"Ten Ritornellos on Breathing" by Michael Templeton
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Templeton is a writer, independent scholar, guitar player, barista, and cook. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press and Impossible to Believe, forthcoming from Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications and the awaiting of awaiting: a novella, forthcoming from Nut Hole Publishing. He has published articles and essays on contemporary culture and numerous works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in the middle of nowhere in Ohio.
It is enough to breathe.
A self appears to itself, its appearance, at first glance, is that of the self-same. This is to say, the self, unto itself, is that same on which one gazes upon themselves. Upon further reflection, the self cannot appear as such in the absence of that which gives it a contextual frame of self-reference. This is to say that the self requires the not-self to have any sense of its being. The not-self, the other, is the very condition for an internal recognition of a self. The self-same is as such only in that it is not.
Stripped of an other, as in the condition of being divided against itself, the self must still find the form of the other in order to experience itself as a self. This is to say that when the self is deprived of others, it cannot function as a self unless it replaces the loss of others with something that stands in for an other. In the case of radical division in which the individual is reduced and dividuated, the self becomes the self and its other. The self, in order to experiences itself as self-same, further dividuates itself from within in finding
and experiencing an interior other from which it is now able to experience, now on the level of hallucination or delusion, a self from within itself. The self and its other are neither material existences nor consistencies in the lived world of living beings. The dividuated self is other-self-same.
(Being in relation to non-being will inevitably remain non-being, and it all finds itself elevated along lines that must be codified in advance in order to approximate and simulate. The vectors of connectivity will multiply exponentially and deny the possibility of the random, but also the possibility of a breath. It is a hell, an immanence of a hell).
At the same time, a living body cannot divide. It remains, and has always been, a living instance, a singularity. And what emerges into the world of the social is not the dividuated monad. It is other, and it is same. From a chaotic gray point that holds all points and all lines and vectors (there can never be a chaotic void), vibratory moments necessarily occur, and vibratory moments will meet and collide with other vibratory moments within the chaotic gray point, and when they do they will begin to oscillate and vibrate together. Formal structures and systems such organization and order all come after
the fact and are not derived from vibratory moments but from cultural systems long since established. In any case, vibrations which have met, collided, and begin to vibrate together become rhythms, and rhythms emerge from chaos into the realms of the chaosmos. The process of “rhythm-chaos or chaosmosis” (Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, 312). The self-syntonic is self-other-tonic-rhythm.
An antagony versus a syntony; the dividuated singularity emerges from within but against the vibratory and rhythmic chaosmotic milieu in which the living breath is contained and refused its natural rhythm. A living body breathes in ways that are naturally uncontainable. Containment is a function of the code, of connectivity over conjunction, of sterility over the skin. Conjunction, improvisation, accident, movement, synchrony that gives rise to syntony. Living bodies moving according to the vibratory meeting of living bodies and the breathing that underlies and overarches living bodies provide the syntonic milieu of a self which will find its self, its other, its interior other, interior others, images and ideas of selves and others—a rhythmic flux and flow. In this case, the self has become a tone—a tonal instance within the context of tonal instances which are, which can only be a musical progression in which there will always be some level of alternation between the tonic center and the ritornello which reiterates (and may even alter toward unraveling) the tonic. At once thought to require the counterpoint of a divine rhythm but has now expanded beyond tonal and rhythmic limitations which may nonetheless instantiate the divine. In fact, we have the capacity to emerge from and within “the Incommensurable” (Deleuze and Guattari, 313). The soluble self within the chaosmotic flows of beings. Self-solubility and breathing.
Disposed as we are to experience “the cruelty of the inexhaustible” (Bifo. And, 36). But now against synthetic codes of containment that infinitely reproduce synthetic forms of living breath, but ultimately suffocate the very process of breathing. Codified measures divide breath into stable metrics and cadences. Divided, dividuated, dead. The cruelty of the inexhaustible becomes finite under such conditions and though easily (and long ago) exhausted, it is possible to create the experience of infinite variety assembled from fractal
shards of dead forms. Syntony is converted into antony in which the atonal is surpassed by the anti-tonal: antonic, and no longer a function of the breath or emerging from the chaosmos. Codes, pre-measured modes simulate movement while limiting and preventing movement. Rather than bodies moving among bodies, we have bodies rooted in place while the simulation of movement is projected. Breathing is replaced by limited gasps that kill. The cruelty of the inexhaustible is transformed into the sterile and impenetrable
exterior form. Behind the screen of sterility is decay and putrescence. The fully atomized and dividuated self is an alien image that elicits disgust.
It begins, the withdrawal begins, with disengagement. A dangerous moment because disengagement and withdrawal present us with multiple paths. A path of complete removal, sterility, and death, reasonable in the face of the unreason of the code and the loop. Unable to imagine the outside, one pulls into their own body and finds solace in the absolute zero state of non-experience. And then the path of extrication and finding your way toward the imperceptible, and of course toward an exterior of which we cannot know
because it simple does not exist. This is a return to the chaosmos and chaosmosis, but also to deep breaths, deep gasping breaths of the kind that are not deliberate. These are the grasps of one who has been suffocating or drowning. The pain of breathing anew without any guarantee that we will continue to breathe.
Strategies of withdrawal plunge bodies into freefall. The exhilaration of liberation is experienced as the terror of dis-integration, when in fact everything at this moment is a radical pull toward integration. It is the isolation of the atomizing codes that encircle us within ourselves, and the openings of stillness return the breath that is linked to the chaosmos of origins and emergence. That primal indeterminacy, that exhilaration of
vibration and free rhythms. The difficulty is not the indeterminacy of syntony but evading the mechanisms of codes which will seek to pathologize all that escapes it and place breathing within the frameworks of destruction and catastrophe. Yet, the return is the return to the disaster as much as it is the return to the return and to the turning of the ritornello.
The phrases can return in altered forms. The sonic sequence returns. It comes again. It comes yet again, but it brings a degree of dissonance and a-rhythmia—something barely perceptible, a microtone and a beat just ahead or behind. A ritornello cycles through the larger sequence with another ritornello layered over it so as to disturb the tonality, rhythm, and flow of all. The sounds begin to drop in and out of the ritornello as the chaotic unstructured pulls at the structural form. And the entirety falls into the chaosmos of pre-emergence where everything comes and is to come again.
… is to come again, and again… the lines that are not drawn until traversed. As the singular breath against and amid the rhythm of the universal, and as such, and as the self in relation to the other that has itself as a self and a singular breath against and amid the rhythm of the universal… Respiring falling into the rhythm that simply insists, made up as it is of intensities along axes which are never present until traversed.
The vestiges of the self and freedom are in the cruelty of the inexhaustible, the indeterminacy of potentials, the inter-conjunctive and spontaneous codes of bodies to bodies, breathing, simply breathing within the chaosmos.