Sounds are native to breath, writes Valerie Hsiung in To love an artist (Essay Press, 2022). Though the words instruct against breathing, at least coherently.
Incoherently, I understood it backwards. I read it as a body that is breathing is also making sound. That breath is prior to sound. That only things that breathe make sound. I thought—does a stone breathe? Does it sound? Do all things that breathe make sound?
I lean closer in to listen. I put a probe in the ground, or a camera to the sky. I fixate on a line that doesn’t open the work into the whole. A book I could explain in themes: of illness, of language as illness, as currency and its circulations. What it is to inhabit your fractures, knowing what broke you. Punctuated in slivers, or paper cuts. So much as the line slows me down. I pause, put the book down.
When I return I understand it forwards: that things that breathe have the capacity to sound. Things that breathe mill around their elemental awareness without listeners. What breathes, what sounds is not the question. Merely that where there is breath there is a possible sound. What moves them? What is coherent is the material that is being blown to bits or released into the air and scattering. The sound betrays what’s happening (Artist 38).
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