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On the day of the dismantling of the Popular University, the encampment for Palestine at McGill University, a solemn protest takes place outside the gates. Campers are tired from months of holding fort, having seen little to no real action on the part of the University to cut ties with the Israeli war machine. I run into a camper, Z. Together we file to a quiet room in the anthropology building. Z had considered subleasing his room that summer—he slept far more nights at camp than in his bed over the early summer months during which the action took place. He is exhausted. I start recording as we speak, him lying on a worn couch, myself on an office chair beside. We speak of duration, political commitments, conflict. He starts to nod off. Speech becomes circular, nonsensical. He speaks of his mother, her worry, he trails off. The recording is long and composed mostly of silence, the breathing of young sleep too faint for my cell phone microphone to pick up. To give a report on this recording would be to construct argument from atmosphere, it might always be an interpretation made too soon, half a thought short. If On Breathing has more in common with that conversation than the rising and falling of a chest, one point of contact is this; my attempt to reconstruct it for you will be partial and certainly insufficient. By this re-telling, you will not be able to breathe alongside it as I have, quickly as we walk past the red line at the ICU separating intubated patients from those more likely to survive, yawning as we are read to from Goodnight Moon.
On Breathing has a floating kind of focus to it, one that recursively circles back to its own ideas rather than leading readers on straight paths to clear conclusions. In Jamieson Webster’s previous book, Disorganisation & Sex, we learn that the word “cure” traces back to the Latin cura, or “care.” This is a care that does not seek to return to some untroubled past, but rather looks
to new states entirely, perhaps differe