Units of Breath

Human limitations and the things you can't destroy

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,

and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.

― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

After I went through psychosis for the first time it took me several months to regain the ability to read books. I started with audiobooks: I listened to Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance on a porch swing in the backyard of my mom’s house in the shade of the hot afternoon sun. The first printed paperback I managed to sit through was a copy of Mary Oliver’s extremely gentle and patient A Poetry Handbook.

In Ms. Oliver’s conception of poetry, each line can be thought of as the length of one breath. Each of these breath lengths can be further broken down into metric feet like Iambs (one unstressed syllable followed by an a stressed syllable, as in the word be-hold), Trochees (gar-den), anapests (un-der-stand), and Dactyls (po-e-try). A short line is slower and more deliberate, a longer line is rushed and breathless. The most neutral length for a line to be is five feet, like Shakespeare’s famous iambic pentameter (aka lines made up of five iambs).

The poetic revolution unleashed by Walt Whitman (who incidentally was Mary Oliver’s childhood inspiration and one-way parasocial intellectual sparring partner) was the popularization of free verse. Whereas before poems were always packaged in rigid, “metrical” forms of repeating line lengths, Whitman’s lines each have different lengths which create a sort of cascading patter. But even if it’s not as immediately obvious, free verse is still made up of and constrained by the limitations of human breath.

You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.

― Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road, Section three

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Breath also shows up in music. Both in the literal sense for instruments like the flute or clarinet that are powered by breath, but also as a tool of analysis for piano or other instruments not constrained by breath’s limitations. It forms a certain anatomy of musical phrases:

The inhale: Before the first note is played and between phrases, the pianist performs a slight lift of the wrist or a micro-pause, indicating to the audience that one thought has ended and another is about to begin.

The exhale: the music happens on the exhale. The real or metaphorical lung capacity of the performer creates an arc for each phrase that has a beginning, a climax, and a tapering off that mirrors our biology.

When you listen to someone speak or sing you’re unconsciously tracking whether they will make it to the end of their phrase. When a saxophonist uses circular breathing to hold a note for three minutes, or a choir uses staggered breathing to hide the individual singers’ inhales, it creates a “breathlessness” that results in awe or anxiety: an immortal breath that transcends the limitations of the body.

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The country of Afghanistan has a complete ban on music under their extremist islamic government, and as a result has seen a surge in the popularity of traditional folk poems called landays.

A landay is twenty-two syllables long, sung to the beat of a hand drum, and passed anonymously mouth to mouth across generations of Pashtun women at weddings and around wells. A young poet named Rahila Muska set herself on fire after being forbidden to write: her father burned her manuscripts, but the landay she used to repeat survived in the whispers of her sisters across the culture:

“I call. You’re stone. One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.”

You can smash all of the guitars and take away everyone’s mp3 players, but you can’t destroy our lungs without killing everybody.

It seems uncontroversial to point out that nobody is reading the “poetry” published in academic presses, our popular examples of verse exists primarily as lyrics in songs. The primary difference between a song and a poem is that in music you have much more control over the length of time you decide to linger on a particular word: in some cases one single word cried out over the entirety of a lungspan.

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For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

― T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Prufrock measures his life in coffee spoons, how do you measure yours? In steps taken? Heartbeats? Inhales and exhales are a very human unit of measure: the in-and-out pendulum of breath is one of the most physical embodied things about being a human being.

Our thoughts are broken up into individual sentences, which have a natural time limit before they become run-on sentences: that human biological reality is baked deeply into the corpus of text that AIs are trained on.

In my recovery I struggled with the “shortness” of my focus, forced to contend with the natural limitations of my attention. The length of thought I could sustain was, for a while, barely a phrase. An AI could relentlessly produce a 10,000 word sentence with no punctuation fairly easily: the fact that they don’t shows that they have been trained to mimic our own limitations, and that means that they have inherited something very human.

A riverbed is shaped by water even after the river dries up. One day the breath will be gone, but the forms it carved will remain.