Breathe In, Breathe Out

Dearest Readers,

I hope you have had a wonderful long weekend and enjoyed the extra day off! As a student who has no family in BC, I spent the day studying for upcoming midterms and had dinner with wonderful friends!

Similarly to the previous week, my ASTU class has continued the conversation about Judith Butler, but we have also now added Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, which is a collection of two poems.

I want to talk about the first poem in Juliana’s collection, titled poem that was written after September 11th, 2001. When I first read it, I felt as though as was unable to catch my breath and almost gasped for air. The poem gradually builds by starting with

“as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands in and out” (5)

In her writing there are no commas or breaks where you feel it is appropriate to breathe, so this is where you may experience the breathless feeling. It continues to build until she gets to this point,

“as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and the space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphere and the space of the mesosphere in and out

In this everything turning and small being breathed in and out by everyone with lungs during all the moments.

Then all of it entering in and out.

The entering in and out of the space of the mesosphere in the entering in and out of the space of the stratosphere in the entering in and out of the space of the troposphere in the entering in and out of the space of the oceans in the entering in and out of the space of the continents and islands in the entering in and out of the space of the nations in the entering in and out of the space of the regions in the entering in and out of the space of the cities in the entering in and out of the space of the neighborhoods nearby in the entering in and out of the space of the building in the entering in and out of the space of the room in the entering in and out of the space around the hands in the entering in and out of the space between the hands.

How connected we are with everyone.”(8-9)

This poem drastically altered how I understand everyone to be connected. In geography we discussed how everyone is connected through using the example of products like the iPhone, where its components can come from 60 plus countries, but Spahr shows us it is so much more than that. Possibly the least thought about yet singularly most important component of living, is air, and I had never realized just how much it connected every living thing on this planet. Spahr opened my eyes to this idea that I had never considered before and it got me thinking. I was thinking how much we rely on the air to be clean and breathable so that we can live and be healthy and yet at the same time how much in one day we pollute and damage that exact air.

With all this thinking about air I could not help myself but think about global warning. Humans drive cars everywhere, garbage is overrunning our planet, destroying the air. There are many people on this planet who do not feel that global warming is a big deal, but maybe that’s because they were like me and haven’t connected all the dots just yet. When we talk about global warming, it is largely focused on the idea of how we are polluting the air, which is killing the physical structure of the earth, which has resulted in the change of temperature patterns which has led to the death of many creatures, along with many other things. But why is it that it’s never stated that the pollution we create is killing us? If people thought of polluting the air as killing themselves, or their mother and father, or their children, would they be more concerned? If you personalize the damage of air, would people change their patterns and possibly save this planet that we call home, along with all the living organisms that live on it?

As Juliana Spahr put it,

“How lovely and how doomed this connection of everyone with lungs.” (10)

 

 

Works Cited

Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Print.

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