L'orpheline Serge Lutens

Glacial. Incense is usually associated with warmth and comfort but in L'orpheline the incense does not cast its usual brilliant glow and the scent feels stark and cold, almost grim. If I could give it a colour, I would say it's steel. The musk is no heated up primitive musk, it is a naked musk, stripped of any emotions and not derived from anything biological. It feels sterile...spiritless.

Two notes. Musk and incense. Notes that represent or play a role in passion and celebration. Here, creating such a heavy smog of melancholy, such strangeness, such emptiness...all alone in a bleak land, the sun and moon having disappeared forever, the stars snuffed out like in W.H. Auden's poem.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. 

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

L'orpheline is a stray waif, so very distant from the opulent orientals from the Serge Lutens line. Strange. Apathetic. Detached.