Nicotine Page 12

  It’s M. who tears me away from my thoughts. She’d been playing with her iPhone the whole time and shows me a photo of a New Year’s Eve firework stuck in the snow having apparently failed to go off. She thinks it looks unbelievably sad. I ask her to send me the photo for my book. We’ve just arrived at the northern foothills of Columbus. Do you remember, she asks, when we sat in front of the restaurant in Berlin with Elisabeth? It was a year ago… a year to the day. We went home, it was a mild evening, and you made me make a promise. Because you didn’t want to think about smoking. Because you didn’t want to be caught unawares.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Light up if you feel like it. I always smoked when opening a book or tackling a new chapter after a reading break. I would sit down, flatten out the page and light a cigarette before I’d read a single sentence. I would take a slow, deep drag and only then devote myself to the text. Now you do it. Smoke one for me. I shouldn’t really care if you smoke or not. But as you know: I’ve become a vicarious smoker.

  I don’t want and haven’t wanted to try to persuade you to do anything, and this is why this book is not a self-help guide. I can’t help you in any case. Help yourself if you want to, or don’t. Your economic debt will be covered by other people anyway.

  What’s it about? my friends ask when I reveal the title of my manuscript, and they immediately think of Che Guevara, Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn. I have no interest in servicing the corresponding associations, neither the socioromantic nor the rest. I don’t care about conjuring up pictures of Hollywood stars, workmen, soldiers and smoking revolutionaries, nor am I interested in mourning a lost pipe-smoking bourgeoisie. In the great conflicts of the last century both sides have always smoked in any case, the commoners and the revolutionaries, the poor and the rich, the right and the left, the cleverest minds and the greatest idiots. International corporations only made their real cash when they succeeded in winning over the everyman, the dull, the bored and the disaffected to their product. Incidentally, Hitler was anti-tobacco and a militant (ahem) non-smoker, just like King James I, who in 1603 composed a pamphlet against the blacke stinking fume and who had the traitor and fantastic tobacco snuffer Sir Walter Raleigh decapitated. But I don’t live in 1603 or 1936. I’m interested in the present, my present, it has my entire attention.

  In my dealings with cigarettes I’ve learned a lot about myself. In the course of my one-year preoccupation with the subject I’ve recalled some formative experiences and looked for the causes and the effects within my habits of thought and action that resulted from them. Through this I made use of the fact that the relationship between things, between different actions, events or objects becomes visible simply because they are examined together; they appear before the inner eye, stand one after the other or side-by-side on the inner stage of the mind.

  What I’ve told is completely my own story. I hope, nevertheless, that one or other of my reflections are universal and are of use to you. Perhaps I’ve even succeeded in awakening and holding the interest of a few readers for whom the inner world I’ve laid out is completely alien, because they don’t smoke and never have, through my choice of form. I foster this hope as I am less concerned with the thing itself – nicotine and cigarettes – than what is at times referred to as self-management, a term that represents the ideal of autonomic action: we want to be able to decide ourselves what we do, above all, what we do to ourselves, with our bodies, with our immediate surroundings.

  It’s a fair desire, but we have to accept that our bodies don’t belong to us. They are not even at our disposal. Consider paid physical work, abortion laws and social norms with regards to sexuality. The phrase at our disposal also infers a kind of ownership structure for the psychological realm and from that a derivable power of disposition: we are, it’s said, more or less in possession of our mental abilities. At least we have ourselves under control. But actually, under closer scrutiny, the spirit is also under complex internal and external constraints, so we can hardly speak of a true autonomy. Addiction is what most clearly places this before our eyes. And dealing with addiction is what allows the first, perhaps still timid steps towards some kind of self-management.

  Each one of us has an addiction, everyone can at least imagine what it means to be affected by a simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar inner compulsion that seems to act within us as if of its own accord. This is the only reason we believe that if we are attentive enough we can take small steps towards a different state in the first place. We examine our behaviour – those automatic day-to-day actions that seem to be insignificant – thereby understanding what causes these actions in the process. And already we have gained more freedom. We haven’t won it (the way you win the lottery), we have taken it for ourselves. How is this possible? I don’t learn through my dealings with a thing, but rather through contemplating my behaviour during my dealings with the thing. To contemplate something means to embed oneself into the inner experience that corresponds to a sensory impression, with an image, a scent, a sound, and then from it to spin a thought, a story in which there is more than just a spark of truth.

  I’m walking along a street in a cool part of Brooklyn shortly before midnight. I’ve forgotten where I’ve parked, I’ve been looking for my car for a quarter of an hour. A young couple emerges from one of the long-unaffordable brownstone houses typical of the area. They go arm in arm down the few steps to the pavement. The second floor of the house is illuminated, I hear voices, laughter and the long, deep beats of Jazzmatazz. I step out from under the beam of a streetlamp and watch them. The boy is wearing a parka, the girl a much too large biker jacket with the hem of a short violet woollen skirt peeping out. Her feet, tucked into white patent leather shoes, are turned in chicly. They fumble and lean in over a lighter. The girl’s long sleeves protect the small, flickering flame. Their faces light up briefly, they’re even younger than I thought. They straighten up and take the first drag. They reset the deficit. I close my eyes, I know what they’re feeling.

  These brownstones don’t have balconies, that’s their only flaw. Perhaps they left the party sooner than they had wanted. Maybe they’re just going round the block and will come back later. Maybe they don’t care about the party and are just in love. I could keep speculating like this but it wouldn’t lead anywhere. There’s only one thing I can say with any surety, because I haven’t forgotten: I know that in these first few seconds, they are truly happy.

  They stroll down the street and disappear into the darkness, I can still just about make out how they lightly and jokily bump into one another – they smoke, they giggle, the girl dances and tries to fall in step with her boyfriend, and they link arms. For the first time in my life I get a sense of how much smoking is connected to youth, with love and joie de vivre. Perhaps, I think, I’ve just grown out of it.

  I would of course light a cigarette in this moment if I were still a smoker, only so I could process the image just afforded me. And again: I don’t learn through my dealings with a thing, but rather through the contemplation of my behaviour in my dealings with the thing. To contemplate something means to embed oneself into the inner experience that corresponds to an external event. This ability has been bound to nicotine since my early adolescence. The regress that has plagued me incessantly during my work on this text emerges. I’m attempting to free myself from my addiction through a certain mindset, but know that the substance I’m dependent on is absolutely necessary for this mindset. But I no longer smoke, and I can only hope no one notices it in the book. Or rather: I no longer smoke, and I can only hope that you can see it in every single line.

  That I now no longer smoke despite the fact that smoking had this great significance for me, my work, my thinking, and that I have left behind this phase of my life hopefully for good, I owe primarily to my reading of Moshé Feldenkrais’s The Elusive Obvious, which I quoted from for the epigraph of this book. The merit of Feldenkrais is his bringing to our attention that for every learned behaviour, even the voluntary
ones, there are alternatives, and that we simply need to learn them to gain our freedom. Even if we choose to continue to practice what we’ve done up to that point anyway, we are freer. This is valid not least for the kind of automated behaviour that we consider to be unalterable if and when it troubles us. It’s just as valid for physical exercise – Feldenkrais was a physicist and a Judo master – as it is for patterns of behaviour and reaction patterns that seem so obvious to us that we barely ever notice them. It also particularly applies to the socially learned and culturally conditioned behaviours that we refer to as addiction.

  You don’t have to be addicted to nicotine to experience how learning itself – not the school kind of learning, but that mental flexibility, that all-embracing inquisitiveness that we can preserve into old age – can lead to greater freedom. Are you right-handed? Try to write with your left hand for a few days. You’ll find that it’s a lot easier than you might think. And even if you have to give up your attempt for practical reasons you’ll still feel that you’re already freer. You’re free to appropriate an alternative pattern of behaviour or reject it. If you make progress you’ll in any case feel something like euphoria, at least a little thrill. Do you jog? Try and pay attention while jogging to how you jog, which muscles you move and which you try to release. Maybe you could push back your shoulders and relax the muscles in your neck. Perhaps you’ll change the inclination of your pelvis, like the legendary medium-distance runner Steve Prefontaine did on the advice of his even more legendary trainer Bowerman. Run a lap and pay attention to how you use your neck muscles. Pay attention to your form. Pay attention to your form when you come out of the bend and hit the straight, when you push your shopping trolley through the supermarket, when you’re peeling carrots or shovelling snow. Pay attention to how you get out of your car, how you go down to your child’s eye level. Attempt to do it differently one time. Just give it a try. Learn. Pay attention. Consider what you’re doing and consider what alternatives are available to you.

  A few years ago the New York Times summarized the opinions of a handful of academic experts and sports doctors who reported that it’s simply impossible for long-distance runners and hobby joggers alike to consciously alter their automatized running style. There isn’t an optimal running style, they claimed, everyone runs differently, which is apparent when professional runners cross the finishing line in a variety of styles. It must have been pretty excruciating to watch the Czech long-distance runner Emil Zátopek, who collected one world record after another at the end of the forties and won three gold medals within a matter of days in Helsinki in ’52 – and who always ran like a panicked, fleeing child who’d rolled over a wasp nest with a lawnmower. According to the New York Times, one must resign oneself to one’s shape, to one’s form, to one’s roll-over (there are heel runners, mid-foot runners and forefeet runners) as well as the resulting injuries. I was surprised when I read the article at the time because it went against my long-evolving belief that we humans are flexible creatures and in the best-case scenario never stop learning right up to old age, even and especially with our changing bodies. I already believed at the time that we were able to manipulate and optimize a lot of what we consider to be unchangeable in our lives. We can relearn our whole lives long; the most fundamental of movements, the most well-rehearsed, learned patterns of thinking in the mental realm that seem compulsive to us. We can free ourselves from most of the routines, structures and rigid processes that we consider compulsions. As one example of many from the world of high-performance sport, Marion Bartoli, until recently one of the best tennis players in the world, radically changed her serve before the 2009 season. Even though she had by that point hit many millions of balls and had put in years of donkey-work by rehearsing the same sequence of movements until it had passed into her flesh and blood, she completely rebuilt her serve from the beginning. Anyone who has ever watched a top player like her training is aware of how much courage and power is required to change a serve that is ritualized to such an extent that it’s in the smallest of muscle contractions, the tiniest of gestures.

  The realization that this is also relevant for the mental realm, the idea that we can change not only the way our minds function through altered patterns of thought and new courses of action but also even the anatomy of our brains, has been discussed in recent times under the term neuroplasticity and established as a scientific paradigm to compete with the partly overhauled, often rigid theories about human development and learning capabilities associated with names like Noam Chomsky, Marvin Minsky and (under the heading of constructivism) Jean Piaget. The critical period and its accompanying concept – that man learns in predetermined, strictly defined (biological) periods of life in surges and phases – seems to have served its time. There are very few time frames in human life that close forever.

  We can relearn, but we can’t unlearn. New studies by Theodore Slotkin who experiments with rats in his laboratory at Duke University confirm that the consumption of nicotine during adolescence leads to permanent neurological and functional changes that can’t be reversed. The changed structures are still detectable even after the (addictive) behaviour has been stopped, an effect that is especially pronounced in male animals. I see two possible ways of proceeding in light of this outcome. I can resign myself to my fate and reject all responsibility for my current actions. I am not to blame. I had no chance of evading this threat due to my upbringing. And on top of this, I’m a man. My brain is how it is. I might as well light up. The alternative is: I can’t reverse the damage, but I can find new ways to bypass my addiction. I can redirect it, I can think of my desire to smoke another way. To start with, I can write about this desire.

  What is addiction? What is habit? How do we bypass patterns of behaviour that we never knowingly opted for? The enlightenment philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg clearly already had a concept of neurological networks and reflected upon his own brain’s plasticity, his malleability. He at least found an apt image for that which I have attempted to narrow down and grasp here in this book. In his youth, Lichtenberg lived on an unpaved square in Darmstadt and he observed how walkers made their way across this square from his window. ‘When the weather was good, people would go as well as they could on the diagonal. When the weather was bad or the unpaved part was very marshy, people went along the two sides and not diagonally.’ If it had snowed in the night, there would be a fine, crooked trace in the morning composed of a few footprints. In the course of the morning a path would form from out of this faint route and at around midday even ‘very sober and wise men’ who must have known that the shortest route would be the diagonal, would walk across the wonkily beaten path that had been left behind by a single sleepy night watchman or a drunk labourer. If the young Lichtenberg had lived on the ground floor or had belonged among those who had to cross the square every day, he would never had made this observation.

  If you haven’t for a while, light up a cigarette. But do what you do – seeing as you’ve just read a book about nicotine – more attentively than usual. Observe, for example, how you handle the lighter. Are you right-handed? You most probably find it easier and more comfortable to hold it so that the flint wheel turns left and the flame shoots up near your index finger. This is to do with the anatomy of your thumb. When it’s bent, the joint that connects your thumb to your hand goes left more flexibly than it does right. Incidentally, children who are still wary of the flame almost always do it the other way around. They hold the lighter so that the flame appears to the left of the wheel, and because the thumb uncomfortably dodges to the right, they press against the wheel so firmly it jams.

  Appendix

  p. 31: Deng Xiaoping © Corbis

  p. 36: Aunt Anna (private)

  p. 46: Laufen Lunge (private)

  p. 47: Reanimation (private)

  p. 54: Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver

  p. 55: Cigarette dissection (private)

  p. 66: New Year’s Eve firework (privat
e)

  p. 70: Smoking room (private)

  p. 71: Mercedes (private)

  p. 80: Table (private)

  p. 83: Milton H. Erickson (Source: www.franbarbero.es/blog/wp-content/uploads/milton-erickson.jpg)

  p. 87: Gloria fire extinguisher (private)

  p. 88: The Jumper (private)

  p. 94: Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (Source: www.ghmchs.org/thisweek/photo-listing4.htm)

  p. 97: Rush Creek Village (private)

  p. 102: Jeep (private)

  p. 104: Racing bike (private)

  p. 113: Ice pick (Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/7/7e/Historischer_Eispickel_mit_GFK-Stiel.jpg)