Sleep Fissures (ROUND 11)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Dryad, by Papillon
Dryad (2017, Liz Moores)—a green-leather chypre that, sodden as it is with both the rooty dampness of fungal decomposition and the vegetative verdancy of a young stem twisted to its limit but refusing to snap, seems less a composition than a resurrection, Robert Piguet or, to cite the Bandit perfumer I have in mind (my panties-huffing astral sister), Germaine Cellier clawing back (Thriller-style) through the oily leather of its coffin and through the soil and perhaps even through the tarmac of an overgrown parking lot into a scrub of bracken and brambles and blooms salted by sea air—
evokes a variety of pastoral scenarios (pulling garden weeds with vegetable-tanned cowhide gloves, a goat circular chewing a ball of green—womb-warm, not spa-fresh—in the background; clouds irradiated gray with impending rain, everything overgrown but nothing grotesque; foraging in an Irish-folklore forest where the moss-gripped trees hunch under a spectral fog of chilled humidity, phosphorescent lichens crawling up their trunks; digging through loamy soil—the kind of soil you would choose to lie down in—for fishing worms, the air of the mist-cloaked forest thick with musk after a long night of countless rapes and murders too hidden to detect but too close to asphalt to believe),
and why it evokes such scenarios—why, in particular, these scenarios tend to center around coastal forestry rummaged by ruminants, perhaps even a pollen-dusted Julia butterfly (the lone member of the butterfly genus Dryas) mistakable in its flutter for a thorn-crowned nymph (a dryad) whispering among the dew-slicked weeds and wildflowers of Parfum d’Empire’s Mal-Aimé (foxglove, thistle, nettle, fleabane)—is perhaps clear when we consider the contribution of each element:
(1) galbanum, dominant from the first inhale, unleashes green-bell-pepper verdancy sharpened, especially with the help of the citrus elements (bright-tannic bergamot, sour-steel citron, tart-green bigarade orange), into a metallic bitterness that suggests the chill of morning dew on tall grass and imparts a retro feel to the composition (especially when coupled with the next note);
(2) oakmoss, nearly as dense and leathery (only more inky and not as soapy) as the Irish-Spring moss of Rogue’s Mousse Illuminee, lends an earthy gravitas of fungal bark, its aroma of lichen rot deepened by various other decompositional elements (vegetal-compost vetiver, matted-fur costus root, fermented-urine civet, carbolic-perineum castoreum) and given a camphoric glow especially by the woody-medicinal lavender and the peppery-sharp geranium;
(3) costus root, here more reminiscent of the sebaceous gland excretions of wooly quadrupeds rather than the scalp of naked bipeds, the biggest contributor to the goat effect and the man reason I feel Silenus is Dryad’s best representative, lends an unwashed-fleece sensation that nudges the scent into livestock territory, although here the cud-ball greenery—even with the inclusion of vanilla-cream benzoin, milky-skin apricot, waxy-indolic orange blossom, powdered-paunch orris, and banana-custard ylang-ylang in addition to the civet and castoreum—outshines the underlying lipid-rich lanolin enough that (unlike with one of my other costus stars, Goat by Wolf Brothers) the grasses and shrubs and berry briars upon which the ruminants graze remain more the focus than the ruminants themselves (although this becomes less true with time as the oily musk of green leather builds);
(4) waxen green florals (mainly tobacco-honey narcissus, but also the more spectral florals like geranium) add to the spring sensation of new beginnings, the skunky-pollen jonquil (a type of narcissus) bringing—especially with the help of the tobacco elements (autumnal-hay deer tongue herb aka liatris, smoked-leather tobacco absolute)—a feel of animal-warmed hay;
(5) fruity elements (the various sparkling-clean citruses plus the kitten-ear apricot and the berry-bush Turkish rose) impart, especially with the help of the radiant civet, a subdued glow, enough to brighten the overcast sky but not enough (unlike in the case of another green leather like Aramis’s Tuscany Per Uomo) to override the dark-leathery aura and reveal a totally unfiltered sun;
(6) herbal elements (rustic-herbaceous thyme, savory-green tarragon, hay-urine clary sage, stemmy-camphoraceous lavender) reinforce the scissored-stem greenery of the galbanum while adding a shadowy medicinal fog, although their potency—even when coupled with the pine tar and other resinoids meant to evoke the Bay of Biscay pine forests of France’s Landes region—not enough to bring us to one of Prin Lomros’s woodland witch apothecaries where mysterious green tinctures steep in wooden bowls);
(7) comforting resins (mainly benzoin, but likely also cinnamon-tar styrax, smoky-sweet labdanum, crème-brûlée peru balsam) thicken the glowing oakmoss as well as add enough cozy warmth to make the goat’s presence seem nearby;
(8) rooty vetiver, more vegetal and decayed than bright and grassy (although both sides seem present), boosts the smoky-fungal-leather feel that could make this composition too unclean in its cleanness for some (filth much closer to Beatrix Potter than to Marquis de Sade in the liminal space between manicured lawns and absolute wilderness) and serves as one of many dark elements steering the composition in a brooding direction, far enough away from the airy verdancy of chypres like Cristalle or Givenchy III (which comparatively feel more springtime-in-the-sun rather than mossy-forest-in-the-mist) that I can almost get hints of fireplace ember and even the peat of Fumidus—
the overall effect being a costus-galbanum chypre that, blending the best of Jinx’s Rayong Fleur with the best of Parfume d’Empire’s Mal Aime, brings you right back to Guerlain heyday (even though novices, or perhaps just people young enough to have spent their entire lives in metaverse distraction from the encroaching ecological indeterminacy that Liz Moores seems to be saying something about here, would not be entirely wrong in smelling toilet-bowl water blued by bleach-free hippie-approved toilet tablets).
*This is a poem about a woman who, reclaiming abuse the way some reclaim “nigger,” carved into her skin a portal back into the womb-wrecking ravages of a man with one hell of a toddler tooth.
*Worked on Section 2. The nerd in me really liked the allusion to the metaphysics of material colocation. Gumby is the textbook case of what some metaphysicians see as the spacetime convergence of two distinct objects: Gumby and the lump of clay he is. You can squish the clay into a lump and thereby kill Gumby even though you still have the same material. Mr. Malik, in the earlier versions, used her Gumby toy as a butt plug on the little girl, and in order to indicate how perfectly aligned the woman’s genitalia are with the little girl she has tattooed on her I say that the two converged as closely as Gumby and the material that makes him up. That little nerdy philosophy thing though did not need to be said. The plumbness was already clear with the mere word plumb. In this new version I used to extra real estate to describe that Mr. Malik would work her asshole with not just his thumb but a candle.
Sleep Fissures
1
The mom—amoxicillin bottle four, baffled by what could keep doubling a toddler over
(foul olive discharge, frothy and fevered as her puke)— guts the home of all culprits:
scented soap, dryer sheets; junk food, synthetic panties too tight—all, save Mr. Malik.
2
Porn-pretzeled preschool self tatted below her tits (bald pussies converged, the overlap
plumb also at the ass he thumbed and candled), now the real “fuckin big girl” can feel—
self-bruised cervix pigging out on every avatar’s load— the mewling child in the perp.
3
Inked cheeks in her care, claws too deep to slip—she loves to spatchcock the butterfly,
purpling that spot where splay mattered most, and hiss cruelties (“Spit on her cunt!”)
until lovers work up the balls to snatch the baton (“Lil slut ain’t never havin no baby!”).
“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)
