Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, Literally and Figuratively

 

deleterious - adjective - causing harm or damage (Google)

Just in case you are unaware (or live under a rock), because of the seemingly preternatural abundance of wild fires burning in Canada and the southerly direction of the wind, the New York metropolitan area has been enveloped in smoke. The normally blue skies at this time of year appear to be burned a gray-orange, and the air is tinged with a corrosive musk, deleterious to the eyes and lungs of all creatures. Even with our advanced technology, there is little we humans can do but wait for the forces of nature to find us relief. Yet until that happens (it might take days for the patterns of wind to change), all of us in the path of the smoke will have to find suitable cover in order to prevent smoke from literally getting in our eyes and elsewhere. 

In the 1960s, my pianist grandmother (1888-1983) introduced an inchoate me to a song, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" written by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach for a 1933 musical called Roberta. Since at the time, I was not even into my second decade of life, I couldn't distinguish between the literal and the figurative, so I just thought that the song's title underscored one of the hazards of smoking cigarettes, a popular pastime at the time, around non-smokers. How naive of me. It turned out that the lyrics contain tropes that have nothing to do with the superficial. The words denote the deleterious nature of romantic love. Passion, to be precise. In short, the heat of lovemaking tends to produce a wild fire, which in turn, exudes smoke, which in turn, gets in the lover's eyes, blinding him to any semblance of reality. "When your heart's on fire/you must realize smoke gets in your eyes."  In the tune, the female lover absconds with the heart of her partner, leaving him with tears as a consolation prize (the effect of the cause) and the thought that "when a lovely flame dies/smoke gets in your eyes." Which simply implies that he will remain blind to her faults even though he is enduring heartbreak. 

It pains me to think that in this natural crisis, there are individuals out there on the East Coast who ironically may be experiencing both the literal and the figurative meanings of "smoke gets in your eyes." If you are, then my heart goes out to you. All I can say is find a safe haven inside of a building possessing an interior that doesn't remind you of your ex and wear an N95 mask if you have to go outside :). After all, you just can't afford to have any more smoke getting in your eyes.

#word-to-words, #slice-of-life,  #blog, #blogging, #editorial, #reading, #vocabulary, #ReadersMagnet, #spilled thoughts, #good advice, #personal-essay, #writing community, #writing, #optimism, #philosophy, #truth, #everyday-philosophy, #current-events