BREATHING TOGETHER
ISSUE SIX: December, 2020
BREATHING TOGETHER
Things we can’t see
All these bodies. We will not fit. Not into this tiny room. Some of us manage to squeeze in, others remain squashed in the doorway, spilling into the hall. It’s late afternoon, the last day of Spring, 2019. Outside, the sun is shining, but in this 19th Century room there is no window. As our vision adjusts to the dark, we become quiet. It’s then that I realise: there are ghosts here.
A congress of ghosts is crowded into the room. Invisible. Trapped. Anguished. (OK, I’m projecting.) Their emotions have lingered, for however long, becoming vibrations, becoming soundwaves, pitching through the air, crashing and overlapping, and landing – BANG! - in our eardrums. They sigh. They groan. They breathe, loudly, something I thought ghosts did not do. They moan – that’s less of a surprise. Occasionally, they laugh. (The corners of my own mouth begin to curl up; I almost laugh along with them, even though I don’t get the joke.) They form sounds; sounds just like the beginnings of words. Stutter them out. Begin again. Fail, again. They are trying to articulate things, important things. They are trying to communicate the crucial thing, the thing each needed to say, back when it had a body to say it with. They are unable to say it now. They cannot construct the right sounds. They have no mouths. They have no tongues, or teeth, to form the words they need. They have no left frontal cortex to control language production, no posterior temporal lobe to process meaning.
Cruel punishment. For them, and for those they left behind, in the world of the living, where their important words will never make landfall. People like me, and all these others. All of us. Huddling together in the dark like a coven of witches, listening and breathing.
Being with other people
Dark, lumpy, shapes: other people. Every space we enter: other people, pressed around walls, squashed up together near the doorway. Other people. We cannot control or understand them.[1] Even in modern cities, the presence of others might be considered uncomfortable.[2] Despite this, we crowd together. Into cities, and, within those cities, into small, dark rooms where ghostly voices sound for all the world just like other people.
Something rising in the chest
Another room; upstairs, filled with natural light. People sit, stand, bodies fitting anywhere that works. In our midst, a woman begins to breathe in, noisily. No. A woman begins to sing. No. A woman is breathing in and singing. Breathing in and singing. Breathing and singing have become one verb, melded together, going on and on. We need a new word. She is inhalesing. She is bansheebreathing. She is unsinging. All the air is leaving her body. I feel anxiety rising in my own chest, like I’m short of breath. In my throat, a strain. It’s like hearing a woman singing while suffocating.
Into the sky
Where do people go to when they die? When it was my brother, it was tempting to think at first that he must still be somewhere, that maybe, after all, he’d gone up into the sky.
The view from the air
Earlier that day, off the South Australian coast, cold winds surge, and travel thousands of miles east, across the ocean, to Melbourne.
There, in a little concrete courtyard in Fitzroy, the sun is shining. The event has not yet begun. Humans begin to arrive and congregate. They stand around, talk and laugh. Some carry cameras and use them. Some buy drinks and drink them. Their chatter swells in volume as their numbers increase.
Words, and other sounds of human interaction, are picked up and carried on the breeze. “more water?”, “we used to…”, “you could make one at home,” “a film camera!”, “…how do you know?”, (laughs), (sneezes), “ha!” “umm...,” (farts), “oh!”
Into the sky (part 2)
These noises float up into the air above the little concrete courtyard in Fitzroy and are caught in the winds from the southwest. Words, snippets and phrases drift in air currents, and slowly conglomerate together, clogging up the clouds, forming into a mass. They swirl around for a few hours up there, cooling and expanding.
Everyone gets comfortable
Do you know that bustle of quiet, good-natured movement when people are advised to get comfortable? That light-hearted endeavour of getting comfortable together? People smile. They shuffle and shift around. They move along to make room. Speak warmly to strangers. “Would you like to sit?” “Here’s a spot!” They perch on seats and boxes, lean against walls, contain themselves in space, so that other bodies can sidle in.
Offerings from above and below
1. Now comfortable, the humans become quiet.
2. From the oak tree branches that canopy the courtyard comes the shrill, clear chirp of a bird. It chirps again. It continues to chirp through the evening.
3. The breeze joins in, blowing across the faces of expectant humans and ruffling their hair with a soft swoooshhhhhhh
4. Our host, warmly: “welcome, everyone.”
5. A car engine sputters, revs, and proceeds to hum loudly through the rest of the outdoor introduction.
6. A different moment. Later. Upstairs. A saxophone’s improvised meandering pauses between bars. Into that brief, silent, stillness, a group of voices below on the street hurl an exuberant two-note song: “WOO-HOO!”
Are they listening in, down there? Do they know that behind the window we are sitting together in silence, breathing?
The possibility of touch
A woman is moving, slowly and deliberately, on her hands and knees, through a room. We troop in and find places to put our bodies. Now, she must crawl past, through, around, or over, lumpy clumps of other people. She clambers, gently. Rests her hand on a shoulder. Rests her hand on a thigh. Sometimes pauses. Her touch always slow, careful. Her gaze always carefully turned in the other direction.
We are all crowded in. We are all so close. To one another.
The crawling woman pauses, arms outstretched. One hand hovers, inches above the hand of a seated woman. She is facing the other way. Seconds pass. She could be looking out the window. She could be thinking about the weather. Will it rain, she wonders. Noting the breeze. Its momentum. Its direction. As she remains in position, arms outstretched. Perhaps. Or perhaps not. She could be somewhere else. Except that her hand and the seated woman’s hand are hovering, inches apart.
With as little effort as possible, we all breathe.
Uncertainly, the seated woman’s hand moves. Tentatively. Microscopically. Upwards. The distance between the two hands shrinks. The hands may touch. The hands may grasp each other. In a moment, we may all be saved. We may all be a little less lonely. I can’t look. I do look. They do not touch. The crawling woman, her gaze still steadfastly elsewhere, gently retracts her arm. Moves on. Stops and sinks down. Rests her forehead on a shin. Remains there for a long time. Or, for a minute. For as long as it takes to breath: in, and out.
Watching, I see: a figure, on the ground, eyes closed, forehead pressed into the (clothed) leg of another human. Close your own eyes. Press your forehead into your own hand. It will suffice. It will give you an idea why I thought of these things: sorrow. Grief. Exhaustion. Loneliness. Surrender. Comfort.
Others who are not here
Earlier, outside. We collectively consider how momentous it is, that we are here. Sitting in the early evening sunshine, in this courtyard together. Breathing. And how momentous, all the time we’ve each spent, so far. Breathing. Unlike others, who are not here, or no longer breathing.
As the breeze blows gently around us, we all take a breath in, with as little effort as possible.
In, or to, what place, does who (or what) do - what?
(aloud:)
Wh-ere w-ill the w-ind come from?
Wh-ere do people go wh-en they die?
-Where do people go when they die?
-Where do people go when they die?
-Where do people go when they die?
-Where do people go when they die?
-Where do people go when they die?
-Where do people go when they die?
-Where do people go when they die?
Humans together
At the end of everything, all movement and sound ceases. Things go quiet.
For a moment, it could be a beginning or an ending. For a long time, or a minute, no-one moves. We stay seated, quiet; breathing, together.
The wind rises
Meanwhile, in the oak tree outside, the bird chirps.
Later, it’s dark, and the little 19th Century building is locked up, silent and empty. Everyone has dispersed, gone out to eat, or travelled home. The winds rise and shake the branches of the oak tree that hangs over the courtyard. The temperature plummets. At midnight, there’s a sudden, heavy downpour of rain.
[1] Team Lab
[2] as above
M. Griffin’s Breathing Together is a response to a performance & sound installation, Breathing Together, by performance artist Amaara Raheem, at Seventh Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, 30/11/2019
MARIA GRIFFIN’s essays, poems and reviews have appeared in Ghost Proposal, Southerly, Writing In The Expanded Field, Not Very Quiet, Right Now, L’Ephemere Review, Talking Writing, and StylusLit. She lives in Melbourne, Australia, in a house with more coffee pots than humans.