We were looking for a name and an ashtray chanced upon us. Proper names die alone. So, let us have the collective combustion of a common noun. Now, you cannot find an ashtray in Coffee House. The tambourine man is no more. Ashtray in its telos is dead! Well, it may have begun with the contingency of a non-idea, but just like all non-meaning has to go back to meaning, all a-politics making a return
to politics, even ashtray has turned into an idea, or let us say it has shaped an idea—the idea of a mood—of togetherness. Ashtray beckons the collective festivities of our fluid addas. It is a token of the commune, never to be, but all the same. We do have the burnt out ends of smoky days! Ashtray may ring many bells. It is provocative if not seductive. But mind you, it is also naughtily self-conscious when it comes to its own seductiveness. Ashtray may be the unconscious, the dustbin of psychoanalysis! It may also be tinged with the humanist paradox of Man the Wonderful pitted against Man the Quintessence of Dust! Make sense who may!!! We care a F**K. Take it or leave it. It is anyone’s guess. It is not our job to interpret our work. However, there is indeed an urge to communicate through this trash. We hope to produce something new from this wasteful humility. The new must always break with the existing body of work. The new is thus always at the edge of the rubbish. We do not want a canon. A canon ball will do for us. Let us simply shake our ashes of inhibition, expectation, convention and even a clichéd counter-position of radicalism and read Ashtray with a truly open mind. Let this openness be at one with the absolute virginity of a blank page. A white page needs most daring indeed. Let the mind be a tabula rasa as it plunges its butt into the ashtray.
