A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes (ROUND 3)
scent of the day: Vespers, by Amphora Exotica
Vespers (2024, Sundar Rayhan)—an all-natural floriental that, weaving bark and bloom and balm all in one derviche dance of meditative mysticism, calls to my mind (at least at first, before an intrusive homoeroticism kicks in) the still flame of a ghee lamp in the darkened prayer closet of some fixed-gear-bike hipster who, craft beer and artisanal coffee no longer doing the trick to fill an inner void, has taken to Eastern spirituality (Eat, Pray, Love, lumbersexual edition) rather than to the Antifa shenanigans of white saviorism common to too many of his Oregonian peers—
presents a variety of show-stealing spices (bitter-rooty saffron, barky-tannic cinnamon, citrus-pepper ginger) and midtone florals (apple-chamomile jasmine grandiflorum, green-musky jasmine sambac, creamy-peachy champaca, waxy-nectar pink lotus, banana-custard ylang, makeup-compact orris butter) over a bass-and-drum duo of woods (smoky-rooty javanese vetiver, mint-chocolatey patchouli, buttery-velvety mysore sandalwood, raisin-rum Cambodian oud, hay-compost Indian oud) and ambery elements (honey-caramel Hawaiian vanilla, vanillic-waxy Bushman’s candle),
this indolic-oudy ensemble given extra mammalian animalism by a variety of musky-pheromonic elements (powdery-terpenic Siberian deer musk, salty-sweet white ambergris) that work with the ginger to provide—the ginger doing the same in Overture Man—compensatory animation and counterbalancing diffusion to what would otherwise be a torpid chassis of inescapable butteriness (a texture, perhaps intentional since Sandar lists a butter accord in the note pyramid, quite similar to the ghee I get from Prin’s unmatchable Homa except that here, unlike with the “problematic” barbarism of Homa, the experience is much more cozy, reminiscent of a college “safe space” where some white “racial-sensitivity trainer”—with a tranquil affect you just want to throttle to the point of petechial bruising—lisps harm in the guise of care: “the question is what are we to do, what are we to learn and unlearn, about the contagious disease of whiteness”)—
the overall effect being a spicy-exotic oud fragrance that, in showcasing a tobacco-straw Kasmiri saffron (less smoky than Spanish saffron, less sweet than Irianian saffron, and with none of the Clorox-metallic screech of overdosed inferior saffron like we find in Rogue’s Aoud Ancienne) and in showcasing a vanillic-coumarin bushman’s candle (a plant whose waxy-flammable bark, which seals in moisture in the dry climates of Southern Africa, makes it a perfect slow-burning torch), has become my benchmark for both notes, these two together (the stars of the show) not only providing the core of what could be an alluring and unique Sandarian signature (up there with Tauerade or Bianchiade or so on) but also specifically in Vespers providing the core of what comes off (in concert with several other notes, especially the Indian oud and Jasmine grandiflorum) as an impression of hay bales whose vanilla and honey and burley facets were brought into stark relief by the sun’s having sucked away the last drops of moisture (hay bales, however, that seem cocooned, as if some artist had hoped to mummify a metonym of heartland summer, in a peppery-benzoin paraffin reminiscent in the first few hours of Honour Man, a paraffin that here in Vespers grows much more leathery over time in a metallic-hide-castoreum feel somewhere between Pinoy Sirun’s Heavy Metal Aoud 2 and Prin’s Varuek);
the overall effect being, in other words, a buttery jasmine-oud fragrance that, despite sharing with Prin’s Maruyama a gourmand core of sotolon (here this immortelle-fenugreek chemical is delivered by both saffron and bushman candle whereas in Maruyama it is delivered mainly by lovage root) and despite sharing with Maruyama both a musky element (here is it animalic-sensual deer musk while in Maruyama it is nutty-cognac ambrette) as well as a sandalwoody element (here it is buttery-luscious mysore while in Maruyama it is smoky-resinous amyris) that together prevent the fragrance from collapsing into that sotolon core, travels not in Prin’s herb-fern-stem-vine-underbrush direction that makes me think of enchanted-forest apothecaries smelling of Yatagan and medicinal botanicals but rather in a more floral-woody-animalic-ambery direction that makes me think (much more than Rogue’s Derviche 1 or Derviche 2) of Sufis kicking out perineal animalics from under their billowing skirts as they whirl in a Mevlevi lodge where incense-floral aromas dance with cooking-spice aromas from the onsite kitchen,
the whole spiritual atmosphere undercut by an undertow of sexual irreverence that makes this fragrance perfect to wear while reading Hesse’s Siddartha: the ecstatic bouquet of tropical florals (lotus, champaca, ylang), coupled with the deer musk and ambergris and especially the erotic moon energy of Hindi oud, amplifies the jasmine’s face-squatting facet (letting us know on what side of the perineum our nose finds itself) while the queasy smear of butter over everything, at least when set against the homoerotic poetry of Rumi and Hafiz and other Sufi masters who slavered over young boys like the best of troubador poetry and who extolled the Socratic-erotic bonds between boy disciples and their shaykhs (masters), makes me think of grease (Crisco, olive oil, ghee) for backroom penetrations of man-boy blasphemy, the man in question definitely bearded like the Brawny paper towel lumberjack not simply due to the rugged notes (vetiver, ginger) but mainly due to this unanalyzable vibe of lumbersexual homoeroticism that I get from Amphora Exotica’s whole aesthetic and from Vespers in particular (a green-anchor-tattoo Portlandia vibe I cannot shake, however much it stands in tension with the sacred ghee-lamp throughline of eastern mysticism).
A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes —for my Grandma, Barbara A. Istvan (1939-2015)*
Anyone who has hummed behind Becky on an escalator (“Hmm mm-mm”), let alone seen her tie her beach sarong, has beheld—even if too choked by the nasty smoke itself to infer the blaze—traces of self-play taken too damn far: snail-footed liver lips that could shadow-puppet alien undulants on walls, as much tuckable frill as Ray Finkle; a weighty number, deli-rippled roast beast of Dr. Seuss technicolor, that would have Georgia O'Queef herself rubberneck—and rubbernose even, can you blame her?— like a botanist before an uncatalogued jungle flower. It would seem a lie given her 5ft frame of bird bones—
straight insanity. But yeah, bitch gets real mean with it: The Gut Puncher™—that suction-bottomed black fist, its silhouette in the spook-the-shit-outta-ya shadows mistakable for a toppled lawn gnome, cornstarch dusted like a diaper rash and stowed under the bed quivering siren calls of elastomer stink with each Amtrak rumble. If only we could see it pummel that brown eye, that one surviving gullet whose involuntary “grip” still afforded a semblance of violation sensation (that hole edged now, when off duty at least, with little lips all its own: demonic slanders to God), we would believe. If only we could see
what—after each puckerless plop of retraction—reposes at such Beldar Conehead limits of sunlimned dilation, no time under the Cinderelli-Cinderelli glow of Disney would be needed to translate the magpie’s mad chatter at the uncurtained window of her exhibitionist kink: crazed pleas to come perch upon the perineal ledge, that calamari of scar tissue glistening even when dry; pleas to peck at intestinal breadcrumbs like an oxpecker, that scavenging symbiont to the Serengeti rhino—deeper and deeper, like a child gathering flopping fish and other slimy currency in the majestic drawback of a tsunami sea.
* There is a deep tradition of bawdy humor in my family—the Istvan clan, the Last of the Mo’Beacons. Obscenity kept affection alive and distracted us from hunger pangs. Grandma—and old-school banger of pots and pans out in the street (which funny enough was one of many things that made my visits to Sangre Grande in Trindad, twenty years ago now, feel like coming home)—liked to sing, for example, the Istvan twist on the ditty uniting noncontiguous trashlands across America.
Of course, I have elevated the familial vernacular into something that would give even Cormac McCarthy pause. And it has come at a major price. It secured my alienation from my native kith and kin, who not only—like the rest of us—do not read (a fact that speaks to the Quixote-nature of my vocation, alienating me from most of the world) but also in several cases cannot read in the literal sense. However much I elevate the language into literary platinum, and however many degrees I have earned that might otherwise distract a populace so mired in genetic fallacy that they judge art by its maker, the humor does reveal my class position. And that—along with my insecure posture, and hand jazz while speaking, and eating like I am in jail, and using “sorry” as a conversational filler, and treating service staff as peers instead of ignoring them in good manners—was one of the things that alienated me from the academy, one of the things that made me vulnerable to cancellation even before the tides of TDS cancel culture put everyone with my options—yes, even the most kowtowing ally—on probation.
But I honor my grandmother by carrying forward, as my late father did before me, that torch. With them it was all oral. But I have taken the written approach. I have followed the lead of the great writers who have become—stuck in the overlap of various no-man’s lands, more and more hated, can you blame me?—my true family, if only out of the same necessity that makes people on a deserted island start talking to coconuts. That—along with a tad of Nietzschean self-mythologizing (yes, I am not blind to what I do)—really helps to take the edge off in a world where now even those who check all the boxes (politically correct, the right color, the right gender, the right cadence) are alone, everyone staring into their phones. It prepared me early, before the phones took over. I am grateful for that. And yes, gratitude—trite as it is to say—is another thing to add to the take-the-edge-off arsenal.
Chaucer is a good example of someone in my soul tribe, my astral family. It is sad that my people will never know The Canterbury Tales, even though their own toilet humor amounts to twists of what Chaucer already wrote there. Take The Miller’s Tale, for instance. A parish clerk named Absolon tries to woo a woman named Alison. Absolon comes to Alison’s window at night, begging for a kiss in the dark. Instead of her face, Alison sticks her naked backside out the window. Absolon, expecting a romantic moment, “kissed her naked arse / full savorly.” He only realizes his French mistake when he feels her pubic hair, which Chaucer describes as being like a beard.
When I first read that, back in my undergrad days at Stony Brook, I thought immediately of a story my dad often told me—I had to be no older than six the first time—about a guy who goes into a whorehouse. The mistress of the house says the man can visit every floor he wants, except the top floor. The man sees that it is getting sweeter—tighter, warmer (whatever)—on each floor. So by the time he gets to the last permitted floor, he knows he must hold out his jing for the musky paradise soil—what we might call Jannah in the language of Russian Adam—that must be one floor up. But when he opens the door from the stairwell, everything is pitch black. He feels around until he finds a hairy patch. He unloads in only a few strokes, like a horse—pent up as he was. When he is leaving, the mistress says, “You didn’t go to the top floor, did you?” He says, “Nope.” But then all of a sudden a midget with a beard runs out and goes, “Yes he did—ptuah ptuah. Yes he did—ptuah ptuah.” I tried to tell my dad about the Canterbury Tales. I even tried to get my dad to read the fucking thing. Part of me believed—with these totally naive eyes, the same eyes that would believe his promises to quite drinking—that he could.
Totally ridiculous, I know. But I have always been this way. And most of you who read my work, a rare few to whom I owe many thanks, likely feel the same way. That is what Obama meant by his campaign slogan: “the audacity of hope.” I talk to my cats like children. Deleuze would hate me for it. He would call me “disgusting” for it. But I do. I sit them down and tell them where they went wrong and where they went right and why they can’t get this piece of meat: “There’s too many seasonings, my men. Daddy can’t just wash it off this time.” I rationalize my continued way. What else am I going to do when, like Martin Luther said when he nailed the 95 Theses up in 1517, I cannot do otherwise? I rationalize my native style by saying that, in the case of the cats, some inadvertent good comes from the talking (same with talking to plants), even if they do not understand. Perhaps with age and disconnection I have grown funny, like Radagast. But I do believe the cats do get it, especially over time, more than skeptics might think. Deleuzian becoming runs both ways. Cats can be “lifted”—or “moved,” since “lifted” speaks to the arborescent-hierarchical model, whereas “moved” is the more Deleuze-friendly rhizomatic-lateral term—to a more human level. They know “no” and “chicken.” My cat Fille knows just what to do when I say, “Let me get that belly, babe!”
By the way, the Becky I have in mind is the character Becky, a woke white woman from my story “Arlo.” You do not need to know the story to enjoy the poem. Nor do you need to know that my writing is perhaps the only thing stopping me from de-mapping as many instantiations of her type before I de-map myself. In the early morning twilight sleep on the day that I wrote this poem, I had been dreaming of a bird at work on a rhinoceros anus—an image we all know. I realized I had no choice but to follow it where it led. So I took some of the imagery surrounding Becky’s use of The Gut Puncher™ and crafted a poem that would have my grandma laughing—and yet, tragically, would never have her laughing even if she were still alive.
“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)
