Things Are Rough

I keep vacillating between writing all or nothing about what goes on in my head and my life–maybe this will help me to go with the write-about-it impulse.

‘Mad Pride’ Fights a Stigma

The stigma begs for both openness and occlusion.

Foucault on Writing

In Foucault’s introduction to volume two of hisHistory of Sexuality

As for those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next–as to those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet.

Smoking is…

…a way to enter Pessoa’s dream world, a link to his dead ghost just as surely as a psychic at a seance. (BTW, are ghosts alive or dead?)

…communing with the spirits of dead writers.

…to enter a man’s mind on a wisp of smoke.

…a prolonged pause that inspires thought. (Thought rushes up your nostrils and down into your lungs to be dispersed into your bloodstream…)

…a repose from the monotony of the daily rush to completion.

…a break from getting things done.

…a pit-stop in the rat-race.

…doing something while accomplishing nothing. (This is why smoking is still allowed in Congress.)

…an aristocratic pastime co-opted by the working class.

What is smoking to you?

Effluvia (aka this is your brain on nicotine)

I am the reverse Pythia, sitting here spewing out noxious vapors, babbling my nonsense that no priest will interpret. Tobacco, the laurel leaves of the New World. May they anesthetize my soul to its own imperfections. I don’t just inhale the vapors, I spew them back out to poison the minds of all who dare approach me sitting on my tripod, communing with Apollo, the god of prophecy and civilization and poetry. Over-brimming with words, my touched mind spews its poison daily, an undammed river cleaving a canyon through the desert of my life.

Smoking as Fiction

Remaking the landscape of reality into a smokey dreamland filled with friends, coffee, and conversation. Just as Pessoa says of writing, so too for smoking—it slows down time and turns life into a visual tableau on which you can write your own character and plot.

Smoking also perhaps helps to blur out those annoying little imperfections that plague real life. It aestheticizes life into hyper-real fiction. You find yourself hiding behind the smoke like a picturesque illusion.

Write What You Know

“Write what you know.” Old adage, cliché, truth?

I find that to write both prodigiously and vividly, the best thing is to write about what you are getting to know. Writing is a process and so is learning, and the two go hand-in-hand. So as I learn to smoke, I write about the experience.

Very often, those who are masters of their subject obfuscate the basic elements, the foundations of their more advanced thought—not intentionally, but out of habit, because the knowledge base is assumed. When you write as you are learning, even the most mundane detail can turn into a jumping off point, a creative spark, the sort of detail you might never notice if the experience is old-hat to you. Every step is a sensory experience, rather than a mere intellectual exercise.

My New Hero: Fernando Pessoa

From The Book of Disquiet:

All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and all of our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary.
–Fernando Pessoa