Something sweet happened in class yesterday, prefigured by seeing my breath in the clear sunny air of a crisp morning as I walked to the subway at 125th Street on my way to school.
Our readings were David Abram's "The Commonwealth of Breath," based largely an Native American understandings of holy wind as holding and pervading us, not just as "air" but as consciousness, "awairness," and the first few chapters of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. I thought we might start by celebrating the air in our classroom - no need to open the window, air is everywhere! - but students quickly dismissed by suggestion that we "savor the air," instead complaining about how bad the air in New York is. (I saved noting that the air is much better than that in many cities, including New York past and, given unfolding Trumpery, future.) Rhapsodies followed to the air of the sea, of home, of upstate - we should take a fieldtrip, one proposed! As for the City, "I try not to breathe it," one said. This wasn't going anywhere (I was going to draw attention to a note where Abram considers the different, but analogous, experience of denizens of water) so I let the discussion move on.
But then we came to Kimmerer's report that, at the start of a course on ecology at her college, she'd been astonished at students' answers to a questionnaire she'd given them. While they listed many "negative interactions between people and land" - they were students of environmental policy, after all - when she asked about "positive interactions between people and land" the response was: none. My students shared her surprise at this, but I interjected: can you name any positive interactions between people and land? "I'm not sure I can," I admitted. One student spoke of parks and nature reserves and taking children to them. Another said that it was a positive interaction when we undid the damage of our negative interactions. I was hoping for more - I wasn't joking when I said I'd come up short myself - but that was it.
After a pause I confessed that this question haunted me, and I had no answer. I knew no way to understand my own existence as anything other than parasitic - taking but never giving back, consuming, destroying. Kimmerer's pecans and strawberries are happy to be eaten because their seeds are spread to other soil by the eaters, but my shit just goes down the toilet. A negative interaction! Composting is great but our own bodies' work as composters, which fed the nightsoil cycle I was so moved to learn about in Bonneuil and Fressoz last year (poop collected in European cities used to be collected to fertilize the farms that fed the cities), is interrupted.
But then I had a little whiff of Abramian inspiration (one of the many terms he reminds us are about the power of the air). What about breathing out?, I asked. We read about how plants take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, don't we, as animals, return the favor by taking in oxygen and producing CO2? Uptakes of breath throughout the room. It's not a lot (actually we typically inhale and exhale about 10,000 liters of air every day) but it's a start...
This is something I'm thinking hard about, and will continue to. (I sense that the next step, one uncomfortable in other ways, is reckoning with being a predator - whose ecological niche involves giving by taking.) For now I'm savoring the thought that this discovery was a gift of the crisp air and the sun this morning in the Manhattan Valley, which forces the subway and its passengers out into the open, and made the invisible wonder of breath - including my own - briefly visible.
Our readings were David Abram's "The Commonwealth of Breath," based largely an Native American understandings of holy wind as holding and pervading us, not just as "air" but as consciousness, "awairness," and the first few chapters of Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. I thought we might start by celebrating the air in our classroom - no need to open the window, air is everywhere! - but students quickly dismissed by suggestion that we "savor the air," instead complaining about how bad the air in New York is. (I saved noting that the air is much better than that in many cities, including New York past and, given unfolding Trumpery, future.) Rhapsodies followed to the air of the sea, of home, of upstate - we should take a fieldtrip, one proposed! As for the City, "I try not to breathe it," one said. This wasn't going anywhere (I was going to draw attention to a note where Abram considers the different, but analogous, experience of denizens of water) so I let the discussion move on.
But then we came to Kimmerer's report that, at the start of a course on ecology at her college, she'd been astonished at students' answers to a questionnaire she'd given them. While they listed many "negative interactions between people and land" - they were students of environmental policy, after all - when she asked about "positive interactions between people and land" the response was: none. My students shared her surprise at this, but I interjected: can you name any positive interactions between people and land? "I'm not sure I can," I admitted. One student spoke of parks and nature reserves and taking children to them. Another said that it was a positive interaction when we undid the damage of our negative interactions. I was hoping for more - I wasn't joking when I said I'd come up short myself - but that was it.
After a pause I confessed that this question haunted me, and I had no answer. I knew no way to understand my own existence as anything other than parasitic - taking but never giving back, consuming, destroying. Kimmerer's pecans and strawberries are happy to be eaten because their seeds are spread to other soil by the eaters, but my shit just goes down the toilet. A negative interaction! Composting is great but our own bodies' work as composters, which fed the nightsoil cycle I was so moved to learn about in Bonneuil and Fressoz last year (poop collected in European cities used to be collected to fertilize the farms that fed the cities), is interrupted.
But then I had a little whiff of Abramian inspiration (one of the many terms he reminds us are about the power of the air). What about breathing out?, I asked. We read about how plants take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, don't we, as animals, return the favor by taking in oxygen and producing CO2? Uptakes of breath throughout the room. It's not a lot (actually we typically inhale and exhale about 10,000 liters of air every day) but it's a start...
This is something I'm thinking hard about, and will continue to. (I sense that the next step, one uncomfortable in other ways, is reckoning with being a predator - whose ecological niche involves giving by taking.) For now I'm savoring the thought that this discovery was a gift of the crisp air and the sun this morning in the Manhattan Valley, which forces the subway and its passengers out into the open, and made the invisible wonder of breath - including my own - briefly visible.
