Breath Junkie.

Abstract

Breath Junkie Havi Carel (bio) 1. Breath junkie I am a breath junkie. Forever worrying about where the next breath will come from. Will I have enough? Enough to get through the night. Enough to walk up a slope. Enough to finish the trail. Everything is measured in breath. How much breath do I need to walk in the park? How much for a day trip? My hunger for breath is insatiable. Air hunger—always, always wanting more. Always needing more than I can get. I suffer humiliation, daily, when I move, so slow, so needy. I humbly bow my head to my sadistic body, meting out blows. I accept silently the myriad failures notched down to a daily tally of catastrophic inability. Can’t lift that; can’t walk that far; can’t keep up; can’t join in. I used to rebel, try harder, get angry. No more. Now I know my place. I’m a lowlife breath junkie. Everything comes second to the breath. 2. My body’s weather My body’s weather is always too hot or too cold. Too dry or too wet. It always requires something. If I’m sitting down, it needs the bathroom. If I’m standing up, it gets fatigued. If I’m walking, it gets breathless. [End Page 248] If I’m talking, it forces me to stop. There is always the possibility of a storm. The threat of an avalanche. The risk of a flood. My body is the master of my world. It dictates if I can come or go. Board that train. Give that talk. Stay for dinner. Talk or be shut up. 3. Bondage I am my body’s slave. Not the captain of a ship. I am a slave, bonded to it for life. I am forever tending to it, unsuccessfully. Like a plot of barren land, it never does what it’s supposed to. Never flourishes. I am a failed farmer. The crops never grow. I know that my labor will always be in vain. “you will never get better,” a physician once told me. “don’t bother trying.” And yet I bother. I lament my body’s failed mechanics, the ruined alveoli, replaced by holes within my lungs. I endlessly pine for more breath. Everything is too hard. I am so slow I bore myself. I am always the last. A disgrace. Whatever happens, I will remain a slave. No one can buy me out or help me escape. I am forever shackled to my failing lungs. Perpetual bondage to air hunger, tight chest, fear, and the inability to do, to be, to act, to fit in with the tempo of life. Always too fast. 4. Unlaced I don’t worry about the big things: death, Covid-19. I only worry about the small things. Will my son have a clean t-shirt for his play date? Will we get a table outside in that café? Did I remember to pay the window cleaner? My worries are petty, dull and constant. They keep me going. I don’t worry about the big things. It is not a theme for my consciousness to chew on. The big things have been etched into my life and body (the master!) years ago. They are sewn into the fabric of my life in a complex knotted lace, so intricate I cannot begin to unravel it. The pattern so minute it is invisible to the naked eye. The odd thread comes loose in a dream. A green lizard; a greying man; an arm lifted. But I forget; I lose the thread. [End Page 249] I am a hermetically sealed breathing machine, with faulty electrics. Grotesquely malfunctioning in a semblance of the everyday. 5. Green lizard The soft engine of my body chokes and stutters, Ineffectual. Screams of loss pummelled by fatigue. The possibility of love requires breath. [End Page 250] Havi Carel Havi Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. She recently completed a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award for the five-year project the Life of Breath (www.lifeofbreath.org), which received the Health Humanities’ Inspiration Award 2018. She is the author of Illness...