Cigarette #6: Getcha thanatos on, all the way down, all the way down to the ground

SIXTH CIGARETTE, 4:35pm
The most beautiful courtyard in America
MUSIC: "I Want to Evil," Eartha Kitt

Like something that seeks its level, I want to go to the devil,
I want to be evil, I want to spit tacks, I want to be evil and cheat at jacks.
I want to wake up in the morning with that dark brown taste,
I want to see some dissipation in my face . . .

If you haven't already figured it out from the location tags, I spend a lot of my smoking time on the "hacking bench" in this particular courtyard. For an explanation, I can only offer this from Eve Tushnet:

Ritual is a great way for sins to grab you and overcome your resistance. Why? Because a ritual is meant to provoke ekstasis, ecstasy, standing outside oneself. In the Mass, the rituals — the music, the costumery, the familiar words and patterns — remind us where we are, draw us away from distracting everyday concerns, and pull us into an ecstatic relationship with Christ. [...] The rituals of the Church are meant to draw us out of our usual lack of focus and into a focus that sharpens our blurry edges and makes us more ourselves.

In the rituals of addiction, we seek to do the opposite: to sink ourselves and lose ourselves so that we don't have to think too hard about what we're doing. I'm not entirely sure if this is the language I want to use, but provisionally I'll say that there are ecstasies of eros ("the paradoxical desire for union with what is different") and ecstasies of thanatos, self-destruction; and addiction rituals draw us into the latter. Addiction rituals are meant to fragment the self, muffle the conscience, and blank out the mind.

This is certainly true — once I sit down on the bench, I can't help but follow the ritual through to its conclusion. The problem is that by using the language of ritual to describe what I had previously only thought of as a habit, Eve has made smoking on the bench more attractive. It's like Phillip Roth says in The Counterlife:

Then one evening after work, as Wendy was cleaning his tray and he was routinely washing up, he turned to her and, because there simply seemed no way around it any longer, he began to laugh. "Look," he said, "let's pretend. You're the assistant and I'm the dentist." "But I am the assistant," Wendy said. "I know," he replied, "and I'm the dentist — but pretend anyway."

"And so," Henry had told Nathan, "that's what we did." "You played Dentist," Zuckerman said. "I guess so," Henry said, "—she pretended she was called 'Wendy,' and I pretended I was called 'Dr. Zuckerman,' and we pretended we were in my dental office. And then we pretended to fuck—and we fucked." "Sounds interesting," Zuckerman said. "It was, it was wild, it made us crazy — it was the strangest thing I'd ever done. We did it for weeks, pretended like that, and she kept saying, 'Why is it so exciting when all we're pretending to be is what we are?'"