Luca Turin changed my life

Way back when, I would go to my favourite second-hand bookshop and then browse the second-hand magazine shop, before going for coffee. That was how I spent most Friday nights, because by the end of the work week I am usually tired and grumpy, and a little belligerent. One of my finds was The Emperor of Scent, a biography about Luca Turin. It is an A5-sized hardcover with a swirling dark cover that was hidden between the larger books in the Science section. I can't now remember what interested me about the book when I bought it but I am not exaggerating when I say it changed my life.

Luca Turin is a biophysicist turned chemist after following his interest in fragrances into the science (and industry) of scent. He has a delicate and trained nose, with an almost poetic style of writing that matches his liveliness. For example, take Angel, a perfume I wore in my late teens. I would maybe have said it was sweet and if pushed that it had a saltiness that reminded me of seawater. Says Turin:

"Angel certainly is a joke... a handsome resinous woody patchouli straight out of the pipes-and-leather-slippers realm of men's fragrance... in a head-on collision with a bold blackcurrant  and a screechy white floral. These two halves... share a campherous smell, which kills the possibility of cloying sweetness. Buy the perverse, brilliant original, but wear it only if you know how to tell the joke properly.

Now you are thinking, well, this is a bit like wine tasting. In a blind taste test, experts can rarely tell the difference between certain estates and vintages. because our senses are subjective.(Yes and no.) Honestly, I don't care. My nose agrees with his - when I need a pick-me-up, I visit a perfume counter, then describe and rank five perfumes before looking up his reviews. I rarely disagree, even when I seem to disagree. For example, Balmain's Ambre Gris. The bottle is innocuous and not publicised. The name is the name of a generic sandalwood base, so the scent is rather predictable. As Turin notes, in making a scent dominated by a single base, the result is diluted and disappointing. On the other side, you get what it promises: a single sandalwood note that lingers without changing.

Turin can break down scents into their ingredients so effortlessly I am tempted to call him a savant. (He says the skill only takes a few hours to learn. Maybe a few of his biophysics, chemistry-dabbling savant hours, yes. I bet you anything he plays a musical instrument and can cook.) Half of his review is usually devoted the technical details: the elements, the notes, the construction, history, even price. The other half is flowery comparisons that make you want to track down that fragrance immediately and never wear anything else - or track it down and then pour it down a drain.

On his five-star review alone, I asked my mom to pick up a bottle of Bvlgari Black on her flight back from Australia. I had become interested in darker scents via citrus. Luckily, it was love at first breath. I remember sitting at a small breakfast table next to the kitchen, in front of a window. Wrapping paper and ribbon higgeldy piggeldy on the table. I sprayed the perfume on my left wrist and smelt something so purple it may as well be black, with a smooth skin, that smelt like sweetened liquorice.  Now, having worn it sparingly for eighteen months, I would agree with Turin, who calls it "hot rubber" (in a good way). He continues:

"At different times, Black will strike you variously as a battle hymn for Amazons, emerald green plush fit for Napoleon's box at the Opera, or just plain sweet and smiling." 

He always explains his choices, making you feel like an expert by degree. The perfumist, he says, went one step closer than using a pair of contrasting bases to using trio. The result has no "top notes", so the scent does not change, only your perception of.

Bvlgari no longer makes Black and Bvlgari's Jasmin Noir makes me smell like a bog monster, so I am always on the hunt for another bottle (mine is dangerously low) or a new favourite. I already wear Cool Water (not the diluted women's version) by Davidoff. My shortlist includes:

• Balmain's Ambre Gris
• Gucci's Intense - I have 'blind' smelt this twice, having forgotten the brand; both times I could still smell a trace of it this morning and it still had the sweet darkness that is slightly sweeter than Black
• Michael Kors' Signature - the clean top note reminds me of a sharp herb or aloe; like Intense I smelt the perfume and forgot the name
• Yves St Lauren's Opium - legendary
• Issey Miyake's Limited Edition - which predictably is sold out

Trusting Turin and various Internet forums hosted by fan girls and boys of Black, I am awaiting a delivery of Patchouli 24 by Le Labo via my sister. Said fan girls swear that this is a good (although not complete) replacement for Black, although they said the same of Khorous by YSL, which (yes, me of Cool Water) find too much like a cologne, with occasional, more muted notes.

See how much fun this is? For me, at least. Maybe you should try it yourself.

Once upon a time, I said I wanted to become an Epicurean, thinking this might ground my nihilistic shades. Something outside of myself to get me to stick a forefinger in the air and feel the direction of the wind (does that even work?). This hobby of identifying and describing scents - nevermind wearing them - is that wind. They need words and I have many (not as many as Turin, but reading and comparing his descriptions is cathartic, too). These words as well as the scents helps me find and steady the parts of myself that find themselves here, and on and on.

Luca Turin changed my life. Perfume changed my life - and sometimes saves my life. My bookshop is in Jo'burg and I am in Cape Town now, where there are few second-hand bookshops and none as well-stocked or organised, leaving space on Friday nights for my new hobby.

This is what I wearing as I type this

PS. I have eight fragrances, most of them cheap knockoffs, most of them interesting:

• Black
• Cool Water
• Issey Miyaki's floral - magic
• Le Occitane's Magical Leaves - given to me by sister, with a soap; heady and rich; one of my winter daytime scents
• A knockoff of Cacharel's Anais Anais - although the base fragrances argue among themselves like most knockoffs, I enjoy that and I but can't say why
• DKNY's Be Delicious - sickly sweet, repeats on me and gives me a headache
• A knockoff of Lacoste's Play - I once had the original, given to me by a friend; makes it good for casual days
• The Body Shop's Sun Kiss - me summer daytime fragrance; like colour-dyed sugar water

I wish I were a fashion designer or scientist or...

Proenza Schouler

I am writing this post for this blog now, when I should be working, because a waitress in the restaurant I frequent asked if I am a fashion designer. I keep Pinterest open for when I take breaks. And I said, "I wish." And I thought, "I do wish."

There are two things I wish I had done: studied a science degree and found a way into fashion. I don't wish I had studied fashion or become a designer or become Dion Chang (I really truly do not), but I wish I had found my niche in the industry.

Flaming stars and captions to the lines of "You can do anything" flash overhead. No, no, you cannot do anything. Apart for things that are physically impossible, so much relies on luck. Being in the right place might be at the wrong time and vice versa.

People who can do something are often lucky: the right parents, right degree or internship, the right people and the drive. You can try for anything but you will only get somethings.

I am disillusioned. I have the dreams, the drive and I have spent the last ten years learning to be the best at what I do. I am pretty damn good, I get on with people and I try to be everywhere at all times. I am also pretty screwed up and Bipolar - thanks family tree.

It's not a deal-breaker, but it requires at least another person's worth of drive to get up in the morning, answer my phone or check my email. What I have left goes to eating properly and maintaining a routine - and that routine includes waking up at 10.00 and working until 1.00. What I want to do is curl up on my couch and read or draw or make origami mobiles.

Thanks, therapy. Before, my drive kept my head above water. I packed my distress away in literature and various self-destructive behaviours. I thought myself existed outside those shelves, but as it turns out it was mostly inside. We let that me loose and I made up for lost time. "Feel the fear," I pushed, because that is what I do. I do.

Lanvin

For a while it worked. Until it didn't. Until the distress and fear grew into utter despair and I couldn't do anything. Couldn't answer my phone or check emails or read or get excited about things. Depression isn't sadness; it is despair. It is being in a dark basement and knowing that this is your past and will be your future. Why bother answering phones? Why bother?

So, thanks Bipolar; thanks heredity; thanks therapy.

With one gesture of a magician, my drive is gone. I have to believe that being alive means that I have something to live for. Guilt? Fear? Fear of failing? FYI, I am failing, miserably. Congrats, therapy!

Fashion distracts me, as does learning about science and technology. I want to absorb it all. I want aesthetic and the satisfaction of making something and some sense of identity. I don't know that this, even if accumulated, is enough to make me want to live. It's something to do, while I fail at failing to live.

I meant this to be a gung-ho post: life is a series of planned and unplanned coincidences and we persevere. I wanted to say these things make living worth the darkness. But nope, they don't. They are a distraction and maybe this is as good as it gets so let's be glad for small things. I want my drive
back.

Alexander McQueen: post 1 of many

Only Alexander McQueen could be the subject of this first post. Because only Alexander McQueen anything. The man and the fashion house, the second his legacy. I imagine his ghost, freed on Halloween, trawling the archives of the last four years and nodding his head. (Not smiling. This man could convey emotion with a deadpan stare.)

This is my blogpost, so I won’t spend time on his background, influences blah blah. That is why Wikipedia exists, quite literally. What that site doesn’t tell you about is why I pin his dresses on to my Pinterest board ad nauseum.

Patrick Demarchelier | Vogue

It was love at first sight: women dressed in hundreds of golden butterfly wings, over variations of tight-fitting dresses – emphasised shoulders, ragged hems, excessive ruffles. Every dress is an in-joke: elegant and demure but self-conscious, constructed and confrontational.

When you pledge allegiance to the brand that is McQueen, you pledge all or nothing, bad with the good. Future lines use the bird feathers and butterfly wings, all dancing the dance of our in-joke. Full dresses of gold or silver and a suffocating chiffon veil, a bird’s wing stretching from the model’s throat, a fabric Mohawk. Soft scraps on tight leather bodices. Bad to the bone, not preacher bad.

The meaning of those first dresses hit me like a ton of bricks, to fling the hackneyed expression at you, like a Chagal painting once did. Like a song by Perfume Genius does or a James Meek novel or Hamlet. The meaning, to me? Devastation. The pretty face of everyday life with a nod to its true brutality. Horror laughing at us. No, forcing himself into our homes and sitting silent in our living rooms.

Except, in my home, he has a key and is annoyingly chatty.

My meaning, not his or yours, I get that. Still, part of me insists McQueen also lived with this sense of desolation in conflict with living and sewed it into every creation.

As evidence, perhaps, his suicide in 2010. He had tried overdosing twice before, but killing yourself is more difficult than most realise (more than 90% fail). Go big or go home. Don’t try, but do. He combined four methods: he overdosed, slit his wrists and hung himself. The fourth? There are rumours of asphyxiation. I’ll leave that to you to figure out.

Alexander McQueen in Vogue Italia

I get it. I see his suicide as an act of courage, not cowardice. In Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, he says “conscience makes cowards of us all”. Our tragic hero is more of a coward than we thought. He is saying that killing yourself is scary: even though living is a series of traumatic moments, there isn’t any guarantee that death is better than life (frying pan, fire). (Remember this next time someone uses the first line as some motivational slogan.)

My own words now: there’s some fear in failing to kill yourself, too. Of having lived that moment when you make the decision and carry it out, and have to remember it. That moment is one of pure desperation. Distress. Despair. Pure darkness that briefly has a pinprick of respite. Remembering it is worse than having to live. I am a coward, too.

Discovering that someone else has thought the same reviled thoughts is a shot of relief. These thoughts can’t be faked: when Hamlet talks about “the thousand natural shocks / that flesh is heir to…”, I hear him describe the daily traumas that are the return on investment of being alive. (Did you notice my euphemism? I am trying to avoid saying “being bloody meat”.)

The work of Alexander McQueen brings me out of myself. I recognise my awful secret in the world outside myself and see how beautiful the awful can be. A jolt of sublime pain. To step out of myself, my thoughts, my rabid emotions for a moment. To acknowledge that the world maybe might possibly exist. To take this into ridiculous depths now, to suggest that there is something that is just beautiful out there.

For me, clothes are one way of telling you how I feel and who I am, because I don’t have the language to tell you and because I have to censor what I can explain. My internal struggles become something I can wear and that others can appreciate, without necessarily knowing what those struggles are or staring at me slack-jawed. It is a way of saying the world is horrible and so am I without upsetting anyone. (Well, I just gave away the secret…)

McQueen is a constant reflection of the locust infestation that is my general interior. For example, their collections have a regular motif of a cowgirl-gone-Goth or a disillusioned former socialite. A woman who sees the awful but channels it into being strong. Someone who doesn’t let the awful define them and who can turn inwards themselves without breaking. Like Wonder Woman, but with more material.

Style is identity, not fashion. The creations of Alexander McQueen sum up the million avatars of who I have been, who I am and who I want to be.

People say the value of art is subjective, but I think art first talks to how I feel rather than what I think. And my feelings are fluttering all over the place, so pinning them down is a quest on its own. Alexander McQueen’s pieces went on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after his death. Every time I see one of his dresses, my breath catches. In them I see vulnerability and courage, because being vulnerable is more terrifying than it should be.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Why oh why, you Epicurean you

My profile needs to be updated: “Considering becoming an Epicurean.” Not that I am an Epicurean now, but my nose could pick up things Sherlock Holmes missed and my tastebuds could root out poison for paranoid kings. I wrote my profile about two years ago, after a wine and nougat tasting. I had just become interested in perfume and suddenly I could smell all the things Luis Turin had promised. My soul was peeling outwards. Therapy was what done it. Therapy and the desire to be healthier that had brought me there.

I have since cursed therapy for opening me up to a world that I did not want to live in; cursed it for making me more aware of my behaviour and triggers, and therefore less content ignoring the consequences of being self-destructive. Sometimes it feels like swearing off ice cream and then relocating to an ice cream factory. Usually, though, a good perfume is like anaesthetic and I remember what drove me to therapy in the first place.

This is meant to explain the shift of this blog from squishy blogposts to some aesthetic sampling that I hope might lead me to something to do with the next twenty years of my life and an emotional landfill. Warning: there will be no lifestyle spreads or trendy made-to-look-DIY recycling, no styled pictures of food, no tight jeans or bundled scarves in summer.

This is my soul, people. My soul in the sense of some weird thing that thinks it is ‘I’ (knows it is ‘I’ and rolls its eyes at my denial? Or stupidity). I do not believe in, well, anything, very very literally and honestly I do not care to. Very practically, I am looking for healthy, at least occasionally. Sensual things tell this seething soul that for all intents and purposes this world exists. And sometimes sensual things interrupt the erupting volcanoes of my emotions and teach me some geology.

I warned you...

Squishy ahead.

I think Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half is better than all internet memes (which is sliced bread for cheesy-joke-inclined) ever. I am a couple of steps from creepy fangirl finding out what Allie's favourite food is and eating only that forever. Forever.

But this is mostly because her character (which is her) reminds me of me, which makes this weird, now that I think of it. Except I am not afraid of geese and my pets would qualify for animal MENSA. Also, I am not blonde and I do not wear pink.

Her book was delivered last week - the reason I am not posting this on my other, book blog is because of the squishy that is about to smack you in the face like an alien in Aliens.

The last chapter I read is 'Identity part I'. Have I mentioned reading her comics is like watching a mini-series of myself? She bravely describes her conviction that she is a horrible person, specifically 'selfish' and 'conceited'. My first reaction is to email her and her she is awesome and definitely not a horrible person, especially not in a society that lets children sleep on the street.

Except I've been thinking these kinds of things a lot lately. Not as much as I used to - more to figure out why I think I am so terrible, especially because if it were realistic, I would bring every child in tattered clothing home with me to be fed, sheltered and educated.

But I'm projecting. What I want is for me as a child to be taken care of and for the child still hiding in me to be let out. So I'm not really a good person; I'm a manipulative one.

I can also be really charming, when I have the energy, which is usually nervous energy and wilts quickly. Other activities to which nerves are directed are: chores, gardening, banging holes in the walls and then just using double-sided tape, or walking in circles around shopping malls, comparing prices and then not buying anything because I am a terrible, wasteful person.

Surely the fact that I am self-aware should give some street-cred to myself, right? Nope. Insular, melancholic, two-faced and just generally terrible.

When I was knee-height, I had already concluded that I was a terrible person, which meant I had done terrible things. But let's assume I did one really heinous thing. That was the only explanation for the fact that I felt unnoticed and sad, and that I was a tugboat and the world was the perfect storm. I had about five years between this conclusion and birth in which to look, but my memories were mostly pictures that didn't construct a helpful timeline.

Really, that's the end of what I wanted to say.

Although I know this on a conscious level, the rest (and most) of me is cautious. Just because I haven't found an event doesn't mean it doesn't exist (well, I have found an event but I'm not ready for that post) and logically, this makes the most sense. Why else is are things so terrible? And unfair? Mostly unfair. I am pissed that people around me blithely skip through life and I can't even get out the front door.

Just thinking that is terrible, right? How can I be angry because stuff happens? But I am. Enraged maybe. Definitely enraged.

Until a few years ago, I was religious and then spiritual. I faithfully prayed, lit candles, made deals with whoever was listening, prayed, hoped for a plane to fall out of the sky, fought, gave in, serenely acknowledged karma, fought the world and cried. Whoever this deity was, he or she had proclaimed that I was horrible, obstinate, stubborn, selfish and melancholic.

Which, I increasingly thought, was really mean. It is definitely unfair to hold me accountable for something I had allegedly done when I was still an amoeba in this perfect storm. That's tyrannical. Dictatorial. Unfeeling. And no the ends do not justify the means, because what I do know is that extremes are usually falsely imposed, and that a deity could surely think of Plans B to Z.

I also thought some other things, which shall never be posted.

I thought I was enraged? Now I was a baby star with the stamina of Alexander the Great and the ambition to be the largest star that can be without falling apart. This baby star is now a young adult, just waiting. Waiting for what?

See above argument. I jettisoned all deities along with meaning and truth. I replaced them with disappointment and resentment, which my melancholy proceeded to grow over like moss. I am genuinely a nihilist, but I am not happy with this answer. I need information. I need the truth. Objective truth. Not this subjective rubbish. My subject is sad, sometimes suicidal, afraid and just horrible. I need the answer to my question:

What the eff did I do before I could speak that could possibly result in this amount of awful?

Again, I have a theory, but not everyone is going to like it.

Until I have the truth, I must continue to assume the worst. So Allie, I get it. And you are awesome even if you don't believe it, because you made me laugh out loud into my coffee. If you happen to know what I did, please drop me a line, even as a comment on this post. You don't even have to make it funny.

All planes sound like they are crashing

Most mornings my family ate breakfast in front of the TV, watching CNN. As most modern families do. Although usually seen as a dysfunction of the family unit, I was glad. I am not a morning person. I think mornings are wonderful and sometimes I wish I spent more time with them but only if no one speaks. This morning featured a story about a plane crashing into a suburban home. A full-on commercial plane, not those light jobbies. I can't remember whether anyone died, but I suddenly had a solution to a problem that had plagued me for a couple of years.

See, death is a good solution to life and so rationally one should have the option of expediting this solution by one's own hand. However, (before I lost interest in even loathing a certain deity) my main worry was that my family would suffer, granted in varying degrees. Ok, I confess I was worried they would blame me. (This is still an issue, but now it shares the stage with my suspicion of, well, everything.) Car accidents are messy, drowning is too horrifying and so on. But here was instant death, for which I could not be blamed. Unlikely, but look, it just happened!

I prayed every night for a plane crash, where no one died but me, and every time I heard a plane fly over I would listen for the whining of a burnt-out engine until I heard whining every time a plane flew over. Sometimes, I would brace myself, holding my breath in until I couldn't any more, so exhaling signalled that I was not about to die. I still hear that whine, and sometimes will involuntarily take a deep breath and search the sky for telltale wisps of smoke.

I don't believe in mollycoddling. My metaphors will become more graphic and just more. Forewarned is forearmed so read on at your own peril. Also this is my blog (well, one of), my chemicals and hormones, my dysfunction, and my past and present. This is my catharsis.

Which leads me to my disclaimer: This is my experience. I do hope that it will resonate with parts of others' experiences but fundamentally it is mine and I am very attached to it. By this life thing. Please do not project onto my experience or assume that this is exactly how someone else feels - just blerry ask them. (Trick erm statement there: Don't take my word for it.)

So, back to my disappointing experience of planes. Take a guess how long ago this was? I am 31, as of publication. 19? 15? 22? To prevent cheating the answer is three times three minus zero. Yes, 20. Spot on.

I know this story and I have told it to my therapist, oh, and I have written about because I had a dream about a plane crashing, which my brain re-enacted a number of times. Just to ram home whatever oblique point it was making. So, I don't need to rehash it when the dream would probably make a more interesting and revealing story.

The beginning of the point is I started thinking suicidal thoughts at round about age seven. The narrative in my brain at age five was 'I hate myself.' You think I am projecting because at that age, individuation is only a bud of an idea? The finale of the point is that I have lived with depression since I was a tot and manic-depression at least since my early 20s. I was diagnosed at 29 and have religiously (in lieu of anything else, perhaps) worked on managing my condition for more than two years, with two specialists with a full line of degrees.

I guarantee you I know my behaviour, thoughts and condition better than you do, given we're all cooped up together pending a plane crash (although I won't pretend I understand any of it and my unconscious has tried to kill me more than once, but this should reinforce how little you know about any of this unless you have some qualification I don't know about).

I can tell you more stories, about how I have admired Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf for what I see as having the courage to kill themselves since I was in school, or that the boy's suicide in Dead Poet's Society made me conclude I don't have the courage to shoot myself if I were presented with a gun.

I have been depressed and occasionally manic for most of my life (although I'm told that I couldn't have been consistently depressed and when I stabilise I will remember other periods of stability, but maybe I just blocked them out as worse than the depression). Unless you can time travel and have 31 years to spare, we can rule out that you have any thorough knowledge of what I go through any more than I do or could have of your life.

You may remember (I wouldn't; short-term memory of one of those mining pans) that I told you to just blerry ask. (While I swear, the words are mostly approximations like blerry and effing. If I spell the words correctly. Duck. Cover. And crawl away slowly.) This blog is about catharsis for me, but also to try to help others understand me and my fellow Bipolar Bears. (Couldn't resist.) I know, first I tell you this experience is mine and mine alone, and now that you should to some degree project onto my experience (so tempted to use another polar bear joke). I dunno, I'm still figuring it out.

My tone has been aggressive so far. I am (justifiably) irritated - and don't worry, this story will unfold over many posts, and I promise to sneak in a few erm and har! moments among the blerries and effs. I don't like being told what to do under the best of circumstances (like 'You, here is a drone which we would like you to test', whereupon I would sneakily set up my own parametres). And I don't like to be told how to think about what I feel and my unconscious likes it even less.

To share another contradiction (setting the tone) I rely heavily on external feedback. My basic assumption is that I am an awful human being who like Atlas (but prettier) carries the world on my shoulders, so when you tell me that I needn't carry the world I get all confused because I don't know how to put it down, which obviously means I am worse than I knew and I don't know how it got there or why it's there but I do know it's heavy and hang on, it is my responsibility actually and so you can just eff off. But, just to be sure, do I look dumb standing here with an orb on my back?

When someone, no matter how saintly, tries to process my experience, I feel judged and angry and confused in addition to everything else ricocheting around my brain (we'll get to that) - because you don't deal with this alone for 29 years and come out unscarred - it's like a Transformers' battle except no one knows who is an Autobot or Decepticon because their eyesight is going as they age (I mean, rust) and then we add some Smurfs and some Nolan-type snow-suit baddies from Inception.

You're walking into that and saying, here is Batman - he has come to play. My brain should flatline at this point but instead I focus all my energy into imagining you, my dear, dear, well-meaning friend, with a concave nose and me with a bruised fist, and we all survive. You may remember I am not thrilled about surviving in the first place.

Well, this has been very instructive, for me at least. You may be worse for the wear. But without commenting on my experience, you have helped me to figure out that my irritation and anger at people trying to interpret my experience is partly my own confusion. I am still figuring out how to untie some of the strings that knotted as I swivelled and ducked for 29 years of working through the mess while trying to hide it. That's my experience and maybe someone out there feels similarly, but no doubt their story is different. Especially the bit about the plane. A train, for example. Lightning?