Rebreathing My Own Air - Sept 15 2020

Rebreathing My Own Air

Sept 15 2020

In this small contained space

we keep our distance.

Behind walls of silence

averted eyes,

intrusive thoughts

we're determined to keep private.

Too far

to feel each other's heat,

but close enough

to hear the sound of breathing.

Which I always found too loud

and how could you not notice,

but squelched my annoyance

scowling curtly inside.

Yet no matter how much we try to separate ourselves

and however much space,

the invisible air

we're obliged to share

is the ultimate intimacy.

Because while with each warm breath

molecules of you

are diffusing freely out

to every nook and niche,

I am taking them in;

to the depths of my lungs

then directly to blood

and right to my heart,

until they're just as much

a part of me.

Or I could build real walls

of mortar, brick, and steel,

rebreathing my own air

in my pure hermetic space

in blissful solitude.

Until I have exhausted

the last atom of oxygen

and am hammering on the walls,

the silence finally broken

our aloneness exposed.

The Covid pandemic has illuminated how interdependent we are: our interdependence as a society; and the interdependence between us and the natural world in which we're inescapably embedded.

Responses to crises like this are often populist. But populism is grounded in a false notion of purity that is much like the poem's illusion of uncontaminated air. Populism, whether of the left or right, divides the world into a homogeneous us vs a mongrel them – the alien outsiders and interlopers. It sets corrupt elites against the nobility of “the people”. And it proffers up simplistic solutions to complicated problems – “pure” solutions uncontaminated by nuance and empathy.

It doesn't take a planetary disaster to realize that the notion of the “self-made” man is a conceit, and the idea of compete self-reliance almost impossible. We are social animals, and even if we prefer solitude we can't avoid the need for intimacy and connection. And no matter how hermetic a life we think we have constructed, there is no such thing: we breath the same air, share the same planet; there is no getting away from the other.

In a similar sense, we have no choice to be a part of nature, not apart from it. Man does not stand astride the natural world, exempt from its exigencies, observing from behind the glass and from over the parapet. A high price will be exacted for our unsustainable lifestyle, greed, and short-term thinking. And if we don't pay that price, our descendants will. ...Except I think it has become increasingly clear that bill is now coming due, and that we can no longer afford our wilfully blinkered denial.