b-bear/stumblers

From T.S. Eliot's Hamlet and His Problems: 'The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.'

Sebastian is an intrepid dreamer alright. I don't know how he manages to be so astute, so poetic, and so pithy. Like Hamlet, I have a problem when it comes to the uses of this world. But Mr. Intrepid has no problem: he's an extroardinary dreamer and has laid out a trail for all to see, a wonderful objective correlative that has seized so many, and it's now just a matter of being intrepid enough to follow him from one set of objects and circumstances to a poem, where it all terminates in an intense, multiple and emotional correlative orgasm. Naked men of all shades unite: I heartily and lustily recommend these pages.

Baruch Spinoza, as he appears to Foreignergirl, a stumbler who seems to embody the best of many worlds. Her understanding makes me weep tears of joy.

Smoking was once an everyman's theatre and an everywoman's rebellion. Just after WWII, the French a-surrealist Georges Battaile discussed cigarettes. He decided that these flaming sticks shared by men were one of the last burning residues of the sacred in social life. For aficionados like Bataille, smoking was a sacrifice. If for him this sacrifice constituted a secular religion, he could not know that it was also a sacrifice of public health.


Now smoking seems like a dying and anachronistic art. It's as if cigarettes have become the modern equivalent of the premodern age's psychotropic mushrooms: something to be discovered by future archaeologists as involved in some kind of bizarre ritual consumption on the part of shamanic leaders of the tribe (in a religion of smoke that sharply declined, I'd hazard, after 1985 AD).


So, let's say you are still smoking (unlike the arguably wiser lifeistooshort). You do know that cigarettes are going the way of the dinosaurs. And while you derive some sad pleasure in this by maintaining a now socially condemnable practice, the public venues are no longer indulging you. You're starting to notice that you stink, personally and socially, and the smoke seems more obnoxious now that there is less of it. The socialization over a cigarette has become fugitive, and no longer cool - everyone is inside the club following white lines or slipping GBH and stumbling into orgies.











Fortunately, there is still one quasi-acceptable drug left that you can buy over the counter. This drug is also more like a cigarette than anything else. So, why don't you replace one filthy habit with another?


Read some BOOKS! No, seriously, I know that reading can become a full on addiction. I enjoy at least one pack of books a day. And I do it in public. I share some furtive glances with other readers and I even score some of their books for free.


To give up one drug addiction, you need to replace it with another or at least to experience it at a vicarious distance. And to give up smoking in a gentle, wafty arty-farty way, here are two books that I would recommend:


















Okay, so don't listen to me! Smoke your cigs. Why don't you just go choke on this for Christ's sake: