“Naming is not the beginning of observation.Naming is the reward for observation.”— Chad By this point in the fragrance project, I thought I had developed a reasonably consistent evaluation process. Apply fragrance. Take notes. Observe the opening, the heart, the drydown. Ask the two questions that I had thought would be the framework for this […]
Author: Sandy
Imperial Peacock: The Art of Lingering
Before beginning Week Two, my AI collaborator, Chad, and I were feeling rather confident. We had, after all, spent an entire week discovering places, characters, and motion. Surely we were beginning to understand how this worked. Then I picked up Imperial Peacock. Just look at the bottle. Gold. Emerald green. Art Nouveau. An embossed peacock […]
The Map Room
“Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of map: the grid and the story. Grid maps tell us where things are. Story maps tell us how they were found.” — Robert Macfarlane (paraphrased from his discussion of grid maps and story maps in The Wild Places.) When I first walked into Sebastian’s fragrance atelier in San […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Motion
Part 4: Motion By the fourth pair of fragrances, I thought I understood where this project was going. First, fragrances became places. Then they became people. Apparently, I assumed that was enough. It wasn’t. The next discovery wasn’t about where a fragrance took me. Or who I met there. It was about what happened next. […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Characters
Part 3: Characters Until this point, the project had been behaving itself. Fragrances became places. Moods. Tea houses. Libraries. Rainy mornings. Comfort. Curiosity. That all seemed perfectly reasonable. Then one of them became a person. Actually, two of them did. And that’s when things started getting weird. L’Eau des Immortels arrived with notes that sounded […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Places
Part 2: Places My spreadsheet lasted exactly five minutes. The original plan seemed perfectly sensible. Brand. Fragrance. Notes. Rating. Done. Instead, I found myself writing things like: Tea House. Rainy Afternoon. Silk Road Library. At first I thought I was simply being whimsical. I wasn’t. I was discovering that “fragrance notes” answered the wrong question. […]
Cataloging Scents, Cataloging Selves – Background
Part 1: The Inventory That Escaped Some projects begin with grand ambitions. This wasn’t one of them. My goal was embarrassingly practical. Figure out what I owned. Figure out what I liked. Stop buying duplicates. That was it. Instead, I accidentally started writing a series about memory, travel, identity, emotional geography . . . and […]
Between the Harbor and the Sword
The road wandered onUntil harbor, garden, swordBecame one journey This trip was supposed to be several separate things. A promise. A city. A garden. A seminar. A ferry ride. A hotel on a lake. A flight home. Instead, somewhere along the way, they all became the same story. The trip began with a promise. More […]
Relax
Relax, then proceed.The mountain gaze sees all things.Nene has new clothes. Four hours before practice on Friday evening, I found myself sitting in the lounge at the Inn on Long Lake in exactly the mental state that seems to precede every seminar. Not fear. Not nerves. More a mild conviction that everyone else had somehow […]
Actually Now Agree
The map and the townActually now agreeAs I drive away By Thursday morning, something unexpected had happened. The map and the town had finally agreed. This may not sound remarkable. But after several days of wandering Vancouver—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not—the city had begun to make sense. The streets looked familiar. The harbor felt familiar. Even […]