The longer you’re away from nicotine the more you realize how many other things are also pulling on you. It might be high time to hit the road and take a journey just to see how you relate to everything anyway. This journey turned out to be a tale of desire, maybe even a journey away from one towards another. Sometimes you just have to take an oblique angle. Quitting smoking was the catalyst for me. At the start everything seemed like a dying conundrum.
Conversations with Nic© is a journey toward the mature integration of the self, incorporating experiences of time and the development of our inner life. It is also a tale of desire. Flummoxed in the land of withdrawal, the narrator is catapulted into different avenues of awareness when she is forced on a journey away from the pull of nicotine. In the company of Nic, and some more familiar mythic beings, she discovers how to search her subjective world for the answers she needs to move fully into her life. Though she begins on an uncertain shore she ends on another full of hope.
With humor as a backdrop, the “memoir” style narrative will feel familiar to those that have read contemporary writers in search of self and soul. What we leave behind in the dark of our minds and histories can boomerang back through our psyches. All you need is a catalyst, or a home made bomb. That’s what happened when the narrator quit smoking and the persona Nic was born. That was the start of these conversations, a serio-comic and spirited journey that has Nic chasing the narrator throughout the tale. Once she turns the chase around a full passion for life and creative expression blossoms. The desire that pulls the narrator forward through the land of withdrawal addressed her entire being. As her need to justify her last twenty years emerged she discovered a strong identification with Odysseus, the original journey man. And she also learns to appreciate the role that his wife, Penelope, had in his world.
Forced on a journey through the virtual and subjective realms that she had only given marginal validity in the past, this move also put Nic on notice. She was no longer fighting him head on, but using all the tricks in the book to counter his wicked, insidious ways. This included comic monologues and giving voice to the “Goddamned right I am” woman who had something to say about the entire mythical history of the western world.
For anyone who has ever quit anything or who have had something quit on them this story about deepening, with its comic episodes like “Buddha Smokes,” shows the important elements and the digging needed to understand our soulful connections and primal pushes.
———————————
Conversations with Nic – by freda karpf