These notes were produced for a BBC Radio 4 feature about breathing, produced by Clare Hughes and broadcast in May 1999, as The Kiss of Life . In The Enemy Breathing and Time Breathing lies between the condition of the natural and the cultural. Breathing is a biological invariant, that is nevertheless capable of being subjected to significant forms of variation.
All human beings breathe, all the time and involuntarily.
But it is also possible to take control of our breathing, for the purposes of speech, song, making music, etc. If human history depends on language, and if language is interrupted breath, then our capacity to effect complex regulations of the breath lies at the bottom of our humanity. Breathing is a symbol and enactment of the relationship between the inner and the outer which constitutes us. But, because it condemns us to sharing the world, and mingling our substance with other creatures, it can also provoke hostility and borderline-anxiety. The reason that thinking about breath and breathing always seems to give rise to ideas of purity is that there is something intrinsically impure about it.