ode to breath + confessions of a recovering techno-optimist
still-warm bits of was-just-self, becoming atmosphere
Article voiceover
a whole winter, this constant companion— every morning out delivering papers, every exit from school— breath made visible, maybe a little, maybe a lot, but almost always there, still warm but cooling, bits of was-just-me dispersing. i didn't leave the cold, the cold left me. i'm still here in pennsylvania, always known for its freeze-thaw, sure, always been on that border, but now it's more thaw and less freeze, less breath-made-visible, less chance to commune with those spent bits of myself joining the brownian motion, the chaos of currents, particles jostling. i used to try to direct them. used to try to blow rings. it works with smoke, why not with breath? but it doesn't work with breath. breath won't cohere. you don't get to control where these bits of was-just-you becoming atmosphere land. where they journey. who uses them next, and how. zoom out enough and we're one big organism, aren't we? zoom out enough and it’s one big nutrient flow; one body. air, the lymph or blood or cytosol, cohering us, cycling one organ's waste products to another's inputs, then back again, "round and round it goes, ever singing on its course" — what was the air, before this comingling? before oxygen exhalers called forth oxygen breathers; before the macro-organism was born? the hookah lounge in college taught me it wasn't my technique. breath really can’t cohere. smoke can. i never mastered the skill, never bothered spending the time to blow perfect rings, but now i knew. the task, friends, is to straddle the border between chaos and order. but tell me: which is which? which chaos is destruction, to be avoided, and which is mere uncertainty? the original oxygen exhalers poisoned all other life forms on the planet, and yet: from our vantage, beneficiaries as we are, was not even this an act of creation? i always missed my breath come spring. i'd almost forgotten here twice a life beyond those paper-route mornings those hookah lounge half-rings most waking hours in between spent making internet, or at least a few pieces of it. i used to believe in this project, in the world-improving inevitability of Connection™. i used to love the shapes i made as they drifted out away from me. but as everything i do decoheres joins the ambiguated commons of our collective exhale i can't tell— will anything i do do any good? will it call forth a better world? will it poison all current life forms? i'm here still sending warm bits of just-was-me— words, work, art, noble intentions and half-hearted efforts— hurtling into the jostling particles of a world gone incoherent. if my breath won't hold together long, let me breathe for the joy of it. if i keep my focus short i can see where it lands, who gets nourished, how i still might do some good.