Europe Smokes

It was disturbing in Berlin, living in an omnipresent cloud of cigarette smoke.  Inside their houses, their apartment, inside bars and train stations, everywhere, everyone smokes!  And as it turns out, it's been the same in Prague and now in Istanbul.

I even got on board for a while, seduced by that strange idea I got somewhere - movies? - that coffee (or wine) and cigarettes make for a good time.

Polluting one's body is not a good time.

Inhaling vitiated air, fighting for oxygen, feeling one's eyeballs dry up and itch, waking up with the breath of a train chimney… what's pleasurable about that?

Yet we do it, we roll and lit that tobacco like there is no tomorrow

Wait a second!

Is that why people smoke so much?  Is it because we believe there's no tomorrow?

I've come up with this loose theory that Europeans might have a more nihilistic/fatalistic attitude towards their health, because of they have that special flavor of existentialism, and that special relationship with the weight of history.  

"As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date.
And one perhaps nearing its end." (Michel Foucault)
(Istanbul)

When the streets you walk on have been the theater for corteges of emperors, and kings, for crusades and plagues, revolutions, trenches, bombs, dictators, and now still this heartless, ever-so-absurd neoliberalism… When your history is so blatantly filled with suffering and double-edged promises of "progress" … you might not see as much of a point in trying to keep yourself "healthy."

Nature and Civilization
(Berlin)

  When you know war first-hand, on your own land, you might have a harder time according importance to your own individual health.  You might even hope to die from lung cancer, before the atrocities happen again.

Smoking tobacco is not evil in itself.  Tobacco is a medicinal plant, after all.  Tobacco was used in ceremonies, in peace pipes that bounded treaties.  (I guess it has always brought people together, in a way.)  I'm all for medicinal plants. 

We gotta take the power back!
(Leipzig)

But I'm not too sure about tar, DDT, arsenic, cyanide, and everything else!!  I'm not too sure about the ethics of Malboro, Gauloises, and Camel.

In these times of truth speaking, of demanding for accountability and of acknowledging the gap in power dynamics, I wonder… why are we giving away so much of our will-power to them?

Why are we giving away our desire and ability to take care of ourselves?  Why are we following tobacco corporations down the dark sooty  tunnel of decay and death?  Why are we so eagerly contributing to the pollution of our atmosphere, treating our bodies the same way we treat the planet?

East Side Gallery
(Berlin)

I know, it's far from easy to quit.

Addiction is a phenomenon to ponder.  It is everywhere in many forms.  (We'll talk about sugar in a future episode.)  We tend to see addiction as a personal affair, but it is also-so-social... and in the case of tobacco, so gregarious.

I don't want to romanticize cigarette smoke anymore.  I don't want to feel the inside of my body turning black.

Yes indeed, a behavior reflects a state of mind.  Sometimes I imagine myself as that weightless stream of smoke, going up into the ether, eventually dispersing, free.  Somehow, I associate smoking with freedom; with taking a vacation from the buzz of modern life.  

Sometimes I need to regroup myself, get out of the crowd for a moment, be with my thoughts and feelings for a moment.  I don't need to smoke a cigarette to take that break, but for some reason that's the normal thing to do.  Sitting alone on the curb looking at the stars would raise too many questions on my state of mind.

Finally taking time to write these thoughts down,
(Thanks, perhaps, to rainy Istanbul.)

I've been feeling a bit alarmed, obviously.  I've been dreaming of clean air.  I wonder if there exists a city where it is easy to take care of one's body/self.  I could use their momentum.

Because everything is habit.

Everything is habit.