New York, January 25, 2021: my first run with a mask on. I leave the apartment in DUMBO and choose the waterfront route, the path leading me through park areas, underneath Manhattan Bridge, then Brooklyn Bridge. In about five minutes, a sunlit Manhattan passing by across the East River to my right escapes me as I am taken in by something happening much closer: damp fabric glued to my skin, pushed away with every exhalation like an inflatable bag, only to reattach itself with every breath back in, an intensifying rhythm of moisture either too cool or too warm. For the first time in 37 years of daily and nightly practice, and after eight years of conscious academic engagement with the literature of breath, I finally experience what my breath actually feels like: soggy, mucous, something more material than even I, despite having read all the right theories, could have expected. Mixed with other discharges of my body — sweat, saliva, snot — it seems to me no less than an irritating interference of the inside of my body with its outside. The very thing keeping my breath in place, barring it, preventing it from spreading out and thus potentially spreading the virus, renders it obtrusive. And to top it off, I can, as a glasses-wearer, no longer see my surroundings: my breath, blown upwards through the gaps in my mask, is fogging up my glasses. I can finally see my breath — but not much else. Certainly not Manhattan.

There’s a privilege in this: I am not just fortunate to have the time to go on leisurely runs during a flexibly scheduled workday in times of varying degrees of lockdown; I am fortunate to be able to breathe in the first place; the breath I perceive as annoyance passes smoothly through my lungs. As we know, the virus infects the respiratory tract, and for many of the 5,639 people recorded positive on this day in New York alone, the heightened awareness of breath in our new daily life takes on forms incomparably more severe.

While breath is noticed more viscerally than possibly ever before, it is relatively invisible in media discourses and the COVID-related images we are surrounded by: even though it is a respiratory disease transmitted by breath, we rarely encounter representations of breath in the public sphere. As I run, I see signs showing humans separated by arrows, hands being sanitized, faces covered by masks, or just masks on their own, hanging in space with no face behind them. In subway stations, there is also an interesting focus on our feet: shoeprints (and sometimes even paw prints, hoof prints, or wheelchairs seen from above) mark for us how far we should stand apart. In the news and on TV, we see graphs, curves, and colored maps representing case numbers, and not-infrequent representations of the virus itself. Breath is, admittedly, hard to represent — but so is a virus. I have never seen a virus on a winter window.

In contrast to breath itself, that which conceals and contains it — masks — have become omnipresent. Masks, which separate our breathing, are the clearest daily signs of the pandemic. They might appear to be the easiest starting point of parsing discussions of breathing and COVID. In contrast to the nebulous viscerality of breath and its diffuse semiotics, masks are conspicuous visual and discursive signs, and they are sites of political, moral, and scientific debate. What side are you on? Are you a denier or a believer? Are you “doing the right thing”? How we breathe is shaping public discourse, and masks have quickly established a whole network of accepted associations as well as divisions between in-groups and outgroups. Mediated by masks, breath itself tends to be overlooked. But maybe we could learn something from a closer attention to our newly omnipresent breath. More specifically: closer attention to those aspects of breathing tend to make us feel uneasy — and the invisibility of breath in public discourses and images during the pandemic might be indicative of this unease.

As my research has explored,¹ breath throughout the centuries has figured predominantly as a synonym for life, freedom, and inspiration. Unsurprisingly, we seem to be more comfortable with an image of life-sustaining, uniting, inspirational breath than with breath that threatens our health and survival as living beings. In contrast to other bodily waste, exhaled breath is hardly ever subject to abjection — on the contrary, the etymological link between breathing and spirituality still holds strong. To sustain this image of itself, breath’s physiological presence has to remain as close to invisible as possible; its metaphorical dimension must be tied to vitality, animation, and freedom. In the last several years, a different discourse of breath that draws its metaphors from experiences of physiological suffocation and respiratory restriction has emerged in feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theory, as well as in political activism — most recently George Floyd’s haunting repetition of “I can’t breathe” has been activated as a motto in protests against racist police brutality. In such discourses, deathly suppression is pitted against free breath and worthy life: being able to breathe promises possible escape and liberation. Breathing is subject to unjust power relations but breath itself retains its traditional connection to freedom and self-determination.

The language surrounding breath is completely different in the context of the pandemic: we can’t breathe freely because breath itself puts us and our neighbors at risk. Because we breathe the same air, we have to keep our breath apart. The visible separator enabling us to do so in turn divides us, into maskers and anti-maskers, in an obvious case, but also by the kind and quality of the masks we own and wear: single-use, high-power-surgical, home-made, etc. If we look at breath itself — both physiological breath and its entanglements with language and images — the separations and divisions it involves are less dualistic: edges blur and ambivalences become transparent. As I argue in my book, “[b]reath is liminal on various levels: it moves between visibility and invisibility, sound and silence, readability and obscurity. Physiologically, it operates across the borders of the body, and etymologically, the meanings of oscillating terms such as pneuma, psyche, anima, and spiritus float between binary oppositions: inside and outside, material and immaterial.”²

In contrast to its relative absence in news media and public signs, creative engagements with breath in the pandemic (for example in the visual arts,³ theatre,⁴ and music⁵) are profuse. With mixed feelings, I note that this pandemic has lasted long enough to produce its own poetry anthologies before its end: Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus: The Anthology (a collection of poems submitted by writers from all over the world to support Doctors Without Borders and Partners in Health) and Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic (a more curated collection of contributions by selected American poets).

Breath is explicitly and unavoidably present throughout both collections. The word itself, not counting synonyms, metaphors, or variations, occurs no less than 34 times in the former anthology and 25 times in the latter. While breath is associated with liberating, redeeming, and calming qualities in seven instances (e.g. “take a deep breath / and then another / leave your home and lock those fears shut / inside”⁶; “The candle wavers. But for a minute longer, I rest, / breathing, wandering quietly inside myself”⁷), it occurs 19 times in contexts of precarity, suffocation, illness, and death (e.g. “fever flushed forehead lackluster lungs stiff in a yellowy mucus cloud breath”; “He held firm as her labored breaths / subsided, her eyelids fell”⁸; “Say it. Say it to my face. Bat-eater, blood poacher. Carrier pigeon, germ-carrier, carrion breath”⁹; “This morning, CNN announced even an innocent exhale can kill. / We are stranded, too near each other to breathe”¹⁰).

However useless counting might be for reading literature, this is an exercise that helped me get a lay of the land, and observe a tendency: in poetry responding to the pandemic, breath departs from most of its well-worn classical associations; the breath we encounter is more visceral, more ambivalent, and more fatal. While not an unprecedented departure in literary engagements with breath (I’m thinking of Samuel Beckett’s speakers panting in a realm between life and death, or Sylvia Plath’s hospital patients dwelling in a similar sphere while being kept alive by artificial respiration, or Thomas Mann’s tuberculosis patients — a long list), the shift in proportion is significant and telling: breath is no longer the benign, sentimental, liberating act we are accustomed to; it has become precarious.

Let us look more closely at two poems from these collections. In “Quarantine,” Dave Lucas establishes a direct link between writing poetry and a form of breathing which endangers life:

You could not come to me
           so instead I set out for you

           these lines. Because the lungs
and breath and tongue had all
come under doubt, I wrote
           it down¹¹

Breath renders direct physical contact impossible, separates the speaker from its addressee. Because the organs of the respiratory tract which enable spoken language “had all come under doubt,” words carried on breath have to be replaced by written ones. This form of contact is ruptured. It involves a gaping absence which becomes visible in the enjambment of “I set out for you / these lines”: “I set out for you” raises the expectation of a face-to-face meeting, a thought interrupted by the blank line. After encountering this voided space, we notice that the sentence was not complete, that an object follows: “these lines.” Because of their placement, “these lines,” the self-reflexive words starting a new line in the poem, recall the empty line before. Here, writing starts to resemble the breath preventing the meeting: we meet a void where a person could be. In the last stanza, breath reappears when a possible future meeting is imagined:

           You cannot come to me;
I cannot go to you, until

another season or in some
           other life I come to find

           your hand has found mine
in that field where our blood

blossoms just as the crocus
           opens and each leaf trembles

in a wind so kind it recalls
the slow full breaths of sleep.¹²

Here, breath becomes part of the atmosphere where a personal encounter might sometime take place — atmosphere which, however, is almost profusely marked as “poetic”: the setting invokes a number of familiar tropes we associate with lyric poetry: spring, flowers, wind, sleep, and (last but not least) breath. Presented as a faint afterthought wrapped in a double layer of figurative speech (the comparison “just as the crocus / opens and each leaf trembles” with the personified “wind [which] recalls” it), this a(n)estheticized breath averts the meeting of “I” and “you” — just like the physical and contagious one in the first stanza. I recognize here a familiar dynamic: literary breath shows up on the scene as a syncope, a skipped beat, a leap of the heart, a passing out — connecting and separating at the same time.

Bearing this in mind, let’s briefly turn to another poem focusing on the relation between writing and breath, Cornelius Eady’s “Corona Diary”:

These days, you want the poem to be
A mask, soft veil between what floats
Invisible, but known in the air.
You’ve just read that there’s a singer
You love who might be breathing their last,
And wish the poem could travel,
Unintrusive, as poems do from
The page to the brain, a fan’s medicine.
…
The poem longs to be a filter, but
In floats Spring’s insistence. We wait.¹³

We again encounter a wish that has for millennia been associated with writing and literature: that it can connect despite physical distance. The news that a loved singer — notably someone not personally known to the I — might possibly “be breathing their last” triggers the hope of an instant communication, page to brain, that might be a cure. The idea of poetry as a remedy in the era of the pandemic situation is presented as illusionary. The poem cannot give a metaphorical-metaphysical reviving breath to the one who loses it. The hoped-for healing connection remains a wish. Neither can the poem act as a shield from the contagious atmosphere outside, as we read in the first and last lines: it is not a “mask,” not a “filter.” In the language of this poem, spring is no longer a redeeming idyll, no longer an image filtered by lyrical embellishment: “The buds emerge, on time / For their brief duty” — it insists, pervaded by perishability. The poem cannot fully connect, and it cannot fully separate; it does both imperfectly.

What these two poems sketch might capture a form of respiratory communality we are experiencing right now: as breathers, we expose ourselves to one another; breath connects, but it is shared separation. Facing this syncope of breathing together apart opens the door to an ethics that John Paul Ricco, drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy (from whom I’ve borrowed the term “syncope”)¹⁴ has devoted much thought to, not least in relation to COVID. As he observes, critical analyses of the pandemic primarily center on “(a) the bio-political, in which life is sovereign and either must be preserved or made to be sacrificed; and (b) the political-economic, in which work and profit reign as supreme means and ultimate ends.”¹⁵ As an alternative focus, Ricco argues for reclaiming the “space of separation between us, which is the space of the ethical, decision and solidarity.”¹⁶ Shared separation allows us to move “in a space that is never wholly mine, yours, nor ours to claim. Instead, it is space that is left open, in-appropriable and to be decided — not once and for all but with each experience between.”¹⁷ This is not an easy place to be; we might wish to breathe another kind of freedom and less precarious air that does not force us to keep our distance. But breath is not a filter.