Four Milligrams of Phenomenology
51
smell on her clothes as the product of other people’s smoke. Her father, who
picked her up, and who had, according to Louise, ‘a nose like a German
Shepherd,’ kissed her cheek and suspected that Louise had been smoking. He
sniffed her fingers to confirm this, and concluded correctly that 14-year-old
Louise had indeed been smoking.
Trevor, a gardener, told me that at work, there was not a special time
for smoko, and that it was taken when Trevor, the head gardener, felt that it was
appropriate. Trevor works in a garden divided by many retaining walls, and
other compartmentalizing devices, which meant that workmates were often not
in one another’s view. Trevor said that, ‘when the other fellows smell my
smoke, they come over to where I am and that’s how smoko happens.’39
If sociality were to be theorized through smell, the experiences of
Melissa, Louise, and Trevor might indeed indicate to us the difficulty of
deciding where people begin and end. If the sociality and intercorporeality
entailed by smoking were to be theorized through smell, we might draw
different kinds of attention to smoke’s capacity to dissolve existing social and
corporeal connections between persons.
In Trevor’s case, smoke dissolved distances between people as the
smell of Trevor’s smoke wafted to the noses of his workmates, eventually
organizing them together in one place, and around one activity. In Melissa’s
case, the smell of cigarettes lingered sufficiently long in her clothes to dissolve a
social boundary that otherwise would have remained between her and the young
man at the bus stop, who eventually became her boyfriend. Armed with this
olfactory knowledge, the man effectively dissolved a knowledge and a social
boundary, which led him to dissolve other kinds of boundaries between himself
and Melissa later on. Louise experienced a dissolving of the connection that kept
her father and herself on good terms; in her father’s view, the specific
connection that had been dissolved was one of ‘trust.’ Louise’s father then took
it upon himself to dissolve some more of Louise’s social connections when he
grounded her.
To these experiences of dissolving, I add my own experience of the
dissolving of good social relationships; the sly approach of my own smoke was
detected as it made its way into the unwilling lungs of a lady in a beer garden.
Beset by the smell of my cigarette wafting toward her back, in an outdoor beer
garden, she lifted her face skywards, inhaled in noisy rattling rales, and accused
me of causing her asthma attack. She rubbed her eyes, which began to water,
and snarled at me said, ‘Congratulations, young lady, you have also irritated my
eyeballs!’40 Smoke not only sneaks its way into unwilling lungs, but also assails
the organs of sight sense, the eyes, with acrid smoke, which sends some into an
almost literally blind panic. Any chance of a smiling sociality between the lady
and myself forged over the interconnectedness of our bodies through smoke was
instantly dissolved, as was my plan to stay around for the rest of the afternoon.
Also dissolved here is the notion that exhalation is strictly related to smoking
pleasure.