#9 On Smoking Cigarettes
The tired cliché of misery and insubordination, of a lonely protagonist in some darkened recesses of a balcony or a room, smoking cigarettes has always appealed to me. Partly for the allure the scene tries to invoke, and partly for the tiredness of the metaphor, of this usage of a cigarette to imply a sense of mystery, of the distaste of reality that needs to be mediated by an instant rush of nicotine to dull the senses, to alleviate the senses to the rush of sensory information. In the endless litany of cultural signs and Instagram poetry, where the cigarette is reduced to a symbol that lacks any meaning, I often wonder what this little act signifies. This dangling cigarette between the fingers, this double impermanence, of the burning cigarette and, of life. I never wanted to write about this, for both the overabundance and pretentiousness of elevating a self destructive act, to something broader than it is. Yet, as I often loiter at the peripheries of disillusionment, in little parties, across tables, smoking in this self awareness of killing oneself in little doses, I often wonder what Beckett might have thought as he inhaled this smoke, or as Swadesh Deepak kept burning his lungs or as Albert Camus posed with a cigarette in one hand and ruined years of young existentialists; if there is an awareness that comes with smoking cigarettes—not the very act, but the moment where one is acutely aware of the barter between life and death, where the weight of consciousness becomes so overbearing that one, although aware of the imminent death, chooses to approach it faster.
The truth is that maybe most people do not put this amount of thought in an act, that maybe an act that is supposed to be a relief from thought, cannot be entrenched in thought. Maybe it is a cultural meme that keeps replicating itself, till the act becomes an abstraction, attaining broader meanings of a social custom, a post conjugal ritual, or a solitary habit. Maybe the biological addiction, to understand the neurochemistry of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, that leads to persistence of the effect of dopaminergic neurons, by inhibiting the modulatory effect of GABA neurons is all there is to it, and the rest is useless philosophising. Yet, in a slight distortion to the words of the ‘great’ Augustus Waters, “It is a metaphor, see; you put the killing thing right between your teeth and you give it the power to do its killing.” You make a conscious choice, an act of will, to either numb down your awareness, to offer power to an intangible object, which has tangible effects in its broader interplay with death, or you are acutely aware of this discourse with death, and you choose to continue at it. Both of which seem to be acts which are counter intuitive.
So, I am sitting at this party, and as I am smoking, watching this metamorphosis of tobacco into smoke, I am thinking about the transience of life. This little invention of suffocation, that leads to a paradox of death. I ask myself the question, “Am I aware at an essential level, that this is killing me? Not at a theoretical level, of statistics and neurochemistry, but at an essential experiential level, that I will die?” The answer is no, which leads to the broader question that am I aware essentially of death, or is my awareness of death a voyeuristic analysis built on the death of others? If I cannot essentially understand death, then do I ever know that I am dying, and in that context, does smoking become an act of accepting or denying death? A quote by Epictetus slowly surfaces in cognition, the great stoicism against death—“Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?” I start from a paradox of conscious self destruction allied with free will, and end into another paradox, of the very perception of death.
I wonder about this cognitive limitation, which stood in antithesis to death. All time was built with a future. There was always more life. Evolution, in its bare necessity had wanted to be a prophet, not to predict the future, but to warn us against it. Hence, the brain would employ a huge amount of its resources, in predicting the near future to prepare us for it. However, what it implied was that there is always a near future, that the totality of death was never registered. Is this the absurdity on which we had built the immortality project? The inability to concede to death, as we kept killing ourselves in little doses—the ultimate paradox of both dying, being aware of it and yet not being able to fully register it until the last moments?
Yet, I wondered if this inability to perceive an end extend to others? If we were not aware of death as a personal experience, we were still aware of death as the grief of a voyeur, as an external participant to the experience. This grief existed as the culmination of the paradox, in some ways, a moment of true absurdity, where we were faced with the totality of a truth that we were unable to accept, or even denied with the very basics of our culture and biology. And yet, as we sat at this party, and smoked together, we were not just killing ourselves but each other too, in an orgiastic convention of death. How was this achieved? Weren’t the most effective no-smoking advertisements ones in which a man, as he smoked cigarettes, passed on death to his little children too, and as the grief of their death registered into him, he could perceive death much better than himself? Were we extending our identity in a shared intimacy, a communal denial of death, by denying it with a larger story than death itself, one of intimacy and shared identity? Are all stories a way of reconciliation, of providing a faith, of building people in memories to negate the end of time? I did not really know. All I knew is that we were smoking, and that act, this tired cliché had a deep significance and interplay with death.
I wondered if everyone was aware of this, if this shared conscience was efficient in its transference amongst all of us, that maybe not in the literal terms, but if we all felt the presence of death and accepted it inherently, and through its acceptance denied it. I wondered if this literary device entered poems and stories, as a metaphor for death, of our callousness and indifference against it, if every tired metaphor was a subdued way to talk about an ultimate truth which we only registered in moments of solitude. I looked at the cigarette as it burned to its end, a beautiful metaphor for our times. I looked at the cigarette and felt really sick, in a long time.