"& the built world trembles with the strain of the long-held/ breath"

The title of this post is from Jay Besemer's new book. 

(Phil got it and read it over his own Spring Break, and now I am on Spring Break and reading it. I also just finished--thank you to the always stylish and charming book curation of Sara Wainscott!--Elspeth Barker's O Caledonia.)

I'm thinking of wind.

Elspeth Barker: " . . . the most beautiful, the most haunting and haunted, was the wind of dawn, which brought the next day, and whirled the past off into the breaking clouds: a wind thrilling and melancholy, tender and cruel, a wind of beginning and ending."

And breath.

I mean: I am also thinking of breath.

Jay: "& the built world trembles with the strain of the long-held/ breath" . . .

I jotted down both of these bits into my journal (I can do that because I am on break!), and I don't know what I want to say but that I want to think about a wind-breath that hangs behind the architecture of teeth and then whirls the past right off, by virtue of its blowiness.

(Haven't read it in years, but a note here about a book that I know I loved: Christine Hume's Ventifacts.)

This wind-breath I am thinking about might be able to make an appearance (ha! that foolish way that wind can "appear"!) in the poetry novel I am writing/trying to write/maybe writing about a girl who hears a vampire on a call-in radio show. Imagine the wind outside the window in a tornado-y way. Imagine breath on the radio broadcast.

And this confluence blew in to my email reading of Rhian Sasseen's substack: "Walking at a distance, the body moves forward automatically. Crossing a street becomes a kind  of autopilot; pausing to let a car or fellow pedestrian pass by is a surprisingly mindless action, too. The body’s relationship to space shifts into that of an observer, freeing the mind to wander into uncharted territory. 'Architecture,' wrote the Situationist Ivan Chtcheglov, 'is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams.' This quotation comes from his 1953 essay 'Formulary for a New Urbanism' (you can read the rest of the essay, as translated by Ken Knabb, here)." 

 “Architecture . . . is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams.” 

I think there is something there about wind and breath being held at a gate of teeth. And how such a force might be harnessed to articulate time and space, modulate reality, and engender dreams.

Jay again: "i'm well aware my wonder won't fill your/ account."