Salome (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Shocking (vintage 1930s parfum), by Elsa Schiaparelli
A lovely animalic floral with a powdered-honey musk body. The dirty civet and honey combo of Boss is defeated, albeit in a femme way, by this Schiapearelli (/skaperelli/) perfume. And to add insult to injury there is genuine Tonkin Musk, real tonkin Musk from Vietnam, in here. Kouros vibes one could say at a reach—albeit more like an ur-Kouros. It has none the same soapy-dirty clash and, the biggest thing, none of that animalis lab chemical that Figment Man has brings into full earthwom fougere glory. The patchouli-civet-honey trifecta is here. That is the seed of the Kourous connection. But I find an even closer connection to Gold Man and Boss Number One. My 1930s bottle has no top or even mid. It is all base, the base is a lot like Gold Man but with noticeable honey—Gold Man crossed with Boss. It smells cuddly like a powdered cat belly whose owner has been wearing not the Shalimar of Bengal Rouge’s cat belly but instead a more masculine Guerlain: Heritage. In the heat being outside today some florals embedded into the base did come out.
*Let's workshop this story about a dying professor and perfume obsessive who, from his bed in a nursing home, witnesses a theft that becomes an occasion for meditations on mortality, sexuality, memory.
*Randomly wrote this in one shot today. It is like a distraction from the shit I need to be doing. I guess you are in a good place, though, if your distraction from doing art is more art.
Salome
You watch the aide in her residential pink, a young girl brown in the way everyone now is brown. She removes the cap and sniffs the sprayer head of each perfume. The five sit on the little nightstand they give you here in the nursing home, the place whose faroff dread feels too like yesterday. The rest of your collection, bottles numbering near a thousand, will be sold with the rest of the estate. Your son is the executor. The year is 2079 and he is old now too. The Minecraft songs you two would jam to each day, to and from elementary school, still loop as they have done since the day he grew past them: “Don’t mine at night!” With no competing obligations (no work, no errands), they have become—like squirrels scrabbling up the sides of a drown bucket—more resistant to submersion than ever. But now they bring comfort, no longer a torment to shoo away with words that draw eyes.
She thinks you are asleep. The aides all say the wall-stream must be on the fritz. But you know the truth. You never sleep beyond twilight. The music keeps going, mostly dead jingles from the era of external TV: “They’re squirmy, and wormy, and purple and green—the grossest-looking creatures that you’ve ever seen!” This is the third day she has come to smell them. You knew, before she did, she liked Salome most. How she paused over it—that said it all, the bores of her nostrils pulsing like a dance in honor of the oceanic ancestry waiting right there in the inner lips. Here was a human being. You could tell. Slutty skank like that—orange blossom and jasmine, castoreum and hyraceum, cumin and musk, together nuzzling us right into the indolic petals, the pissy and fecal muff, out of which we used to come—calls to us like the stars, like the log fires, outside of the cyberscape.
Your intuition that she would steal the bottle had been vivid from the first day. And there she goes, looking over at you and looking around like the chimp no neural implant could have stopped us from being. You want to spare her the cruel poison of shame, inhibitor of dance. She has no idea of the books you have written on this. The hackles of conscience need not involve any shame. Stinking of sheep as much as of death denial, shame is not the only fuel for improvement. And what warrant, besides, could shame ever have when, as any child could see, nothing—no thought, no action, no desire—is ultimately up to any of us?
You have made your peace. What good is the bottle anymore to you? Of course, that cannot stop you noticing her slip it in her seam meld. And for all the peace you have found, you are still you. You must mark your notice if only for yourself, like one of your graffiti pieces in the secrecy of night before even the cellphone, rattle-can tags of “I was here”—“Give it the Krylon touch”—on train cars sitting now who knows where. You whisper lyrics at her with eyes opening enough to show that the body remains ensouled. “I try to tell these young niggas crime don’t pay.”
She puts a hand on your leg. “Everything’s okay. It’s just a bad dream.” It feels good, it consoles you, that this cliché of consolation has survived another century beyond the facility synths who know just what to say. You repeat the lyrics with more emphasis. “I try to tell these young niggas crime don’t pay.” Perhaps a seed was planted. That was not the point. But maybe later she will reflect back and piece it together. To her now, though, this is just the babble of senility. A lot goes missed in that reduction. But is it not, after all, the babble of senility?
She has no idea you were a professor. She has no idea how many girls like her you have sucked into a bucking hunger. Where has the desire gone to tell her? The thought crosses your mind to work a blackmail handjob out of her. Thoughts come unbidden and your life has been spent in alignment with the eons of evolution before you came on the scene. She could spray the stolen one on her neck. That was your wife’s signature fragrance. That was the last of the bottles you gathered before its reformulation-slide toward discontinuation. She could let you get close in the sendoff. But what does it matter?
“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)
