the first time that i quit smoking, i would have nightmares regularly about going back. it would be transactional, the act of consummating the body of the cigarette in its entirety: first i would get it lit, then i would inhale, and slowly, gradually, the distinction between myself and the thing in my hand would disappear completely.
this was in 2020, when i was first beginning to consider the neurological interface that stood between thought and reality, everything part of the same bioorganic network. nothing happened outside of the very physically-determined process of cognition, after all—not the imagination, and certainly not the language which that cognition was able to imagine. as long as an image existed in my mind, it was as good to me as the real thing, and could in fact take on the quality of completion—which in lived experience, on the other hand, occurs only representationally—considering that each image i was able to see must already be a thing which had been imagined. i would simply imagine myself smoking. and while the actual event of smoking was busy transferring over its power to its image in this way, in the meantime it was also reducing itself to its own very possibility: whatever i didn’t actually do started and stopped in the imagination. it was two birds with one stone—raising the imaginary to the real, deferring the real to the imaginary—so that, as it happened, quitting smoking was just a matter of dialectics.
i thought about the particular details of the pack i smoked, starting from the origin of my experience with each, which was a matter of placing myself inside one of the many gas stations lining the long american highway. then came the pack’s position on the shelf behind the counter, where i could easily make out its shape, its color, its dimension. from there, every step in the process became immediately clear: the cashier taking the pack from the shelf, carrying it across the aisle and holding it against the beam of the scanner, sliding it over the counter, reading out the total. once i finally paid, then came unwrapping the box, tugging out the little paper card at the front of the pack, slipping the first cigarette from the tight bundle like a leg from a stocking, and at last holding it in my mouth, where i could bring my flame up against it.
by that point, if i’d made it this far, the series of images had passed through my mind in such a smooth, clear procession that the craving would already be crushed by the realization of the ritual: realization and ritual, themselves both already transactional in nature. owing to the totalizing power of the image, i realized that the only thing i was missing was its actuality, which had just become a part i could take or leave—in the case of a cigarette, the actual is actually a very dangerous thing—and that my imagined self must be infinitely more generous than i was, since he was sacrificing himself for the preservation of my body.