Wednesday night the two of us slept with pepper skins stilled in our unbrushed mouths, having fallen asleep sortof drunk and dangled, seared-up from to a go go day in the smog city. So Thursday morning, in the remaining slag of this bedtime laziness, we breathed peppered spice onto the breakfast cantaloupe which made it a sorta complex fine-dining thing. Not so long after cantaloupe Pearl perks up and gets to work, cough coughings all through it while I’m there just a dry scary-eyed lump with a jammy consciousness, lagging lungs, a hot mouth, a yawning stance. Me, stewing gelatinous with my feet up, so slack in relation to the way Pearl’s coughs are standing her upright. Ahem ahem. It’s simple, I’m weak to the way this air keeps clicking up all around me. Wouldn’t really like to cough myself up into a posture. I cant get up out of the particulate goo of it all; All this and all that. It’s all thick and swarming towards me like Ichor, like a drink. Or simpler, more busy, a hive. The room puts us so immersed in its weather or like stuck in this city and I’m almost certain that I’d really like this home to open-up and crash-out instead of walling us in, fermenting us in its air.
Five years ago there was an artist called Brother Nut who dragged a vacuum cleaner behind him in Beijing for one hundred days sucking up the air. The pollutants he collected weighed a hundred grams. He mixed these smog particulates with clay and mold and made a brick. He placed the brick in a congregation of other bricks at the construction site of a new building in Beijing, saying he would like “to let the brick disappear into the concrete jungle, just like putting a drop of water in the ocean”. Much is dripped thru the city wind, much is particulate and un-sense-able, diffuse, invisible, or silent, and these things matter all the same, could build Beijing.
The inhabitant of a city wears a good-fitting snorkel. Snorkled Pearl is tough to the residue of the night before and its air, and the day now, and it's air, as if the circuit of her world’s breath has an unstoppable velocity that she just rides on the exhale. Like she’s accustomed to this condition of particulate orbits, coping and panting quiet within “the hardening circuits and thickening conjunctures where elements and effects move one way and another, concentrate here and there” (Choy). To breathe together, we two, in this unequally shared milieu, this “planetary medium for respiration” (Choy) flags the problem of making friends, of having different lungs hanging in our breasts, suspended invisibly unalike among it all. Emphasizes the unequal shared cosubjection of breathers in a disrupted atmosphere. All this and all that.
Someone told me horses show trust by sharing breath, snuffing each other’s nose-air in laps between faces. In rooms, or cities, I think we’re doing that in some way too, but this intimacy doesn’t feel so much sweet as a necessary trapping.
“All the air things wear that build this world” (Gerard Manly Hopkins)
The particulate is often too small to experience with unaided senses. We only meet it in a mash, a something that in its congregation has already begun to alter the character of its substrate. Cant see the smog without the air, cant see the air without the smog. Cant breathe the peppers in without the mouth, or retrieve the mouth pre-pepper. Gotta brush to mix it up. Zachary Horton of the vibrant media lab writes that we could think of particulates’ movement as a sort of eco-scalar breathing, a rhythm or cycle of swelling and contraction. We could envision a set of lungs encompassing all the earth. Exhale: a centrifugal movement or dispersal outwards into the environment. Inhale: a centripetal movement or concentration inward, into certain sites or bodies of accumulation. Particulates are always becoming part of all breaths, they spit in the Earth’s exhales and spit in its inhales; the inhales of live lungs, cities, sinking air, gasps inward, inward where they calcify and congeal and intoxicate only to by thrown arms-up out into that big circuit thing troposphere.
With these particulates always making multi-scalar lungs of it all, environments and bodies are immanent to one another. Mel Chen writes, “Standing before you, I ingest you”, and here in this apartment I’m ingesting my Pearl, we cant stop it, with this need to keep sucking along around the room. Its a slogged-down fight that we silently submit to with all these incessant respirations. We all carry the breath of a city’s day in our chests, and poof it out, and again, and so on, and that might make us horsey-type friends. Even in these different bodies and different healths there’s some shared suction and some lactation we cede to in the air, that we gotta keep devouring and spewing and then again – and theres nothing that autonomous about it all; All this and all that.