"Whatever it was, it came out of the trees..."
--Bob Dylan
Wit loves a woody perfume, and though most save them for Fall when the bonfires burn, here on the Staircase the flames never smolder and die. And anyway, we like something complex and difficult in the high heart of summer, like the Heidegger books we used to bring to the Jersey Shore just to freak the girls from the Springsteen songs the fuck out.
This might not be true for Sandy and Mary and Rosemary, but the orange and black of October are present for us in July, and we easily call up August's gold and blue in the dank rain of December. Heat and light are always at home wherever we are, just as they are constantly present in the heart of my great grandmother's antique wedding ring, though the old lady herself has since slipped past the silver and the glass, past the quicksand and the clay.
Michel Roudnitska's Bois de Paradis for Parfums Del Rae has a live core of amber that emanates from a thicket of brambles like the life of the footmen and cooks and courtiers in the stilled kingdom of the Sleeping Beauty, who though motionless, if you touched them their blood and beating hearts still kept them warm.
Uncorking this gorgeous, generous, motherfucking magnificent clear green potion of berries and amber and tough black wood does something similar to time, like the hypothetical forest clearing that makes way for Being in Heidegger's Sein et Zeit, or like all the things seen with my own eyes in the Michigan woods during the cryptozoologically-mad nineteen seventies that I could now never explain or account for even if I wanted to. And besides you wouldn't believe me anyway.
Unless, of course, you were maybe under the sway of some divine, painfully wonderful intoxicant, like the hippie-poster ray of rainbow light that penetrates the center of the darkest North American forest on earth (the hundred acre Michigan wood where I was told to go outside and play as a child) like a beam of clear-eyed memory landing on the hairy, reeking, dingle-berry encrusted figure of Sasquatch taking an upright piss into the pubic-hair tumble of wild blackberries just like a redneck out past the lights of the carnival who was way high on Coors.
See, I knew you wouldn't believe me.


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