Sufficient Reason Beneath the Stutters (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Jamaican Ambergris: Purple Sultani, by Ensar Oud
Black Gris is more my speed, my style, my feel: musty earth meets cavey mineralics meets tropical green. But this I would say is objectively better and more oud-woody than I expected. And after today’s wear and analysis, I might even join the crowd and find this personally better than Black Gris.
Jamaican Ambergris PS is a beautiful marine-tobacco scent with the silvery purple associations I get from my neat Maluku oil (distilled by Franklin Elim) and also my Purple Rain Maluku: iris cool stone, slightly sweet. Yes, instead of jungle density or fruitness, I get violet-iris tonalities and a faint metallic sheen from the oud used here—the sweetness is there but too abstract and polished and aerial to come off as too syrupy (if anything, underneath everything is a hardened gelatin). And yes, the tobacco aspect of the ambergris really comes out here, but it is more of a feminine tobacco if that makes sense: tilted in the direction of the browned skin of firepit marshamellows. And the aquatic, while salty as you would expect, has an erect celery stalk aroma.
I expected something that might be a cross between Black Gris and Tahitian Gardenia and Bishara. But while there is distant tropical creaminess (rooted in frangipani), it is more to me like a tobacco ambergris with some rum aspects and that silvery sheen throughline from the oud. Grey humidifier steam through a cotton candy grape filter. When all dried down though you do get the impression that this was not just only the steam but that part of the scent was also the radix of the steam (like the difference between an incense stick and the smoke it gives off). That base, unlike the ethereal steam it gives off, is dark and animalic and salty and musky. The impression is that this base is like a salted dark fruit melange that had been smeared, via that carmelized marshmallow skin made into a cup, on resinous wood and allowed to get tacky like old jelly on a table—a jelly with not a bright purple color but more maroon-brown.
As I said, the oud feels so Maluku like to me. No Maluku, or anly indonesian oud for that matter, is used in here, according to Ensar—only a variety of Malaysians. But each of the ouds he does use each contribute nicely to that Maluku feel. First there is what Ensar calls his Purple Mélange, a resinous groupign of ouds that—along with the mysore sandalwood—anchors the ambergris haze: (1) Purple Sultani (sinking-grade), which contributes that iris rootiness and plum sweetness, (2) Terengganu (sinking-grade), which contributes that icy-lozenge herbaceousness and violet florality, (3) King Super (sinking-grade), which contributes that molasses sweetness and adds to the velvety stexture of ambergris. Second, there is Blue Oud (SQ Aoudh al Azraq) contributes that airy aquatic edged sparkle and—especially with the help of the numbing-buzzing jambu oleoresin—electrifies the ethereal haze of gray ambergris into a purple-bent gray neon light.
So we have this ambergris haze, a pulverized stone dust cloud, billowed by a perfectly chosen mountain breeze rose (Georgian rose) and yet still held in like an atmosphere by the gravitational pull of these resinous ouds in conjunction with several other heavy elements: buttery-meditative mysore sandalwood whose milkiness is boosted by the creamy-coconut Massoia bark; inky-leathery oakmoss whose greeness is boosted by lime-leaf Haitian vetiver; crème-brûlée Peru Balsam whose vanillic side is boosted by smoky-sweet Bourbon vanilla. This sea-dominant planet is given a further tropical bend by the tannic-teenybopper vulva of jasmine sambac and the nectarous-apricot Hawaiian suntan lotion of frangipani.
Gray ambergris, as expected, is the the star. And it really does bring this oceanic musk impression with a sweetness reminiscent of the fat inside the clwas of boiled lobster. But I dare say that just as much a star is the jambu oleoresin. A botanical resin derived from the so-called toothache plant (and also known as buzz buttons), jambu oleoresin is famous for its high concentration of spilanthol—a chemical that triggers physical tingling, buzzing, and numbing sensation upon contact (very much like cocaine). It gives an electric or static-like crispness in the nasal passages, which creates a cooling effervesecnet illusion. What the jambu oleoresin does here is turn the whole composition on, lighting it up like a neon tube. This oleoresin is a wonderful trick to turn an otherwise regular oud scent into something that seems to buzz like kinam. It is the unsung hero of this fragrance.
*Let's workshop this poem about how the quantum foam view (which says subatomic particles enter and exit reality like beer bubbles) confirms, despite its chaotic surface, reality’s ultimate smoothness.
Sufficient Reason Beneath the Stutters
Even if some particles materialize from and vanish into literal nothing, such that space
is quantum-frothy rather than Einstein-smooth, still a panoptic smoothness remains tacit
in the very rule that the greater the materialized particle’s energy the faster it vanishes.
“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)
