk, ordering antique perfume bottles off Ebay or once again struggling to come up with ideas for a seasonal dish in the cold and stormy heart of winter that does not involve turnips or kale. And since I generally turn the sound off when it is on, I seldom have any idea what anyone is saying, since I can't read the subtitles at all from thirty feet away. Still, occasionally, I have both the television and the television audio on simultaneously, and when this baleful combination of phenomena occurs, it is rare that I do not regret it subsequently.

Recently I was foolhardy enough to press 'power' without 'mute' before walking over to the vanity to select the day's fragrance, whereupon I was wrested from my tranquil toilette to stand agape and aghast at the horror that flickered before my widening eyes. For it seems that now Viagra has a new campaign, worse than all the rest, and while I hold no particular affection for any Elvis song or film from the 1960s, it does seem that using Viva Las Vegas to hawk erection pills diminishes substantively whatever charm or cachet that song can be said to have once possessed.

Not that it wasn't full of macho swagger, boastful virility, and the desire for unbridled hedonism -- if, admittedly, less than artfully put by the crack songwriting team of Messrs. Pomus and Shuman. But that's just it (well, part of it): the ad is using the universally-recognized song to evoke that libertinous 'I'm just a devil with love to spare' strut in the back of the viewer's mind, while the new lyrics, by contrast, kick the unsuspecting rogue in his pants. Not to mention his cerebellum.

Firstly, let me say that I understand Cialis is doing well, and has done well marketing itself as the flaccidity fixer for men who already have women to have sex with. It has advantages Viagra does not, including more rapid and longer-lasting effects. That's hard to battle, and simply whining, 'Heeey, remember us? We've got one, too. And it's kinda the same' is clearly insufficient. If New Coke had done well, its competitor would have had to strive to position some new product of its own as being similar, and similarly delicious. So Viagra finds itself wanting to declare that even married men who want to have sex with their wives will find it useful.

Of course, Pfizer (or their ad agency) could have said that. Explicitly, and in uncloying language. Instead, we are given the image of a group of early-middle-aged men in the widest assortment possible of casual wear (so that you, whoever you are, will surely be able to find one to 'identify' with: is it the plaid-shirt guy? the rakishly-untucked one? or are you really the bandanna'ed motorbike rider in your heart?) who got together in a bartenderless roadside tavern in the middle of the day to turn Elvis Presley songs into paeans to Erectile Dysfunction drugs and sex within the bonds of marriage.

How do I know they're married? Could I not just be leaping to conclusions for the sake of being able to hate all these ads equally (and by the way, I have never yet seen a single ad for Levitra, and for all I know they could be as bad or worse, but if we fall in love, you and me, and you find you're having a bit of a problem, and I still haven't seen any, please do the right thing and support Bayer/GlaxoSmithKline)? No, I know they are married because I was subjected to first-year-film-school clunky closeups of wedding bands on left hands playing various instruments, and because my brain was fried by having the following lines imprinted on it, forever:

• This lonesome toad is sick of the road/Can't wait, can't wait to get home
• At the end of the day/I'm not a guy who'll stray/'Cause she's my heart's desire

'Lonesome toad,' I guess, is supposed somehow to make them seem like normal men who say manly, cowboyish self-deprecating things in bars, rather than go to them to sing about drugs and impotence and monogamy and how they are inexplicably stuck in the bar, when really all they want to do is go home and have drug-enhanced sex with the wives they miss so much. And, since they have been trapped there who knows how long, and have been thinking of little besides their wives and the great married sex they are going to have with their 'hearts' desires,' I can presume that they, unlike Elvis, are not wishing that there were more than twenty-four hours in a day -- unless their Honey I'm Home package includes a Cialis tab or two.

Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

I don't know. I tried to write an entry about how senior citizens aren't what they used to be anymore, and I thought I did the math wrong, so I scrapped the whole bit, only to try it one more time after deleting everything, upon which I discovered I had it right all along, up until the point I redid it. I didn't have to 'borrow' from the zero at all, since I was subtracting a 0 from a 7 before that... Which means, to those of you who don't know math as well as I do, that 2,007-70=, as I previously and rightly believed, 1,937.

So, nothing about Chuck Taylors versus Novachords, or Gene Krupa or Bing Crosby before the 'Road Pictures.' It's sad, too, because it had funny bits. Moreover, it explained things much better than 1927 did, an equation I found inscrutable in many ways, most of all the heads tilted sideways when I mentioned things like Lyonnaise Potatoes and Pork Chops, or Holländer, or the shock of the New Look.

And then I read a story about a seminal philologist that moved me so strongly I actually attempted to 'contribute' a 'comment.' At which I also failed, apparently, because I don't know what I pushed instead of 'Yes, show me, I'm trying to do something here!!' when Firefox let me know it had shut down a popup and did I want to see it. Nothing happened, so I reloaded and recocked, and whether it's the firing pin or the trigger assembly or the action is too light, something went awry and I went straight to the Technical Issues page, and by this point I was all in (seminal philologists can do that to me, even Calvinist ones), so I had to set up my Outlook, as that's the address the Technical Issues office wanted, even though they could reach me far more handily elsewhere.

But I seem to have achieved greater success with the manly Hand Balm I started, which makes sense because you can blunt some of the technical issues of scent and still have good results. It seems quite likable now, but we'll see as it cures. So far it is strong on oregano and saffron, as I wanted, with vetiver, cedar, and oakmoss in the bottom, and very little bergamot for a tiny bounce and to coax out the citrus notes in the vetiver. Who knows, but it smells great on me right now, and the oregano is settling in so beautifully.