Lipton’s Journal/February 21, 1955/634

From Project Mailer

The cigarette is society’s substitute for the penis. It is a cylinder of brown crapped in societies white (germless) (Sinlinder and cylinder and phallus) with the fiery end away from the mouth. But the tobacco (to back-hole—one’s asshole), the tobacco is in the mouth. (Chocolate kisses for example.)

The English who are even more sex repressed than us except for their saving homosexuality—in extreme sup characters, some form (active or passive) of homosexuality is necessary to maintain sanity. At any rate, the English with their tight ass-holes like the tobacco removed tip of Parliaments. (In the Chaplin movie, Chaplin gave a parody of a statesmen who threw out his arms like a fuck and said, “I make a motion.”) And now we begin to have filters.

Our cigarettes are easy on the throat say the advertisements, a genuine homosexual concern I should think if one’s going to have a cock in the throat all the time, but more than that it reminds one that although the cigarette is a tiny phallus it fills the mouth, it reaches the throat. And today coughing up some phlegm, I thought (realized) that the er in me had always enjoyed the phlegm of the cough. Only the sup with its idea that I must be manly, healthy, forthright, had hated the cough. (Healthy—healthy—hell hat three—what a sup I’ve had all these years. To be healthy, to be sexual was to go to hell.)

Anyway, with the phlegm in my mouth (I was in the subway—the iron tunnel—the womb) I had a distance to go before I could expectorate it unless I wished to expectorate in my handkerchief—and over the last few years I’ve not enjoyed expectorating in my handkerchiefs which I’ll go into in a moment. So, instead I decided to walk the two hundred yards to the entrance before spitting out the phlegm, and as I walked I allowed myself to enjoy it, to feel the phlegm coursing through my mouth (I wrote me for mouth—how much of me is my mouth) and I thought, it’s like semen, and how nice semen is in the mouth. And indeed it is and should be if one allows oneself to enjoy it naturally. So the smoker’s cough with its accompanying phlegm is the suppressed desire which finds its semen satisfaction substitute. Smoker’s coughs without accompanying phlegm are something else. Maybe it’s even stronger, it’s accompnaying.

Anyway, I believe one lights a cigarette, or takes a puff in order to galvanize oneself from passive variety into one-giving. Which is why writers so close to the ocean of their passivity-thought smoke intensely while working. They have to in order to drive forward to their ideational-one-point. And we light a cigarette whenever we are disturbed—dist—er—bed—more and more I like er—whenever our wide er passivity is engaged but we wish to go on to a definite point. So an interruption, a conference, a party, a wave of external impressions makes us smoke furiously.

Thus, people with exceptionally active er who have a very strong one-sup smoke a great deal. To stop smoking one must relax the sup, let two-consciousness and n-consciousness (n is vast number and nothing) predominate. Which means that to give up smoking, given such people, one must be less socially efficient or desirous of being socially efficient. Or else, the er must relax, even deaden, one’s soul must become less vivid.

Which is why resigned people smoke little, why homosexuals who accept their homosexually smoke little, why happy women who believe in sex and accept it smoke little—at least, that is, accept the female passivity of their natures. Tremendously repressed people, ministers, judges, social characters who have succeeded in whipping their er into submission are usually not smokers. Smoking is the state of imbalance between sup and er. I, for instance, will not be able to give up smoking until I become much more passive, but because I do not wish to become too passive, because I feel that I wish to give to the world, I shall probably have to smoke or else suck cock. And cigarettes all in all are easier on me.