BreatheandRepeat

March 19 2020

They say concentrate on breathing

to empty the mind.

The long slow draw . . .

              a fleeting pause . . .

                       then full exhalation.

The circularity of breath, the cycle of life.

Breathe and repeat

ad infinitum.

What strikes me is how automatic it is.

How the machinery of the body

goes about its business

without our even noticing.

How I never think about breathing

my heart's shifting beat.

Saliva, seamlessly swallowed.

The pressure of this chair

against my seat

until I turn the light on it.

We privilege consciousness,

the one thing at a time

to which we attend.

While most of the brain

is preoccupied with maintenance.

As guts secrete

lungs reliably pump,

killer cells

are out for blood

the corner of the eye on guard.

The emotions that rule us

dwell there, as well;

in the netherworld

of inattention,

the motor

of intent.

While our executive mind

is a thin skim of ice

over black bottomless depths.

Our rationality

the conceit of an animal

who presumes to call himself

sapien.

Take long full breaths.

Count slowly to 10

when the anger wells.

And never imagine

you think objectively.

Because we should have known better.

We are not Vulcans, we are men.

And the mind cannot be emptied;

merely distracted, at best.

In mindfulness training, one is trained to divert oneself from the chattering monkey brain by focusing in on breathing. How instructive this is: to have something that is normally totally unconscious all of sudden occupying the entirety of our attention. Where was this breathing before? How did I go on so long with life while being totally oblivious to such a critical life-giving function?

It's also instructive to experience just how intrusive and persistent that chattering monkey brain is: how hard it is to turn off thinking and consciousness.

If breathing – utterly essential to life – can go on like this, it raises the question about what else is going on down there, in the netherworld of unconsciousness. And so the poem comes to be: an exploration of body and mind, of emotion and rationality.

I had a little fun with title. It recalls the ridiculous advice on shampoo bottles to “rinse and repeat”: as if one really needed instruction on how to shampoo one's hair! (An instruction I suspect has more to do with increasing sales than personal hygiene.)

We privilege consciousness, imagining that anything unconscious is merely distortion, or noise, or spookiness. Yet consciousness occupies only a very small part of our brains, and a lot of our thinking is going on below the level of awareness. The poem begins by talking about unconscious processes: the machinery that keeps us alive. But this is merely a way in to the central theme, which is first about attention and salience, and then – going deeper – how we decide how to act, form opinions, and construct a world view.

I might also have talked more specifically about the unconscious cognitive biases that distort decision making (things like priming and anchoring and confirmation bias), as well as the crude heuristics and fast thinking (referring to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's theory of slow and fast thinking) that fool us we are making measured and rational choices. But this is a poem, not an essay on cognitive neuroscience, and it's enough to imply that we are not the cool rational creatures we imagine.

Although I might also have said that our emotions are an essential part of us, and often help us be decisive. Because it's been shown that people whose emotions are numbed -- through either brain injury or chemistry -- can be paralyzed in their decision-making: emotion, even though it's unconscious, can be an excellent tool in focusing all of past personal experience into a quick and efficient weighting of alternatives. So emotion is the original heuristic: a cognitive shortcut (along with experience and prejudice) that most often emerges as what we call intuition. (The poem briefly alludes to this in the two short lines the motor / of intent: as good an example as any of how poetry can distill a complex idea down to inscrutability. Which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on how you think poetry is meant to work!) I'm highly suspicious of people who “go with their gut”. (A certain President comes to mind!) Nevertheless, gut feelings can be useful, and even those among us who most pride themselves on their rationality (me, that is!) cannot help but go by them.