Torfdoen

The pale red evening sky is reflected in the water. The sun hangs like a white ball of embers over the black, contourless mountains. No carefree pink, no youthful blue at their edges. Everything blends together. Orange, green, purple. The water.

In certainty of approaching darkness, I let myself fall.

Memories become. Juicy billows of deceptive citrus skillfully spill a deep ripe vibrancy. Herbaceous green 1978, but today. Moss and creepers, more wonderfully retro and bulky than they've been in a long time. The honey-yellow rays increasingly caught in the predawn state of evening glow.

Moss ferns warm me. Nothing pushes back into the darkness. I remember something. Breathing. The green feelers of the plants reach into my organism. I dig into the resin and lie down beside the little flowers.

Powerful pinks. Earth tones. Feet tied into a tail. I glide through this complex melange of masculine and feminine pithiness as if intoxicated. It remains unclear whether the beguiling power can even be attributed to a gender other than nature.

The sumptuous duality melts into insouciant, leathery bubblegum powder, an imposing but elegant jasmine stringency, orange-speckled citrus sand, and big, heavy blobs of green-resinous dark honey.

A lush, antique floral sea, iridescent and deep. The earthy rugged ground that holds it lies in mysterious sweet vapor on my skin.

Face down in the moss. Thank God, the champagne flute is still in one piece. I'm digging like mad in the peaty soil, stealing my lemons. There aren't many. I stare at the back of my hand. That son of a bitch has marked his territory. Gotta keep moving. Feel his pale paprika breath.

A small puddle of sparkling wine on green overgrown ground. I greedily slurp the dew, which according to its sour note can only be an old, noble drop. Somehow expired, but deliberately. Like a Norne today, but instead of the sweet-etheric, fermented woody, like nothing known in nature. Real oakmoss. I'm thinking Success, Paco Rabanne, Lauder for Men. It's hard to know where to start and where to stop having sex.

I stumble through a densely overgrown, exotic world of plants, but I am still not interested in it, too busy to look into the flute, balance the lemons and pick the remaining earth out of my teeth.

Then I pause. It's all right. It's an '80s chypre jungle I got into. Super dense, with lots of shades. Disco lights, terrycloth covers and hygienically excessive things worked into a complex natural growth. Little ironed out, without the urge to dismantle everything into its sterile individual parts. And with a latent herbaceousness that is sultry and vegetable. Sparkling tiger eyes. Survivor.

Shortly before I think I'm about to hold a very mature, but somehow timeless galbanum cocktail with an earthy citrus fruit mystery in my hands, it tears me to the ground.

She holds two thick lemons in front of my face. The tiger creeps elegantly around the ferns and lianas. He steps out of his hiding place and doesn't even look at me

"Out of sheer friendship, he did not kill you. He likes you."

He pisses in the champagne flute

I stand up and wipe the dirt off my pants.

"That's nice of him. I like him too. Especially since he didn "t attack me. It "s as if he had an order. There seems to be a somewhat rougher tone here at all."

She approaches me and removes the arrow from my head.

"Don't talk nonsense. He likes playing with you. And he's nothing against the power of the old forest."

Someone holds out a full champagne flute to me from a velvet seating area. I take the glass and drink it. Far away glittering and booming.

The only reasonable thing seems to me to be challenging the Mistress of the Forest to a dance-off, 8 minutes Boogie Wonderland.

Good idea, I still think, becoming one with the movements, overgrowing in green acidity.

(Thanks, dear Tabla, for the rehearsal.)

On the merry asteroid one drifts lightheartedly through space.
The weather conditions are sometimes a bit rough, but you won't see any of it under the gigantic glass dome, which must have been built on the flying wreckage by some Californian idiot or god himself.

Here everything is fine-grained, mineral, the pulverized rock of the surface fortunately oxidized by a sufficient amount of oxygen. This would at least explain the mint-green colour that has settled over the silvery, subterranean blue.
When you are tired of weightlessness, you let yourself fall into the dry dust, which, because of its density, makes you float like an invisible river over the floor of the chapel. The scoop is that the fine dust grains in the mouth condense to a liquid, sweet and sour lemon sherbet not unlike, of course, supplemented by the strange minerality and an indefinable, ethereal green, so that basically no boredom can arise or, if it does, is quickly driven away with a leap towards the dome roof.

An infinite silence emanates from this pebble, which gently measures the eternity, so that one can overlook one or the other planet rattling by.
In the state of gliding on the thick mineralik pond light years pass quickly...

The sight of the earth is of unmistakable beauty. Whether they will like my traveling souvenir?

Andy Tauer has an idea. With both arms he paints in the air: "Goldfish leaping out of the glass into the open air. He pauses. A servant, inconspicuously tucked away in a long, white cabinet in the corner of the room, emerges silently, activates the giant touch screen in front of Andy Tauer and withdraws again in exactly mirror-inverted motion. The screen welcomes Andy Tauer. He opens his eyes.

"Hello, computer buddy. Good to see you. How are you?"

"I'm fine, Andy. How can I help you?"

"You can't help me, dear friend, you know that. You're just a computer, a callous calculating machine I designed to please me."

"That's right, Andy. I will never match your processing power. I can only be as good as you made me in your infinite resourcefulness. I am a reflection of your intellectual achievements. Conversely, my flaws are due to your flawed thinking. If you were a perfect human being, I would be your equal in my computer existence and possibly stop ..

"All right, all right. Don't strain yourself with your interesting, completely absurd considerations. You're here to work, that's all. Poetry is my responsibility."

"Yes, Andy."

"Soon as I leave you off, I'll just turn you on for Excel or something or a game of solitaire. You're a power hog, nothing more."

"Yes, Andy."

"You think too much, that's your problem. Leave the niceties to Andy. Andy has the ideas. You just execute and that's what makes us unbeatable as a team."

"Yes, Andy."

"What? No more team spirit?"

A hand appears on the screen. Tauer gives high five.

"Yeah! Woohoo, here we go. Watch out, you know those perfume critics who get so immersed in the spray and then go crazy and believe everything they're told. Exactly. That's who I want to be. Completely brain-burned - it is infinitely difficult for me - I describe my fragrance in short, unadorned form. That's how they do it often. Watch this.

High-contrast painting in earthy and skin tones of pastels framed by rich, vivid green. Above all, a sweet and cloudy veil, sparkling, sparkling varnish, blue and red foam, which during the day reveals what the morning holds hidden.

What do you think of that? "

"Turn it over."

"Excuse me?"

"Well, you put the beginning at the end. A sweet and cloudy veil, flashing, sparkling varnish, yellow and red foam, reveals what the morning holds hidden. A painting of contrasts in earthy and skin tones of pastel shades, framed by rich, vivid green.' To sum up: ,effervescent frankincense along with whole fleshy rose, dew and surroundings.'"

"Yeah, that's good. Amazing. Looks like you handled the kernel replacement well. I like it. Then see what you come up with on this one, haha. A perfumer - oh my god - a perfumer who invents stories about scents, hahaha. Any stories, that kind of nonsense, huhuhuhu Okay. So."

He's taking deep breaths.

"One night, Hugo Landbier was awakened by strange noises Nothing could be seen outside. It was thick, impenetrable fog. The sounds came from his garden. His wife was snoring. He went down the stairs and through the door onto the veranda

"Hello, is anybody there? No answer. The flashlight always caught the same steaming swirl before his eyes. That's when he spotted a male in a protective suit. And another one. 'What are they doing on my property? He grabbed one of the guys and shone a light through his Plexiglas window

'What's this all about? Who are they? What are they doing here?'

The man answered calmly and objectively: "Mr. Country Beer, I suppose. On behalf of a Swiss bio-engineering company, we cultivate a rare plant that only thrives in their garden. We have produced the fog ourselves in order to protect the blossom as best as possible from all harmful environmental influences. See for yourself. Here is an offshoot in advanced development. '

Mr Landbier was astonished. Plants thrived so quickly in his garden? He dived deeply with his nasus extensus into one of the flower organs...

Then there is the story of how his wife Rosalie frees Hugo, who is put into a trance by the paralysing plant scent, from the clutches of an occult sect, loses her husband, but pays for her own rescue by being trapped forever in an orphic cloud on her property. I call it Gardener in the Mist."

"Very strong, Andy, but you forgot one thing."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Apart from the fact that your story seems like a hodgepodge of pop-cultural horror film borrowings, the crucial information is missing: the scent. What does it smell like?"

"The smell! The smell! Haha, that's how you know you don't have a clue. Subjective perfume reviewing is not about how something smells - least of all how it smells - but solely about how a subject, a person - a casual perfumer who has come along by chance - can broadcast his egomaniacal fantasies to the world. The fragrance is completely irrelevant. In fact, it's disturbing. It's just an excuse, you know? The less information the better."

"Such people exist, Andy?"

"Do not worry, my dear friend. That's just one of my crazy ideas. I don't know where it all comes from either?"

"Maybe you're programmed too."

"Don't talk nonsense. Everything here is real. Speaking of real, I have something else."

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________br />


"Yes, tell me, young man, but a mouth guard won't help with your eau de cologne, it goes through everything."

"I'm sorry, I just sprayed that on, it's a little intense."

A REWE employee approaches: "In her case it might be appropriate to set the distance markings further apart. You would have to stand over there by the sausage counter."

"Wow, it smells like a gum factory blew apart in here. Who wears candy around here?"

"Wait a minute, after 14 hours, it turns into a whole new direction. It's got beaver horns and stuff."

"Well, I'd have that money returned to me. Did you buy this?"

"No, it was a gift."

"I guess they couldn't smell it anymore either, hahaha!"

All: "Hahahahaha!"

True story.



(Thanks, Gschpusi, for the sample)

Again I stood at the fork in the yellow forest. The one path, the darker one, was in my good memory and I was tempted to walk it again. Alone, I'm a perfume walker (or walker), I also had to get to know the other one. It's much nicer, tidier, right in front of me. A touch of noble orange freshness caresses my senses, urges me to leave. They had even secured the path to the sides with ropes and removed the wild growths.

In the middle of the forest, pepper orange trees smell, reminding me of the earthy warm liquorice haze I heard during my first trail experience. They stand in line and limb, up to the clearing in the distance and drip resinous orange blood. Under them a moss carpet is laid out. I break one of the branches and can't believe my eyes: small plastic parts are worked into the wood. Also the moss, as clean as freshly rolled out and completely odorless. On the way small puddles of orange resin have formed and I have to be careful not to step into them. Now would actually be time for a cigarette break, I think, but apparently I used up the tobacco on my last hike. So I pause and become aware of the already intense sunrays that fall through the not very dense canopy of leaves. The air has now filled with tiny pepper particles that float weightlessly around like glittering dust.

In general, I am driven to the end by a sensual sense of vegetative-vetiver freshness, but I am not able to get ahead without further ado. Due to my inattention I sank too deeply into one of the countless pepper orange puddles. The sultry, peppery air is slowly becoming a bit much. I wriggle out of my stuck shoe and continue on my way with dwindling steps, careful not to put my foot in another orange peel.

The path makes some not noteworthy detours. With the clearing in the distance always in view, I hurry past the endless pepper orange trees, the image of impressive fields of salty-juicy sweet grass perennials in my mind. I accelerate my step and meanwhile hop quite gracefully over all the impassabilities that come my way. My hat's coming off my neck. Anyway, I'm leaving him behind. Someone will need him. Both to the right and left of me, I see nothing but these trees. Accurately, as if pulled on a string. I accelerate again and concentrate on the clearing

I run out of breath after half an hour. The clearing is in the far distance. It seems I haven't made any progress. I lie down exhausted against a tree, feel the thin layer of moss underneath me and close my eyes.

When I wake up, the muffled pepper haze has largely dissipated. It's still light. In the far distance the clearing. I suddenly find myself at a fork in the road. Confused and overjoyed at the same time, I walk towards the dark, overgrown forest entrance. But, I'm clipping. It's just painted on. Behind the huge canvas the pepper orange forest stretches out.

This Lutens Sheldrake, I think in a fit of rage. Chanel episode, I still think