Ambergris

The Fixative, The Mandatory Oblation, The Basenote For Beauty

Before stepping into the river of perfume take a moment to just consider the word. Perfume. Per. Fume. It is a Latin phrase 'per fumen' meaning 'through or by way of the smoke." And so this indicates that something was burned to deliver and impress a scent. Often this means some kind of fragrant plant - thyme, marjoram, rosemary, sage, storax, balsam, chamomile and the like. And of course oils like olive or almond or sesame were also burned for the same reason. For religious ritual or for aesthetic ritual. Perhaps the two, beauty and spirit, aren't different.

In the language of perfume the vegetal holds a strong seat - floral, sweet, woody, grassy, fruity, citrus, vanilla. Or even smoky or tobacco. There are many others, of course, but these are all what are called “forward scents” or “top notes.”

But base notes in perfume are more mysterious, funkier, rotted, subterranean, animal and are used as scent fixatives. Civet. Leather. Ambergris. Those are just three.

While leather is widely available civet and ambergris are not. They are very rare and expensive and have been replaced by modern chemistry. A hydroxy here, an aldehyde there, with a twist of alkaloids and a splash of amberein and suddenly you have a reasonable facsimile that will, as they say, get the job done. But the modern synthetic equivalent isn't the same. "Stole a faint stream of perfume." That is the way that Herman Melville described the scent of ambergris in the famed novel Moby Dick.

What is ambergris? For thousands of years the material has been sought and stumbled upon, has been collected in its clods of gray and black, washed up and well salted on the shores and implemented into perfuming. Though sometimes for medicine and sometimes as an aphrodisiac. All over the Mediterranean, the European Atlantic coast, East Africa and into South East Asia.

A few years ago a group of thirty-five fisherman in the Gulf of Aden in Yemen found a carcass of a sperm whale and they towed the body to shore and they set upon it -looking. If you didn't know Yemen is a nation wracked by war and poverty. The UN estimates that 80% of the population needs assistance with food and with protection and 70% of the districts in the nation were at risk of famine.

"As soon as we got close to it, there was this strong smell, and we had the feeling that this whale had something," the fisherman said. "We decided to hook the whale in, take it to the shore and to cut into it to see what was inside its belly. And yes, it was ambergris. The smell wasn't very nice but it was worth lots of money."

This wasn't the kind of ambergris that has floated in salt water for months or years which is even more prized. This was still fresh. But that lump of fresh ambergris, that ancient ripe wax, sold for $1.5 million. Those fishermen and all their families and all their villages have been suddenly and dramatically lifted out of poverty. That was the last beautiful gift of that good whale. A life changing wealth for those fisherman and that untold number of people might have a touch of this ancient kind of perfuming devotion. A gift for the rich, to be sure, and a gift to the poor. Such is the generosity of the world even in these times.

And what is this mysterious ambergris? The material was certainly known in the proverbial “days of yore,” but the source was veiled for all of antiquity. Whalers of the 19th century finally discovered that ambergris came from deep in the bowels of the sperm whale. While the mechanism is not totally clear, what is known is that sperm whales eat schools of cephalopods, such as squid and cuttlefish, which have beaks and other body parts that cannot be digested. Most of the time, the whales vomit out these parts. But on rare occasions, the parts move through the intestines of a whale and gather and collect in corners and crevices. Cetacean biologists think that whales produce ambergris, this waxy coating, in these situations to smooth the passage of these hard objects and protect their internal organs. The substance is rare, however, and has only been found in less than five percent of sperm whale carcasses.

Perfume. By way of the smoke. For religious ritual or for aesthetic ritual. Perhaps the two, beauty and spirit, aren't different. Somehow for thousands of years all around the northern hemisphere the very notion of beauty had in its base notes a kinship with the animal world. Anchored there. Stitched in. Almost as if in one incarnation of ritual was a kind of mandatory oblation in the direction of the domain of the feather-winged ones, the furred ones, the swimming ones.

Maybe it is still that way. Maybe ambergris or civet isn't the only gateway. I'm sure it isn't. My little tallow born venture, Primal Derma, is, with any fortune, a kind of remembering of the relationship between the living world, beauty and endings. But poke around your home and you might be struck at how much of the beauty and spirit wealth you are fed by and indebted to is of animal origin. Maybe look for this trined relationship in your corner of the world and report back. How much poetry trades in the pulsing animal world to remind of us of the presence of this ripple in our midst that so easily gets repelled towards the margin. On the tongue or on the skin, the animal is a basenote for beauty - bring it in.