odourofdevonviolet.com
The Scent That Captures That "1930s Moment"!
All material copyrighted to odourofdevonviolet.com © 2014
or to the various credited sources © 2014
LVI
The Secret Doctrine served as a ‘door-opener’ –and door-stopper–
For scientists all over the globe still ‘groping for light at
The dead-end of materialism’ as Howard Murphet put it in
His hagio-biography of Blavatsky, When Daylight Comes
(That materialised through the Theosophical Publishing
House in 1975), replete with violet-tinted cover
Portrait of la Madame herself, and violet-steeped photograph
Of Murphet on the jacket flap –signed copies from the other side…
Possibly now Blavatsky is enveloped in her vanity project
Of afterlives, Violet Unveiled, or Violet Observed, revealing
Itself through violet sleeves in violet tropes on violet-scented
Notepaper from the violet-tinted afterlife, her will still holding
Out for that which one of her apostles, W.B. Yeats,
Prefigured as the coming ‘greater renascence –the revolt
Of the soul against the intellect’… O invisible ultraviolet waves!
Those they light hostel toilets with so users of that odourless
Aunt Hazel can’t locate their crinkled veins, no matter how hard
They strain, how tight they tug the torque –O violet emanations,
O violet vibrations, O violet leitmotivs, O violet liquefactions!
WHENAS in silks my Violet goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That mauve vibration each way free;
O how that Violet scent infects me!
[pastiche of Robert Herrick’s ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’, 1891]
LVII
Isn’t DEVON VIOLET quite surfeiting? It is, and most uplifting,
Smiting pessimisms and disinterring stale appetites for life
Filtering in through the nostrils, spices exhumed from strife
Of fiscal retrenchments to infiltrate the lotus-drowsing sight
Until we find ourselves idiot savants in the salvific
Waves of violet haze wafting into reveries of revivified
Inter-war years, our lost decade-long Walpurgis Night,
Walpurgisnacht, Valborgsmässoafton, Vappu, Volbriöö,
Valpurģu nakts, Valpurģi, Violet Night, feverish Scandinavian
Carnival, Baltic bacchanalia, festival of devils and witches,
Celebrated by Satanists, Pagans, Roman Catholics and those at
The violet end of the spectrum (mostly mystics, clairvoyants,
Visionaries, seers, mediums, psychics, adepts and eccentrics),
Or those who toed the Siegfried Line from Vichy to Sudetenland
Triangulating North to Norwegian Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal
Samling, and South, to Franco’s Spain, taking in Mussolini’s
Italy with it; drift of olfactory phantasmagoria, or what is
Called in theosophical circles, clairfragrance, a challenge
To marketing, though, but, as with DEVON VIOLET, its’ scent
Is ubiquitous, a gift to advertising verse and promotional spiel …
littleliverpil-
heated-Nujolneeding-There's-A-Reason
americans (who tensetendoned and with
upward vacant eyes, painfully
perpetually crouched, quivering, upon the
sternly allotted sandpile
Mhow silently
emit a tiny violet flavoured nuisance: Odor?
o no.
comes out like a ribbon lies flat on the brush
[ee cummings: ‘Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal’]
