NomadicBreath will make some sonic interventions to the Baltic Sea Run in Helsinki at Spring 2012.
In Finnish: http://juoksemeresiedesta.fi/
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/where_we_work/baltic/
While massaging this sound I encountered three very different aspects of joint breathing. First, in a book about women's ethnography I saw a remark of a Tibetan care of dying, where people close to the patient breathe together, sharing the same breathing patterns. [see "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" by Sogyal Rimpoche.]
Second, when reading "Breathless", a fascinating book by Allen S. Weiss, I found a reference to the following passage written by William S. Burroughs, in his The Ticket That Exploded":
"The realization that something as familiar to you as the movement of your intestines the sound of your breathing the beating of your heart is also alien and hostile does make one feel a bit insecure at first. Remember that you can separate yourself from the "Other Half" from the world. The world is spliced in with the sound of your intestines and breathing with the beating of your heart. The first step is to record the sounds of your body and start splicing them in yourself. Splice in your body sounds with the body sounds of your best friend and see how familiar he gets. Splice your body sounds in with air hammers. Blast jolt vibrate the "Other Half" right out into the street. Splice your body sounds in with anybody or anything. Start a tapeworm club and exchange body sound tapes. Feel right out into your nabor's intestines and help him digest his food. Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it."
And finally, saw an article on Circle Dance created by Deborah Hay at 1960s' and 1970s'. According to Hay, "breath is movement and movement is dance and anyone can dance." "Holding hands, breathing together with friends and strangers, an odd fusion occurs for a moment – a felt understanding of interplay." [See "Terpsichore in sneakers: post-modern dance" by Sally Banes].
After breathing together in the seminar room we switched the lights off and sat down to listen to the past-present flows in our bodies. Together.
Been excited of the concept of "deep patience" that I heard a couple of years ago in a very nice conference from one participant of the conference. Deep patience, in the Inuit "quinuituq", means the long wait on the ice at a seal hole, the waiting for the seal to come up. According to Tom Pearson it literally means "long waiting, prepared for a sudden event" (2003). Waiting for hours to one second.
There's something extremely intense and intriguing in the idea of waiting for hours for one second to act. The quality of waiting is far away from the assumed "passive" features of waiting, some kind of relaxed hope or trust to things to happen. The deep patience is waiting as bloody and sweaty; it is waiting with the constant embodied consciousness of the now-flow that has to be confronted as awake. As very awake. As urgently awake. As holding your breath. Or letting it flow. Forgetting to think about it. Deep patience actually consists of thousand of micro-intense waiting capsules that contain their own temporality and density.
In this short sound mesh the trains and trams are waiting on their stops. In terms of machinic technologies, these motors also perform a deep patience in their waiting of the very initial second of finally leaving. The moment of moving. The moment of mutating. The moment of becoming-moving line.
"Listen for breathing and feel for the neonates breath
by using your hand to feel the chest rise and fall
or listen with a stethoscope"
[Standing here besides and observing the care of the nurses. I am listening in, carefully and meticulously. I listen to holding my own breath. Sensing the vulnerable movement of the air.]
"If the neonate is not breathing of
is not breathing normally (i.e. taking the occasional gasp),
commence positive pressure ventilation one inspiration per second via a Laerdal or Neopuff with medical air initially"
[Later, in the empty room: palpating the tiny ventilation tube in my hands. Holding the micro-space that delivers the air from the ventilation machine to the lungs of the neonatal. Sensing my own breathing quickening.]
"If the infants condition, tone and colour does not improve with in the first 90 seconds
introduce supplemental oxygen"
[Breathing in. Forgetting to breath out.]
"Avoid excessive volumes;
deliver only the volume needed to produce
visible chest rise"
After doing a collaborational sound and film project Breathing into Tubes* with visual artist Elina Saloranta at the neonatal intensive care unit in a hospital I encountered the advises of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation [“Neonatal basic life support” guidelines (2010)] when browsing information about the ventilation machines in the internet. Those guidelines resonated powerfully to my experiences of observing, listening in and recording the diverse soundscapes of the neonatal unit.
Those advises seemed to touch the space I sensed at the unit, the space "prior to all localization, and a substratum both immobile and mobile, permanent and flowing, where multiple temporal divisions remain forever possible", the somehow totalized presence of air (Irigaray: Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, 1999, 8). The air, that, according to Irigaray, is something that is "always there, [...] allows to be forgotten."
But the air could not be forgotten at the neonatal intensive care unit. Where I now-then am-was. The air, the newborn fragile breathing is here-there everywhere. And I am surrounded by it and the whole machinic sound realm that surrounds the neonatal microcyborgian life. The folding plastics and fabrics, the streaming liquids,the hissing pressures of air columns in their tubes. The pulsing weight of efficiency and care; the constant vibrations of control, measurement, adjust and support. With no excessive volumes. Very subtle and smooth.
Later: I am holding this tiny ventilation tube in my hands. Elina and I are in the empty room to film my breathing into unused ventilation tubes that the nurses have given to us. We wish to to search some ways to be in connection with the most fragile and intimate elements of breathing, the air streams, and the sensing and understanding the diverse registers of the vital flows in us and other people around us.
I am in an empty room, sensing the sounds of the ventilation machines in the next room.
My skin feels the complex meshwork of the medical machines and prostheses, and the certain openness and emergence of the flesh. The cyberprojected beating of the visceral depths that haunts you with its anxiety, digital interiors, and with the infinite resonance of the rubbery newborn skin.
And I begin. I inhale. Its sounds as liquid wind. As a mucous lightness. Bu tin a very small space. a vast narrowness. I exhale. It sounds as a wet inhaling. The directions of the air seem to blur. The ins and outs intertwine to each other.
And I inhale. I exhale. I in-ex-contaminate the air.
And my lips get tamed by the non-excessive volumes.
I in-out-act...
My lips were made to learn through sucking this tube.
*The project was realized in consent with the neonatal care unit stuff. The babies, parents and nurses were not filmed. All the data was collected after careful negotiation of permission and ethical considering.
(The title inspired by the Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Suck My Kiss").
Disclosure
Sometimes, sitting on the deck out back, I
inhale, exhale, and my nomadic breath
isn't sure it's going to come back in.
It has a kind of rogue moment when it
wants to make up its own mind.
I'm on the deck out back and
all I want to do is make poems
and breathe without fear.
Inhale, exhale, and then–
who knows what might happen?
by Martina Reisz Newberry [in Late Night Radio]
