in defence of the cigarette

disclaimer: i am not funded by big tobacco

They found a 12,300-year old hearth in northwestern Utah, and the land there is scattered with tobacco seeds, like so many cigarette butts outside an ambient gig. I suppose it’s our earliest evidence of a smoking section. I like to imagine a mother, frazzled and strung-out as she wrestles her wayward children to bed, lighting up some makeshift reed as she looks out on the mammoths roaming by. I do not think they knew very much about cancer at the time. Still, I also do not think that the acrid burning in her lungs felt particularly life-prolonging, and yet she persists in the face of self-injury. I wonder if she felt that strange sense of calm descend upon her. I wonder if she thought about how, sometimes, it feels good to do things that hurt you. 

I had my first cigarette when I was sixteen. It was in the backyard of some tedious houseparty, the type of houseparty where experimenting with new substances compensates for the dullness of the people. I recall very distinctly who gave it to me, because her coolness mattered—long dark hair that framed her face like a Tumblr grunge editorial, smug grey eyes that bore into you like they knew something you didn’t. She was flippant about school and serious about partying, she puppeteered male attention with bored ease, and her disregard for authority felt darkly seductive. I wanted so badly to impress her. I could not explain why, but it mattered more than anything.

Sixteen is the strange age at which you have the awareness to recognise that things like ‘popularity’ and ‘coolness’ do not matter, but your baser instincts always push you towards social pressure. I wanted to rebel, and to become Part of Something more important than the safe, ubiquitous Something I was used to. Against the word of every parent and teacher and knowledgeable adult, against the great evil of every cigarette I had been warned about my whole life, I wanted to take a drag. It all seems so mundane now. But I supposed each drag of a cigarette is a conscious act of self-harm, however infinitesimal, and the taboo of it all felt so exciting. I wanted to look cool for some goth girl, and what could be cooler than choosing my own annihilation? How banal, and yet—I could not escape the sense that I was becoming Part of that Something.

This inarticulable Something we all seek is greater than the individual soul, and greater still than the sum of our parts. We are looking for some sense of belonging to a great collective spirit, so potent that it can make meaning out of our lives. Objects retain their cultural value and become relics and motifs when they become representative of this Something. The acquisition of such an object can become a point of access to the World it symbolises. Perhaps a football is such an object; it allows access to the salient world of sport, but in doing so, it also connects the bearer to a particular expectation of masculinity, a certain understanding of love, a specific purpose of the body. As such, the football is no longer just a thing, but becomes a portal key to its own Something.

Cigarettes are such an object, too, leading us to a world beyond our own. I smoke a cigarette and I am out late on a weeknight, hanging out with a boy who’s bad news and drives too fast. I smoke a cigarette and I am outside the bar, talking to a girl in Ann Demeulemeester about how annoying Björk is. I smoke a cigarette and I wear all black and I read Foucault and I think about Death a lot. I smoke a cigarette on a porch, look out at the night sky and the stillness of the World’s breathing, and I am moved by its beauty. This is my Something, pretentious and insufferable and artful and morbidly fascinated with beauty, for better or for worse. 

What is better: the orgasm, or the pursuit of it? What is better: the cigarette, or the desiring of it? The space between my want and my satisfaction is my longing, and the longing which exists here is delightfully counterintuitive, like I am longing for some suicidal ecstasy. This is what I find in a cigarette. The cigarette contemplates the ache of desire and the pleasure of violence. It is the first symbol of the erotic nature of vice, compellingly dangerous and seductive, and in wanting a smoke, I am unconsciously willing a closeness to my own mortality. I want to kill myself a little so I can feel alive, and the life that is left feels all the more precious for it.

I should probably state at this point that I am not pro-cancer and I am not funded by Big Tobacco. I am, however, pro-‘doing something that is bad for you on occasion’. Too many people walk around like they could not get hit by a car tomorrow, and this blind faith in life makes them so dreadfully boring. There is a lifelessness in a man who cannot accept the inevitability of death. I cannot stand to be around it. I want to shake him by his shoulders and tell him he does not live by default, that this life is a gift and must be lived consciously and beautifully. 

And perhaps it is completely insane for a person who loves life to suggest smoking, but I promise it makes sense. Death is a gift too. It is our one surety. It is in death’s very existence that life attains any meaning, and the only way to see the beauty in everything is to hold both in equal stead. The cigarette is beautiful because it is a bridge, composed of that same substance that veils the dead from the living. I do not think there is a smoker alive who does not make small, unknowing peace with death. This is what makes vice so beautiful and alluring; each engagement with vice is an acknowledgment of the relentless end.

I think one must gaze upon the Void for at least a few minutes every once in a while and learn not to succumb to it. Maybe this is what a smoke break is really for. 

I am not, by any means, suggesting that every smoker is inherently artful, but I do suggest that there is an inherent artfulness to cigarettes. You can see the vignette, too, even if you try to deny it: a glamorous woman, makeup ever-so smudged, taking long drags in the stairwell to her apartment; a band frontman, covered in tattoos and brimming with an uneasy restlessness, ripping a durry in the greenroom. The cigarette is as crucial to the mis-en-scene here as the location. It adds to the art of this person’s being to know they need a smoke, because it represents the Something that drives them. You know they are prone to vice and compelled by transgression, a little more conscious of their own impermanence than most. There is a deep elegance and certainty in the way that they light the cigarette, a smoothness in the choreography of how they put it to their lips and pull. It is a timeless visual, and not so easily replicated.

I vape these days, and I enjoy it—whether this has been better for my health in any way is yet to be seen—but I cannot help but mourn the ritual of the cigarette. There is something cynical about these electronic replacements further alienating us from the pleasure of living; I can vape anywhere I want at any time, and the sacred space of the smoking section has become all but defunct. Where else does one meet the enigmatic, brooding stranger to fall in love with? Where else does one go to become mindful of the moment, to engage in that thoughtful routine of fishing out a dart, asking around for a lighter, breathing deeply as you look out on the expanse of the night? Perhaps cigarettes bridge the spaces between us, too, and to the world itself. Each cigarette treasures the time it takes to be smoked. 

In Tom Robbins’ Still Life with Woodpecker, he suggests that smoking cigarettes is as ‘intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation’. We smoke to identify with the primordial spark; we smoke to touch danger and walk away bearably scathed. We smoke, in essence, for the palpable reminder of our own aliveness. I defend the cigarette as a symbol of this form of living, as a threshold to longing and death and beauty and all these intricate marvels of life. And I think you should share a cigarette with me whenever I ask, because I’m really fiending for it.