odourofdevonviolet.com
The Scent That Captures That "1930s Moment"!
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or to the various credited sources © 2014
LIII
O flirtatious, loquacious, vivacious DEVON VIOLET,
Quite salacious and licentious, lascivious but never lewd,
Too shrewd to be crude or gauche, this subtly scented flighty
Socialite of fragrances, throwing off mystifying whiffs
And terpsichorean pheromones, perfumed passé dobles,
Pirouettes for the nose, imperceptible strobes of invisible
Violet vibrations bouncing together with such badinage,
Virtuoso of tones, olfactory colours only visible to those
Occultists and magical thaumaturgists who observe in one
Another the clairvoyant’s violet aura –and clairfragrance
Clinging to their silver-surmounted heads; whose third eyes
Sculpt thought-forms from the odour of DEVON VIOLET:
Quaint little pottery bottles, or chic columnvular vessels
Of art-deco cut-glass, seemingly three-dimensional,
Almost tangible; the choicest spices for exponents
Of the Sixth Scent: such as white-caped, burnouse-hooded
Medium Annie Besant (once described by Edmund Russell
As “the little grey woman” he encountered crouched by
Madame Blavatsky’s chair-arm in her cartomantic parlour);
Alexandra David-Néel, that intrepid tulpa-spotter;
Walter Old, shrouded in mystique through his alter-ego,
‘Sepharial’; Marie, Duchess de Pomar of Palais Tiranty,
Who claimed to communicate with the spirit of Mary Stuart,
Queen of Scots, in a special chapel filled with “Mary relics”;
Spiritualist Violet Tweedale, prolific author, whose final
Contribution to spiritual literature, The Cosmic Christ,
Was published on the cusp of the psychic-damping Thirties’
Platinum dawn of a back-to-basics, bread-and-butter age
Signatured with bakelite hallmarks translating as
The apparent triumph of materialism over heart and spirit
(Ironically at the compass-point of capitalism’s near-collapse
With the rise of unemployment and underconsumption
In the wake of the Wall Street Crash –the world’s first Market
Quake which threatened then to consume consumerism…
LIV
Last, but by no means the weakest link –in fact, by far the strongest:
A veritable “giantess” of transmigration– in impromptu
Puffs of “inextinguishable cigarettes”, Russian tobacco
Self-rolled with an origamist’s finesse: white-eyed Madame
Blavatsky, neé Helena Petrovna of the aristocratic
Dolgorukaya dynasty of Novgorod, on the Volga,
Descended from Carolingian knights of the Baltic-German
Mecklenburg line; broad head ‘surmounted with silver’,
Smudges of thick curls giving her countenance the effect
Of one of her spirit-portraits palm-rubbed with plumbago
Through a sheet of paper, the self-described “hippopotamus
Of a woman” riddled with kidney stones and lumbago,
To whom anything of purely temporal import was simple
“Flapdoodle”; depicted by her theosophical pen-pal,
Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (uncanny surname: almost an
Anagram of ‘Occult’), his affectionately abbreviated
‘H.P.B’, “…in her shabby wrapper… smoking cigarettes,
Her huge head with crinkled brown hair bent over the page
She was writing on… a look of introverted thought in her
Light-blue eyes…”; inveterate tester of selected friends,
Blavatsky had a dragon’s tongue which “could breathe enough…
Fire to… singe the green of Holland Park”, or char the stucco
Of Landsdowne Road, and plenty more residences besides;
Could cause conflagrations across her clairaudiences
Sparked to raptures at her incredible ability to magic
Up crisp bank notes from deep within her tobacco basket;
Producer of the transcript, The Secret Doctrine, dictated
To her through automatic writing in Seraphic purple
Prose by supreme Tibetan adepts (she, their secretary)…
LV
For aren’t all writers, after all, really mediums, adepts,
Amanuenses of posthumous insights and enlightenments
Of passed-over discarnate souls –poets especially so…?
Hence the etymology of the mystifying term, ‘inspiration’,
From the Latin inspiratio, to breathe something into something:
The breath of God, of Yahweh, of spirit; to inspirit…? For where
Does it all come from, this inspiration, these silver words and
Ideas, this dark manna of imagination, this burdonesome
Ambrosia of the sublimated mind, sweet-bitter as black treacle,
Treacherous to the nerves as temporarily numbing absinthe,
And these green-fairy reflections of things not lived –unless
Delivered up from unconscious memories of past lives, us,
Reincarnated, going some way to explaining déjà vu, déjà vu)…