Archivi tag: Musings

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11 lunedì Gen 2016

Posted by in Life and work

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And day of rest it was, yesterday. After a long break, I am coming back to the blog with a new post, so long overdue. But, what is more important, with a slew of new ideas, projects and inspirations, some of which I am going to disclose here in the coming weeks.

Yes, the book was completed and submitted (but no, it’s not going to see the light before the end of the year) and after a somehow troubled last few months, I just settled in a new place and managed to rearrange my organ. The reason I have neither written nor blended scents in while is that I did not have a space to do so in my old place. Now I have it, and that’s good news, and inspiration is back.

So, rearranging my organ I had to face the issue of sorting the ingredients. It is a useful exercise (and I suggest everyone tinkering with scents to do it from time to time, not least because, by opening the bottles one by one and smelling get you to rehearse the whole set of your materials): some of the ingredients get misplaced with time, others are forgotten or overlooked, and simply never used, resulting in the disruption of the initial criteria according to which I had placed the bottles.

The issue of criteria is crucial. Some of the materials are pretty straightforward: woods are woods, flowers are flowers, citruses are citruses. Although the criterion may be questionable and the boundaries are blurred (I lump cinnamon bark with spices, for example, but it would not be entirely extravagant to group it with woods), these are no-brainers.

The whole thing gets much more complicated (and intriguing) when it comes to other materials, which got me to think that the primary criterion I use to sort them is not what they are in nature, but what their use is and what they smell of. I realised that I have a slot for materials that remind me of water, but that most of them are in fact more related to earth – geosmin, patchouli (which is, in fact, a herb), earthy pyrazine, mitti attar etc. – or things that I identify as related to watery edibles, like melonal, calone and the like. Right, I do have a slot for “edible” odours: coffee, cocoa, saffron tincture and safranal (which I divorced from the spices. Why I see saffron, as opposed to basil absolute, as an edible and not as a spice is beyond me), tonka bean (and coumarine with it), vanilla etc. But I also have assigned a space to reeks, that is, to all those ingredients that are outright disgusting when smelt pure, but are so subtly awesome when are used below the threshold of consciousness (civet, castoreum, different kinds of tars. I also place ambergris here – to me, it smells of rotten teeth when pure – and this is the reason why you’ll find ambrofix along with my “bad smells”).

Some chemicals are utterly unruly, when it comes to categories. They could stay with the stinks as well as with flowers or edibles (some aldehydes form example). But one of the most interesting of my own categories stands besides the stinks: it is the slot I have assigned to leathers, tobaccos, hays and intoxicants. Here too the boundaries are not fixed (I have moved wormwood, the plant absinthe is extracted from, with woods and not with drugs), and far from unquestionable. But, after all, the arrangement of an organ must be functional. An organ is arranged finely when you can quickly find what you need, when you need it. So I found myself putting my anisaldehyde with “drugs and intoxicants”. The path that led me to line an innocuous molecule that smells of bitter almonds is quickly explained. Among the intoxicants, stands methyl benzoate, which is what dog actually smell when trained to detect cocaine. To me, methyl benzoate only smells of one thing: a waxy glue that was very popular in Italy when I was a kid, and ubiquitous in schools and homes in the 1980s:

The name of the glue was Coccoina. It clearly resonates with “cocaina” – hence my assigning the poor anisaldehyde (which nowhere smells of cocaine nor of any other drug) a place next to hashish and cannabis.

When I’ll need to use it, it will come way handier to resort to “the chemical that smell of Coccoina”.

 

Anosmia and the “nose of the heart”

13 venerdì Feb 2015

Posted by in Musings

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Anosmia is the inability to perceive odor. It is usually temporary (due to a trauma, for example) or permanent (very rare), or limited to one or more specific odors. Many people, for example, are anosmic to musks, which because of their molecular structure, can be hard to detect. Temporary anosmia to musk is particularly common – try to smell a musk for a long time and you’ll likely experience a temporary anosmia to the other types of musks.

This to say, I’ve been away from the blog for a while and the trend is not going to change anytime soon. Thing is, the book is taking more than expected, but I’m in the run-up to submission, and can hardly afford distractions. It is not the only reason why I’ve been absent from here though. I have become temporary anosmic. No, I can still smell – I am reminded of it every time a pass by my perfume making station, and this morning my senses were assaulted by a violent scent of honeysuckle and broom (very unusual, for an early February London morning) that make me want to brave a “dirty honeysuckle”. No, my olfaction is alive and kicking. It is my soul that has become anosmic, not permanently, I hope.

Islamic esotericists have developed an articulated physiology of the “subtle body”, in which, by way of analogy, they talk about the “eye of the heart” to refer to that subtle organ that provides the ability to perceive the spiritual realities. I like to think that, besides the “eye of the heart”, there could also be a “nose of the heart” you can smell spiritual smells with (a treatise on perfumery I am translating by Muhammad Karim Khan Qajar, a 19th century Iranian Shaykhi master seems to allude to something along these lines). If that is the case, well: the nose of my heart is somehow anosmic, or perhaps just caught a cold. Whatever that is, I am currently incapacitated to talk about perfumes, think about perfumes, sit down and blend perfumes. I’d probably need to move to a base in the Mediterranean for the nose of my heart to reopen to beauty and sway in the delight of smells again, but that too seems not to be going to happen soon. But oh, how I’d need that.

On Fabrizio De Andrè, smells and life as a work of art

30 giovedì Ott 2014

Posted by in Musings, Stories

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Yesterday, in melancholic moment, I bumped into Rimini, a particularly heart-wrenching song by the late Fabrizio De Andrè. De Andrè was an absolute genius, and his sudden death in 1999 left many in Italy with an incurable sense of void. His death woke many of us up to the reality that his voice would not have commented on our world and its miseries and joys forever. Rimini then led me to this interview:

Now, Fabrizio De Andrè wasn’t keen on giving interviews, but in the few he gave every word uttered is heavy as a stone and sharply meaningful. He was used to speak his truth with a warmth, humility and precision that one would think he took it from the same mysterious source he drew the lyrics of his songs from. As much as his relationship with the supernatural was troubled, to say the least, and despite his iconoclastic anarchism, I wouldn’t hesitate to call that source ‘divine’. In this sense, his words were always an entrenching and rigorous exercise in what the Greek called parrhesia.

The way De Andrè conducted the interview had me thinking about the notion of the care of the self and the connection between ethics, aesthetics and truth. Briefly and simply put, the care of the self is a fundamental principle of moral rationality, which has been exiled form modern thought and simultaneously deprived of its ethical content in current practice. The connection between ethics and aesthetics, however, is necessary if one want’s to turn life into a ‘work of art’, to borrow a Nietzschean expression. It is a call to practice beauty, which I think is one of the marks of De Andrè’s life and work.

Now, what does this have to do with perfumes. It does.

This interview sparked a reflection on my own practice and the role I want perfumery to have in what I do. As I have said, in order to make sense of a fragrance, you have to tell a story around it.  But alas! when you do it, you are doing it to make it attractive, to trigger emotions, feelings and memories. The risk of it is slipping into affectedness and inauthenticity.  If, with Plato, rhetoric is the art of making truth persuasive, marketing is the art of making a lie appealing. What I am trying to say is that, in the practice of perfumery and its necessary marriage with words, one has to practice the discipline of the care of the self: making love to words cannot degenerate into raping them.

De Andrè was well aware of that. Answering to the last question on an prize he had just been awarded, he responded by eluding the question. Western, Aristotelian obsession with telling the black from the white, he says, results in being obsessed with victory: ‘I am rather against victories, and awards are victories’. With his usual yet always stunning and unsettling sensibility for the wretched of the earth, he goes on: ‘The other side of a victory is a loss, or even multiple loss. And these awards gratify the most vulgar side of my self’. De Andrè managed to make of his life a work of art, and did so by being truthful to himself by exercising parrhesia in his art as well as in his thought. Whatever the art or craft one is busy with, it’s so easy to slip into falseness, to get phony and affected – which would compromise not only art, but also life.