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34 Wigmore Street

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Portal, Resting Place of My Head

Carpets have an odd smell, they are musty, but not dusty. A bit like twine, earthy, but they have a sourness, something citrus, something that catches at the back of the throat. It can be quite pungent, a definite scent and yet quite unfamiliar and not at all ordinary.

I am standing in front of a hanging carpet in the window of carpet shop on the corner of Albemarle Street. Noisy crowded dirty Piccadilly is behind me. I have come to sniff carpets. You can’t smell the Ardabil carpet in the V&A, it is behind glass. Not much smells in the V&A, not as things would have done.
Inside, I enter a cooler decorum, two men and a woman are showing a man a large light green carpet, ‘the finest cashmere silk’ the seller says. He, the buyer, wants to take a picture. ‘That is fine, but you must turn the lights off, you must have them off to take a photo. I will take it for you.’
I move to the other side of the room, partly to be out of the way, I wasn’t here to buy. When I’d arrived, I’d explained myself to the shop attendant, she’d seemed slightly bemused, and not that amused, nor interested. I had asked if I could touch the carpets, as part of the etiquette that comes with the encounter of old expensive objects. And in that moment for filling the most obvious of requests, she’d mechanically said, “of course” and smiled without enthusiasm.
The picture is taken. With the lights off, the room is filled just with daylight, quite dim and the carpet I am examining, cream with a red and brown pattern is quite plane. The windows are mostly obscured by more carpets hanging on display, so when the stoplights are incrementally turned back on, the light judders. I am not prepared for the zing that pops out of the carpet, it illuminates itself, gold, silver, iridescence, strong red, concentric circles, then another proportion of the lights are turned on, and again the intensity is ramped up, the colours hum, they sing bright as daylight, like the key in the ignition, and the confident rumble which follows.

Everything is flat, a vast horizontality. The flatness of the representation mirrors the flatness of the object, the harmonious unity of form and function is characteristic of the art of this period and highly prized by the interested bidders.
If I sat cross-legged in the center next to the larger lamp I would feel engulfed, in a tangled indigo pool, amongst the bobbing pomegranate rind, immersed in the soft colours and the even softer touch of this exceptional object.
The Central yellow medallion is surrounded by a ring of pointed oval shapes, hanging from these ovals is a lamp, one at either end, but unlike the symmetry of the rest of the design, one is larger than the other. It is speculated their asymmetrical takes into account the perspective of the user — when one is sitting at an end looking down to the other, both lamps will appear as the same size. These small irregularities are there to point out that perfection belong’s only to God.
Delicate quivering tendrils snake across the floor. Perfectly balanced, intertwined but not overlapped. Floating hand picked flowers are strewn across the glassy surface of a deep pond. Otherwise, they are constellations, endless in the night’s sky. And these patterns do not stop at the border, they disappear under it, like clouds under a bridge.

To the touch, a Persian carpet is soft like velvet, surprisingly soft, luxurious, light but sturdy, the carpet itself less than a centimeter thick, but vast. Its current state a symbiosis of its brother carpet; once a pair that emblazoned the floor of the Shaykh Sufi al-Din mosque. An earthquake damaged the building and the carpets were sold off to fund repairs, themselves damaged. Ziegler & Co, a Manchester firm picked them up in Iraq and set about the surgery; sacrificing one to mend the other, the border amputated, reconstituted into the survivor. At which point, it was acquired by Messer’s Vincent Robinson & Co, where it was put on display in the Persian Antiquities dealer of No. 34 Wigmore Street.
One day, as it was gloriously laid out below the skylights, a Mr. William Morris, representing the Victoria and Albert Museum came to judge its ‘singular perfection’, ‘logically and consistently beautiful’ and acquired for the establishment in 1893 for £2000.

Sussex Nurseries

The scent of a flower shop is green. Fresh like cucumber. Live matter, severed. Fleshy chlorophyll expelling its scent. A snip snip snip in dampened air, kept moist, in a perpetuated state of hydration. Inhaling you can smell the moisture in the air, as it’s settled on the leaves, a preservative for the expiring all around.

The atomized mist gives the rooms a slightly sub-tropical temperament, the amalgamated perfume is warm in your nostrils. The shop is scented but not of one specific flower, neither is it distinctly floral — it teeters too much between grass and soil and a rubbery smell. Neither unpleasant nor deeply satisfying, it is not distilled into a perfume, not evaporating off the skin of another, that scent which engulfs you, that roots you. For the flowers absorb the water, but it no longer channels through their veins as blood does for use, pumping, growing.

All around there are pots, large and small, ceramic and terracotta, metal and plastic. Billowing displays, exuberantly terraced and splendid in the sunlight, a crystal palace. Bouquets and bulbs bulging, crocuses just about spurting out of their soil, not get blooming. And a deep purple iris, with its three petals, arched like tongues baring themselves to the sky, satiny soft as you run your finger down the center of its petal.


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