Linda Hogan tells the following story to teach us that “what happens to people and what happens to the land is the same thing:
“At the far edge of copper-colored water, a white egret steps through the shallows, an eye sharp for fish. On the other side of the water’s edge stands a solitary blue heron. Herons are fragile birds, and it is not unusual for them to die from stress. I think of them when hearing that Hmong men, forced to leave their country and rootless in America, die of no apparent cause while they are sleeping. I understand the loss that leads to despair and to death. It has happened to us and it is happening to the land, the breaking of the heart of creation.”
Linda Hogan, Dwelling: A Spiritual History of the Living World (New York: Norton, 1995), 89.
Environmental Humanities scholar Jean-Thomas Tremblay has taught me to see Hogan’s story as an aesthetic attunement to breath, the insight that in the ongoingness of life, breath stops. For the egret, for the Hmong, for the Indigenous American, and for the land, living breath imbricates death as immanent possibility, as response to toxicity and oppression, and as storytelling witness. This morbidity of breath is Tremblay’s opening assertion–“Breathing is inevitably morbid”–and the ongoing background of their theoretical investigations (Breathing Aesthetics, Duke Press, 2022, 1).
Indeed, Tremblay seeks to examine the aesthetics of breath as the intertwining or mediation of the life-sustaining and morbidity of breath. This mediation, “the linking of seemingly disparate of contradictory positions and processes” (2) is aesthetic in two senses. First, it is aesthetic as the sensorial rubric of of exchange “between bodies and milieus” (3), and second it is aesthetic as “a distinct mode of creation and expression” (2). Both senses of the aesthetic exceed a person’s embodied set of lungs and implicate the quality of air in one’s neighborhood, the health of one’s roommates or neighbors, and the norms of anticipated injury or protection in one’s society (“I can’t breathe”). As Tremblay notes, “breathing traffics between the structural and the experiential,” and this, I think, is why Tremblay’s turn to performance and literary art is so affective and effective. By drawing readerly attention again and again to the dynamics of breath as inter-dependent on a host of collective, historical, and political factors, Tremblay lures the reading body into a visceral awareness of its autonomic breathing-in and breathing-out and also of its inescapable porosity.
Even while Tremblay attunes readers to the universal condition of breathing (at least for those who are reading), they repeatedly inflect this shared condition with what they call “ecologies of the particular” (14), a form of analysis that acknowledges shared states of breathing and of toxicity, without minimizing the differential scales and modes of breath and precarity within any one shared milieu.
Tremblay guides readers through a broad array of music video, independent film, performance art, and poetry to feel out the contours of “breathing aesthetics” each with its own “ecology of the particular.” Over five chapters and a coda, Tremblay demonstrates how aesthetic expressions of breath, porosity, toxicity, precarity, and death attempt to claim some kind of expressive and perspectival control over situations that cannot or will not resolve or heal. All breath ends; death comes. But the story of death and of the life that precedes death continues. Tremblay folds the breath of speaking, of discourse, into the breath of life
What I find most compelling and beautiful is Tremblay’s demonstration that the perspectival expression of these aesthetic works cajoles their audiences toward witness. To witness the mediation of life and death through expressions of breath is not to gain some unusual agency to intervene or to repair. Instead, the duration of witnessing pulls the breath of the other into rhythmic synch with one’s own (each ‘one’ in a different manner), not as romanticized and often violent empathy, but as increased and embodied awareness of the labor of breathing and of the inter-dependent matrix of bodily and environmental signs that weave together the particularity of the dying life and living morbidity being expressed with the discursive witness that outlives the expression.
I think this inter-dependent ethic is why Tremblay ends their coda with a scene of SM waterboarding that nearly went awry. Tremblay recounts the experience of a subject who willingly subjects herself to waterboarding but who had (unknown, unseen) experience with long-distance swimming. This fact that meant that her body inhered unusual capacity to withstand a lack of air, and (thus) her body did not emit the expected signals. The scene of aesthetic expression + witness that Tremblay has explored through the book expands here to ethical injunction. To witness is to feel-with, not (again) as cognitive capture of an other’s singular experience, but as mutually embodied precarity that calls out for careful attunement to bodily semiotics. Affective aesthetics is also affective ethics.
Returning to Hogan, Tremblay writes that “Native women’s breathing is not, for Hogan, merely autopoietic, it generates the conditions for other people’s survival” (101). Hogan’s trained aesthetics of breath guide her to sense and grasp analogies between the stress of heron-being and Hmong-being. I would call it, after Tremblay, Hogan’s breathing aesthetics that connects human and nonhuman life with environmental (historical and geological) stress. It is a connection that is not easy or superficial but which emerges out of patient attention to life, to breath, to morbidity and precarity, both for the sake of attention itself and in order to craft “conditions for other people’s survival,” despite how colonialism, racism, sexism, and other relational and environmental toxicities break the heart of creation.