Jamieson Webster’s Elegant Meditation on How We Breathe
Formally, the book is broken into short essays, each around 10 pages long or shorter. The structure reminded me of the sessions of a psychoanalytic treatment. Grouped under four themes—First Breath, Anxiety, Asphyxiation, and Last Words—the essays overlap in subject, and sometimes an observational thread from one essay will follow through to the next or appear again a few essays later, the way certain moments or behavioral patterns are discussed again and again in therapy. “I have always felt that psychoanalysis is closer to poetry than narrative,” Webster writes at one point, and On Breathing, which is often poetically beautiful and surprising, could be described this way too. (Of analyzing dreams and nightmares, for instance, Webster writes, “I always liked this task; turning the nightmare inside out like a glove to see its soft, colorful inside.”)
Again and again, Webster guides the reader through surprising material, fluidly making genuinely unexpected links as she goes. And again and again she resists a declarative ending. (In this sense too, reading On Breathing reminded me of analysis sessions, and encountering the forgotten memories that are unearthed, which feel so out of place from “real life,” and then the growing acceptance of their essential subjectivity, the impossibility of one accepted narrative.) If something is strange or hard to explain, it is allowed to be. In one section, Webster describes the work of Dr. Catherine Vanier, a psychoanalyst who worked in a neonatal intensive care unit in Paris. Vanier was curious about why some premature infants, or “preemies,” survived while others in similar conditions did not. “For many years, I had heard of a mythical creature,” Webster writes. “This analyst would whisper to the babies their history, the conditions of their coming to be born, and who their parents were, in an effort to speak them into life.” Vanier proposed that parents, scared of the reality of having such a small and helpless child, were leaving infants entirely in the care of doctors and machines. She theorized that contact with parents would show the preemy that “there was someone, beyond a machine, to form an attachment with.”
In one story from Vanier’s notes, a preemy called Anna would go into respiratory distress every time she was taken off her ventilator. One day, when the team accidentally left the ventilator running while they removed her, they discovered she could breathe. She did not need to be connected to the ventilator; she needed only to hear it running in the background. Vanier encouraged Anna’s mother to speak to her often, and as truthfully as possible; eventually, the baby was weaned off the machine. “I find this so beautiful and right,” Webster writes. “And yet I must admit that reading Vanier’s work I wrestled with a perverse cynicism: she imagines she’s speaking these infants into life and breath but really it’s her imagination.” Over a few paragraphs, Webster contemplates her cynicism, given her own similar working experiences. She can’t help but feel skeptical about the slightly mystical quality of this story: It sounds unlikely that a baby could be whispered back to life by the truth. On the other hand, she writes: “I have experienced the quasi magical power of speaking, simply speaking, to affect the body.” This story could be arranged to suit her broader thesis; it could be said that these babies learned to breathe when they were reminded of their connectedness to their parents. But as the essay ends, Webster leaves her own question unanswered, a refusal to accept the convenient narrative that feels refreshingly authentic. The story of baby Anna is a strange one, slightly mystical. How convincing would it be to pretend otherwise?
