Delhi Astier de Villatte

in the mid-nineties, at 16 years old in an oriental shop,
a small hidden store in my hometown.
Surrounded by ethereal sounds in an esoterically appealing interior.
Among batik bell-bottoms, fisherman shirts made of Indian linen,
hand-carved wooden boxes adorned with oriental arabesques,
clay ocarinas and darbukas covered with natural skin,
hand-knotted hippie necklaces made of colorful stones strung on a leather cord
and above all lingered the scent of Nag Champa incense sticks,
which came in the blue-and-white box with the red lettering.
Nag Champa, the epitome of spiritual aura and meditative ambiance
and at the same time an alibi scent to hide the other resinous fragrances in my childhood room
from my parents.
Oh how I lived, immortal in my youth, when the days were still powerful
and the endless hours lay before me,
when every minute was still full of life and opened its arms to
dive into their embrace.
I remember
psychedelic sounds under a crystalline sky,
the nights subjected to an insatiable search,
the drive to want to go to every end,
a hunger for knowledge and poetry that never satisfied,
but only grew more eager with every newly discovered morsel.
Sleepwalking between books, poetry, philosophy,
between intoxication and meditation, ecstatic shamanic drumming, guitar and piano.
Sleepless nights, lurking for moments of realization,
in the fight against sleep, as it robbed conscious life time.
And what is it today?
To the time-forgetting and time-forgotten, hardly more than a scent,
yet to the still-seeking, the spirit of a memory
of an all-consuming hunger
and the question of what satisfied it over the years -
or did one simply forget the appetite with the years?
Accustomed to the flow of days, accustomed to the hunger
and understood the wasting away as satisfaction?

Yet now and then, beneath the trickling sand of time,
one finds a piece of ember from old times, covered and guarded by the sand,
one reaches for the embers of the past
and with the breath of memory, one ignites them into a new flame.

Delhi is for me an emotional reminiscence of the times of my early youth, which I
prefer not to dissect too much olfactorily.
At the center stands the Nag Champa of those incense sticks, whose impression
I prefer not to interpret differently in favor of nostalgia.
All other notes from the pyramid are perceptible, they entwine
and support the main note.
But Floyd has already described this perfectly in his wonderful review
and I have nothing more to add :)