Perfume Epilogue One: Safran Troublant, Black Cashmere and Pleasure in a Time of War

My story about Paul Klee and Walter Benjamin is in part a story about the meaning of pleasure in wartime on the homefront. I’ve been mulling over this subject for a while now, because so many of the books, films, and paintings I love were created in the shadow of war, even when they don’t speak of it. The champagne silliness of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, for example, seems light years away from the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, yet they happened in the same historical moment. Isolationist and economically depressed, America studiously ignored Europe’s troubles and went to the movies. Looking back, Astaire and Rogers seem to be dancing lightly on the edge of a precipice, their sparkling grace both an escape and a charm against what was to come.

As the War on Terror* wears on—a very strange war that is both ghostly and all too real—writing about pleasure has become both a more urgent and a far more obscure project. It’s one thing to look back over the decades and think about how others dealt with the everyday-yet-far-away presence of war on the homefront. It’s another thing entirely to write about a historical moment while still living through it. Still, in the same way that Astaire and Rogers couldn’t help but dance above war’s darkness, anything I write here about pleasure will also be about pleasure in wartime.

May it cease to be so.

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I’ve been thinking about all this—pleasure and war and dancing and darkness—as I thought about the perfumes for this epilogue to the story of Benjamin and Klee: L’Artisan’s Safran Troublant, and Donna Karan’s Black Cashmere. The first is warm, gentle, and transparent—a dusty rose-gold cloud floating over a warm golden background. The second, aptly named, is about spices emerging and then receding back into a cloak of darkness. Can you guess which is for Klee and which is for Benjamin?

Safran Troublant opens with a pure note of saffron. Tangy, a bit dry, almost bitter, it is quickly warmed and sweetened, first by a touch of rose, and then by the sheer vanilla-sandalwood base. The whole construction never quite touches the ground. Some reviewers have called Safran Troublant too fleeting. Others have wished it were somehow more. I understand both of these complaints, but the more I wear this perfume the more I appreciate its evanescent quality. It’s true that the initial spice and warmth subside after a few hours, yet when I wear it in the evening I can still smell traces of saffron, sandalwood and vanilla on my skin in the morning. Like many of perfumer Olivia Giacobetti’s creations, Safran Troublant has the complexity and clarity of a water color painting, and I have fallen in love with its luminous just-sweet-enoughness.

In her gorgeous review of Black Cashmere, Victoria of Bois de Jasmin speaks of an initial “resinous” accord so dark that it is almost impenetrable. Soon, however, “jewel-like” spices begin to emerge:

…just like when eyes begin to identify shapes of objects in the dark room, the olfactory veil begins to slip. At first, cardamom dispels the darkness with its shimmer. Then, the spice notes begin to undulate out of the balsamic richness more rapidly, revealing a lacy pattern of cinnamon and clove.

Victoria—whose nose is much better than mine—goes on to note that as the spices emerge, the initial resinous notes give way to a dry incense whose “pine-like brightness” provides a foil to the spice and smoothes the transition to the perfume’s gorgeous woody base until we are left with “glowing cinders of incense in the heart. While darkness still pervades the composition, it has the quality of tender, yet passionate embrace.”

When I first tried Black Cashmere, Victoria’s images leapt immediately to mind and I have never been able to think of the perfume any other way. Her review perfectly captures Black Cashmere’s movement from impenetrable darkness, to darkness lit by the gleam of jewels, to a gentler darkness, warmed by embers still glowing under a soft layer of ash.

For me, Safran Troublant’s transparence recalls Klee’s floating angel and the artist’s faith in playfulness, while Black Cashmere recalls the flashing gems of Benjamin’s lyricism beautiful even in his darkest hours. (I also can’t help but think that any of the tough, brilliant women upon whom Benjamin greatly depended, including Dora Kellner, Asja Lacis, Charlotte Wolff, Hannah Arendt and Gisele Freund among others, could have worn and enjoyed Black Cashmere.) But it is the way these two perfumes share the note of saffron that beings to mind the streak of joy the two men shared—so apparent in Klee, yet also present in Benjamin if one looks at his work with attention.

Black Cashmere’s saffron is not immediately apparent. In fact, it is so surrounded by the spicy heat of cardamom, clove and cinnamon that if I hadn’t worn it side by side with Safran Troublant in preparation for writing this essay I wouldn’t have believed I could smell it at all. But, sniffing first one wrist and then the other, there it was—dusty, tangy, dry, slightly medicinal, yet somehow irresistible.

Saffron, the stamens of the deep purple crocus sativa, is harvested painstakingly by hand. It is famed for its flavor, its fragrance, and the brilliant color it imparts to all it touches (Buddhist monk robes are saffron orange). It has long been believed to have healing properties and is used homeopathically to reduce swelling and inflammation, strengthen the digestion and reduce fatigue and anxiety by bolstering the heart and nervous system. Most endearingly, it is also reputed to induce laughter. The word joy recurs in almost every description of saffron I have read.

Yet saffron also beings me back to the darkness of my country’s
seemingly endless war, and our current leadership’s obsession with
the oil-rich, predominantly Muslim Middle East. Middle Eastern cuisine is redolent with saffron’s fragrance and flavor. The world map of saffron cultivation on wikipedia reveals a golden ring embracing Iraq and Afghanistan with some of the heaviest production in Iran and the troubled region of Kashmir. (With further production throughout India, China and—this surprised me—the United States itself.)

I had been fascinated, but puzzled by saffron for some time—it inevitably tasted dry and dusty to me, or had very little flavor at all—when I ordered some Iranian Sargol saffron after reading Michelle Krell Kydd’s description of its special qualities on her wonderful blog, Glass, Petal, Smoke. On the day it arrived, I could smell it through three layers of plastic packaging and the cardboard box it came in as I carried it from the mailbox to the kitchen. Here at last was saffron the made all the worshipful prose make sense.

And here, too, was a small but powerful pleasure: A scent to strengthen the heart and banish fear. A flavor in my mouth to link me, in some small way, to a people for whom war is much, much, closer.

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Qahwa (Kashmiri Spiced Green Tea)

I came across several recipes for Qahwa (or Kahvi, or Khava depending on who’s doing the transliterating) in my research on saffron production and was struck by the way the flavors of cardamom and cinnamon surrounded the saffron in much the same way they do in Black Cashmere. I supposed one could make a tea that approximates the perfume more closely by using a resinous black tea instead of a green one, but I haven’t tried it yet.

I have read that it is traditional to ovedose the brew with sugar—one recipe I found called for two teaspoons per cup. However, it is also traditional to boil the heck out of the tea in a samovar (creating a more bitter brew) and to make the result a primary sustenance of one’s day. I prefer to steep my tea gently and sweeten it with a touch of honey.

5 cups water

1 tsp. loose green tea, preferably a malty or roasted green tea (no Jasmine, please)

2-3 green cardamom pods

one cinnamon stick

1 tbsp. ground or powdered almonds

5-6 saffron threads

Honey

Boil water with cardamom, cinnamon and almonds until fragrant. (Some recipes add the almonds at the end, by placing them in the cup just before pouring.) Add tea and crushed saffron. Steep until brewed. Strain and sweeten to taste. You may add the spices back into the strained tea if you like. The almonds add a richness that substitutes for milk.

*That phrase—“war on terror” –will never stop astounding me. The whole rhetoric propelling this war is straight out of Orwell, beyond parody. And if it isn’t doublespeak we are truly lost, for a literal war on terror is surely both endless and self-perpetuating.

Beginnings: Sweet Life on Ash Wednesday

It’s a strange thing to begin a blog about life’s pleasures on the day after Fat Tuesday, a day when the carnival ends and ancient rites of mortification and humility spring to life. Strangers, their foreheads marked by dark crosses of ash, pass me in the street, like a warning, or a rebuke. But I’ve been challenged by my dear friend over on A Cynic’s Lent to bypass perfectionism (if not mortification) and go directly to the page, and I can’t say no. So I’m offering you one of the most surprising instances of sweetness rising from catastrophe I’ve ever stumbled across, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus.

Long before I saw Klee’s angel, I was sure I knew what he looked like. I based my dream vision on the arresting description of Angelus by German philosopher, literary critic, flâneur, Jew, contrarian, experimental drug user, secular mystic and wonderfully lyrical writer, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was living in war-ravaged Berlin when he purchased Klee’s painting in 1921, for the equivalent of about thirty dollars. It is clear that it gave him great pleasure. He took it with him on his many moves, and it often surfaced in his works. It was in 1939, in Paris, that Benjamin wrote his Theses on the Philosophy of History. He had already survived one war. Now, with the Germans on their way, and signs of the coming horror all around him, previously unimaginable history was repeating itself. Staring at the painting on his wall, he saw:

…an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Reading this passage, one of the most cited of his surviving work, I saw the storm, and the wreckage, and that unbearable wind. And I saw the angel: terribly strong—strong enough to fly against a wind from Paradise—but rendered impotent in the face of unending catastrophe. He can do nothing but bear witness. He cannot even turn away.

I imagined him heavy, carven and allegorical, like an engraving by Durer. I saw his face, noble and Roman, with a furrowed brow. And I saw his eyes, wide and clear, but heavy-lidded and ringed with pain.

Obviously, I knew nothing of Paul Klee, who was one of the least sad artists to have walked this earth, and whose aesthetic is about as far away from Durer as it is possible to get. I should have known I was wildly off the mark when I read Donald Barthelme’s wonderful short story about Klee’s service in the World War I Imperial German army, during which he painted numbers on planes and later escorted them from base to base. In the story, Klee returns to the train where his planes are stored after a good lunch, only to find that one of them is missing. He is perturbed, but entranced by the shapes the now-empty canvas and ropes used to cover the plane make, and sits down to sketch them for awhile. Later, he solves his problem by “diddling the manifest,” to change the delivery charge from three planes to two, using his artist’s skills which are “not unlike a forger’s.” Then he tramps off to find a good chocolate shop. The secret police watching him in the story are relieved they will not have to explain the missing airplane and applaud his ingenuity. After successfully handing over the remaining two planes, Barthelme’s Klee goes on his nonchalant way:

The drawing I did of the collapsed canvas and ropes is really very good. I eat a piece of chocolate. I am sorry about the lost aircraft but not overmuch. The war is temporary. But drawings and chocolate go on forever.

Yet somehow, my readerly image remained stubbornly intact. Finally, while preparing to teach Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, I looked up Angelus Novus (Kushner quotes the Benjamin passage) to show the painting to my students.

We were shocked. This? This curly-headed, wide eyed, big-eared, open–mouthed, child’s version of an angel was the Great Angel of History? Where is the storm? And couldn’t his wings—his short, stubby wings—be raised in greeting as much as blown back away from his curious body? This angel was not grave, not stern, not weighted down by tragedy. He was tender, gentle, and really…rather sweet.

Klee painted Angelus Novus in 1920, a mere two years after returning from the war to find his colleagues dead and dispersed. The same year, he left to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar. He continued to make his vibrant, inventive, utterly original images throughout the rest of a life that included his dismissal from the Bauhaus and return to Switzerland in 1933 after his work was labeled degenerate by the Nazi’s, and five years of the painful wasting disease that took his life at the age of 60. Klee died in 1940, the same year in which Benjamin committed suicide on the Spanish border, during his attempt to flee Nazi-occupied France.

I hope that in the years before Benjamin’s terrible and accurate vision, the Angelus was a solace to him, proof that at least one artist in Europe was still filled with joy and playfulness and faith in the light touch that allows one to float, transparent and gentle in the air, even in the midst of history’s endless storm.

Sources and Additional Links

Donald Barthelme’s story, "Engineer-Private Paul Klee Misplaces An Aircraft Between Milbertshofen And Cambrai, March 1916," was originally published in The New Yorker, April 3, 1971. It can be found in several editions of his collected stories.

The passage from Benjamin is drawn from the 1988 edition of Illuminations, the collection of Benjamin’s writings edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn and published by Shocken Books (an imprint of Random House) in New York.

To see a wonderfully playful recasting of the Angelus as Benjamin himself, go here.
For a lovely review by Marshall Berman of two biographies of Benjamin go here.