These notes were produced for a BBC Radio 4 feature about breathing, produced by Clare Hughes and broadcast in May 1999, as The Kiss of Life.
| Theories of Breathing Bad Breath Inspiration Breath and the Voice Long Life Fresh Air Mouth Breathing Lets In The Enemy Breathing and Time |
Breathing lies between the condition of the natural and the cultural.
Breathing is a biological invariant, that is nevertheless capable of being
subjected to significant forms of variation. All human beings breathe,
all the time and involuntarily. But it is also possible to take control
of our breathing, for the purposes of speech, song, making music, etc.
If human history depends on language, and if language is interrupted breath,
then our capacity to effect complex regulations of the breath lies at the
bottom of our humanity.
Breathing is a symbol and enactment of the relationship between the inner
and the outer which constitutes us. It tells us renewedly that we can only
remain entire by mingling with the world (no air is ever truly fresh).
But, because it condemns us to sharing the world, and mingling our substance
with other creatures, it can also provoke hostility and borderline-anxiety.
The reason that thinking about breath and breathing always seems to give
rise to ideas of purity is that there is something intrinsically impure
about it. We breathe out through the same organ as we breathe in: we breathe
through the mouth, which also takes in food: and the nose, which also takes
in smell, or tainted air. Breathing is both sacred and sinister partly
because it is invisible: it is associated with touch and smell rather than
with sight, or even hearing.
Perhaps one of the reasons why smoking has proved such a difficult addiction
to cope with is the strong association between breathing and the idea of
the sacred: when one breathes in a substance that changes one's physiological
functioning, it is hard to dissociate that pleasure from the long history
which associates breathing with sacred intoxication and the taking in to
the mortal self of the powers of the divine. The Stoics, who flourished
from about 100 BCE to about 200 CE, set great store by the influence of
various kinds of pneumata, or materialised spiritual influence,
for example in the exercise of prophecy, or in onsets of divine madness.
Stoic notions of the pneuma passed across in spiritualised form
into Christian ideas of the Holy Spirit. [Back to Top]
Aristotle believed that the principal function of breathing was to cool
the body: `The nature of animals requires cooling owing to the fiery nature
of the soul which exists in the heart. It achieves this cooling by breathing.'
Aristotle, On Breathing, XVI, Loeb, 467.
In the second century AD, Galen argued that the function of breathing was
twofold: to cool the body, and to assist in the infusion of vital spirits
to the arterial blood. In his De respiratione of 1603, Fabricius
was still cleaving to the Galenian view. Before the function of breathing
could be understood, Harvey would need to have discovered the circulation
of the blood (1628), the materiality of air would need to have been demonstrated
(by Robert Boyle, who showed in the 1660s that it had weight and compressibility),
oxygen would need to be discovered (by Joseph Priestley in 1774) and its
properties explicated (Lavoisier, 1780s and 1790s).
And yet, there is surely, in theological, anatomical and popular tradition,
a kind of metaphorical pre-understanding of the nature of breathing. Long
before Robert Boyle's measurements of the density and compressibility of
air, folklore and theology alike assume the magical substantiality and
power of breath. In many cultures, the action of blowing sends away bad
spirits. The winds of Pentecost naturalise the idea of holy breath. And,
of course, the word spirit itself, substantiates the conception
of the soul as contained in the breath.
Breath derives from OE breth, which meant an odour, exhalation,
or vapour, as given forth by heated objects, as in cooking, and only transferred
during the 13th and 14th centuries to the action of human breathing. Th
early emphasis of the word was therefore on expiration, rather than inspiration:
and it was associated much more closely than nowadays with smell. This
meant that, in Old and Middle English (up till the fifteenth century, roughly),
breathing was associated in earlier periods much more freely with other
kinds of entity than, or as well as, human. This kind of outlook survives
only in contemporary expressions like letting wine breathe. It was
not until late medieval times that breathing became something restricted
to sensate creatures; the pre-modern world was a world of emanations, influences,
and breathings: conspiracies (to con-spire is to breathe together).
Up until the seventeenth century, to breathe, was used most naturally
in the sense of to smell, or to give off odour: a 1468 book on domestic
arrangements speaks of sweet fumes to make them breathe most holesomely.
This association tended towards the negative: breath could easily be thought
of as emptiness, stink, baseness, corruption. [Back to Top]
Because breathing has two aspects, inspiration and expiration, it is
apt for dichotomising thought of all kinds. Breath has two aspects: sacred
and profane. Holy or sanctified breath is pure: unholy or profane breath
is putrid and decomposing. Breath became the sign of the insubstantial,
the trivial, the unappealingly vacuous (In Divine Songs, Isaac Watts
speaks of `Hard names...and threatening words that are but noisy breath'.)
A breath-seller was a seller of perfumes:, transferred in Florio's
insulting gathering together of `Lawyers, breathsellers, and pettifoggers'
(Montaigne, I, xxii, 1632). In such usages, the breath therefore as something
inessential, an excrescence. But this meaning crosses and cooperates with
the idea of the breath as coextensive with the soul, as precisely what
is most essential.
Often these different aspects of the breath were symbolised in different
forms or locations of breathing, as well as with other actions of the body
(perspiration is a kind of breathing of the body). The art of fascination,
or the exercise of the evil eye was also considered as an act of impure
and contaminating breathing. St. Thomas Aquinas repeats from Aristotle
the superstition that a menstruating woman is capable of clouding a mirror,
her impurity as it were a metaphorical exhalation. Susperstitions about
the basilisk, or cockatrice, a snake-like creature who was believed to
paralyse its victims by the mesmerising power of its gaze, while its noxious
breath killed them, continued this association between breathing and the
malignity of the eye well into the eighteenth century.
Until the eighteenth century, there was a theory, maintained by theorists
of language like Julius Casserius and Conrad Amman, that ventriloquism,
a practice associated for centuries with demons and possession, was produced
by speaking while breathing in. To speak the wrong way round is equivalent
to saying the Mass backwards - it profanes the voice, the double of the
divine Word. Other accounts of ventriloquism suggested that it was speech
produced otherwise than through the vocal organs - in the belly, or even
through the female genitals (Origen, St. John Chrysostomos). Post-classical
ideas about the Delphic oracle (the cleft in the rock, emitting mephitic
vapous which inspired the priestess to possession and prophecy), seem to
embody a fantasy of the Earth, breathing out profane prophecy. The pythia
derives her name from the founding legend of the oracle, that Apollo slew
a dragon there and left it to rot (Gk. puthein). Thus, in this derogatory
reading of the oracle, pagan prophecy is reduced to the condition of bad
breath - or bad breath is revealed as the profane itself.
If breathing out is a source of danger, then, in the form of the afflatus,
it also has a kind of divine power: Breathe on me, breath of God).
The giving out of the breath was spirit. [Back to Top]
Inspiration is an interesting word, expressing a twofold operation:
one is inspired, when one breathes in the breath that another has expired:
up until the eighteenth century, to inspire can mean both to breathe in
(the opposite of expiring): and to breathe simultaneously out from the
body and into some other object, as, for example a wind instrument: (Pope:
`Let my Muse her tender reed inspire').
A church spire derives from Gk speira, coil, twist or winding, but
the influence of Latin spirare, to breathe, seems irresistible.
[Back to Top]
It took nearly as long for the workings of the voice to be understood
as those of the breath - and for similar reasons. By definition, you can't
see either process in action. In the early 18th century, there was disagreement
about whether the voice was primarily a wind instrument (Dodart), or a
string instrument (Antoine Ferrein). Ferrein won the day only when he was
able to show, by actually blowing through the vocal organs of a corpse,
the operation of the vocal cords (and was satirised for his pains in Denis
Diderot's obscene fable about talking genitals, Les bijoux indiscrets).
Breath is both identified with the voice (`I am sorry to give breathing
to my purpose', says Antony to Cleopatra, Antony and Cleopatra,
I.3: 14), breathing here meaning articulate utterance, that without which
purpose is bodiless and insubstantial) - and also identified with the opposite
of voice, or something alien within the voice. A `breath- consonant' in
phonology is an unvoiced one - k, t, p, x, s. Breath is part of the noise
of speech, not part of its essence. What are we then to make of the expression,
to speak under your breath? Breath here is divided into the proper,
articulate and audible use of the breath, in voice, and the suspicious,
surreptitious, secretive, whisper that seems to bypass the breath, even
as it is made up of nothing but breath.
But breath can also be something alien within that voice that is higher,
or of more refined substance: poetry, in particular, gives expression to
the breath, which exerts its pressure upon poetic language - in rhythm
and syntax, for example - without ever being represented in it. The breath
is made audible in the lyric Oh (with or without its aspirant ending):
the sound of the breath is the sound of pure utterance, utterance as sheer
excess of feeling, semantically empty, or open. The poetic oh is
both more and less than language, more than language because it is less
than language; what it says is that language is not capable of saying what
it is that I mean here to say.
Involuntary actions of the breath, in the convulsive expiration of air
- in sneezing, coughing, yawning, and even hiccuping, seems to provoke
anxiety and suspicion. (Atishoo, Atishoo, we all fall down.)
Lisping, as an excess of the breath in speech, is regarded as infantile,
incompetent, uncomprehending, and sexual-corporeal. I have just remembered
an old seaside postcard showing a doctor examining a bosomy: Doctor: Big
breaths. Girl: Yeth and I'm omly thixteen. Breathy speech is as it were
speech veiled in fleshliness. [Back to Top]
The association of breathing with life, and the awareness that breath is transferable from being to being (breath is not merely transferrable between beings, it is transfer or transfusion of being itself), resulted in some bizarre fantasies, as for example the following:
As a Person labouring under an infectious Disease may communicate it by his Breath; so the pure Breath, and insensible Transpiration, of a healthy young Girl, may contribute to rouse the sluggish Motion of an old Man's Blood, and give it a brisk and strong Circulation. [A summary, by Dr. George Cheyne, on a pamphlet published in Koblenz, by one Dr. Kohausen, entitled Hermippus Revived, or a Curious Physico Medical Dissertation, on an Uncommon Method of Prolonging Human Life to 115 Years, By Means of the Breath of Young Women, in Dr. Cheyne's Own Account of Himself and Of His Writings (London: J. Wilford, 1743), p. 52.
In the nineteenth century, breathing became a master-metaphor, encoding any number of social ideals, concerns and demands:
But where, let me ask, are men to get a breath of real free fresh air in our public social circle? The social lungs are so compressed - the breath of fresh knowledge is taken in with such small and feeble inspirations, and the state of the blood of the body-politic and social, is so paralytic and foul, such a poisonous sphere is given forth at every letting-out of the breath from the asthmatic, or else hectic lungs of the public pulpit, platform and press, that the social circle is impregnated with poisonous effluvia; till the whole body-politics is on the vergte of a consumption of the lungs; arising chiefly from the heated and disordered state of the interior circulating fluids of impassioned thought; of disordered imagination, of chit-chat about foul crimes, and bickering, back-biting, and slanderous insinuations, concerning one anotherþs conduct; with an hectic flush of determination to avenge imaginary wrongs; while the hectic patient can get at no real relief, for want of free, open expression being given to that truth, which would, like the eledctric thunderclap on a suffoicating summerþs day, shake the social fabric till it trembles; but, at the same time, purify the mental and social atmosphere, till humanity, all but dead from suffocation, could breathe freely, and get some relief for its all but consumptive lungs. [Thomas Robinson, Breathing: Considered in Relation to the Bodily, Mental, and Social Life of Man (Glasgow: John Thomson, 1869), pp. 23-4.]
Mouth breathing came to be thought of as enfeebling during the course
of the nineteenth century, in which there was huge concern about the maintaining
and promotion of healthy breathing.
When he lies down at night to rest from the fatigues of the day, and yields his system and all his energies to the repose of sleep and his volition and all his powers of resistance are giving way to its quieting influence, if he gradually opens his mouth to its widest strain, he lets the enemy in that chills his lungs - that racks his brain - that paralyses his stomach - that gives him the nightmare - brings him Imps and Fairies that dance before him during the night, and during the following day, head-ache, tooth-ache - rheumatism - dispepsia and the gout. George Catlin, The Breath of Life, or Mal- Respiration and its Effects Upon the Enjoyments and Life of Man (1861), p. 26
Breathing is the mark and reminder of our mortality, and, in particular,
our exposure to ongoing time. Some of our most telling words for the passage
of time involve reference to breath (expiry, transpiring). Breath is life
(Lear, looking on the dead Cordelia: `Why should a dog, a rat have life
and thou no life at all?'), but is also associated with death (we expire
when we die). As long as we breathe, we can remain alive; but, inasmuch
as we must breathe in and out, every breath has a little death in it.
Breathing is never complete; it exposes us to the continuing necessity
of the next breath. As long as we remain alive, there is the necessity
of the next respiration. Breathing is the enactment of the essential state
of becoming that is being alive.
There is an interesting usage of breathing, found in the 16th and 17th
centuries - frequently in Shakespeare - to mean take breath: to
pause, suspend actions, rest, recover oneself. Asked by Richard to murder
the young Princes, Buckingham replies `Give me some little breath, some
pause, dear lord/Before I positively speak in this' (Richard III,
IV.2; 24). John Hooker writes that `To breathe between troubles may be
termed quietness' (Ecclesiastical Polity, 1598). Breathing is here
an action performed for itself; when the being is concentrated upon its
breathing, breathing is itself transformed, transfigured, into a kind of
artifice, or ritual.
The word breathless: which means both urgently alive (lacking breath
and therefore breathing hard), and with the breath suspended - breathless
with excitement, adoration, awe, anticipation - or in death. Shakespeare
runs these meanings together, when he has Salisbury swear vengeance for
the death of Arthur, Duke of Britaine: `Kneeling before this ruin of sweet
life/And breathing to his breathless excellence/The Incense of a Vow' (King
John, IV. 3; 65-7).
Breathing is also used to convey aspiration, that word that signifies desire
for something that cannot be held in oneself: J. Smith, Selected Discourses,
1652: `Those breathings and gaspings after an eternal participation of
him'. [Back to Top]
| Steve Connor | School of English and Humanities| Birkbeck College |