The Camel Pack (1)

To take the strange reason for being and expound upon it, I will focus on the pack of Camel cigarettes as it surely holds the position of the most glorified object of the novel (2). It should be noted again that this text was intended to display each object for the sake of the object, so the importance of the Camels must certainly be dissected (3). With this novel, Robbins set out to write a story about objects in a profound new way. He wanted to tell the story of the objects themselves, the story of something with its own proper function and meaning to society. This story, of the cigarette pack, is the only story involved in the book which isn't characterized as a love story (4). Unless, of course, you consider that Leigh-Cheri used said Camel pack to foster her connection with Wrangle, used it as the seed to her recreation of Wrangle's room in prison, used it to meditate on and find a meaning in it that might “make love stay,” as the star-crossed pair longs to do. In that case, it's no surprise that we find another love story (5). However, the point of this dissection is not to establish life with the Camel pack as= another love story, although that does certainly fit it neatly into the structure of the novel as a whole, the point here is to establish it as part of the very structure of our princess, Leigh-Cheri.
The Camel pack initially stands alone as its own object, described as it is, a small box wrapped in cellophane which contains cancerous agents. It is introduced to the princess as the sort of box which Wrangle carries with him to keep him company in prison, and more importantly, to explain his constant stash of matches. Once Leigh-Cheri begins to contemplate its face though, the pack face becomes a part of her, a world in and of itself which fits into her universe. As stated, she uses the box to meditate upon to become closer to her imprisoned love by sharing his surroundings, but in meditating, Leigh-Cheri finds a world in the Camel pack face comprised of the elements presented to her, and those she finds there through metaphysical travels (6). Having been found and colonized by her, this land fits into her universe and thus the structure of her very being, and because of their mutual isolation, Leigh-Cheri and this Camel pack, she visits its face often not to escape her room, but to become even more acquainted with herself.
The Camel pack face yields a very interesting move on the part of Leigh-Cheri, a dive into the index system as laid down by Charles Sanders Peirce; where there's smoke, there's fire (7). Our princess took quite the plummet into indexes, though, when she decided the very image of the pyramids indicated the presence of a world she could visit. So she did, and this world was not Egypt, as such, but rather a logical world of indexes which much resembles that Saharan land (8). After hypothesizing at great length about the true nature and origin of the pyramids, for she decided they must all share one common nature and origin, our princess took indexes to their furthest point and entered a world based on the elements present on a pack of Camel cigarettes. From the pyramids, sand, dromedary, and palms, our princess decided that because there was no end to the horizon, there must be no end to the land. She “found” that land. From the pyramids, on land which must be there, for there was no end to the horizon, Leigh-Cheri decides there must be some population here, for otherwise, where would the pyramids have come from? Then, upon meeting these people, they and their animals, friends, slaves, she had conversations with them. How could she have decided they could be communicated with? Because the fact that these people travel together indicated they must have some kind of communicative method or else how and why would they have banded together? One might even go so far as to say the herders would surely be the most apt communicators, for they share not only a kind of language with one another, but they can also communicate, on a certain level, with animals. To me, it seems quite obvious that in a work where the face of a pack of Camel cigarettes indicates the existence of a world one might step into from their own abode, the existence of herders indicates a presence of some sort of communication, but also that inter-species communication is certainly an indicator of communicative prowess (9).
Where Leigh-Cheri is presented to us as royalty, a princess, the Camel pack is presented to us as something somewhat regal in its global presence, its grand face, its very traceable heritage like the lineage of a knight. The both of them, though, are very, well, usual. They are extraordinary in the honest breakdown of the word, they are extra, that is to say, particularly, ordinary. Leigh-Cheri, deposed by a royal mishap along with the rest of her family, doesn't function in society in a way much different than most other twenty-somethings. She is passionate, but about nothing specific until it catches her interest, has her little obsessions, views love in a strange and constantly changing way. Much like the princess, Camel was deposed by what could be called a royal mishap. Surely it wouldn't be a stretch to call the turn of the mighty, fashionable, cool and smooth cigarette dynasty into the lord tyrants of the cigarettes and cancer throne. Though, after, Camel still functions in society much like any other cigarette company. It is prolific, but only so much as we allow ourselves to let it be, has its little quirks that make people choose it over others, and continues to sell its products, lethal as they are. In their characteristics, we find surface similarities between Leigh-Cheri and the pack face world, but internally, they are not just similar, they are the same (10).
In the face of the Camel pack, Leigh-Cheri finds a Saharan land. She wanders this land by way of her mind, discovering the weathered faces of the pyramids and the hidden oasises where she meets the people of the pack face, the sort of people you might expect to find wandering the desert. She becomes quite protective of the pack of Camels, which she carries with her in this land, telling those travelers that, no, she cannot give them a smoke because “a successful external reality depends on an internal vision that is left intact,” (Robbins, Still Life, 167). As Leigh-Cheri develops this well-rounded and quite realistic understanding of the pack face, she becomes all the more aware of herself, of her mind, and what she believes. This pack face world is an analogous mirror world of our princess' inner self, where she becomes comfortable and sure; this pack face world becomes not simply a being structurally similar to Leigh-Cheri, but a structural element necessary to her self, and her personal development (11).
The “external reality” that Leigh-Cheri must maintain here can arguably be herself or the room, which she seeks to live in by her penitentiary rules, without losing her mind. The young woman as a human, seen and heard by other humans, who we find asking for her suitor after a letter breaks her heart, this woman is not a frail individual. I would argue that, while she crushes the Camel pack in her bitter reaction, it is only because of the world within the face that Leigh-Cheri now possesses the sense of self to be capable of crushing it. As it is smashed, the world is crumpled with it, she “[topples] the pyramids and [busts] the dromedary's hump,” yet she does not lose her mind because she is in totally control of that pack face world, and has made herself as real and as hearty as that world (12). That being said, as it is literally her, the chamber pot, cot, and pack of cigarettes within that room, losing the wholeness of that cigarette pack would effectively rip into the fabric of her mind, and likely destroy her sense of self and all that she had developed that self into. She does not open the pack when she crushes is, she is destroying the outward appearance of the pack and its innards, yes, but she is not crumpling that world as she had found it. Leigh-Cheri creates on the surface of the pack a visible infliction of the internal pain she feels, further bridging her self and the pack face world; when she recovers, the pack, as well as her self, will surely bear the hallmarks of agony, but they both continue to flourish in spite of their scars.
The pack face world ceases to be the carefully preserved mirror of Leigh-Cheri after the incident, to be the very core of her world. But, the world still holds a significance to her, in that the pyramids it houses have proven to her the phenomenal power (13) which the human race has prescribed to them for millennia, among few other things that have proven to have such a monumental bearing on our species. Like, for example, love.

1 Were it not for Gulietta, you would be the star of the show
2 If you ignore how many time Leigh-Cheri's breasts were glorified, of course. Don't even get me started on the "peachf..." I give, Robbins, you make my stomach turn.
3 Because what else am I going to talk about? Robbins' penis envy?
4 Before you tell me I'm wrong, the book says the love story takes place inside the pack of Camels, I'm talking about the story of the world the crazy girl makes up
5 I'd like to say "unfortunately..." here, but it was awfully pertinent to my paper, so I guess I should be thankful.
6 Keep in mind, she's presented as the "normal" one in the couple
7 Where there's crazy, there's meds. Oh Leigh-Cheri, please do take some.
8 The girl should have picked up a book with merit at the library, like a book about structuralism instead of one on advertising
9 I'm not sure what scares me more about everything written after annotation 8, that I wrote it in a hazy stupor of sleeplessness and starvation, or that it's actually entirely valid based on Peirce's outline of indexes.
10 Hey world, meet the first person to get better after finding cigarettes.
11 Which is why I contend somebody needs to put her on meds, I don't typically condone that, but here, anything to get her away from Wrangle seems like a marvelous plan
12 Which I've just noticed I inadvertently likened to a can of Campbell's Chunky
13 PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWA!!! Like the genie. In the lamp, in Aladdin? Get it? Well, I did. Because I'm 21 and still love Disney.