1 post tagged “soldier”
... and the cigarette as civilisation.
A cultural history of the Cigarette, written by someone trying to give them up, 'Cigarettes are Sublime' by Richard Klein, is also a plea to see the current campaign against cigarettes (given the cheeky moniker of 'Antitabagism') as part of a broader campaign of 'censorious moralizing'. This last phrase might have rung in my head more before the days of K-Rudd and Obama ... but is in the mumblings against binge drinking---
The rising tide of hysterical overreaction, by its stridency, has succeeded in drowning voices raised to recall the social and cultural benefits of cigarettes--- the mystery of their having conquered the world, as Cocteau said. It is after all a world in which, for almost a century, a third (at least) of all adults have smoked billions of cigarettes a day.
I was surprised to find that-- in contrast to current efforts to remove smoking from pub-cafe-street ... public-- that smoking was an actively encouraged past-time, even a patriotic one through all the trials of our capital 'H' History. During all our wars, during all revolutions. The ever-present accessory of the soldier, the revolutionary to say nothing of the poet. As a war good, they were thought more important than food-- the humble cigarette's power and potency to deal with the anxieties of great change, great risk, and great romance, even with death itself, have played a central role in the great drama of the west.
I was also surprised by this obvious fact: that the cigarette is American, because tobacco is.
As the title goes, Cigarette smoke is sublime -- the stuff of dreams -- and that in war, revolution or great romantic trial, a brief escape can be found in smoke, and smoking: In the pause that it places on real time; the painful pleasure that is the act of smoking; 'for the dark beauty they bring to the lives of smokers.' In this, to see the cigarette as a prayer for our times.
Paul reflects: "And around us the prairie flowered. The blades of grass bent in the soft warm air of the late summer; we read letters and newspapers and smoked beatifically. . . It would have been easy not to have been sitting on those boxes today; we barely escaped it. And that's why all sensations today are new and strong: the red poppies and the good food, the cigarettes and the summer breeze" (Remarque 13) For Remarque's narrator, it is as if having barely escaped taking a hit was equivalent to haveing taken it; life after is like afterlife. Reborn, as if he had died and gone to heaven, lying there in the warm sun smoking "beat-iffically," the soldier is raised up and blessed amongst the saints, with what seems like and eternal life in which all sensations are new and strong; at that moment, he is also Kerouac "beat"-- very high, very real, very free. Once again able to taste and feel and smell, the parataxis of his language, the adding up of elements, things, and pleasure, enacts the return of his capacity to respond to stimuli other than those connected with survival; born again, he begins to discriminate between this and that, to sense the quality of the moment, to rediscover ephemeral beauty, the beauty of ephemera-- smoke vanishing in a summer breeze.
The most astonishing thing was this concrete moment, because I didn't know how politically important Casablanca was to our success in the Second World War. For a film where everyone smoked ... and that was shown to Franklin D. Roosevelt weeks before the United States made it's final commitment to join the European land war ... not that these two things-- smoking, and american intervention-- are connected obviously, but that they were connected by more than mere fiction through the romantic character of an (american) Rick... A character who prevaricated about his own commitment to europe, france and freedom at the very same time that FDR, America's Generals, and America in General were prevaricating themselves ... and whose trial through the movie-- a silent trial mediated continuously by smoking, and one that concluded (infront of Roosevelt himself, and the rest of america shortly after) by finding the courage to put the political needs of a foreign people above the immediate desires of the self; to put the bitter fight for Civilisation first, with a bitter drag from a smoking cigarette.
This is a great book. I'd recommend it to any smoker. I wish i could furiously demand all non-smokers read it too.
