The conviviality of smoking in Dublin is one with a handmade touch. One of a manual nature, like the streets of telephoto compression in the finale of “The Graduate”, where buildings seem compressed into one long stretch of industrial brick. Where the Amber Leaf must be carefully separated and folded between two thumbs, unsteady in the cold. Where there is no illusion of ease, and where you are only seen plainly beyond the shroud of smoke near the outdoor barrels.
It’s a coy game to play — there’s an independence to knowing where to fold and where to lick. A mastery of a sexual level in which the cigarette is only as good as its maker. And to the rollie’s credit, there’s another sense of delicacy, a frailty in which the paper could so easily fall apart from an excess of saliva, or a flame caught too early. It’s an extension of the human “thing”, the intangible, the limb of something not quite grown into itself.
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In New York, al fresco seating often seeps onto the street, the surplus on thin metal tables and dining sheds with Spanish corrugated plastic ceilings. You walk by a couple in indirect sunlight, hiding a Vuse in their pocket, and a flavoured tea between them. You walk by a paradox of convenience.
Newsstands no longer deliver news, but rather are settled in a pack of “Double Happiness King Size Filter Tipped Hong Kong” on the corner of Golden Way Market and under the abutment of the Manhattan Bridge. We are meant to learn our way through the city in cardboard boxes.
(The irony of the American enterprise and hawkishness eschewing the idea of smoking altogether, when the cement between tenements is fused by the still-lit ends of the lasting city is, to me, the last great expectation I had of American virtue, gone.)
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Yet again I find myself in Dublin. The sky is, however rainy, redeeming to the European vision. I am reborn to a city of values, of frailty and gestural to the probability that something, anything, could go wrong. I relied on this very absence of anatomy, of risk.
I am supposed to lose the patience I had for the craft itself. I am meant to want an unnatural mechanical in motion — to ingest, digest, and produce. Produce more than myself, and more than a limb which might break when the windstorm arrives too early. To want the age of automation, and yet I stand bisected by the thin paper “skins” which sit beside me.
There lies the effigy of my outstanding due to the future.
This is my time to induce my labour of fruitfulness. To begin my mecca of the true youth, the years that Hollywood ignores, and from which many redact their footprint from the social stage. The age of stepping on the fingers under our heel of the ladder, unsure of where the Machiavellian tendencies will lead us. To be cutthroat, and not know whose throat you are splitting. It is the age of “unknowing”; not to be confused with “unknown”. We are indeterminate in a determinate world. We live within the unease and the frailty of the rolled cigarette.
I should be protected, and then again I have no reason to be so. I should be regressive, and yet my body cannot find a place to rest within the median, and to pinch what little I have left would be to leave my remains on the concrete below. I am passive against my will. I am waiting for a Godot, which this time, I know, must come.
