Natural Fashion

Showing posts with label Scent. Show all posts

sweet

the Past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.

-edward thomas

in the wilderness-rex whistler

.

Paul Bowles Life's Final Draft

image from here (asshole.org)

Celebrating 100 years this year of Paul Bowles life.
easy to celebrate and impossible to cover & besides, there is an entire site devoted to referencing and reverencing him and his work. When speaking with interviewer Daniel Halpren- Bowles declared 'the first draft is the final draft.' He followed this linear path thorough out his unquantifiable life.

Jane and Paul Bowles photographed by Cecil Beaton

This from his haunting novel Sheltering Sky: "Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

movies, manuscripts, their lives and love for each other endured turbulence, liaisons, Jane's death.

Bowles said the day his wife Jane died- "all the fun was over."

Luring many acolytes Bowles to Tangier- he was a connoisseur of people.Something Paul knew about-he called himself a "connoisseur of odors. He was the "scent" that drew and scent is powerful. It lures. Something Paul knew about-he said he collected incense and perfume. I imagine him as drawing people to him, collecting them just as he did his strange perfumes, incense, teas. He "had 28 kinds of incense and knew them all blindfolded raw or burning. Then I mixed them and got some interesting results." He remembered a tea oil that he found one year. "One drop on a cigarette end and the whole house smelled of fresh hot tea. Very strong. Marvelous odor. Like mint Tea. I never found any again. The next year I came back looking for it all through the perfume soukhs of Fez and Marrakech. Never found any more. I smelled hundreds of bottles and they would say, this is it. But No."

Henry Ossawa Tanner.Street in Tangier, 1912.

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Paul Bowles never found that special tea oil again. It forever eluded him, but he never forgot it permeating scent.
Something very much like a Love that is Lost, Remembered for moment in perfect clarity, but never Regained, nor Forgotten.

Jane Sydney Auer

image here

He must have felt this strong marvelous odor much like he thought of Jane- never again.

Resources-
a terrific site asshole here with interviews
an interview here written by Daniel Halpern
other resources-
Conversations with Paul Bowles,Paul Bowles and Gena Dagel Caponi
In Touch:The Letters of Paul Bowles, Paul Bowles, with Jeffrey Miller

( "the Cherifa Plant" is a plant Cherifa-Jane's Bowles Moroccan housekeeper and lover used-Bowles believed Cherifa used to control Jane.)

read them

Summer Scents & Sensibilities

Breitner the red kimono,Geesje Kwak posing

image from Hawkwood here

"Let a noise or a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again... & immediately the permanent &

habitually concealed essence of things is liberated & our true self which seemed to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened & reanimated." PROUST

what fragrance moves you?
why?

photograph by Eugene Atget, around 1910

my perfume cabinet

fragrances
evoke a season, a person, a moment

violets ~

Viola odorata

my GranMa carried a violet bouquet at her wedding, Dec. 1918
the smell of violet, hidden in green

pour'd back into my empty soul & frame

the times when I remember to have been

Joyful & free from blame-Tennyson

in the cabinet, Napoleon Bonaparte presides

as candle by CIRE TRUDON

candle maker to the French Royals since 1643

why should we settle for one signature scent?

the scents that say summer for me-
a rose- a bouquet of violets- rows of tuberose- tobacco- lily

my grandparents had a field of tuberose each summer
Polianthes tuberosa

tuberose is night-flowering-the Aztecs called it bone flower

Tokyo Milk fragrances
(click on each fragrance to read the contents)
Poe's Tobacco No.1
Contemplation No.7
Waltz No.14
Ex Libris No.16

NICOTIANA

the overwhelming heady scents of a tobacco warehouse

a constant summer memory for me- en masse, or

the sweet remains of the day on my father's collar

Scents & Buddha
from diptyque- L'Ombre Dans l'Eau

from Hermes 24, Faubourg

Madame Gres & Summer fragrance

Hermes Eau des Merveilles

Hermes Eau de Pamplemousse Rose

summery citrus with rose notes

George Trumper Extract of West Indies Lime

a favorite of Pauline de Rothschild so says Mitchell Owens-de Rothschild expert

from the NYTIMES here

Pauline de Rothschild

photograph here

BELLE FLEUR ~MAYAN TUBEROSE

a heady single note

around the house, Candles, Diffusers
in summer I prefer a single note floral, or lemon

AGRARIA~ LEMON VERBENA

CITRUSY fragrances in any form are summer favorites

inexpensive & addicting-

VOLUSPA ~PANJORE LYCHEE

notes of lychee fruit, pear, sweet cassis

ANTICA FARMACISTA ~CASABLANCA

this- a fragrance and flower I could never fore go in the summer

Lilium Regale, drooping their heavy heads

my own in the garden

"that was the moment I first saw the lilies. and that was the moment when, having seen them,I mentally signed the contract to buy the house...I had to possess those lilies...The lilies were a variety known as Regale, and they stood in rows of glistening white down the whole length of one side of the kitchen garden.a faint breeze was stirring, & as they nodded their heads there drifted towards us a most exquisite fragrance.never before, in any garden of the world, have I seen such lilies; their loveliness was literally dazzling;the massed array of the white blossom was like sunlit snow. nor was this shining, shimmering beauty merely the result of mass, for as I walked closer I saw that each individual blossom was a perfect specimen, with a stem that was often four feet high, bearing on its proud summit no less than a dozen blossoms." BEVERLY NICHOLS