Age puts a hole in
your pocket. You reach in there and find out that, without you knowing it,
somewhere in the course of your days and wanderings, you’ve lost … well, all
kinds of things that you thought you absolutely needed. Memories. Desires.
Or, for instance,
breath.
When I was a child, I
thought about breath in terms of holding my breath. I’d exaggerate the whole not
breathing thing, mumping out my cheeks, keeping from breathing through my
nostrils, until I’d have to stop, breath in, breath out noisily. The rumor was
that you could do this and at a certain point you’d turn blue and pass out. For
some reason, I thought that sounded great, a feat worth doing. I never passed
out, though. I never met anyone that did. I began to think this was a myth.
I also learned to hold
my breath when I swam underwater. I tried to make it from one side of the pool
to the other underwater, to build up my stamina.
Later, in my spiritual
twenties, I took Yoga. As part of the routine, I tried to meditate upon my
breathing.
And the Yoga phase
passed. Decades passed. Wine and beer and coffee and all the starches and
sweets of a developed economy passed.
Then, a few years ago,
I came down with pneumonia. I’d had pneumonia before. We were old friends. But
this was ultra pneumonia, like I never had before. It carved a month out of my
life. Afterwards, I was short of breath whatever I did.
Since then, I am not
ever long of breath. I sit here, breathing in and out, nothing simpler, but I
know that I can easily get out of breath if I get up and run around. Breath has
dribbled out of the hole in my pocket.
Mallarmé, in an essay he pieced together out of three previous
essays and published in Divagations – Crise de Vers, 1895 – imagines poetry,
or literature itself, as a sort of institution of breathing: “replacing the
perceptible respiration of the in-spired ancient lyric (la respiration
perceptible en l’ancien souffle lyrique)
or the enthusiastic personal direction
of the phrase.” I could go all deriddian on this notion of a replacement, but I
am more interested in the transfer of the breath in one body, human, with its
tongue and lungs, to another, the written, lungless, an imprint of a long lost
breathing – rather like the X rays that they took of my lungs when I had pneumonia.
One thinks of Mallarmé as the high priest of the blank page, the
page addressed in A throw of the dice. But by grounding literature in breath,
he foretells such poets as Olson and Snyder. The beats. Ginsberg.
How am I to locate, what am I to do with breathlessness? I’ve long
thought we build our strengths out of our deficiencies – not in denial, but in
experiment, pushing against the limit. So what am I to do with breathlessness?
I’m not sure I can follow out some ideology of strength and
deficit and make it all a happy end. But what I know is that it makes the stairs
more stairs, the hill more hill, the stone stonier. Perhaps shortness of
breath, too, is a device. A god in decline, but a god still.
