A PARTICULAR QUADRUPLICITY

1. We eat and drink - the one arguably physical and the other chemical; vegetative and watery parallels, in Elemental terms, to the world of masculine and feminine values.

2. Should we - or some of us - not therefore smoke (not necessarily tobacco) and sniff (not necessarily cocaine, which in any case is more usually 'snorted') if there are to be metachemical and metaphysical parallels to the above.

3. For smoking and sniffing arguably appertain to the same kind of holonic quadruplicity as eating and drinking, with the difference that whereas the former are noumenal and effectively upper class, the latter are phenomenal and basically lower class, which is to say, corporeal rather than ethereal.

4. Perhaps it is because we live in a predominantly worldly time, with lower-class values as the democratic mean, that eating and drinking are far more prevalent than smoking and sniffing; or perhaps, not excluding an element of that, it is also because the former habits are mandatory to survival, whereas we can still survive without either of the latter, notwithstanding the need to breathe?

5. Certainly it cannot be logically denied, whatever evidence to the contrary might suggest, that smoking and sniffing are more habits of 'the (noumenal) few' than of 'the (phenomenal) many', even though there are several different ways of smoking if not sniffing.

6. There are certainly different ways of drinking, if not eating, as well, but a person who only drinks and eats would seem to me to be a lesser type than one who also smokes and/or sniffs.

7. Be that as it may, smoking and drinking appertain, in Elemental terms, to the female side of life, and eating and sniffing (including incense) to its male side - the former options respectively metachemical and chemical, having to do with fire and water (fluid), the latter ones ... physical and metaphysical, given their correlations with vegetation (earth) and air.

8. We are told that smoking is bad for us, and so for many persons dead or dying of lung cancer and related illnesses it would seem to be; but can the same be said of sniffing, and, if not, then what is to prevent more people - apart from lower-class prejudices rooted in the phenomenality of volume and mass - from indulging in this alternative noumenal habit out of a desire not only to 'turn the tables', so to speak, on smoking but to 'up the stakes' from drinking and eating merely - something that everybody does, whatever his class or gender, with all the concrete assurances of the world and few if any of its abstract hang ups!

9. Certainly I can remember a teacher at school who was - and probably considered himself to be - a cut above the rest of them, and he both smoked tobacco and sniffed snuff on a regular basis, thereby attesting, it seems to me, to a superior disposition in relation to this particular quadruplicity than those who only, or merely, ate and drank, after the fashion of ... well, most of the life forms on this planet that are even more worldly, or terrestrial, than man.