synchronicity and blood

The first photo from this photographer- (how I feel sometimes)
http://www.chantalmichel.ch/fotografie/index.html

In the past week I had two dreams of blood. One of the dreams I had cut myself and felt the blood run down my hand. The sight of the blood made my stomach knot up so tightly that it woke me up and I felt nauseous. The next day at work, I had two bloody noses.
The other dream I had: a basin that was overflowing with blood.

I remember reading about the connection to blood and perfume; it was in a book titled, Scent, by Annick Le Guérer: "the power of perfume have centered upon its similarity to magical potions, its association with the mythologies of vital fluids such as sap and blood". There is a whole chapter on Blood, Incense and Ritual.

I looked for a blood in contemporary perfumes, the closest thing I found was with blood orange: Maitre Parfumeur et Gantier Sanguine Muskissime, reviewed here.

Sanguine is one of the four humors that relate to blood. The other three are: Choleric, Melancholic, and Phlegmatic.

The Sanguine temperament, according to Wiki:

Sanguine indicates the personality of an individual with the temperament of blood, the season of spring (wet and hot), and the element of air. A person who is sanguine is generally optimistic, cheerful, confident, popular, and fun-loving. He/She can be day dreamy and off-task to the point of not accomplishing anything and can be impulsive, possibly acting on whims in an unpredictable fashion. Sanguines usually have a lot of energy, but have a problem finding a way to direct the energy. This also describes the manic phase of a bipolar disorder.


I'm more of a Choleric type, myself.

Some history of the blood orange:

"The Blood, Moro, or Maltese Oranges are very old orange varieties. There is some historical evidence that the blood orange hybrid first appeared in Southern Europe around 1850 and was then brought to North America many decades later by Spanish and Italian immigrants. Commonly know throughout most of the world as "blood," "blood-red" or "blush" oranges, they have a number of other common or regional names."



Last week, within one hour I read two reviews of the same book, not intentionally. One in the New Yorker, the other in Raintaxi (which does not have it available online).

from the New Yorker

In Her Absence
by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (Other Press)

Mario believes that his wife, Blanca, has disappeared and been replaced by an impostor who is almost identical, only more sensual and tender. Thus begins the story of an unlikely marriage. Mario, guided by the lessons of his working-class origins, values “almost nothing in life more than stability.” But Blanca, privileged and with an “innate” sense of entitlement, has come to feel that their life is one “from which great experiences were absent.” Mario is infatuated with Blanca; Blanca is infatuated with art. As her interest shifts from one trendy artist to another, Mario strives to keep pace. Muñoz Molina layers a subtle satire of artistic hypocrisy with a stirring account of class separation. Mario is entranced by his wife’s “aura of uncertainty” but cannot escape his own self-annihilating caution. “Penury,” he reflects, “makes people fearful and conformist.”

kypros

Kypros is an ancient Greek perfume mentioned by Theophrastus . It contained cardamon and a sweet-scented material called aspalathus which had first been steeped in sweet wine. It is used by men and was used to counter lassitude. -Nigel Groom, The New Perfume Handbook

It is times like these that I feel my thoughts are pressed like leaves between pages of the texts I read.

scent of Vienna?

More stolen pictures: 1. Ernst Haas- Photographer, born in Vienna 1921
2. A photo by Ernst Haas- and yes, that is Marilyn Monroe, from Arthur Miller's The Misfits, 1960


More thoughts on Vienna, I was imagining, what would a perfume inspired by Vienna smell like?

Like Diorella?

"Start with the obvious: Diorella is a profoundly strange perfume. A Frenchman I said this to became very defensive and replied, ''Diorella is a classic!'' Which was not only irrelevant -- it also missed the point entirely. Can you describe Diorella? People say, ''Intensely flowery''; they say, ''Fresh yet weightless''; they say, ''Notes of citrus and ripe fruit'' and blah-blah-blah. O.K., fine. All of this is wrong: what is wonderful about Diorella is that it smells like a new fur coat that has been rubbed with a very creamy mint toothpaste. Not gel. Paste. It is a great, great fragrance. It was created for Dior by the legendary perfumer Edmond Roudnitska in 1972, and it feels like 1932 and 2022 at the same time."

No- Maybe more like Nombre Noir:

"The flower at the core of Nombre Noir was half-way between a rose and a violet, but without a trace of the sweetness of either, set instead against an austere, almost saintly back-ground of cigar-box cedar notes. At the same time, it wasn't dry, and seemed to be glistening with a liquid freshness that made its deep colors glow like a stained-glass window."
-Luca Turin



This scent would follow the end song of the plays and stories of Arthur Schnitzler- Wiener Moderne writer.

"Schnitzler's final stories are, inevitably, elegies for a vanished world. It is surely significant that several of them end in suicide, as if the self-destruction of individuals embodied the disaster of a whole society rushing into oblivion. In the novella "Night Games," a young officer, Lieutenant Wilhelm Kasda—precisely the sort of person Schnitzler would once have satirized—is ruined in a game of baccarat. He has a day to raise the money or his honor as an officer will be lost and suicide his only option. Few writers could hope to equal the intensity with which Schnitzler imagines Kasda's desperation as he begs for money, first from a rich uncle and then from a woman he slept with once and then neglected. When the suicide comes, however, the narration switches to a tragicomic mode that is almost Chekhovian. The uncle, arriving too late with the money, cuts a painfully foolish figure beside the corpse."

debouch

Stolen pictures- left side- from this website: http://capacioglu.stumbleupon.com/

the right, Hiroshi Sugimoto, from this site- http://www.kultureflash.net/archive/68/.

Sugimoto is currently being exhibited at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, I saw the exhibit, it covers the variety of his photos; from the minimalism (as shown in this photo) to his faux-figuratives.





Today's obsessions:


What would ancient perfume smell like? "Extracts of anise, pine, coriander, bergamot, almond, and parsley "





Joseph Conrad:



"To survey with wonder the changes of one's own self is a fascinating pursuit for idle hours. The field is so wide, the surprises so varied,the subject so full of unprofitable but curious hints as to the work of unseen forces, that one does not weary easily of it. I am not speaking here of megalomaniacs who rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded conceit--who really never rest in this world, and when out of it goon fretting and fuming on the straitened circumstances of their last habitation, where all men must lie in obscure equality. Neither am I thinking of those ambitious minds who, always looking forward to some aim of aggrandizement, can spare no time for a detached, impersonal glance upon them selves"





The Estonian language:


"The majority of European languages belong to the Indo-European language group (e.g. Spanish, Polish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Albanian, Romany, Greek or Welsh). Of the ancient European languages, once so widespread throughout the continent, Basque in the Pyrenees, the Finno-Ugric languages in the North and Central Europe, and Caucasian languages (e.g. Georgian) in the southeastern corner of Europe have managed to survive.

The Estonian language belongs to the Finnic branch of Finno-Ugric group of languages. It is not therefore related to the neighbouring Indo-European languages such as Russian, Latvian and Swedish. Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian are the best known of the Finno-Ugric languages; rather less known are the following smaller languages of the same language group: South Estonian, Votic, Livonian, Ingrian, Veps, Karelian, Sami, Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi, spoken from Scandinavia to Siberia. The relations between languages can often be seen from the similarities in numeric systems:



Estonian differs from its closest large related language, Finnish, at least as much as English differs from Frisian. The difference between Estonian and Hungarian is about as significant as between German and Persian.

Along with Icelandic, Estonian is at present one of the smallest languages in the world that fulfils all the functions necessary for an independent state to 'perform' linguistically. Teaching, at both primary school and university level, is in Estonian; it is also the language of modern science (molecular biology, astronomy, computer science, semiotics, etc.). Estonian is used in the army, in the theatre, aviation, journalism - in all walks of life. Estonian is the only official language in Estonia in local government and state institutions.


Estonian is spoken by approximately 1 100 000 people throughout the world. About 950 000 of them live in Estonia, and more than 150 000 are scattered over Sweden, Canada, USA, Russia, Australia, Finland, Germany and other countries. The first attempts to describe the Estonian language scientifically were undertaken in the early 17th century. In 1803, a lectureship of the Estonian language was established at what was then the German-language University of Tartu, founded in 1632. With the spread of the ideas of Enlightenment, the interest of the Baltic German Estophiles in the local language and culture increased. During the 19th century, the first educated Estonians began publishing scholarly research of their mother tongue. The first doctor of the Finno-Ugric languages of Estonian origin was Mihkel Veske who did research into the history of the Estonian language in the 1870s; the Estonian Writers' Union, established in 1871, undertook the task of standardising the common language. "