The Art of Subtraction (ROUND 3)
scent of the day: Viridian Buzz, by Ensar
Bitter mate powder pestled with a melange of italian aromatics (basil and even tomato stem) that have almost a spearmint edge in the first hour / so much of my galbanum comes with leather or at least a leather moss—not just in the phenomenal Reckless leather and Bandit but even in Dryad and Beach Hut Man. Here, though, we get no sense of leather beyond the rootiness of an unstated vetiver note. Rhu Khus style drydown of Vetiver Nocturne, hints of green apple and all, come out a few hours in, giving this a strogn resemblance to other Ensars: Layers of Jade and Qi Nan, especially
The Art of Subtraction —for Rilke and the six Mikes
I isolate. Like my own father before me, it takes everything in me to look straight at my son. I have inherited the tremor, the shifty eyes. I walk around hunched. I see now from the inside, in belated empathy for the dead, the difficulty of facing the gaze. How strange what persists in memory. His little nose—“Bip it. Bop it.”—in the bathroom mirror, eyes meeting over “Pee-yew” diapers whose numbered days no father wants to face, to this day intrudes with the vivacity of mere yesterday— foregrounding too much for me to fathom the man he is becoming. To say that is the full story, though, would be yet more vain evasion.
His claustrophobic gab of vigor has ebbed into something considerate, almost—get-the-hint-already squirms having bored into his me-me-me world despite all my pains to be indirect lest he understand his mercy for Dad as I did in his shoes: as mercy for Dad. But still—blazing eyes barging in with ebullience for it all, for what might be, just as I exhale a bit of peace in the bathroom—I look down, look at me, like a cuffed criminal ushered into court for his disgrace. And what do I find? The carved torso of Apollo, marble and mirror, hurling even more dazzle: “You must change your life”— an order v-cut by oblique brutalism: “Your time has come to an end.”
Standing within such whiplash requires no squaring of circles. I know as much. It means surrender. But that surrender, I know too, need not be to weariness. “Become he who can bear not being the center”—that is the hidden hinge, the sunken reconciliation. It is the call to train the spirit for its final crawl, to apprentice oneself into erasure— to practice, yes, the art of subtraction. The image lingers of my own father, bowed over beer bottles towering in a bravado beaten by my own blaze. I doubt my strength for the other road, freeing as it might be. What I do know, and what makes that road harder still, is this: if I cannot muster the strength, at least I will walk beside him.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
