Spectator Competition: It is what it is 

In Comp. 3373 you were invited to mull on a line that Sigmund Freud almost certainly did not say, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’, substituting another object if it seemed apt. In the event there was plenty about cigars as substitutes and not so much about their substitutes as substitutes. A word in praise of Frank McDonald’s lovely poem about the transformations wrought by imagination and Gail White’s ‘Cat is simply cat’. Also deserving of a mention: Alex Steelsmith, Janine Beacham (‘Cigars are just cigars, no deep complex… Good Lord, stop thinking everything is sex!’) and George Simmers, whose poem ends:

Then he, being an utter bastard,

Quoted Kipling to provoke:

‘A woman is only a woman,

But a good cigar is a smoke.’

The following win £25.

Perusing Ludwig Wittgenstein I read

‘The world is everything that is the case’.

Does this mean, as my mother would have said,

A place for everything then? Watch this space.

Perhaps not. Moving on, do I recall

A Freudian apocryphal aperçu

That sometimes a cigar is literal?

It all depends upon your point of view.

‘A rose is a rose is a rose, avers

The modernist virtuoso Gertrude Stein.

This famous insight or soundbite of hers –

Obscure tautology – is not my line.

I sought to plumb the secret core of ‘is’,

Discovering what I always feared:

That isness is a complicated quiz.

Ontology is frankly rather weird.

Basil Ransome-Davies

Cigars can be Churchillian:

Calm. In control. Iconic;

Like Groucho’s, vaudevillian;

Pacino’s: chilled, sardonic,

Exuding masculinity,

Epitome of cool,

Or Roger Moore’s: virility –

‘Name’s Bond. Nobody’s fool.’

Some smoke it presidentially

Like Eisenhower or Clinton,

Who, strictly confidentially,

Would give one to his intern.

Sometimes cigars are just cigars, Fidel:

A bundle of tobacco leaves to light -–

Except, of course, for that one, truth to tell:

With added CIA sweet dynamite.

David Silverman

Sometimes, it’s really a phallus,

Priapic, a symbol of lust –

Belongs to a bloke who is bulging with smoke,

And ready to thrum or to thrust.

Sometimes it’s made out of chocolate

And filled with pistachio paste –

It won’t burn your lung, but explodes on your tongue

With a moreish and glorious taste.