Category: Breath in Literature & Art

The poem First Cell by Ruth Padel, is a passionate account of „the world’s first magic“, the formation of a cell. It is part of her book We are all from somewhere else, Migration and Survival in Poetry and Prose which I’ve read and listened to countless times to take in her wondrous hymn to life. (Ruth Padel herself narrates the audio version of her book.) We are all from somewhere else explores why living beings migrate, whether it be immigrant plants, millions of wildebeest, zebras and gazelles crossing the Mara River, the ancient Hebrews’ flight into Egypt or today’s migrant workers and refugees. It is „the pull of the world“, the call for survival which began with the first cell’s making and breaking bonds to multiply and replicate itself. „This was the original migration“, Ruth Padel writes, „ – the spread of blue-green algae over the globe.“ Photosynthesis of air to oxygen – the stuff our breath is made of.

I’d like to share a poem from one of the most unique and brilliant contemporary poets in the English language, Anne Carson. This poem is taken from her book Decreation, poems, opera, essays. The idea of decreation stems from Simone Weil, who sees it as “an undoing of the creature in us”, an undoing of the self. Anne Carson explores various ways in which decreation is possible or manifests itself, for example, through sleep, madness, love or immersion in God’s light. Three women in history who have battled with this subject are elegised: Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil.

"Acquire the air" is a line from the poem Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath. I couldn't help but notice just what a perfect verb "acquire" is for the relation-ship living beings can have with air. In the original Latin "acquirere/adquirere" means "to get in addition to, accumulate, gain," from ad "to" + quaerere "to seek to obtain". And how perfect it is for a visceral understanding of mushroom life,  too, a quiet, discreet seeking under the earth while obtaining air in the process. In her poem, mushrooms are portrayed to be models of interaction and Sylvia Plath proves to be the human to write their manifesto.

I’ve never played a video game but I do find the art form fascinating, for example Breath Pirates, an interactive fiction video game from 1997 by Mike Snyder. Breath Pirates was the introduction to a trilogy called The Oxygen Wars which, unfortunately, was never written. The premise of the game is that something caused a decline in Earth’s natural oxygen. As oxygen becomes scarce and the air thins, this leads to a war. As much as the game is a sci-fi fantasy, it seems strangely close to home today when corporations compete over who owns, governs and influences natural resources like water and air.

In Michael Ende’s beloved story Momo, Beppo the street swiper teaches us a lesson about equanimity -and the type of breathing that accompanies it – with his broom.

“…it’s like this. Sometimes, when you’ve a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you’ll never get it swept. And then you start to hurry. You work faster and faster and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you’re out of breath and have to stop–and still the street stretches away in front of you. That’s not the way to do it.

Capacity is a glass sculpture by cross-disciplinary artist Annie Cattrell, made by her own breath to form the delicate structure of human lungs. Through their large surface area and permeability, lungs are indeed organs for capacity, holding, releasing and retaining air. To me, the glass lungs embody the fragility and permeability of being alive which is heightened by the material Annie Cattrell used, Borosilicate glass, normally used for manufacturing test tubes.

Do check out her other works navigating art, science and the poetic on the Royal Society of Sculptors website.

I’d like to share the poem „My breath“ by Rose Ausländer with you. Rose Ausländer was a Jewish poet from the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1901-1988) who often wrote about the bare essentials of life, which, of course, include breathing. She dedicated a whole volume of poetry to the breath, called “Atemhaus” (The House of Breath).

I’ve translated the poem “My breath” for you here, with the original below:

My breath

In my deep dreams
the earth cries
blood

stars smile
into my eyes

when people come
with multi-coloured questions
go to Sokrates
I answer them

The past
has written me as a poem
I have inherited the future

My breath is called
now

Revisiting the poems by Marie Howe, one of my favourite contemporary poets, I found these beautiful lines, “I’m having trouble with my breathing,//I’m still trying to make room for myself.”

Breath is fundamentally about space, space being made and unmade and having more or less access to space. A struggle to breathe, as well as the felt or perceived struggle to breathe, are an issue of space. Space for air, for movement and for transformation.
But what is space to us without safety? Or, at least, the illusion of safety that placates our nervous system, diffuses our worries and fears, lets us find rest.

For Marie Howe, poetry can provide a safe space. “Maybe the first poem was a lullaby. A woman saying to her child, the incantatory, ‘Everything is okay, everything is okay, go to sleep, go to sleep’”.