Reading to Exhale

So already, on December 21, I finished reading Tiphanie Yanique's novel Monster in the Middle* right before I got out of bed in the morning, and I began reading Joy Harjo's memoir Poet Warrior** right after I got into bed in the evening. Thus, I eased my way around the temporal hairpin turn*** of the winter solstice in the company of two beautiful, complex, challenging, hopeful, different but also importantly connected books.

In her poem "Shapechangers in Winter," Margaret Atwood says of the shortest day,   

This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go of and becomes the future;
the place of caught breath, the door
of a vanished house left ajar.**** 

Atwood's poem was the third piece of literature I read on the solstice, and with its references to unlocking, thresholds, the past, and the future, it was relevant to both Monster in the Middle and Poet Warrior: Yanique and Harjo both speak at length about ancestors and forebears. 

But Atwood's phrase "the place of caught breath" was what really got under my skin because I simultaneously didn't understand it and also believed it was true. One week later, though, I gained some insight into it, courtesy of an experience I had. 

I suspect I'd been primed for that experience by the following thoughts and questions that I'd had in the intervening days:

• 
  So what does it mean in Atwood's poem that the breath is "caught" in a time that Atwood says is a place? [Please note: One of the Jewish names for God is HaMakom, or "The Place."*****]

• Does Atwood believe that we're breathless or close to breathless just before the solstice, and that at the solstice our breath is restored or renewed? 

• If our breath is restored or renewed at the solstice, are our souls also? [Please note: the words "breath" and "soul" are often synonymous in Jewish prayer and thought, and both are divine in origin.*******]

• Or is Atwood using the word "caught" in the sense of trapped, implying that the solstice is the moment that our imprisoned souls are freed, released into the world, perhaps through the door that's been "left ajar"? 

•  Or is Atwood using "caught breath"--with its implications of the swift, satisfying intake of breath--simply to emphasize the hushed stillness of that actual moment of sun-return, that astronomical pivot point on that shortest day?

The experience I referred to just before I laid out those five questions was this: last Tuesday, a beloved Cambridge Rindge and Latin School former colleague and forever friend brought together a group of current and former CRLS teachers to discuss Monster in the Middle. Some of us had known each other for years; others of us were meeting for the first time.

Being the excellent, inspired, literature-loving teacher that she is, my colleague emailed us several resources we might want to explore in preparation for our Zoom discussion. 

Specifically, she suggested that we listen to Yanique read the novel's opening "Love Letter" five minutes into the YouTube video of a conversation between Yanique and Edwidge Danticat, and the beginning of the chapter entitled "Monster in the Middle: The Story of Stela's Dad" at Minute 2:20 of the YouTube video of a conversation between Yanique and Brandon Taylor.  [My feeling is that if you listen to Yanique read these two short segments of her novel, you'll want to read this book as soon as you possibly can.}

Frankly, I'd been drawn to both of these sections of the novel upon reading them, dazzled by both their craft and content: I'd chuckled along with the other knuckleheads at the wisdom of the parents; I'd been fascinated by Stela's dad's sense of what deserved gratitude and what deserved the "monster" designation.

But hearing Yanique read them made me see beyond their craft and content, and gave me the chance to experience myself as part of something bigger that included me, and all of us. It shouldn't have come as a surprise to me: I've read Manuel Munoz's works******* and then heard him read them, and can honestly say that my initial experience of them as gifts and offerings is always elevated and intensified when I hear him read them with his characteristic respect for his characters and his deep understanding of the worlds they inhabit and navigate. We, his readers and listeners, are routinely enlarged and made kinder by his writing.

Before I go on, though, a question for you: have you ever tried to read aloud while holding your breath? How many sentences could you get through, and what happened to your voice--and to your stomach muscles? 

Yes, on some level, these are silly questions: everything we need and want to do, especially with force and conviction, requires breath.******** But this is where I have to get all Jewish on you again, though I know Judaism is not the only religious tradition to sanctify breath, to assign to it a spiritual role and source.

Given my understanding of breath and soul, breath and the divine, breath and God as closely related and even synonymous, I naturally think of the spiritual connections between "inspire" and "inhale," and "express" (as in express spirit) and exhale. 

So when works of literature reflecting a compassionate, loving view of people, as well as a love of the world and of life, are breathed out into the world through the act of reading, I feel that the universe, or at least the hearers of those readings, are lifted up, inspired, sometimes even transformed. When the authors of those works are also their readers, our experiences of the bond between creator and created further intensifies the capacities of those works to inspire. The moment is as potent and pivotal as the solstice.

Yanique's two readings were still much on my mind when I sat down two days ago to continue reading Poet Warrior--and came upon the Harjo poem that I'd first encountered--and immediately loved--when Richard Blanco read it aloud in April 2020 as part of the Academy of American Poets' Shelter in Poems event.********* That whole evening was an experience of being comforted and raised up by listening to literature.

Immediately, I went searching online, hoping to find a recording of Harjo reading her poem, and I easily found one. The poem abounds in beautiful lines, but I think that the one that always takes me up short, makes me catch my breath, is "It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women" (25).

That's the whole thing, really: being as fully human as we can be, which requires breathing in and breathing out for the sakes of our bodies and our souls, our fellow humans and our world.

As we round another pivot point in order to let go of 2021 and move into 2022, I find myself appreciating literature anew as provocation and inspiration, as hard beauty and hard truth for the sake of more peace and more joy. It's also nice to know and admit that at age 66, I still really love being read aloud to. Happy New Year!

* Yanique, T. (2021). Monster in the middle. Riverhead Books. 

** Harjo, J. (2021). Poet warrior: a Memoir. W. W. Norton & Company.

*** "Starry Night," 1922, by Edvard Munch, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: <a title="Edvard Munch, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edvard_Munch,_1922,_Starry_Night,_Munch_Museum,_Oslo.jpg"><img width="256" alt="Edvard Munch, 1922, Starry Night, Munch Museum, Oslo" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fb/Edvard_Munch%2C_1922%2C_Starry_Night%2C_Munch_Museum%2C_Oslo.jpg/256px-Edvard_Munch%2C_1922%2C_Starry_Night%2C_Munch_Museum%2C_Oslo.jpg"></a> 

**** Atwood, Margaret. “267: Shapechangers in Winter.” Exceptindreams, Livejournal, 11 Aug. 2008, https://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/69761.html. 

*(5) Rutman, Yisrael. “May ‘The Place’ Comfort You.” Aish: Judaism-Life Cycle (Death and Mourning), Aish, 2002, https://www.aish.com/jl/l/dam/48961211.html. Accessed 30 Dec. 2021. 

*(6) My Jewish Learning. “Body and Soul.” My Jewish Learning, My Jewish Learning, 14 Apr. 2021, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/body-soul/. 

*(7) Earlier this year, I blogged about Manuel Munoz's "Anyone Can Do It."

*(8) Photo adjacent to this paragraph by Leilani Bustamanate and collecteby by Molly Burgess: Burgess, Molly. “Artwork © by Leilani Bustamante: Unusual Art, Painting, Surreal Art.” Breath, Pinterest, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/192177109072826499/?d=t&mt=login. 

*(9) I blogged about that evening soon after it happened and mentioned that poem, "Perhaps the World Ends Here," in another blog post I wrote a couple of months later.