doomsday_disco
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Everything posted by doomsday_disco
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Courtly love that becomes cosmology, a spiritual ascent, a ladder to heaven. In The Divine Comedy, Beatrice is not simply muse or lover, but a guide. She is radiant Sophia, living wisdom, the luminous intelligence that draws the soul upward through ever-widening spheres of divine light. Beatrice’s eyes are mirrors that reflect the radiance of Heaven itself, “with eyes of light more bright than any star.” Her gaze does not return to the pilgrim but lifts him upward, directing his sight beyond her to the splendor of the Eternal. “Then to the eyes of beauty my eyes turned,” Dante says, and the beauty he sees there is “far more beautiful than the vast universe beneath his feet.” The beloved is not held but beheld, and in that gaze the soul is altered. Though she is one of the Lovers, she also rises above them, not to inflame desire but to purify it. Through her presence, longing is refined from appetite into ascent. The earthly self, heavy with burdens, is gradually transmuted. L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. In these Lovers exists adoration that moves the sun and stars. Longing clarifies, burns, and rises, and the anima lifts the earthly self toward its red perfection, where desire is no longer hunger but illumination. Love that is hope, love that is divine, love that reflects the radiance of the highest heavens. White rose and scarlet iris, beeswax smoke and frankincense tears, vellum and sacred myrrh, and a thread of red saffron steeped in luminous amber.
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In the song attributed to Homer, their devotion turns the tide of war. Patroclus is the hidden heart of the warrior, the tender pulse beneath iron and oath. When he falls, the world blackens, grief becomes wildfire, and pride is burned away in the furnace of loss and sorrow. This is love as ordeal and the beloved as mirror of the soul. Nigredo in the shadow of the pyre, calcination in the roar of battle. From mourning rises terrible clarity, bright and merciless as a drawn blade. Love does not soften fate; it forges it. Bronze-bright armor warmed by the sun, salt-wind off the Aegean, crushed amarantos beneath restless feet, and the metallic sting of blood on sand.
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In the book of Book of Genesis, the first pair stand in untested unity, formed of earth and breath, innocence and possibility. “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him” (Genesis 2:18), and from that declaration arises polarity as gift rather than fracture, difference as the condition of communion. Bone of bone and flesh of flesh, they are not rivals but reflections, two aspects of one living mystery: the soul and the spirit of humankind. Yet the drama of the Lovers is not stasis but choice. When the fruit is taken and shared, consciousness deepens and the seamlessness of Eden gives way to the currents of history. “Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken” (Genesis 3:23). Through Eve’s invitation and Adam’s consent, spirit and soul descend into the rivers of Time, entering the full measure of embodied existence with its labor and ecstasy, its birth pangs and graves. Mortality becomes their teacher, and the dust from which Adam was shaped becomes the destiny to which he must return, “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). Esoterically, she may be seen as the animating impulse, the quickening spirit that urges experience, while he embodies the ensouled humanity that must walk the path she opens. Their so-called fall is also initiation, the necessary passage from unconscious unity into lived duality, where joy and sorrow are known rather than merely imagined. The Lovers here are not simply the bliss of Eden but the courage to enter time together, to face consequence side by side, and to seek, through exile and return, the restoration of a higher garden not of innocence but of awakened wholeness. In the first dawn of consciousness, before history clothed itself in shame, stand Adam and Eve as archetypes of a polarity not yet divided against itself. She is the descending brilliance, arching her consciousness towards the world itself, the soul drawn upward toward gnosis. He turns toward her, embodied will answering its own reflection. Above them burns the stark, pure radiance of unity and within them sleeps the yet-unforged Stone. The serpent coils at the axis of the Tree. It is the mercurial spirit, subtle and ascending, the luminous volatility of both knowledge and growth that refuses stasis. Through its whisper the fruit becomes the tincture that awakens innocence into awareness. Sulfur awakens in desire, Mercury stirs in receptivity, salt forms in the tears of exile. The expulsion is the separation required for conjunction, solve preceding coagula. What was unconsciously whole must become consciously divided so it may one day reunite in wisdom. In these Lovers, unity dissolves into duality, and in that darkening begins the opus. This is not the loss of Eden; it is the ignition of the Great Work. Skin musk, fig sap, pomegranate, apple skin, and the smoke and warmth of humankind’s newly-kindled fire.
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Vanillekipferl plunked in a pile of pine needles.
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Rain-soaked leaves, lightning-struck wood, gleaming black myrrh, smoked cedar, hinoki, and black tea. Yosa Buson
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“O father, see yonder! see yonder!” he says; “My boy, upon what doest thou fearfully gaze?” — “O, ’tis the Erl-King with his crown and his shroud.” “No, my son, it is but a dark wreath of the cloud.” A dread shape forms in the mist: chilled white musk, rain-soaked earth, and a gleam of blackened steel.
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A tribute to Epidendrum nutans, the nocturnal seductress of the forest canopy. Sweet, indolic jasmine curls around a breath of citrus and moonlit air, a perfume that blooms when the world sleeps.
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An aromatic crusty loaf covered in pre-bake slashes to create a floral pattern on top, flecked with flax, sesame, pumpkin seeds.
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A Lupercalia Box of Chocolates scent that was supposed to go live this year but we were short on components. A chocolate truffle filled with wild plum, amaretto, burgundy wine, and black currant.
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Winnie-the-Pooh sat down at the foot of the tree, put his head between his paws and began to think. First of all he said to himself: “That buzzing-noise means something. You don’t get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something. If there’s a buzzing-noise, somebody’s making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is because you’re a bee.” Then he thought another long time, and said: “And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey.” And then he got up, and said: “And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.” So he began to climb the tree. He climbed and he climbed and he climbed, and as he climbed he sang a little song to himself. It went like this: Isn’t it funny How a bear likes honey? Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! I wonder why he does? Then he climbed a little further … and a little further … and then just a little further. By that time he had thought of another song. It’s a very funny thought that, if Bears were Bees, They’d build their nests at the bottom of trees. And that being so (if the Bees were Bears), We shouldn’t have to climb up all these stairs. He was getting rather tired by this time, so that is why he sang a Complaining Song. He was nearly there now, and if he just stood on that branch … Crack! “Oh, help!” said Pooh, as he dropped ten feet on the branch below him. The bees were still buzzing as suspiciously as ever. A golden gourmand for a philosopher. Wild clover honey buzzing with mead fizz, a gust of woodsmoke, and a dusting of ambered pollen.
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The Dregs of a Bottle of Vanilla Extract (Discovered in the Mud)
doomsday_disco posted a topic in The Edward Gorey House
Alas, poor Marsh! Dribbles of masticated vanilla pods soaked in ethanol and caked with mud. -
Raspberry punch with elderberry liqueur, lemon juice, a splash of gin, and a smattering of Victoria sponge crumbs.
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Billowing bulbous blobs of grapefruit marshmallows.
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The crime of Lady Violet at Gilravage Hall in Neglected Murderesses. Black Darjeeling brewed to the edge of acridity, its dark tannins laced with the faint metallic sigh of tarnished silver. Bruised and rain-damp wisteria petals clinging to a loosened knot of fraying violet ribbon. The lingering ghost of charred wood from a dormant hearth drifting beneath a sweep of velvet the color of fading bruises, tangled with the ragged threads of silk-stitched roses.
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From Edward Gorey’s Scènes de Ballet. A glimmer of white tulle in a thicket of ink-black pines, graceful as a half-spied pirouette between a silhouette of clawed branches. The hush of forest moss under satin slippers, a wisp of candle smoke, the flick of a wrist as pale as lilies beckoning through thick myrrh shadows.
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These are not soluble in lemonade, as clarified in The Awdrey-Gore Legacy. They are, however, most likely toxic. Pale crystals poured from a chipped glass jar, emitting a brittle whiff of bitter almond and cinnabar, swirling, undissolved, into sugar-clotted lemonade.
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A bitterly cold, bone-white chypre; austere polar musk, vegan ambergris, and white tea combine to make a genteel, frigid perfume as bright and sharp as the first crack of glacial ice.
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A fatal temptation: vanilla bean paste, allspice, ground almond accord, cinnamon sugar, golden caster sugar, and a dusting of icing sugar.
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A bloodless scent stitched together like delicate antique lace, with a hint of powdered violet, plum brandy, and gleaming aldehydes.
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A whiff of seasonal dread, candied and cursed; the perfect gourmand perfume for holiday melancholics. A dense, boozy thud of brandied plum, candied citrus peel, dried cherries, sherry, blackened clove and nutmeg, ambered dust, moth-eaten burgundy velvet curtains, and a tiny plume of smoke from recently-spent matchsticks.
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Wishing you and your cocks a happy new year. Red peppercorns and gingersnaps.
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A fussy, irritable, irascible dragon with a taste for drama, velvet throw pillows, cryptic social media posts, ink-smeared burn books, biting commentary, and vintage clothing with a past. Its scales are the color of dried blood, old bruises, clove-spiked pomegranate, aged patchouli, and vermouth.
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Also known as the Dead Head Dragon, this is a guardian of rot, rust, and revelation, feeding on spiritual decay and quietly hoarding the sordid secrets of the powerful. Scales of deep purplish rust-red: black fig, patchouli-steeped purple clove, black tea, blackcurrant, red musk, and oud.
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There’s still a little time to kill before the viewing… surely it wouldn’t hurt to stop for a short stack? Black coffee, syrup-drenched buckwheat cakes, and a crusty cruller for the road.
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A dribble of Dorian and a squiggle of Snake Oil, delicately stirred with a moss-crusted muddy shovel.