Delhi Astier de Villatte

in the mid-nineties, as a 16-year-old in the orientshop,
a small hidden store in my hometown.
sprinkled with ethereal sounds in the esoteric-looking interior.
between batiked flared pants, fisherman's shirts made of indian linen,
hand-carved wooden caskets decorated with oriental arabesques,
clay ocarinas and darbukas covered with natural skin,
hand-knotted hippi necklaces, consisting of colorful stones, strung on a leather band
and over everything was the scent of nag champa incense sticks,
in the blue and white box with the red inscription.
nag champa, the epitome of spiritual aura and meditative ambience
and at the same time an alibi scent to hide the other resinous fragrances in my children's room
to hide from my parents.
oh how i lived, immortal in my youth, when the days were still mighty
and the endless hours lay before you,
when every minute was still full of life and opened its arms to plunge
to plunge into their embrace.
i remember
of 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 was never satisfied,
but only grew more eager with every newly discovered morsel.
sleepwalking between books, poetry, philosophy,
between intoxication and meditation, ecstatic shaman drumming, guitar and piano.
nights spent awake, lurking for the moments of insight,
in the fight against sleep, because it robbed conscious life time.
and what is it today?
little more than a fragrance to those who forget time and are forgotten by time,
but to those still searching, the spirit of a memory
of an all-consuming hunger
and the question of what satisfied it over the years -
or did you just forget your appetite over the years?
accustomed to the passing of the days, accustomed to hunger
and understood emaciation as satiety?

but then every now and then, beneath the trickling sands of time,
a piece of ember from old times, which the sand covered and guarded,
one reaches for the embers of the past
and with the breath of memory you rekindle it into a new flame.

for me, delhi is an emotional reminiscence of the times of my early youth, which i
don't like to dissect olfactorily too much.
the focus is on the nag champa of the incense sticks of the time, the impression of which
i don't want to interpret it any other way for the sake of nostalgia.
all the other notes from the pyramid are perceptible, they ensnare
and support the main note.
but floyd has already described this perfectly in his wonderful review
and i have nothing more to add :)