MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017--part 85)
scent of the day: Santal Royale, by Ensar
There is even more of the butter-factory character here than in Santal Sultan—the flecks of dry spice, the white florals, and the medicinal notes remain nevertheless. The medicinal quality is lower on camphor and feels maroon-chestnut-olive in hue with a texture of velvet, as opposed to the gold-camel-chartreuese coloration and more silk or cashmere in texture I associate with Sultan. The spice, medicinal, and even the florality are ultimately rooted in the sandalwood oils themselves: cool-cedar Timor, buttery-musky red mysore. Yet in this spray perfume, those natural facets of the woods are amplified by additional materials: spices that feel like cinnamon and perhaps cumin; florals such as jasmine and tuberose; greenery in the form of hinoki cypress.
The hinoki contributes a lemon-pine freshness along with a terpenic smokiness and meditative aura, much like it does in Zagorsk by Comme de Garcon. It serves to frame the sandalwood rather than distract from it. If Santal Sultan is whole milk spilled on linen, Santal Royale is clotted cream spilled on velvet.
Both fragrances possess a white-floral urinous quality. Sultan, however, strikes me as slightly more urinous. Maybe it is just that Royale’s extreme creaminess partially disguises this aspect, tricking the mind into focusing on texture rather than the musky-woody animality underneath. In Royale, everything feels amplified (creamier, muskier, woodier), so that likely is the case.
Both fragrances share a calming quality—vetiver-like in that way. Yet Sultan feels brighter and more energetic. Its herbal nuances and cedary dry throw emphasize the morning-breeze-through-herb-garden aspect of sandalwood, especially the Timor variety. Royale, by contrast, is thicker, calmer, and darker. The rubbery meatiness of the tuberose and the molasses-tobacco richness of the red Mysore sandalwood deepen the composition considerably.
Both fragrances possess a metallic edge. I imagine the sandalwood oils underlying them were distilled in some sort of metal pot-likely steel. Its like a residue smell like you get when you rubs a coin or rub your car keys and smell your finger. That metallic glint may be one of the reasons Ensar’s sandalwoods are so lovable to me: it is there in Sultan Rose Attar, in Siber Extreme, and—one of my favorite Ensar’s on the low, and an Australian sandalwood that really goes away from the velvet and even the silk and more into the dry linen (which has a synergistic effect in texture on the musks)—Musk Millesime. They feel bright and reflective, like sunlight flashing off a sword blade. At times, that brightness almost resembles the radiance of a white rose.
In many ways, this is to sandalwood what Arso is to pine: a nearly one-dimensional spotlight on a single material, with relatively little evolution. Santal Sultan may ultimately be the more complete composition, but Santal Royale is the more focused sandalwood showcase. That is saying quite a lot, because Santal Sultan was formerly the most direct sandalwood spotlight I thought it was possible to achieve in a spray perfume. I would have said it is velvety before I met Royale. It’s plush factor is now brought down to cashmere.
Royale pushes the idea even further. It takes the core experience of sandalwood—the butter, the cream, the musk, the florals, the medicinal coolness—and magnifies it until almost nothing else remains in view.
MADE FOR YOU AND ME 2: hive Being (Stanzas 2017—part 85)
combovers of glorified ear hair
looking over to find another driver watch you crying at the stop light
feisty enough to need rape ropes even with her tongue nailed to the wall
the lack of stomach ulcers in horses
having tacit clearance to drop knowledge on the block
ever think the real conspiracy was all the dumb-making conspiracies?
not quite ready to admit that the passion is dead
fat praise might prove less fashion, toxic compensation, than delayed revenue model
a topless maid
cremation urn displayed at the visiting hours, the boy asks “How did they fit mommy in there?”— laughter contagious even in this darkest hour
children stuck whispering for hours in the wake of a parental spat that dipped into screams and shattered glass
the mollycoddled students, even the HR staff and administers who enable them, know not what they do: the transgressors— heretical dreamers, hermitic madmen—are the seeds of progress
a topless maid still making milk
staying together in hope that such bitterness cannot possibly go on
old love letters hidden not as well as thought
be careful: condemning the replica of the home as just an illusion, fake continuity with the past—that helps preserve the illusion that we could have really gone back were the original still there
the right (yang-white) is the guard of custom and excellence and the left (yin-black) is the guard of progress and the persecuted— a dot of white stops black chaos; a dot of white stops white tyranny
an authentic response to calamity, not so learned like with other things, is fists clenched up to the temples
falling in love so easily with someone lost from our youth, something deeper than mere nostalgia seems operative
some are not joking when they think it special— a sign of a divine order—that they have the same pop song in their heads as a friend
are topless maids sex workers?
unable to stomach the prospect of anyone but yourself curing you of mental illness
licking-plates poor
crypts now above ground with all the floods
items varnished just right for continuity with the past
the biggest buyers of self-help are those who already bought self-help
an identity crisis from coming into millions
positing conspiracy helps hide an even scarier reality: widespread incompetence
free enough to joke about the victims, not just the perpetrators
performing CPR only from what you have seen on TV
watching a loved one—just in their face, their eyes—accept that you will not survive before you yourself have accepted it
internet to bully, drones to strike—technology severs us from consequences of our actions that otherwise would have ruined sleep
we—including the military bombers among us—point fingers of disgust at the guy who shoots his neighbor
vision—sometimes warped, sometimes enabled, by narrative
Jesus as a metaphor for the stars that died so we could live
militant merely for questioning
the faith into which you have been born and pressured
frames not only profound experiences in bed and forest
but also, understand, even your attempts to criticize it
those for whom no amount of evidence could convince them of being wrong claiming to be unconvinced by the evidence
methods of synthetic biology mastered by Gaia-first extremists, those who think the human disease ought to be snuffed out
turning around, now at the car, for one last look at your father’s mound—picturing times here, with him, when only grandparents were buried
it makes sense that the longer the marriage the harder to escape the sad funk of divorce, but might marriage go on long enough to disillusion one from such mush?
the intrinsic joy of single-point focus on anything—escaping a rapist included
afraid that you will no longer be able to create if you quit your drug
waiting for the right moment to ask the other couple if they are open for a swap
afflicted with so many labels, a need arises to flee somewhere to become visible to yourself
excluding diversity—below-the-skin diversity of opinion and language—on the pretense of promoting inclusive diversity
is not the right wing, embolismed by children’s books of crossdressing kids, supposed to be the wing that bans art!?
does the gold of the sun more truly belong to the sun than to the gold of the frog struck just right by its slanted rays at twilight?
now a grandmother, the bigot tells her son, “I’m so tired of hating people”
iced-down medallions rented for the music video
listening is a gift of recognizing the other’s existence
turntables set up on the kitchen counter
days of shoplifting whack CDs just to sell them back
not letting the fantasy of how your children will turn out block you from growing with the reality
when the matador kills, the bull does not have the Texas chance to become smarter for next time
negative self-talk seems akin to entering environments of contagious disease, but still: being around the sick in moderation can fortify us
are not doctors prone to assume—especially in an era when you get the scarlet letter “R” if you dare to condemn the hyperviolent-hypersexual poisons of black culture— that black people, even if in their Sabbath finery, can tolerate more pain than whites?
