Jan 16, 2014 | Uncategorized
RK: Blake clamored for us to enjoy “enlarg’d and numerous senses.” Curious that when back in the Psychedelic Era people quoted that, it was mostly to foster drug experiences–trans-sensual as they are. What of enlarging the senses we already have (or are)?
AG: Perfume is invisible. Many people roll their eyes at it, as if you’re asking them to believe in ghosts. There is a flaky, new age, intellectually negligent perception that surrounds scent. But it’s an entire realm that is completely Proustian, sometimes plangent, dimensional, symphonic. The first oudh (or agarwood) that I ever smelled gave me the impression that I had walked into a new room. It created a space that I could now inhabit. I think it’s funny that we can all agree on what we see, what we hear, what we taste and feel. But not necessarily on what we smell. It’s as if we don’t have the language yet for the sense of smell, but we’re working on it.
Robert, why do you think the sense of smell reverberates for us, as shimmering as memory? Our other senses are more straightforward. It’s as if every scent has the potential to sepia at the edges. It’s as if time imprints scent more readily and hauntingly than our other senses.
Nov 10, 2013 | Uncategorized
Carve silence, churl, carve
absence into aroma
you don’t miss their faces you miss their sheen
ælfscin
or aura, the light around one
that makes her who or him she is,
elf-shine the preter-human shown,
faërie folk are what we must become,
elves are not some belated ancient lingerers
they are our future selves
keen wise dangerous and rife with pleasures
we catch a glimpse of them sometimes
when the moon or noon be right
and the shadow falls
they are we will be
and till then be quiet, read your tree.
Sep 24, 2013 | Uncategorized
As soon as it comes home
it will be me
again or for the first time
who can decide
out here where the trees
publish so many
variations on the same news
the way we music.
Sep 20, 2013 | Uncategorized
This gentle clack of billiard balls on the green felt behind me makes me think of the endless rolling and occasional collisions of asteroids, spread out along the ecliptic mostly, or rogues in free space tumbling along rebel orbits of their own. We pass unscathed through their geometries. Or do we? Do those bodies too (as the ancients surmised about the canonical planets) cast influences our way, subtle shifts of love and aversion and indifference, so that by them also our moods (those vagrant beasts who live our lives for us) are shaped?
Sep 11, 2013 | Uncategorized
The opera of the faraway
like a Victorian children’s book
I hear voices inside the word
of old adventurers, their lions,
glaciers, killer whales,
the green of Shalimar
blood-spattered as with roses,
the opera of all we never knew
here in our trembling hands.
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