He is gone: I clean the house; throw away the remnants of his stay. The shaving cream, the shoelace ends, the ashtray. I buy a necklace, perfume, a haircut and bulbs. It’s the domestic ritual to banish my thoughts of him. Each person has such a ritual, I suppose. Stronger even, any house contains the possibility of ritually erasing the traces of its inhabitants. The cleaning is a way of reconquering space. The house doesn’t store the memory in itself; it isn’t tied to our past. Instead, we can use it to release ourselves from our former life.
Rules for sanitation are meant to keep us from degenerating. The bigger the fear of dying, of growing old or of losing in another way, the bigger our need to take control. Present laws against smoking are a vigorous effort to express our capability of forming our world; they reflect the longing for a ritualistic attempt to make our environment fresh. By sending smokers out of the public space. We identify the danger in such a way that we can eliminate it.
The fashion to purify air rebounds in the architecture. New halls, lobbies appear between the office blocks and the streets. The smoking areas are dark, all marble with big ashtrays and no seats. These places are not fit to enjoy a cigarette and think, rest or talk; they are transit areas, designed to encourage workers to take shorter breaks. Building where nobody smokes take on an artificial smell, like in waiting rooms. Here the smokers mimic adolescents, who, longing for privacy hang out in toilets, on the pavement, the fire staircase. These are the places of refuge. After moving out of the way, a smoker has no other way to rebel. As at school, smoking is an act of both self—assertion and submission. Architects and designers take the place of the schoolteacher, who takes for granted that some pupils will be cast out.
The exact position of your lips on the cigarette has been tested out in the tobacco industry. The duration of one cigarette is also calculated. Law restricts the places where you smoke and the moments you light up.
(Smoke gets in you eyes)
You inhale, hold your breath and exhale. Smoking brings you into another state, emotionally and physically. The desire of that state is stronger than the fear of living shorter, stronger than the fear of getting ill, or being the loser you are suggested to be, out there, on the pavement.