Absinthe,
Tales of Liquid Alchemy
by Daphne Carpenter
Life is shrouded in mystery. I particularly recall the witchy days I lived that autumn. It all started in a two-story building, in my whitewashed apartment that had a nice view of the street. It was there that a magic potion would reveal to me a moment I’d live two years later.
At the time, my mind was occupied with thoughts of tinctures, potions, mixtures, herbal remedies. I read up on spells and medicines, on astral travel and on body language. I tried to read people’s thoughts. Eschewing company in favor of solitude, I was confident and focused, and I created. It was in this abode that I would fall under the spell of absinthe for the first time.
On a Sunday afternoon I sat in my bamboo chair on the patio, feeling the soft wind on my skin. Floating leaves would turn from green to gold to fire-red. They’d detach from the trees and glide through the sky, leaving behind some kind of pollen that only I could see. Suddenly a gust of wind burst into my apartment from where I was sitting. The kitchen cupboards flew open. Stars of anise were blown across the room. Fennel seeds were sent into a whirlwind!
When I could finally stand up to survey the damage, I noticed that the kitchen and the rest of the house were a lot cooler. As I cleaned up, I found a little sachet of herbs that had fallen onto the floor. It was the Artemisia absinthium (wormwood) that I had bought a week before, when I decided to make a drink—the perfect aperitif—that would lend itself to my creativity and be as faithful as a lover. Absinthe.
The drink had elicited a sinister interest in me since my travels in Europe, during crawls through cavernous Czech bars. But I had only taken small sips of it then, and was always left wondering what it was about this concoction that could open up to oceans of imagination, yet drive so many 19th century artists to the brink of insanity. With a strange and wonderful yearning, I wanted to come to know this madness. And now the main ingredients had been stirred into a frenzy in my kitchen.
The scent of myrrh floated up from the apartment below. Two interesting young women had moved in downstairs a week before, and since then, my living room was permeated with the exotic scent of eastern incense. I thought to invite the girls to make the drink with me.
I went downstairs and knocked on their door. Natasha was the first to appear. She was wearing a brick-colored, floor length skirt with gold trimmings. She smelled like lavender oil from five feet away, and was smiling. She was 25 years old, two years younger than I.
“Uh, hi, I live upstairs, and, well, do you know what absinthe is, because I’ve been planning to make it, and the strangest thing just happened…”
Before I could finish my sentence, Natasha’s large glowing blue eyes lit up and swirled like kaleidoscopes. She took me by the arm and led me enthusiastically into her kitchen. “Do I know what absinthe is?” she asked with a devilish grin.
She opened the freezer and pushed aside some packages of frozen blueberries and mangos, then shoved away a box of rainbow popsicles. She swiftly removed a frosty, glowing green bottle that had five words inscribed into it in a fancy script: Absinthe, aux plants de France.
Natasha and Sonia accepted my invitation excitedly, then 10 minutes later the three of us were circling around my kitchen like fairies, measuring out the ingredients. We had lit dozens of small candles and the house had transformed into a forest of shadows.
Natasha placed her own frothy bottle of absinthe down onto the table, then three crystal glasses which she arranged in a triangular shape next to a small metal strainer. Then she pulled out a box of sugar cubes.
She filled the first glass with about an ounce of absinthe, then put a sugar cube on the strainer along the rim of the glass. She poured cold water over the sugar cube, which melted it down to half its size and caused the drink to become cloudy. She used the spoon to dip what was left of the sugar cube into the mixture, and then placed it back onto the strainer above the glass.
Do you want it on fire, she asked?
Yes.
With a match, she ignited the absinthe-soaked sugar cube, and the dark room lit up like a volcanic eruption.
Drink please, she said.
I put my mouth to the glass and took the first drink. A warm sensation spread through my body like lava oozing from my core. Three drinks later, I found myself struggling to find a balance between my inner visions and my outer world. From my couch, some part of me traveled to a large, damp and musty chamber room, where I had been projected into a giant medieval game of…chess?
Trapped in the middle of a black-and-white checkered floor, giant chess pieces—odd creatures with stern expressions etched forever into their faces—began to maneuver themselves around me in definitive movements. Overcome with a fear-stricken paralysis, I could feel the fierce air of their movements as they passed me. They murmured amongst themselves incomprehensibly in peculiar tonal hums that vibrated and fluctuated in volume. When I could finally run, I escaped to the back of the building. I looked up and saw hovering grey clouds—then suddenly, a relentless downpour.
I woke up. Lulled by such an abstract dream, I peeled myself up from the soft couch and saw that Natasha and Sonia were long gone.
I wouldn’t encounter the beverage again until two years later in Tijuana, after a trip along the Maya Belt of the Yucatán. From gorgeous blooming jungles in the El Petén Highlands of Guatemala, and from atop supernatural pyramids, I was now in a small cement room in the City of Desolation, with my artesano friends, Dalia and Javier.
Dalia and I sat staring out the window at these vaporous rain clouds forming in the sky. “That one looks like my ex-boyfriend,” she said, laughing. Then we heard a man say, “Todo lo que dice la biblia es la verdad.” Everything the bible says is true. At that moment, my friend stood up and said, “I think it’s time for some absinthe.” She opened her bag and grabbed the bottle we had bought earlier from the liquor store, and poured us each a glass—undiluted, with no sugar.
By drink three, we were way happier, things got clumsy, and I knocked over the bottle, which amazingly didn’t break. I picked it up from the black-and-white-checkered floor. Then I started to feel kind of déjà vu-ish.
I drank another glass. I glanced over at Javier in the corner, who was sipping from his glass with his right hand, and pushing a knight back and forth across a chessboard with his left. Javier was strategizing, talking to himself, mumbling indecipherably, as if annoyed by the challenge from an invisible opponent.
It was then that I realized how painters and artists might spiral downward with this stuff. Can this alchemical combination of elements somehow manifest abstract dreams into reality? It’s like our eyes can record what we’ve seen before—in another state of awareness—and then project forth these ideas or concepts and develop them into life with a paintbrush of some sort.
I smiled at the conceivable thought of invisible magical realms. A few minutes later, I said to Dalia, “When we get to LA, let’s make some love potions.” She smiled, nodding her head in agreement. And just then, my anticipated deluge of rain? Of course, it burst forth from the sky where we marveled at it from the window.Daphne can be reached at daph.occupylamedia@gmail.com and at www.paintzflwrs.blogspot.com.
