Writing is breathing...

‘For breath is life, so if you breathe well, you will live long on earth’ – Sanskrit proverb

inspire (v.) mid 14th century: ‘enspiren’, ‘to fill (the mind, heart, etc., with grace, etc.);’ also ‘to prompt or induce (someone to do something),’ from Old French enspirer (13c.), from Latin inspirare ‘blow into, breathe upon,’ figuratively ‘inspire, excite, inflame,’ from ‘in-+ spirare’ to breathe (see spirit(n.))  (Online Etymology Dictionary)

“The poem is a machine so simple and so efficient that it only has one moving part, and that made of the most insubstantial material: lightning and breath. ❞ - Charles Olson

BREATHE

Take a deep breath. Now take another. Every day, we take about 26,000 breaths, inhaling something like 14,000 litres of air. Breathing is the most fundamental part of human life, essential to our survival. Most of the time we don’t even think about it. But how we feel and how we breathe are intimately connected.

Have you noticed how, when you’re anxious or afraid, your breath seems to come in quick bursts? This is particularly frustrating for me as a poet and a singer, because when you’re performing, the last thing you want is to run out of breath! At its most extreme, anxiety can even cause us to hyperventilate – when you breathe so fast you exhale more than you inhale, increasing the rate of loss of carbon dioxide. This can be very frightening, causing faintness, tingling of the fingers and toes and, if prolonged, even lead to loss of consciousness. In extreme cases, it feels like you are having a heart attack.

Deep, slow breathing, on the other hand, can be very calming. Often, if I am nervous before a performance, I like to warm up with a slow, gentle song – my favourite are lullabies – because it forces me to breathe more deeply, which helps my whole body to relax.

Of course, the link between breathing and physiology has been known for centuries. In yoga, the breath is Prana or vital force. In yoga practice, we integrate focus on breath during slow movements as well as while maintaining asanas or yoga positions. If we focus on breathing, the control of breathing shifts from brain stem / medulla oblongata to cerebral cortex (evolved part of brain).

Many religions also link breathing and breath with God or the divine spark of creation. In the Bible, God breathed into Adam in order to create him, and the Hebrew word ‘Ruach’- meaning breath– was used as a term for God. In the New Testament, the word for breath, wind and spirit is the same. So when we talk having God’s spirit within us, we are actually breathing in the divine.

You might wonder why, in a blog about writing, I am focusing so much on breathing? Well, writing is breathing. When I write, I am hearing the words on my head as if they are spoken. When I perform, they come to life, living all over again in the ears of those who hear them. Whether consciously or not, whenever I write, I am also taking pauses, breaths. For a poem, this might be a breath at the end of each sentence, or each phrase. If I am angry, this will likely affect the form of the poem. Likewise, if I am feeling very calm, this, too, will become a part of my poem. I can, if I choose, use these pauses for breath to spring a surprise on the reader, perhaps pausing unexpectedly at the end of a line, or serving up a different word when they were expecting a rhyme.

But I think it goes even deeper than that. The life we breathe through our poems becomes a form of dance. The American poet Charles Olson described it as a transfer of energy between writer and reader, like an electric spark a “terrible fire” or “lovely power”. 1

Perhaps a simpler way to look at it is like this: When we create poetry, or a piece of writing, we ‘breathe in’ all sorts of ideas, influences, and images. Perhaps we also breathe in a little of the divine, of magic, of wonder. We are ‘inspired’ (is it any wonder that the word ‘inspire’ comes from the Latin word for ‘to breathe into’?)

But then, once we have breathed in, we have to breathe out again. When we breathe out our poem, it becomes a living thing again, not a fixed thing in our head, ready to be breathed in by others so that they, too, might become inspired to their own creations. And so the cycle goes on….

FOOTNOTE:

1. In his manifesto ‘Projective Verse’ (1950) the American poem Charles Olson proposed a new view of poetic structure based on breath. His ideas, which were taken up by other poets including William Carlos Williams, led to a more naturalistic way of writing, for the ear, rather than the printed page. This is possible, according to Olson, only when the poet reaches “down through the workings of his own throat to that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings, where drama has to come from, where, the coincidence is, all act springs.”

Reading a poem is a transfer of the ‘energy’ of the poet’s breath and speech to the reader. He refers to it variously as being like an electric spark, a “terrible fire” or“lovely power.”