There are some things that I’m always thinking about, whether consciously or not, and one of those things is the breath. When I first started doing yoga, breath work stirred so much in me in ways that were familiar and not. It reminded me of the rhythmic breathing that would get me through the last ½ mile of a run, but it stirred emotions in me that I metabolized so much faster while exercising (and sometimes not at all during exercise! Endorphins are crazy.). To sit with the emotions that bubbled up against the regularity of the breath would make my brow furrow with discomfort and I’d rock in my seat. It was a reminder that my emotions don’t just exist in my brain, but that they also, maybe even more so, exist in my body, too. Yet, the discomfort that I felt with attention to the breath was also met with a gratitude for the breath that I, more often than not, don’t even have to consider to get me through the day. Like anything else in my life, the more that I start to think about it, the more confounding and perplexing the thing becomes. Because the breath might bring and maintain life, the breath also makes sound and language possible, which gives that life meaning. There are two passages that I’ve turned over in my head for years with the way that they strike a similar chord in me when I read them: moved by the communal nature of language, sound, and breath.
The first is from the last section of The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. For those not familiar with The Sound and the Fury, the book is about the demise of the Compsons, a Southern American family that is trapped by fate, and that fate could also be synonymous with the inability to change. It is told from four perspectives, with the last, a third-person limited perspective, perhaps Faulkner himself. In this scene, the Compsons’ servant, Dilsey, is at church with her children and the non-verbal Compson child, Benjy, whose perspective informs the first section of the book that is infamously and famously confusing with the collapse and circle nature of time. In this scene, the church is ready to hear a sermon from a guest pastor:
When the visitor rose to speak he sounded like a white man. His voice was level and cold. It sounded too big to have come from him and they listened at first through curiosity…They began to watch him as they would a man on a tight rope. They even forgot his insignificant appearance in the virtuosity with which he ran and poised and swooped upon the cold inflectionless wire of his voice, so that at last, when with a sort of swooping glide he came to rest again beside the reading desk with one arm resting upon it at shoulder height and his body as reft of all motion as a mummy or an emptied vessel, the congregation sighed as if it waked from a collective dream and moved a little in its seats. Behind the pulpit the choir fanned steadily…
Then, a voice said, “Brethren.”
The preacher had not moved. His arm lay yet across the desk, and he still held that pose while the voice died in sonorous echoes between the walls. It was as different as day and dark from his former tone, with a sad, timbrous quality like an alto horn, sinking into their hearts and speaking there again when it had ceased in fading and cumulate echoes.
“Brethren and sisteren,” it said again. The preacher removed his arm and he began to walk back and forth before the desk, his hands clasped behind him, a meagre figure, hunched over upon itself like that of one long immured in striving with the implacable earth, “I got the recollection and the blood of the Lamb!” He tramped steadily back and forth beneath the twisted steadily back and forth beneath and twister paper and the Christmas bell, hunched, his hands clasped behind him. He was like a worn small rock whelmed by the successive waves of his voice. With his body he seemed to feed the voice that, succubus like, had fleshed its teeth in him. And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but stead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words, so that when he came to rest against the reading desk, his face lifted and his whole attitude that of a serene, torturued crucifix that transcended its shabbiness and insignificance and made it of no moment, a long moaning expulsion of breath rose from them, and a woman’s single soprano: “Yes, Jesus!”
As the succeeding day passed overhead the dingy windows glowed and faded in ghostly retrograde. A care passed along the road outside, laboring in the sand, died away. Dilsey sat bolt upright, her hand on Ben’s knee. Two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time.
The repetition of the word “voice” throughout the passage emphasizes the power of utterances, especially in community with other people. Yet, the voice starts and it “sounded like a white man” as “cold inflectionless wire” and then develops into “sad, timbrous quality like an alto horn, sinking into their hearts and speaking there again when it had ceased in fading and cumulative echoes.” It is when his voice begins to sound like music that it starts to affect the listeners, rendering the words as vehicles of sound that create the meaning. As the preacher embodies the voice and moves his body on the stage, his voice develops with the movement of his body: “With his body he seemed to feed the voice that, succubus like, had fleshed its teeth in him.” This power that he builds on stage is dialectic with the congregation: “And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words.” The voices evoke a feeling as they mystify the power of the moment. Language, and even more fascinating, the English language is such a powerful tool that can sometimes cudgel us into paralysis from certainty, yet, as the voice, or the language, is less cold, less precise, and transforms from words to sounds, it becomes more powerful, so powerful that those words or sounds fall on the listeners leaving them “beyond the need for words.” Every time that I’ve read this scene, I interpret it as the preacher begins by speaking, which moves into singing or chanting. Words, calculated and precise, are a contemporary evolutionary development. Noise and sounds (or human-made notes) preceded our articulation of words, all of which is made possible by the breath. By returning to an earlier form of communication, the characters in the scene are reminded of their humanity, which in turn reminds the reader of our humanity that is restored when we engage in shared sounds created by shared breath. There is irony here in that this is the way that the novel ends. When the reader reads this, the reader has already experienced the words-on-the-page experience of Benjy’s section, where we infer that the words in the section are fleeting in his head. As he thinks about the words that pass through his head as memories, the reader infers that Benjy reacts viscerally to the memories by making inarticulate sounds. His caretaker and several other caretakers tell him to be quiet as he tries to communicate a feeling to the people in his life.
The wonder and awe that is built into sounds have always communicated more to me than any word can. Maybe it is the way that my imagination builds around a sound. I’m not sure. I think about Keith Jarrett’s “Köln” (1975) piano concert, which is known for being entirely improvised. At around the 7:00 minute mark, he starts to transition into a crescendoed movement, and he also vocalizes alongside his piano work, as if to say, or ask of the audience, “Do you feel that? Oh! I do.” I do, Keith. I do.
I can’t help but think about an excerpt from Beloved by Toni Morrison when I think about that Faulkner excerpt, and even though Toni Morrison has said that she is not influenced by other authors, the humanity and resilience of spirit through united voice, held to a spiritual unification tool in the previous excerpt holds throughout Morrison’s passage, too. Beloved, a book about a formerly enslaved woman, Sethe, is haunted by her past through the return of a child whom Sethe murdered to save her. When that child begins to exact revenge against Sethe, the women in the community come together to cast the ghost out of the house, using their voices:
When the women assembled outside 124, Sethe was breaking a lump of ice into chunks. She dropped the ice pick into her apron pocket to scoop the pieces into a basin of water. When the music entered the window she was wringing a cool cloth to put on Beloved’s forehead. Beloved, sweating profusely, was sprawled on the bed in the keeping room, a salt rock in her hand. Both women heard it at the same time and both lifted their heads. As the voices grew louder, Beloved sat up, licked the salt and went into the bigger room. Sethe and she exchanged glances and started toward the window. They saw Denver sitting on the steps and beyond her, where the yard met the road, they saw the rapt faces of the thirty neighborhood women. Some had their eyes closed; others looked at the hot, cloudless sky. Sethe opened the door and reached for Beloved’s hand. Together they stood in the doorway. For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.
Morrison uses the voices of the women who unite in song to create something so powerful that it becomes magic-like, filled with the divine. Morrison writes that their voices combined, “broke the back of words,” rendering any logical, linguistic response pointless amidst the power of the song and the combined effort of the breath. The voices together also move nature with their ability to “sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees.” Like water, “It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.” The voices eliminate the existence of the ghost to bring Sethe back to life, clean and forgiven, with what they can produce with their breath. Both passages combine the breath, the voice, and the divine. The breath makes it possible for the divine to move through the body, whatever that divinity is (God is implied in these passages, but I think about the chill that would move down my spine with the first measure of any song that is sung together in any context).
Many languages use the same word for spirit or life that they do for breath. The Greeks used “pneuma,” which is used interchangeably for “breath,” “vitality,” and “soul.” Similarly, in Latin, “spiro” means both “to breathe” and “to be alive.” In Sanskrit, “prana” means “breath,” and “life force.” The Chinese word “qi” means the same. The breath reminds us of our life and humanity, and the sounds we make illuminate the meaning for our life. Words that we use with our breath are meant to provide more clarity, but the power of the music that we make with our voices and breath allows us to sit in beauty without the desperate attempt to make an argument or meaning of it, because we are allowed to feel it. It makes me think about how humming was often so much more beautiful to me than any song with lyrics or any words. And even though I’ve spent many words on trying to explain what I mean, it is something made most tangible and real by Sam Cooke humming what “soul” is.
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