A Breathless State of Mind

One of the games I invented as a child to entertain myself was called “Give me another sickness.” To play, I began by imagining being afflicted with something other than the asthma I was born with. A terrible skin thing, blindness, constant pain in all my joints, for example. Then, I would slowly and methodically construct a vision of my life with this condition, for hours. It was perverse and thrilling.

Then, I weighed the pros and cons of living with my imaginary affliction against the good and bad of my real one. Which was better? In the end, I always settled with asthma over whatever I dreamt up as being the best of all possible ways to be sick. It’s interesting, thinking back, that I never envisioned a “condition-free” life. The severity of the asthma may have made that idea literally unimaginable.

Disease describes a kind of experience as much as a disorder or an impairment. It’s easier to see this when the word is broken apart. There is no doubt asthma “dis-eased” me. But there have been times when it was more than just physical pain. In the throes of asthma attacks, I have seen things I shouldn’t be able to see, and found myself in semiconscious states where trains of thought travel through mental landscapes my mind has never gone.

I’ve had a handful of these hallucinatory experiences. I don’t ask for them, or even want them necessarily, since having them means also being seized by the misery of not being able to breathe. But when taken by an attack, I welcomed these hallucinations without fear or judgment, and in truth have learned from them in ways that have changed my outlook about what it means to live and breathe at all.

The natural intuition for someone unable to breathe is to try to get more air into their lungs by breathing harder and deeper. Asthmatics are taught the opposite. When an attack occurs, it is crucial that the breathing not be strained any more than it already is. One must try to calm down by breathing at a slower, shallower, and more restful pace. It’s like what beginning swimmers are taught when they feel like they’re sinking. Flailing and struggling against the water only makes it worse.

The problem is the adrenaline. When an attack comes, the fear and stress trigger the release of adrenaline into the body, which incites it to fight for air by breathing more forcefully. But this only exacerbates the attack, and can lead to asphyxiation and death. In a way, asthmatics must struggle on two fronts: the attack, and the body’s own natural defensive tendencies.

I think I reached a liminal point between the lack of oxygen and influx of adrenaline. I start to see fields of color vibrating in my vision. Seeing isn’t actually the right word. I feel colors undulating and rippling on the surface of my eyes. I latch on to objects in view as if they are imbued with extraordinary significance, but I’m not sure why. Above all, I am filled with a strange sense of elation, as if my body is no longer made of flesh and bones, but a substance lighter and more effervescent.

These singularly vivid experiences happen faster than the time it took for you to read my descriptions of them. They feel longer than a moment, yet shorter than an event. I get short of breath just recalling them. It’s not just the sensations that stay with me. One day, years ago, in the studio, something in the air triggered an attack. I didn’t know where my inhaler was. I sat down with my eyes half closed and hands on my lap, desperately trying to calm my breathing.

It wasn’t working. I felt my lungs starting to ache and burn. I began to panic. Suddenly, I found myself staring at shadows on the floor, cast by the afternoon light streaming through the large studio windows. The richness and variety of the movements at the edges of the shadows, where the light shimmered into darkness, mesmerized me. I felt like I was seeing shadows for the very first time. I lost the burning feeling in my lungs. I was in the zone.

I don’t remember what happened after that. Somehow I got through the attack, but I don’t know how. All I can recall is the feeling of having seen something utterly new. Or is it new? I went on to create video installations that tried to capture what I saw during the attack. They consist of video projectors beaming shadows I draw and animate digitally onto the floor, inspired by the look and feel of what I remember seeing that afternoon in the studio.

Thinking, like breathing, is, at its core, involuntary. Streams of thought naturally flow without end. That’s how we have survived—as a species, I mean: Our constant sensorial and cognitive vigilance has kept us alert and alive. But clearly, there are times when thinking does not seem to serve us. The stream can overflow its banks, and flood us with thoughts that overwhelm our capacities of judgment. Or our stream can steer us into ways of being and understanding that expose us to arbitrary and meaningless pain and suffering.

A strong kinship exists between thinking and breathing, it seems to me. What underwrites my ability to think at all is the fact that I’m alive, still breathing. But what I’ve learned is how being breathless can transform my thoughts to a degree that feels as if another kind of mind has come to inhabit my body. I call it a state of other-mindedness. In health, I simply and unquestionably am. But in dis-ease, I get a chance to be other-minded. And that has made all the difference.