On Smoking

So, I think of picking up smoking now that it's mainstream aesthetically so passé in the places, where I tend to live. I keep experiencing these poignant fits of longing as a person, who has never even experimented with cigarettes. Well, when I was about 11 we cut small pipes of dried wild chervil, – same ones we used in fresh form to shoot rowan berries at each other – and stuffed them with assorted dry plants and their unknown seeds. We then tried to light the other end of the straw-coloured and taupe packages to no marked avail.

At school I point-blank refused the cigarettes that were offered to me during breaks. They were an informal sign of non-questioning consensus and a formal application to enter the lower secondary school social hierarchy. At the same time I actually admired – and I still do – the lithe, dreamy figures of 1920s cigarette advertisements, pipe-smoking men (yes, gendered) with or without suits and both the appearance and smell of good cigars; or what I only imagine is a good cigar. Pipe-smoking men preferably with a beard, cigar-smoking men preferably with only a modest beard at most, cigarette-smoking women, and all who weren't a rock 'n roll icons, with tall cigarette holders. It's still pretty much the same.

The aesthetic appeal of never having partaken in a majority vice is powerful. Whether this aesthetic power is more delimited or enhanced by my continuing abstinence, I don't know. Yeah, and cigarettes cost money (to fend myself off). Sexually speaking they are an ambivalent product: especially if used at all extensively they generate new flavours, odours  and reactions all around the human body, yet the sophisticated or rebel imageries conveyed by smoking can be quite alluring. And then there's the health-side, which I'm not that concerned by. Now that bar and public smoking bans are being enforced all around Europe and North America, I still think that it should've been up to businesses and direct democracy to decide. Outdoor sites are largely well ventilated – as far as ventilation is possible on this planet or our metropoleis – and people are quite capable of voting with their feet in choosing a smoking or non-smoking milieu. The employees of any given pub were aware of smoke when they accepted the job. Even as a non-smoker myself, I had learned that the bitter smell of chain smoking added something essential to a pub feeling. The stench of old smoke and grease was staggering after the ban had been enforced. A sad thing (nota bene). All those crippled old places. But enough of politics.

I continue to maintain a yearning to embody the old smoking imageries. I also recognise that cigarettes are one of our many ways to diversify the manner in which time is practiced beyond conscious standardisation of weights and measures. A lot of activities are calculated per cigarette, a half, two thirds. It marks a break, a change, a continuation. Smoking creates particular social places from the balconies, doorways or field sides, where people gather at a party or work, urban or rural. Cigarettes are such a widespread covert economy that I almost feel like calling it global. They have at different points bought social time in almost all nameable socioeconomic genres. In prisons from Canada to Port Moresby they replace money. To ethnographers they have been and still are a major tool, though the methodology gets only a passing remark in field diaries. Increasingly, because of the fuss, tobacco also marks rebellion and civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is sexy.

P.S. Otis Redding, Cigarettes and Coffee, for some lingering 1960s feel. I'm not a big fan of soul myself, but with this enormous bowl of dark and full French roast coffee in front of me, sigh...

(image: from Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes)