Perfumes & Poems: Safran Troublant & Agha Shahid Ali

We are seduced by perfume.  We are vexed by it.  The fleeting nature of fragrance simultaneously charms and irritates us.  What is that delicious smell?  What does it make me think?  What does it make me feel?  Why does it disappear just when I begin to feel it is part of me?

Some perfumes last on the skin eight hours, ten, even a full day.  We call this staying power or longevity.  Some perfumes vanish from the wrist within hours, even occasionally a few minutes.  When we love a scent, we are grateful for its longevity.  When we hate a fragrance, we are grateful if it leaves us quickly.

For a perfumista, the worst tragedy is a glorious perfume with terrible longevity.  When I discovered Safran Troublant by L'Artisan Parfumeur, I learned something new about myself:  that I loved roses and saffron, that the marriage of roses and saffron is for me the smell.  Safran Troublant taught me that I didn't fully know or understand my own tastes.

The notes are simple:  saffron, rose, sandalwood, vanilla.  But the saffron seems as real and present as I if were pinching a few strands between my fingers, rubbing that glorious yellow a few inches from my nose.  And the rose is that edible kind we find in Persian deserts, without ever becoming too sweet.   

And why, why does the perfume fade within 90 minutes?  Safran Troublant seems the very definition of desire, close and yet always just out of reach, or as Anne Carson explains, "Eros seemed to Sappho an experience of pleasure and pain.  Here is contradiction and perhaps paradox.  To perceive this eros can split the mind in two.  Why?  The components of the contradiction may seem, at first glance, obvious.  We take for granted, as did Sappho, the sweetness of erotic desire; its pleasurability smiles out at us.  But the bitterness is less obvious."    

Smelling Safran Troublant, I'm reminded of the work of Agha Shahid Ali, a poet who died too soon but who left contemporary American poetry with a new appreciation of the ghazal, a Persian poetic form that explores repetition, longing, and nonlinear (associative) narratives.  Here is Agha Shahid Ali's best known ghazal, as a complement to the delectable, fleeting nature of Safran Troublant: 

Tonight
By Agha Shahid Ali

Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar.

- Laurence Hope 

Where are you now?  Who lies beneath your spell tonight?

Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?

Those "Fabrics of Cashmere—" "to make Me beautiful—"
"Trinket"—to gem—"Me to adorn—How tell"—tonight?

I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates—
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.

God’s vintage loneliness has turned to vinegar—
All the archangels—their wings frozen—fell tonight.

Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;
Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

Mughal ceilings, let your mirrored convexities
multiply me at once under your spell tonight.

He’s freed some fire from ice in pity for Heaven.
He’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight.

In the heart’s veined temple, all statues have been smashed.
No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight.

God, limit these punishments, there’s still Judgment Day—
I’m a mere sinner, I’m no infidel tonight.

Executioners near the woman at the window.
Damn you, Elijah, I'll bless Jezevel tonight.

The hunt is over, and I hear the Call to Prayer
fade into that of the wounded gazelle tonight.

My rivals for your love—you’ve invited them all?
This is mere insult, this is no farewell tonight.

And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee—
God sobs in my arms.  Call me Ishmael tonight.