Thank you, fug

Much as I hate smoking, there have been occasions when despite my cherished prejudices I have found myself succumbing to the romance of a situation in which smoke formed a crucial element.

I recall a night - part of a night and more of a morning - spent at the Brixton Academy where a mixture of dead smoke, stale sweat and other, sweeter fragrances, was stabbed through with lasers, or burst into garish blotches of colour from the throbbing light system high above us.  And as the exhausted but manic figures bobbed around in this miasma, the atmosphere became almost palpable, as if the kilowatts of repetitive sound energy had cooked and congealed that strange airy confection into a wispy candy-floss veil which wrapped these ghostly presences like a shroud.

In a more intimate context I recall a late-night jazz set, buried deep in the cosy, claustrophobic space of the Village Vanguard in New York.  A hot young band was playing - the Harper Brothers - and the place was packed.  It was a cold March night outside, and the heating was turned up full in there, mixing its almost liquid warmth with copious tobacco smoke and the faint smell of alcoholic drinks.  I could barely breathe, but as I sat there, literally under the bell of Michael Harper's trumpet, I found a sense of authenticity in all this that kept me riveted.

I also recall with amazed fondness the same ostinato olfactory sensation of smoke during one of several long journeys in Egyptian taxis.  The driver puffed away continuously, lighting the next cigarette from the chewed and stained stump of its predecessor.  As before, there was music: a wailing female voice sang on the car's music system, punctuated by tape jams cleared by thumps from the driver, who also tried to use crumpled cigarette packs to wedge in the tape as the car swayed drunkenly about the road. Outside, the sun scorched the endlessly unrolling desert.

Against these memories, the locale of my latest smoke-filled experience was far more prosaic, taking place in a tiny, airless basement of no distinction, I had gone there for a two-day business meeting, and found myself surrounded by two French, one Italian and three Spanish chain smokers.  I was soon conscious of the foulness of the air I was breathing, of the burning soreness of my eyes.

But something miraculous happened.  The more I suffered, the less I consciously paid attention to what was going on around me, though part of my brain was still aware of it.  And what that part still engaged externally saw was, naturally enough, a business meeting.  Nothing extraordinary in that: people spoke, I listened; I occasionally added a comment while they listened.  Nothing extraordinary except that I realised with a sudden excitement that this meeting was being conducted entirely in French, a language I had hitherto been quite hesitant in using, certainly for business discussions like these.  My preoccupation with the smoke and discomfort had freed other parts of my mind simply to forget about details like translating or language, and enabled it to transcend the situation completely.  As the fug descended, I was granted the nearest I shall probably get to a Pentecostal experience 

(26.12.91)

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