A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes (ROUND 8)
scent of the day: Sultan Murad, by Ensar Oud
if there is an Istvan signature scent this could very well be contender. Here we get dark-brown wood with a varnish that, in part due to the violet, gives a fresh-gasoline bite. But then there is this aquamarine element, almost like the varnished floor of an incensed temple was just splashed with a bucket of sea water—this ocean-meets-incense impression largely a functio
n of the combo of Caribbean-blue Port Moresby New Guinean oud (which brings marine elements and incense smoke all on its own) and salty ambergris.
It has a toothpaste-on-mahagany tone similar to what I get in tigerwood (only the toothpaste is more toned down to the straight lidocain-medicinal effect of Tigerwood and the bitter mahogany seems more varnished here, sort of like the varnish impression I get from Yaaseen’s Semangate Pontiak 2005 oil). The oud here is not Tigerwood, which goes into a medicinal-mentholated leather—but rather blue-green Port Moresby and the island-green papua oud. Likely the mint comes from the cool herbs plus piney-camphor Papua oud plus tuberose, which actually gives this a lovely connection to Meo Fusciuni’s Odor 93 (whoich uses sage like Jungle Kinam instead of the rosemary of Sultan Murad and does use a mnass-mnarket oud-pathcouli combo that gives a semblance of the oudiness wwe get in the Ensar). Like Tigerwood 91, it does not come off as complex—more like an single oud oil, which says a lot about the composer. / Really this does have that attar richness and depth. /
It has a vetiver-herbal greenery lilke Jungle Kinam (another Istvan candidate signature) but Murad gives a musk-ambergris fuzzy buzz whereas Jungle Kinam brings the spices / it is perhaps just edged out by Jungle Kinam, which tones down the bitter woodinesss and brings this extra dimension and drama. But with so much stuff in my collection at this point ranking seems futile. And that is only further reason why I need to at least purge from my collection the ones that have dropped low—like the Naxos I once loved for that lavender-honey-tobacco combo) but now makes me sick because of its amberwoods base. /
Yes, Sultan Murad is tremendous!!!! It comes with a character of something like Areej’s Oud Taiwan, which is green too and salty (from seaweed) but brings the spice of Jungle Kinam and ramps up the smoke in a burnt tire direction. Even though it has the character and attack present of Tigerwood 91 and Oud Taiwain, it finds much more family resemblance in smell to Sans Fleurs and Fumidus and even Oud Luwak. All of these are vetiver-peat fragrances and Sultan Murad probably bests them all when it comes to bringing that peaty-tannic vibe of decaying wine-barrel wood and tea-soaked parchment I adore. Sans Fluers comes close because it is centered around musty-astringent crocodile wood. But Sans Fluers does not have the richness that this does.
it is very peaty and so belongs in a class with the more rummy-vanilla sans fluers and the more tarry-smoky Fumidus and the more spicy-musky Oud Luwak—and, although I am only 70 percent sure it outranks all of these heavy hitters, I can say at least that it the most herbal-floral of the bunch (and also the most complex and quality in terms of ingredients). herbal enough to have a slight toothpaste vibe /for Sultan Murad obviously Sultan Murad is the only one out of fumidus, luwak, although maybe not San’s fluers actually that has ambergrse./ Ensar Telegrafi’s compositions are as irresistible as they are overpriced.
A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes —for my Grandma, Barbara A. Istvan (1939-2015)*
Anyone who has hummed beneath Becky on an escalator (“Mm hm-mm”), let alone bobbed and weaved for angles before her sarong drew shut (spousal slaps no deterrent to hunters of beach Bigfoot), has beheld—even if the blaze hides behind all the nasty smoke—traces of self-play taken too damn far: wattled lips killer for shadow puppetry (alien slugs, ET undulants), 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 five-foot frame of bird bones—
straight insanity. But yeah, bitch can get real mean with it: The Gut Puncher™—that suction-bottomed black Popeye fist, its bulbous silhouette in the spook-the-shit-outta-ya shadows mistakable less for Grandma’s O2 tank than for a lawn gnome hatless and akimbo like a snap-back butcher, cornstarched like an 80s diaper rash and stowed under the bed quivering siren calls of elastomer stank 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, whenever 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 (or to empathize with outright) the magpie’s mad chatter, its Hitchcockian head smashes, at the uncurtained window pane of her exhibitionist kink: crazed pleas to come perch upon Becky’s perineal ledge, that calamari keloid glistening like Crisco 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, or whatever 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)
