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?