Art & Association

She was a January girl. She never let on how insane it was in that tiny kinda scary house by the woods, by the woods, by the woods.
I noticed this morning, as I awoke to a rainy, chilly day and got dressed, that there are songs I have subconsciously associated with certain scents I wear regularly. For instance, on this dark wet day I reached, after a moment’s deliberation, for my bottle of CB I Hate Perfume’s Black March. As I did, I found myself humming “Black Dove (January)” by Tori Amos. This is not the first or second time I have found myself doing this. This is roughly the fifth time I have subconsciously associated “Black Dove” with Black March. 
”But I have to get to Texas.”
I said, “I have to get to Texas, and I'll give away my blue, blue dress.”

While I suppose that “Black March” and “Black Dove” share a similar title and that could be the association, this always comes up in conjunction with environment and mood. Something about the song, the time, the place, the scent all conjures a particularly mood or theme or feeling which clearly spawns from the combination of the art of scent, word, and song. I feel both defiant and mournful; resigned to and resolutely at odds with a world that disappoints me when I want to love it and believe it better than it is. 
The trouble with wanting to change the world is that is necessitates holding yourself apart from it. When I get up in the morning and the world is wet and green and wild and full of life, and I feel a sadness that we haven’t done better by it, from a societal perspective or an environmental perspective, I put my fight face on. And I feel a little crazy. But seeing the world as it is simultaneously with the world as it could and should be, requires a duality of hope and disappointment. Honey and vinegar. Clear eyed sanity and crazy eyed madness. And a scent that is both weird in the grand spectrum of perfumery by smelling like dirt and earth and living things while at the same time smelling more naturally occurring and of the real world than most perfume could to be.
Black-dove, you don't need a space ship.
They don't know you've already lived on the other side of the galaxy.

To read my full review of "Black March," go here.