The smoking self

Thank you and goodbye

Two things true at once: to be glad to no longer smoke, and to have loved smoking.

This is a self-portrait by the author and painter Tove Jansson (I wrote about my admiration for her briefly here). The picture is from a website dedicated to her work. It is a website worth spending time on.

We grew up in a fug of smoke. On nights my father and I stayed up too late reading in the living room when he had work the next day, I lay on the couch so that I could be under the layer of eye-burning smoke that hung like a square cloud about half-way up the room. When I took the plates to the kitchen after supper in front of the TV, I brought back a glass of Coke and cigarettes for my mother.

In my second year at university, a friend came around to fetch me to study at the library. My father was saying hello to her and goodbye to me. My satchel was open. He looked down and saw inside. He reached in and brought out a pack of cigarettes. He said, without any irony. ‘You smoke now? Is this how we brought you up?’

I’d started smoking because I wanted to try dagga* and I didn’t know how to inhale. Cigarettes were inhalation practise before they were anything else.

Then they were statement: risk-taker, rebel, Thinker of Thoughts. They were social cachet. They were opening bids for friendship. They were a signal to other people who might be a bit like me.

Then they were escape from the drudge of trying to come to grips with the extreme isolation of early parenthood. After the confused magic of making a baby sleep for a while, I could sit on the tiny balcony and stare into the tops of the trees behind our flat and feel, for the duration of a cigarette, like someone who had a life beyond attending to the needs of the puzzling mammal I was now solely responsible for.

I discovered a new use for smoke: as a barrier. I could not be disturbed when I was sitting in a cloud of smelly, unhealthy smoke. I could keep people, especially children, away for ten minutes. I could not think for a while. No longer a Thinker of Thoughts, but a seeker of peace. I could make time stop. I could step out. I could step away.

Inside, a woman’s work was never done.

Outside, an escape artist burnt a hole in the fabric of expectation.

The moment of taking a cigarette allows one to open parentheses in the time of ordinary experience, a space and a time of heightened attention that give rise to a feeling of transcendence, evoked through the ritual of fire, smoke, cinder connecting hand, lungs, breath and mouth. It procures a little rush of infinity that alters perspectives, however slightly, and permits, albeit briefly, an ecstatic standing outside of oneself.

(Richard Klein, Cigarettes are Sublime)

Then smoking morphed. Public opinion changed, taxes increased.

You get bronchitis for the first time and the cough is outrageous and it lingers longer than is reasonable.

You notice that taste when you wake, the edginess after a long flight of not smoking, the compulsion at a certain time of day. Coffee seems a half-joy without a cigarette.

You begin to feel beholden and trapped; weak and smelly; old-fashioned and a bit silly.

You no longer wear your smoking like a challenge – it wears you.

You give up because you are rebelling. Again. You will not be subjugated and tyrannised. You are your own person. You have agency. Fuck how hard it is to stop smoking, there is something you want on the other side of the urge, on the other side of the trance.

You see young adults take up smoking and you think: ha. There it is. There all of it is: the minor mutiny, the revolt, the rejection, the pleasure, the bonding, the collection of friends and colleagues on the fringes of things, in cold winds outside buildings in ugly cities, in parking lots in industrial areas, holding chipped cups with horrible tea and long-life milk from the common kitchen, the connections with people you wouldn’t otherwise talk to.

It’ll be five years in September since I stopped smoking. I’m glad. But smoking gave me a lot.

Sometimes, when the smokers are gathered outside laughing, I go there and nudge someone for a toke of their rollie, and feel briefly connected to all my previous selves.

Billy Collins wrote a poem called ‘The best cigarette’. He reads it in this simple and pleasing video.

*dagga is the word used for cannabis in South Africa.