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TRYING TO CONTROL THE SMOKE
1.
Many in this community say that we are close to 'end times.' A
paraphrase of part of the Book of Revelations in the Christian Bible. Sef is on
a little walk up to the Haymont square to find and milk a saving community (not
only of likewise Godfearers but of any kind of person who might tolerate and
give ease to his terrible emotional pressure. But Sef has lost much of his
communal and collective interest, having slid away distantly from anything
other than a need to make certain that he and his wife live long and are saved!
Sef, in that seclusion of summers spent here in North Carolina, with his
wife away in the islands, does watch the news from time to time, but only as a
gesture to his former moral self, his former intellectual assessments and
attachments. The better part of the country teeters on the brink of some form
of religious and political extremism... just as a good part of the World at
large seems so fanatically engaged in their own cultural and religious
chauvanisms...this would be Sef's intellectual assessment but intellectual
assessments matter very little to the disease at the foundation of his broken
personality.
Well, being an import to the New South southern US of the seventies, and
having settled and stayed in North Carolina for the better part of his life,
now, Sef had been infected quite early on by what was unconsciously fomented by
the religious fundamentalism of that region. He had, in spite of his Hebraic
name, prior to settling here in the South, been raised a Roman Catholic and the
more perverse tendencies inherent in that faith's limitation along with
numerous other foibles in his travels as a child of a 'government family' made
for the perfect combination of spiritually and psychologically dysfunctional
attributes which now kept him attached either to his computer screen, or
filtering through the occasional news broadcast or documentary...in an age of
cable TV and computers.
The easiest way to describe Sef's overall dysfunction is to say, simply,
that he smoked, and smoked too much. Every pore of him smoked. His mind, body, and spirit, all oozed and
exchanged this fumous intoxicant. It was his pleasure and release! It was his
ruin and asphyxiation. Having been broken as a child, and then molded into that
impossible byproduct of depressive infantilism nourished and suffocated at the
same time by the ambient culture of his surrounding...the more he smoked the more
he needed to smoke. But!
And this is also true...as a prelude to these smoky remnants, it was destiny
from his very first cigarette, that his only choices were to either smoke or
perish. To smoke his way to a slow suffocation, or to die quite young as that
pitiful and vegetable malformation of the priests and societies that America
had provided him.
2
One might say that in this
new Protestant tradition, smoking was a kind of occasioned sacrament in a
parallel sense to the more ritual sacrament of wine in the Orthodox and
Catholic traditions. Just as wine and drunkenness produced a kind of substitute
transcendence among those socially destroyed in their youths for that more
upright and firm potential within more traditional Christian faiths. So in this
new dip down baptism of the new south way where the holy spirit gives its utter
sex and power to the ego, on the one hand, and on the other, to orgasmic
transcendence created, that dragon fire
and inhaled and effused like the flame gone out. Smoke, of course, in a sense
is the fire gone out, or going out.
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