Category: Breath in Literature & Art

A poignant cartoon by John Cuneo in “the age of the breath cure”:
I can’t tell—are you yoga-breathing or are you seething?

Source: The New Yorker, 23 May 2022

Candace Wark, Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and her art colleague Shirley Nannini created stunning photographs of air flow using a wind tunnel.

In the article Airflow Art, Koren Wetmore of Illinois Tech Magazine, writes

„Blending science and art, the images reveal the beauty of airflow patterns captured using smoke, light, and colored filters. To visualize the movement of invisible air, Wark and Nannini introduce smoke into the wind tunnel by coating a wire with oil and running an electric current through it. As the oil burns, the smoke gets carried by the air flowing through the tunnel. It passes around and over objects placed in the tunnel, such as tennis balls or flat plates, and then the women photograph the patterns produced downstream. The images’ brilliant colors arise from filters placed over the lights used to illuminate the smoke.

“We work with the lighting, the speed, and various conditions in the wind tunnel until we get these images that people really respond to. For 25 years I’ve been doing scientific photography of flow patterns and they’ve always looked beautiful to me, but until Shirley, I had never thought of them as art.”

Read the full article here: https://magazine.iit.edu/summer-2015/airflow-art

I recently indulged in one of P.G. Wodehouse’s mischievous novels, Heavy Weather. Heavy Weather is part of the Blandings Castle series of stories set at the estate of Lord Emsworth and his family and, as always, involves his beloved pig The Empress of Blandings. 

Every P. G. Wodehouse novel is rife with gloriously silly schemes which more or less fail spectacularly. In Heavy Weather, detective Percy Pilbeam has been hired by Lord Emsworth to watch over his pig but he is soon employed by rival parties, namely Lady Constance, Sir Gregory Parsloe and Lord Tilbury, to secure a potentially scandalous manuscript by the Hon. Galahad, Lord Emsworth’s younger brother. Needless to say, each party has their own dubious reasons to secure, possess or destroy said manuscript and that the coveted pages change hands several times as the plot unfolds.

When Percy Pilbeam finally gets his hands on the manuscript, he finds the perfect hiding place for it in an empty shed, unaware that this is the Blandings pigsty. The next morning, as he is about to retrieve the potentially lucrative pages, he encounters the Empress of Blandings chomping through the last pieces of paper. This does not deter Percy Pilbeam to try and sell the manuscript, however, he then plans to simply pretend to Lord Tilbury that he’s still in possession of it.

Here is the scene of the sale, with much succinct breathing to be heard: Read More

I’ve just finished reading Colm Toíbín‘s novel Nora Webster, set in Ireland in the 1960’s. Nora Webster is a mother of four children who has recently been widowed and we accompany her on her journey of dealing with grief while ensuring her social and financial survival.

The book begins with the loss of Nora’s husband Maurice and ends with the Nora’s memory of losing her mother. Colm Toíbín beautifully shows how loss creates a caesura as well as a continuance, a new life or a new way of living with oneself.

Having tried to paint her living room ceiling by herself, the protagonist Nora Webster injured her shoulder to such an extent that despite taking painkillers she can’t sleep. Lying in bed in the darkness, she connects with her dead husband Maurice and re-lives the relation-ship with her mother, particularly at the time of her mother’s death.

I recently rediscovered the folk singer John Martyn and his signature song Solid air. John Martyn wrote Solid air for his friend and peer Nick Drake, who was suffering from severe depression at the time. Drake smoked a lot of hash, „an unbelievable amount“ according to his arranger Robert Kirby. 

The term „solid air“ might easily refer to the blue swirls of dense smoke of hash that Drake was inhaling, staying in the haze of a smoke filled room or being so sensitised by the psychedelic components of the hash that he would feel even the pressure of air on the body.

In the poem The toad, the German Jewish poet Gertrud Kolmar (1894-1943) typically takes on the role of an undesirable creature, asserting her right to existence.

Gertrud Kolmar spent her creative life mostly in communion with nature, with plants and animals as her friends and spiritual allies. Many of her poems speak of, as well as speak up for outsiders, the suppressed and the dumb with whom Gertrud Kolmar identified. In her poems she merges with her subjects in a state of compassion and courage and elevates them symbolically to their natural status which is denied them in society, whether they be humans or other animals. 

In her poem The Fox, award winning British poet Alice Oswald makes palpable the preciousness of our co-existence with nature and the animal world.

A fox mother coming to her house at night to ask for food inspires her to investigate their animal-human communication and the shared understanding between mothers.

I’m awed by the striking images of the utterances of the body, the breath made sound and the soul made whole by recognition.

Beautiful image by photographer Kathrin Swoboda of a red-winged blackbird breathing out.
It made her the winner of the Audubon photography competition in 2019.

Here is her story behind the shot:
“I visit this park near my home to photograph blackbirds on cold mornings, often aiming to capture the “smoke rings” that form from their breath as they sing out. On this occasion, I arrived early on a frigid day and heard the cry of the blackbirds all around the boardwalk. This particular bird was very vociferous, singing long and hard. I looked to set it against the dark background of the forest, shooting to the east as the sun rose over the trees, backlighting the vapor.”

In the entertaining and quirky telenovela, Jane the Virgin, we learn what to do in a stressful situation: „inhala, exhala“. Since this is a telenovela with continuous twists and turns, accidental artificial insemination, love triangles, a villain with multiple faces, a husband returned from the dead etc, „inhala, exhala“ is the mantra of the show. 

I’m always accompanied by poetry, my favourite poets, revisits to favourite poems and poems I simply like and appreciate. On top of that, I spend six months to a year with a new discovery. Since summer of 2021 this has been the Persian American poet Kaveh Akbar. His work fascinates me endlessly, so whenever and wherever I open a page in the volume Calling a Wolf a Wolf or find a poem of his online, it’s a sure thing that something will grab my attention and won’t let go.

He’s written several poems which feature breathing in them, and today I’d like to share one which makes a beautiful cross-reference to the spiritual dimension of breathing anatomy.