Trauma Circuit (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Kinamantan, by Ensar Oud
A strange concoction: gray-green zest bitterness of Qi Nan (here with ginger zing, but without the spices) plus gingivitus earthy mint of Tigerwood that you feel in the sinuses and, especially from afar, a juicy-fruit gum somewhere between L’heure Exquise and Jubilation XXV. this can come across, despite the fact that no vetiver is listed, as an artisanal cousin to Tom Ford’s Grey Vetiver—only using something more like the ruh khus of Layers of Jade or Vetiver Nocturne and presenting us with several jarring tensions that the Tom Ford’s much more sober and staid composition definitely does not give us: wintergreen gum yet pink bubblicious (tigerwood and clove meets what seems tolu balsam and blackcurrant and opoponax), garage-band muddiness yet studio-production ethereality (hyrax and oud meets black ambergris and Tibetan musk and Kashmir musk). Ash in base reminds me of Myths Man./
*Let’s workshop this poem about the recursive transformation of trauma into branded narrative, where self-surveillance and moral justification begin to merge.
Trauma Circuit
On loop you retell the horror, clean as branding: “a personal sacrifice”—
you whisper to the role-auditor within, that daimon whose doubt grows
with each speaking fee— “to build a future where no one else will suffer.”
“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)
