Reading writing breathing

ABSTRACT

This article addresses how breath is intra-active with reading and writing. The two meditation methods I used for concentrating on and writing the breath-experience were ‘attention on the breath’ as taught within a Korean Seon (Zen) tradition, and writing this experience as ‘meditative enquiry’ [Stephens, T. 2021. ‘A Meditative Enquiry into Presence: Unmaking the Autoethnographic Self.’ Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 14 (2): 161–178]. Two ‘texts’ gradually converge into an intertwined experience of reading both academic and literary writing, blurring distinctions between them. Various theories are drawn from that un-do dualistic frameworks of epistemology assumed in reading academic texts. This raises questions for the embodied cognitive humanities, post-qualitative methodologies, and in autoethnographic and phenomenological writing as well as for creative writers. The article draws from cultural, philosophical, and literary studies, recent breath studies, and from the field of embodiment, to contextualise the ‘creative academic writing’ excerpts; leading to an unavoidable conclusion: this type of ‘new writing’ is not new but, rather, contiguous with practices of embodiment. Yet, how can a written fabrication of breathing be read, and does stylistic innovation present insurmountable problems for the academic validation of creative academic writing?

KEYWORDS:

• Creative academic writing
• nonself meditation
• breath studies
• COVID-19
• Korean Zen
• post-qualitative reading

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The footnote is therefore a type of paratext according to Genette. As a meta-text it seems to exempt itself from the text; as publishing convention. A neo-discipline of citation practice would begin with the principle that were it not for meta-text we would realise that all text is already meta-text. Meta-text is employed to enact a documented meditation practice that, for the purpose of study, started on 27 January 2017 and ended on 2 October 2022 and resulted in a number of unforeseen writings, of which the body of this article (in italics) is one example. This also qualifies the article as COVID-19 pandemic or post-pandemic theory, and literature. Meditations on (one's) breath is a cultural aspect of this period, for myself as a writer, academic and long- term meditation practitioner. Hence, this is a form of performative autoethnography drawing on my positionality, a testimony of a pandemic experience for a person already studying their meditative breath in the context of a 'global respiratory crisis'. An opposite take is cited later, that of Voegelin's 'could not write' experience (2023, 1), which describes in a type of COVID-19 experience derived chapter 'Breath 4 Postnormal' (81) a section 'Exhalation: The practice of theory' (92), with a depth of theoretical engagement. Yet, if this, my, ‘text in italics' is experiential cultural fiction, it also echoes the third person narrative of Ernaux (2022) whose impersonal autobiography is grounded in material facticity as ‘autosociobiographie' (Baisnée 2018 81) and Ito's critique of a political embodied violence in 'Aerocide' (2021). Earlier versions of the ‘text in italics', in full, and entitled ‘A fictional breath whilst breathing', alongside the story of its circuitous route to publishing, will be made available on the author’s Academia.edu page as an AOM (authors original manuscript). This speaks to the indeterminacy of creative nonfiction, and its ambiguous status in both creative and academic writing. Fictive-theory/fiction-practice nevertheless finds value in articulating a pandemic experience, is unique, and warrants further research.

2 In the Korean Seon (Zen) tradition as taught by Martine Batchelor, from her teacher Master Kusan Sunim (1909-1983) abbot of Songgwang Sa, a method of koan meditation is practiced. A koan is a traditional story in which the last line, or hwadu, becomes a focus for meditation and means of inquiry. 'What is this', or 'What is it', derives from an encounter between Nanyue Huairang (677-744) and the Sixth Patriarch Huineng (638-713), a central figure in Chinese Ch'an, later Japanese Zen. Sunim says: 'In Zen meditation, the key factor is to maintain a constant sense of questioning' (Sunim 2009, 61). In this sense, as Martine often explains in meditation retreat instructions, the most important part of the hwadu, is actually the question mark itself. In one sense my 'meditative enquiry' into the breath is simply, distraction, in another, it is a means of gaining insight through inquiry. In the last instance, it is a meditative form of close reading, with a wide open awareness.

3 The International Transdisciplinary Symposium, Airy Encounters, Respiratory Philosophy and Sound Arts, took place in Helsinki, 6–8 June 2022. Programme available at: https://www.zrs-kp.si/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Zbornik-povzetkov_AIRY-ENCOUNTERS_spletna.pdf.

4 See resources on their Life of Breath website, hosted by Durham University at: https://lifeofbreath.webspace.durham.ac.uk/. Jane Macnaughton (2020) describes her research in the context of the Life of Breath project, an extraordinarily timely project given the urgent focus that the COVID-19 pandemic provoked. The Special Issue of Body & Society on 'Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Breath, Body and World' within which her article features, allowed a focus on topics as diverse as: air pollution science, feminist ecology, grief and song in theatre and smoking rituals (Oxley and Russell 2020). The Cognitive Humanities Bibliography, compiled by Emily Troscianko, valuably collects together recent research in this field, with an admittedly literary bias useful for readers of New Writing. Available at: https://cognitiveclassics.blogs.sas.ac.uk/cognitive-humanities-bibliography/. We might also note a brief editorial summary by McLaughlin of the integration of embodiment studies in a special edition of the Connection Science Journal (2017) for the analytic and synthetic sciences. Here she adds a case study illustration of the natural affinity between embodiment and Acting Studies, whilst directing this question to science and humanities researchers: 'How might we utilise or implement a unifying conception of embodiment across, within, and beyond our disciplinary practices?' (2017, 41), also advocating for 'transdisciplinarity' as one inevitable implication of embodiment theory (40).

5 Nicola Spano lists citations on the breath found in Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (Husserl 2020). (These are cited as Hua XLIII.3, 79; 96; 113; 305; 410; 412; 420; 422; 508–509.) Google Translate renders one of the more interesting quotations as: ‘Here silent breathing is valued as a means of avoiding an evil; noisy breathing would result in harm; the transformation into quiet breathing is now counted positively in transference.’

6 However, I was invited to attend a wonderful day-long teaching day on ‘Wittgenstein, emptiness, the circle, drawing, Zen and ancient maps and positionality’, organised by Jayoon Choi (Lecturer MA Illustration, Camberwell and MA Graphic Communication Design, CSM, University of the Arts London) and co-delivered by the Korean philosopher Dr Sool Park. Dr Park is a lecturer in philosophy and Korean literature at the Freie Universität Berlin and The Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. He specialises in the global history of philosophy, East Asian philosophy, and translation theory, investigating the intellectual interaction and intertwinement between different cultures and languages.

7 These categories may even be ascribed to the historical Gautama, who spent most of his life teaching. The quality of this teaching in terms of style is most often described as practical, in that he avoided speculative or metaphysical questions. The suttas are also replete with agrarian metaphors, images and examples from everyday life, Vedic oral culture and some atomistic and elemental features, each of which might constitute other forms of clarity.

8 An example of Bhikku Analayo's teachings on the brahmavihārās can be found here online: https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/resources/offerings-analayo-old/compassion-audio/. We note that these are from a tradition of oral transmission, and likely to be derived from ancient Indian practices adopted by Gotama from his own teachers and historical context.

9 I elaborate on this complex issue in the Handbook of Research on the Relationship between Autobiographical Memory and Photography in a chapter called ‘Photographic Non-Self’ (Stephens 2023). There is a wider debate, to which I am making further contribution, as to the subterranean influence of Buddhist nonself on French culture, evident in both artistic and literary modernisms; celebrated, disavowed and readily appropriated in turn.

10 Anecdotally, whilst dwelling on nonself, we notice formulations of nonself in many guises as a broad cultural interest, from Oliver Sacks’ neurological case studies of identity lapses to Abi Morgan, the Welsh screenwriter who writes movingly on her husband’s brain condition that rendered her completely ‘unknown’ to him, to Annie Ernaux’s The Years (2008), that won her the Nobel Prize (2022), which is likened to a ‘collective’ rather than individual ‘autobiography’, to the nonself that is Chatbot GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer), which has recently exceeded (some) expectations of AI writing production (December 2022).

11 Annie E. Proulx, Accordian Crimes (1996). This is a novel whose central extended motif is the accordion itself which the narrative traces across its owner’s situations, times, and places. At one point, the accordion becomes a receptacle for a small fortune of folded notes of cash, secreted on the inside folds of the bellows, unbeknownst to its subsequent owners. This acts, simultaneously, as an extended literary and rhetorical device – at certain points shared only between author and reader (excluding the narrator and characters) for motivation of the plot. Without this knowledge belonging to the fictional subjects, this creates subtle literary affects, not least the bracketing of the fiction, as a storytelling secret, or contract, between the author and the reader, and a fictional knowledge in the reader’s mind that affects their interpretation of subsequent scenes.

12 ‘Our life rests upon a single breath.’ This is a verbatim quotation often shared by my teacher Martine Batchelor from her Korean Zen teacher, Master Kusan, as one of the phrases used to encourage meditation practice, specifically that offers an evaluation of the importance of full attention to every breath for the meditator during practice, as well as the fragility and impermanence of life and hence urgency to practice.

13 It is now more interesting that earlier versions of the italicised text had been rejected by both academic qualitative research and phenomenology journals and fiction publishers. Hence, this experiment in a dual-stylistic academic text is a creative variation of this piece.

14 A contemporary example of these debates occurs in Justine Triet's film Anatomy of a Fall (2023). As co-writer of the screenplay, and director, she continues her interest in the complexities of legal and ethical licence through a central character, a sucessful novelist of 'auto-fiction', accused of murdering her husband. The trial becomes emblematic of the co-existence of true and untrue, real-imagined, rational and irrational narratives, which only get 'resolved' in the case when the author's blind son, both re-enacts a memory, which proves to be false, and re-tells a memory, which may be true.

15 After writing and editing I have now read the most recent, if not only, other text on contextualising the breath within early Buddhist and Indian culture, that is Tamara Ditrich's Mindfulness of Breathing in Early Buddhism (2018) which gives a detailed historical and textual account. In creative, as opposed to academic, writing, some influential texts, on the same topic as one's own are best read after the event, in a process of non-cognitive clarification and confirmation. Ditrich's is this text. She wonderfully summarises the role of breath as it appears as prāna in the earliest recorded Indian text, the Rgveda (RV), within pre-creation, and where 'the dynamic structural model of the cosmos in its multiple interrelations to the human body indicate a perception of embodied individual that is not viewed as an independent entity but rather as a relational, interlinked, dynamic structure or process (AitA, 2.1–2.4).' (Ditrich 2018, 100). Also, contextualises breath in later Upanishad text and commentaries, 'including Buddhism, especially in its formula of dependent origination (Pali paticcasamuppada), which reinterprets and redefines this model in the light of its doctrine of nonself and nonsatisfactoriness of existence.' (100)

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Tim Stephens

Tim Stephens is an Education Researcher at University of the Arts London, a writer, and a photographic artist. With 30+ years’ experience of working in education with learners, artists, teachers, and organisations, his areas of interest are: the interplay between art and writing practices, embodiment, the relationship between cognitive and non-cognitive experience, and western and non-western ethics.