CYCLE 85

1. SUPERFEMININE/SUBMASCULINE SMOKING DISTINCTION. Smokers are basically either superfeminine or submasculine, since to smoke is to be either superfeminine or submasculine with regard to pipes on the one hand and to cigarettes/cigars on the other hand.

2. PIPE SMOKING. Those who smoke pipes are effectively superfeminine, whether in purist terms with regard to straight pipes or in quasi-submasculine terms with regard to drop-bowl pipes, as though in a distinction between light and 'lightfire', the latter subordinate to the former. Hence not only is pipe smoking idealistic; it is effectively, if not literally, fascistic, with fascist/nazi overtones analogous to the distinction we had earlier drawn between black-and-white photos and colour photos.

3. CIGARETTE SMOKING. In contrast, I shall argue, to the communist essence of cigarette smoking, something more genuinely submasculine in the context of tipped cigarettes but quasi-superfeminine in the context of untipped ones, where we might be forgiven for advancing a parallel with firelight as opposed to fire, given the absence of a fiery core, or filter, from this purer type of cigarette, one arguably more Leninist than Marxist (if Judaic parallels are not to be elicited in view of the comparatively contemporary nature of cigarettes). Be that as it may, the distinction between pipes and cigarettes is akin to a stellar/solar one, the former objective and the latter subjective.

4. ROLL-UPS. Subjectivity is not, however, a word one would associate with roll-ups, which require to be hand rolled in objective fashion, and which I would therefore contend to be fundamentalist ... where cigarettes are naturalist. In other words, roll-ups would be akin to motorbikes vis-à-vis mopeds, something to be associated with the heart and blood rather than with fire and firelight, and I hold to the view that the more or less Moslem distinction between the heart and the blood can be respectively correlated with 'joints' and standard roll-ups, which is to say, between that which, employing a filter of sorts, appertains to the core of the context in question, namely the heart, and that which, employing no such thing, can be equated with its light aside, after the manner of untipped cigarettes. Hence the heart/blood distinction of fundamentalism would have its smoking parallel, so I maintain, in 'joints' and plain roll-ups, the former of course a means of smoking dope and therefore more profoundly fundamentalist than the latter. Both, however, are equally submasculine.

5. CIGAR SMOKING. As, on a more phenomenal basis, are cigars, whether large and unwrapped or small and wrapped (in cellophane), the idea being that the one approximates to the Father and the other to the Son in what would be a materialist distinction paralleling the emotional brain and its light aside, the intellect, which latter is superficially more watery (hence the cellophane wrapper around small cigars) than fiery. Probably the Antifather and the Antichrist would be more apt descriptive parallels for the kind of smoking we have in mind, but, whatever the case, it is clear that cigar smoking is somewhat less than genuinely Christian, given its materialist basis in submasculine objectivity.

6. PURGATORIAL EXCEPTION. Needless to say, none of the above modes of smoking, from pipes to cigars, would be relevant to 'Kingdom Come', since the latter is beyond idealism, naturalism, fundamentalism, and materialism ... in the humanism, nonconformism, and transcendentalism of its subfeminine to supermasculine salvations. Probably the only appropriate form of smoking in 'Kingdom Come' would be with regard to the use of bubble pipes for hashish, since the tempering of fire by water has a Christic ring to it which smacks of a purgatorial alternative, suitable for use within second-tier centres, to overly fire-based smoking in pipes, cigarettes, cigars, etc. Should this transpire to being the case, then one need not expect any of the traditional modes of smoking to survive into the Messianic Beyond. They would be altogether too hellish for heavenly life.