Living in a Body
Liza Michaeli
Duende, in holding
… in exhaling, a vibrato is released. In a “relief from tension,” life itself is somewhat cheated. What are the ethics of releasement, tightness purged out of a chest? A Cathar is a lighter, not a purer being. Air turned breath, timely relief of pain, a gas exchange with the environment. The economics, as it were, of breathing. Do we hear experience competing for space in chest, in lungs? Needs the geometry of body, physics of speaker to recover the vibrato. For Lorca, these are the “close quarters,” “not form but the marrow of form, pure music with a body lean enough to float on air.”(1)
Duende is a mouthful (in)gathering of chthonic energy. Reckless enough, absorbed directly into blood. The arrival of the duende presupposes a radical change in a body’s bearing (I do not say "willingness" to bear). An “internal biological feeling of relation to the environment” compromised by “‘contraction’ and ‘dilatation.’”(2) A possible recovery is a definite loss. Because duende “is.”
The reduction of a physiological stress may correspond to the reduction of pathos. Yet pathea is vital. And “becoming well again” is actually a loss in the quality of exchange. The economic dimension of experience is thus not just a spiritual issue, it is an ethical predicament.
Life’s most intense experiences are accompanied by a slowness, a retardation of breath. Deep tectonic movement. Larghissimo of breath, “hardly a breath.” Here, the pulse in the neck refuses to emanate significance; it “lends” nothing. Respiratory impairment, difficulty with mobility “inside,” is another phrase for labored breathing, the labor itself of breath. Yet this is not quite dying, it is difficult living. Asphyxia is not only positional; “begin” and “again” forced together in the weight of the restraint.
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Will the pulse ever be re-turned a life? I do not mean the motoricity of pulsation, pulsion.(3)
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… in inhaling, another loan is taken. Vulnera of bios as inner endowment. Passional withholding, lymph nodes growing in chest. The intimacy of this tight biological nexus, spiritual physicality. It happens as ligat(i)o. For breathing to become breath, it must be recovered back to air.
Here is the erotic agon, unutterative. Small adjustments, physiological buoyancy viz. hoarding—a holding—of tension against the dangerous influence of healing. For only in the movement against relief may the body inhale the sustinet [burden of it], is life granted a “geometric” expansion. Gesture distinct from agere [acting], “ … a fight for the sickness whose recovery is simulated.”(4)
What is it to live intensely, at the bare minimum of compromise? What is it not to seek profit in the form of “relief” payments from life? What is this Arbeit of breath which is not breathing? Is there an approach not by the quantity, but by the “physiological pathos of breathing”?(5)
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Where the feeling holds us, душность (too much breath, “suffocation”) joins дыхание (breathing) in душа (soul). There, in the meadows of the holding, may the tremors of history be felt, does all of time finally hurt, само чувство не покидает (feeling itself does not drop),(6) duende.
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1 Lorca, “Theory and Play of The Duende,” trans. A.S. Kline, 2007.
2 de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: Volume Two trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 158.
3 For even in pulsion, in pulsation, I submit, is there a compromise. C.f., Lacan, the “motor reaction” as recovery, in The Seminars of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997).
4 Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 10; emphasis mine. Agamben, “Notes on Gesture,” in Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 135-140.
5 de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: Volume Two, 158.
6 Where the feeling itself does not drop, thrust you (as one thrusts a ball or throws out garbage), forsake, or abandon you. Here, forfeiture cannot be exercised. Fragment is my own.
