Return to the Choir
Let’s workshop this poem about the growing pressure to return--to return forward--to the collectivist modality of the medieval period, where creators were expected to serve truth and beauty not ego
scent of the day: Vespers, by Amphora Exotica
Still working out my thoughts here»
Vespers (2024, Sundar Rayhan)—an all-natural floriental that, weaving bark and bloom and balm all in one derviche dance of meditative mysticism, calls to my mind (at least at first, before the homoeroticism kicks in) the still flame of a ghee lamp in the darkened prayer closet of some fixed-gear-bike hipster who, craft beer and artisanal coffee no longer doing the trick to fill an inner void, has taken to Eastern spirituality (Eat, Pray, Love, lumbersexual edition) rather than to the Antifa shenanigans of white saviorism common to too many of his Oregonian peers—
presents a variety of show-stealing spices (bitter-rooty saffron, barky-tannic cinnamon, citrus-pepper ginger) and midtone florals (apple-chamomile jasmine grandiflorum, green-musky jasmine sambac, creamy-peachy champaca, waxy-nectar pink lotus, banana-custard ylang, makeup-compact orris butter) over a bass and drum duo of woods (smoky-rooty javanese vetiver, dank-chocolatey patchouli, buttery-velvety mysore sandalwood, raisin-rum Cambodian oud, hay-compost Indian oud) and ambery elements (honey-caramel Hawaiian vanilla, vanillic-waxy Bushman’s candle),
this indolic-oudy ensemble given extra mammalian animalism by a variety of musky-pheromonic elements (powdery-terpenic Siberian deer musk, salty-sweet white ambergris) that work with the ginger to provide—similar to how it functions in Overture Man—compensatory animation and counterbalancing diffusion to what would otherwise be a torpid chassis of inescapable butteriness (a texture, perhaps intentional since Sandar lists a butter accord in the note pyramid, quite similar to the ghee I get from Prin’s unmatchable Homa except that here, unlike with the “problematic” barbarism of Homa, the experience is much more cozy, reminiscent of a college “safe space” where some white “racial-sensitivity trainer”—with a tranquil affect you just want to choke—lisps harm in the guise of care: “the question is what are we to do, what are we to learn and unlearn, about the contagious disease of whiteness”)—
the overall effect being a spicy-exotic oud fragrance that, in showcasing a tobacco-straw Kasmiri saffron (less smoky than Spanish saffron, less sweet than Irianian saffron, and with none of the Clorox-metallic screech of overdosed inferior saffron like we find in Rogue’s Aoud Ancienne) and in showcasing a vanillic-coumarin bushman’s candle (a plant whose waxy-flammable bark, which seals in moisture in the dry climates of Southern Africa, makes its a slow-burning torch), has become my benchmark for both notes, these two together (the stars of the show) not only providing the core of what could be an alluring and unique Sandarian signature (up there with Tauerade or Bianchiade or so on) but also specifically in Vespers providing the core of what comes off (in concert with several other notes, especially the Indian oud and Jasmine grandiflorum) as an impression of hay bales whose vanilla and honey and blonde-tobacco facets have been unconcealed by the sun’s having sucked away so much moisture (hay bales, however, that seem cocooned, as if some artist had hoped to mummify a metonym of heartland summer, in a peppery-benzoin paraffin reminiscent in the first few hours of Honour Man, a paraffin that here in Vespers grows much more leathery over time in metallic-hide-castoreum feel somewhere between Pinoy Sirun’s Heavy Metal Aoud 2 and Prin’s Varuek);
the overall effect being, in other words, buttery-wood fragrance that, despite sharing with Prin’s Maruyama a gourmand core of sotolon (here this immortelle-fenugreek chemical is born by both saffron and bushman candle whereas in Maruyama it is born mainly by lovage root) and despite sharing with Maruyama a musky element (here is it animalic-sensual deer musk while in Maruyama it is nutty-cognac ambrette) and sandalwoody element (here it is buttery-luscious mysore while in Maruyama it is smoky-resinous amyris) that together prevent the fragrancce from collapsing into that core, travels not in Prin’s herb-fern-stem-vine-underbrush direction that makes me think of enchanted-forest apothecaries smelling of Yatagan and medicinal botanicals but rather in a more floral-woody-animalic-ambery direction that makes me think (much more than Rogue’s Derviche 1 or Derviche 2) of Sufis kicking out perineal animalics from under their billowing skirts as they whirl in a Mevlevi lodge full of incense-floral aromas as well as cooking-spice aromas from the onsite kitchen,
the whole spiritual atmosphere undercut by an undertow of sexual irreverence that makes this fragrance perfect to wear while reading Hesse’s Siddartha: the ecstatic bouquet of tropical florals (lotus, champaca, ylang), coupled with the deer musk and ambergris and especially the erotic moon energy of Hindi oud, amplifies the jasmine’s face-squatting facet (letting us know on what side of the perineum our nose finds itself) while the queasy smear of butter over everything, at least when set against the homoerotic poetry of Rumi and Hafiz and other Sufi masters who slavered over young boys like the best of troubador poetry and who extolled the Socratic-erotic bonds between boy disciples and their shaykhs (masters), makes me think of grease (Crisco, olive oil, ghee) for backroom penetrations of man-boy blasphemy, the man in question definitely bearded like the Brawny paper towel lumberjack not simply due to the rugged notes (vetiver, ginger) but mainly due to this unanalyzable vibe of lumbersexual homoeroticism (a green-anchor-tattoo Portlandia vibe I cannot shake, however much it stands in tension with the sacred ghee-lamp throughline of eastern mysticism).
Return to the Choir
The integration of AI into every corner of life will spell the death of the artist—but only the artist as vainglorious superstar. The crisis to business as usual will mark a return to a more medieval sensibility, when art and scholarship were not about self-glory but about uncovering and celebrating the truth and the beauty of being itself. Chaucer felt no shame in stealing the characters, the plots, even the words of ancients. Why reinvent the wheel, when—as one small part in the grand hive—one can spend that energy refining it toward greater beauty and truth?
We have already been primed for the ego smash. Social media has shown us— and never lets us forget—the bedroom geniuses laboring uncelebrated: drummers, mathematicians. We can scarcely keep a para-diddle in time or calculate a triangle’s angle and yet there they are—a demoralizing number of them—each time we open the app. Demoralizing, yes — but preparatory. Diderot, confronted with the towering genius of Leibniz, nearly abandoned his books to curl up into a ball in the corner, thinking: “Why the fuck bother, when even a thousand years of my labor could never rival that man’s light? And now the shadow of AI makes a million Leibnizes seem small.
Apart from caring for other sentient beings (our human gift, which was never about glory anyway), there will be little place left for individual acclaim in learning or creating, for the anxiety-of-influence-stricken genius of the Early Modern era. AI can do it better here—and in a much more robust way than sex machines can there. Even so, there will still be a place for contributing to beauty and for uncovering truth. Those who cannot shed the old vanity will be dashed against the rocks of a new shore. The new evolutionary pressure selects not for fame but for devotion, for those who can humble themselves as worker ants in service of truth and beauty.