It is remarkable that in the whole debate over smoking no one ever seems to consider why it was adopted in the first place and thought a useful activity for so many centuries. Even when comments are made about how it helps people to relax and let go of stress, this is almost always in the context of someone who is already habituated and becoming tense again because they crave the next cigarette. Equally, giving emphasis to the socially addictive nature of smoking does not address why it might once have been thought a communally beneficial activity. In the Western world anti-smoking campaigns and changes in the law have been very successful, nonetheless there remains a hard-core of perhaps 10% of the population who are prepared to go to considerable lengths, financially and physically, in order to maintain their habit. Those who want to give-up are already trying and help is available, but there is a significant minority who frame the experience of smoking in an almost wholly positive way.
There are some striking differences in smoking behaviour between individuals and across groups which tend to get lost if your focus is only on the negative health effects. Three strange anomalies have led me to ponder the purpose of smoking over the years; the association sex and smoking – as exemplified in Film Noir, the Native American’s use of a communal ‘peace pipe’ and recent neuroscientific studies on memory and embodied cognition. For this is a tale of pheromones, nicotine and aspirin; of motivation, memory and the absolving of pain.
But first my own personal tale of smoking, the individualistic and anti-social one, which has some aspects of the right answer, but by and large ends up like the ‘it’s just bad for your health’ explanation - stuck up a cul-de-sac when it comes to the hard-core smokers apparently shivering in the rain on the street corner.
I always carry fire, and the means to roll and smoke a cigarette. Since smoking in enclosed public places has been banned in the UK - and smoking in enclosed private spaces become socially unacceptable - I’m often perceived by others as either always on my way to, or from ‘a smoke’; endlessly rolling cigarettes or just simply chain-smoking. The fact is of course that I’m actually smoking less than I ever did. Like almost every smoker I’m better informed about the health risks than non-smokers; I seek to optimise, by minimising the costs and exploiting the benefits. Whilst I may be reducing my lifespan, I’m not fool enough to buy the lie that one can somehow avoid a painful death by not smoking!
The father of the first girl I kissed (she was five, blue-eyed and blonde, I was seven) had a brand new white Ford Cortina Mark 1 with red upholstery, he worked as a salesman for John Player and the doors of the car were blazoned, first with the brand logo for Player’s No.10, then for No.6. Indeed the first cigarette I smoked, age eleven (1970), was a No.6 - I was in the shop whilst a contemporary actually bought them. (The lady who lived across from us favoured Embassy at that time). The first packet I bought was ten No.10, age thirteen. I was bunking-off school at lunchtime and keeping my dinner money. I was doing it to get away from others, from authority figures and boring peers. I was buying time to get my head together. Right from the off, smoking was either about sex, or about finding personal space – outside, in the fresh air. (Oh! And my great aunt was smoking Rothmans in those days, using a traditional silver-plated Ronson lighter.)
Smoking didn’t become a regular daily habit however until I was eighteen. I did a certain amount of social smoking in pubs and with male contemporaries, but the most pleasure I knew was to be had when smoking alone with female companions. I knew it had something to do with the combined smell of them and the smoke, but beyond that…?
Another insight came about when I began to read; study and write seriously for the first time, I was in my twenties having worked at an office job for a few years. I’d never particularly cared for smoking in my own home (if I did, I almost always did so with the windows open) but now it seemed to be becoming a necessity. For there was something in the act of reading, contemplating, noting, emphasising, composing, recalling; with the need to focus intently for short periods, then break the pattern for few minutes, which was all somehow facilitated by the act of smoking.
‘But haven’t you ever tried giving-up?’ Sure, when most people tell you that you should, over more than thirty years, you kind of feel you have to try. The only time I really succeeded, for four months that is, was when I was in an entirely novel environment.
Slowly over the years as the distinction in taste between brands disappeared, along with the ability to get filterless cigarettes, it became clear I would have to get serious about being able to roll my own design in whatever circumstances I found myself.
Rolling cigarettes is a craft skill and it disappears as soon as you stop practicing it. As a hand/eye coordination activity it goes to the core of human mental mapping. The learned, physical and psychological habits are in essence the same thing. Smoking that ‘tailor-made’ cigarette is also a skill, keeping it alight and getting a fast hit of nicotine when and where you want it. But of extra psychological importance is the direction and flow of the hand gesture whilst holding the cigarette. This somehow needs to be coordinated with the hit, the visualisation of the thought and the felt emotion that goes with – all within an environment of other people, or the physical landscape you are moving through. If you doubt this, simply turn out the lights and watch the pattern the burning end of a cigarette makes in the darkness.
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| photo by Nick Hewling |
The way one explains smoking to oneself changes over time of course. For many years the idea of smoking as a ‘displacement’ activity seemed to make sense - an unacceptable emotional response (to oneself or the social group you are with) causes a rise in anxiety, which is then channelled and relieved by the next drag on the cigarette. (A displacement activity is one of the ‘defence mechanisms’ identified by Freud, but which were only formally categorised and developed by his daughter Anna, before making their way into many psychology textbooks!) But that’s a very individualistic explanation, at the very least it needs a social dimension, one which can account for the way smoking behaviour signals to others around you, the way it both attracts and repulses, creates and encloses personal space.
Enthusiasm for Freudian psychology hit its peak in 1940’s America, coinciding with the high point of the Hollywood genre known as Film Noir (films of the night, as it were), such movies crept into my psyche when they became a staple of the weekend TV schedules from the 1960’s onwards. They were inspired by ‘hard-boiled’ paperback crime novels and characterised by night-time locations with street lighting that cast deep shadows across endless alleyways. They were usually shot in black and white, although all were monochrome in tone. The plots didn’t offer a happy ending, the male characters ‘had seen it all’ and the females ‘would just as soon kill you as love you’. Of course everyone smoked, the women too – either because they were thought liberated, or conversely ‘not as good as they should be’ depending on your point of view! In the absence of explicitness, smoking choreographed flirtation, seduction, sex and its aftermath. You couldn’t smell her or touch her, but you could smell the smoke and feel the husky breath as it brushed the back of the neck! Smoking is capable of starting, stopping and regulating sexual arousal.
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| photo by Nick Hewling |
Hollywood was also responsible for promoting a highly white, western ethnocentric image of Native Americans. An image extrapolated from a very short period of history, the middle and late 19th century. In this story-line the native is an accomplish warrior on horseback, and when a truce finally comes, smoking is seen as somehow all about a ‘peace’ pipe. I guess the authorities only sat down with their adversaries when they considered themselves to be partaking in peace negotiations! On the other hand:
‘In the long ago the Lakotas were in camp and two young men lay upon a hill watching for signs. They saw a long way in the distance a lone person coming… When the person came close, they saw that it was a woman and when she came nearer that she was without clothing of any kind except that her hair was very long and fell over her body like a robe. One young man said to the other that he would go and meet the woman and embrace her… His companion cautioned him to be careful… But the young man would not be persuaded and met the woman… His companion saw him attempt to embrace her and there was a cloud closed about them… In a short time the cloud disappeared and the woman was alone. She beckoned to the other young man and told him to come there and assured him that he would not be harmed…
When he got there, she showed him the bare bones of his companion… The young man was very much afraid, but she told him that if he would do as she directed, no harm would come to him… She then directed him to return to camp and call all the council together and tell them that in a short time they would see four puffs of smoke under the sun at midday. When they saw this sign they should prepare a feast, and all sit in the customary circle to have the feast served when she would enter the camp, but the men must all sit with the head bowed and look at the ground until she was in their midst. Then she would serve the feast to them and after they had feasted she would tell them what to do: that they must obey her in everything; that if they obeyed her in everything they would have their prayers to the Wakan Tanka answered and be prosperous and happy...
Then she disappeared as a mist disappears so that the young man knew that she was Wakan. He returned to the camp and told these things to the people and the council decided to do as she had instructed the young man… In a few days they saw four puffs of black smoke under the sun at midday, so they prepared for a feast and all dressed in their best clothing and sat in a circle…
Every man bowed his head and looked towards the ground. Suddenly the women began uttering low exclamations of admiration… Then the woman entered the circle and took the food and served it, first to the little children and then to the women and then she bade the men to look up. They did so and saw a very beautiful woman dressed in the softest deerskin which was ornamented with fringes and colours more beautiful than any woman of the Lakota had ever worked… She told them that she wished to serve them always; that they had first seen her as smoke and that they would always see her as smoke. Then she took from her pouch a pipe and willow bark and Lakota tobacco and filled the pipe with the bark and tobacco and lighted it with a coal of fire.
She smoked a few whiffs and handed the pipe to the chief and told him to smoke and hand it to another. Thus the pipe was passed until all had smoked. She then instructed the council how to gather the bark and the tobacco and prepare it, and gave the pipe in to their keeping, telling them that as long as they preserved this pipe she would serve them. But she would serve them in this way. When the smoke came from the pipe she would be present and hear their prayers and take them to the Wakan Tanka and plead for them that their prayers would be answered.
After this she remained in this camp for many days and all the time she was there everyone was happy for she went from tipi to tipi with good words for all. When the time came for her to go, she called all the people together… She stood in the midst of the circle and when the fire had burned to coals she directed the shaman to place on it the sweetgrass. This made a cloud of smoke and the woman entered the smoke and disappeared… The shamans instructed the people that they could make other pipes and use them and that (the sacred woman) would be in the smoke of any such pipe if smoked with proper solemnity and form. Thus it was that the Beautiful Woman brought the pipe to the Lakotas.’ Finger, Oglala Lakota - quoted by Fitzgerald & Fitzgerald (2006) Indian Spirit.
Above we have the devastating combination of the scent of a beautiful, near naked women, walking around an open wood fire (pheromones) and the communal smoking of tobacco (nicotine) mixed with the bark of last season’s growth on the willow (aspirin) – in other words; motivation, memory and pain relief.
How so? What the nicotine released by smoking does is slightly speed-up the natural formation of new neural pathways in the brain. Pathways or new memories are created by the progressive insulating of new connections between brain cells with white matter (myelin) to the point where the pathway is relatively unaffected by the cell activity around it. Somehow nicotine at a synapse attracts myelin. Smoking aids brain mapping, but is also painful, perhaps through the destruction of existing connections or simply because greater speed and efficacy means many more electrons are jumping around! Equally the gestures made by the arm that holds the cigarette - almost like a pencil - will force other connections, which in turn may have originated far off in some other part of the brain.
However much mental mapping is ‘assisted’, using nicotine to force connections can only be useful if it is purposeful and selective - if our way of smoking is entirely routine it could only reproduce and entrench existing ways of being. If smoking is considered, both individually and collectively, as one of the many tools that assist memory (through inter-generationally oral, pictorial or written history), then what? Well, haven’t our guesstimates of the longevity of oral history grown massively in recent years?!
So what of the elusive pheromones, long known to be somehow crucial to both sexual attraction and compatibility but about which researchers have often appeared to stumble over – with their desire to examine your three-day old T shirts, rather than going for the more obvious crotch?!
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| photo by Nick Hewling |
Only a few months before writing this it was quietly announced that humans do indeed, as long suspected by a few, have as good a sense of smell as many other mammals, but as with other neuroscientific issues, the real way in which we are fooled is by the tiny amount of data that our overwhelmingly unconscious brain can put up into consciousness at any one time. We can sense thousands more smells than those we are habitually use to - it is more a question of what we, and/ or society are willing to be aware of. Not to mention that such an insight makes the association of smoking with a loss of smelling ability - well, just another nonsense really. Smell provides the most basic of orientations and baselines for navigation in a natural way in our social world and is perhaps of most importance in aspects of sexual selection.
One of the ideas that modern academic enquiry cannot tolerate is that things were done better in the past, that the answers are already out there! But the ultimate deception is when health becomes synonymous with longevity, with living as long as possible a good ‘in and of itself’, where a painful death is thought to be avoidable.
Further reading:
Nicotine withdrawal
Teenage brains
Nicotine as cognitive enhancer
Nicotine - Wikipedia .
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