115. Hold Your Breath

(If you're reading this right as it's been posted, or precisely some whole number of years afterwards, take a deep breath before you start reading. Hold it for as long as you can. If you finish reading before you must breathe, make a wish, and it will come true (Epistemic status: lol.).)

 

Why must a counterfactual be breathed into being? The link between air and human volition by way of breath, speech, and the soul is well-attested; Latin roots have inextricably linked the breath to the soul and the soul to one's hopes. "While there's breath there's hope", as Latin would have it, and even the world "aspiration" is quite literally to "breathe for" something. But I think that the link goes deeper than that.

Today is 11/11, for one, which is where our first case study starts. The custom of holding your breath at 11:11pm on any given day to make a wish is one of those strange bits of folk ritual that seem to have come from nowhere, right alongside the Cool S sigil and the power of "dibs". Mark a special time, think very hard about what you hope for, and hold your breath for (ideally) a whole minute; the wish is made. Why? Why does the custom need to exist, and why should that be all you need to do?

Birthday wishes are another strange case. Dessert for a day special to you, fine. Candles on top of the cake - a more recent innovation, dating to the 18th century (or more likely before) in Germany, possibly by way of ancient Greece. But where did the custom come from of staying silent about your wish? And why the add-on of needing to blow out your candles in a single breath?

Dandelions might be a related sort of wishing ritual of the breath, or it might be totally different. I don't know and can't say. What's clear to me, though, is that wishing on a dandelion is a very pure form of the pattern I gesture at: it's only possible at the right time of year, and it involves the enactment of the wish through a short ritual, the most important part of which is the breath.

"I wouldn't hold your breath" - something you say to someone, when you want to tell them not to hope too hard for something to come to pass. I used to think that this was a matter of "even if it happens eventually, it won't happen any time soon", but these days, I wonder whether it's not an injunction against hoping too hard for the thing to occur in the first place.

For one final case study, we close on hyperstition, speech acts, or - if you prefer - self-fulfilling prophecy. Some words can move the world around you, and make themselves be truthful; some things you can say are themselves actions, and powerful ones, and indeed ones that cannot be achieved in any other way.

Here's what unites all of these, that I don't think has been remarked on before: it points towards the holding of one's breath as the simplest and smallest ritual act. To hold one's breath, one must be breathing by default: hence alive, and visibly so. To choose to hold one's breath, one must be in reasonably good health, and in possession of one's senses. And it takes effort on top of that choice to hold your breath for any length of time: you can hold your breath fairly easily for a minute, most likely; maybe you can just barely make it to two minutes, or five, at the absolute most, and that's starting to get hazardous to your health. It is also a just-barely-visible act, and intentional, and it comes with a cost: you cannot hold your breath forever. You sacrifice a tiny bit of your life; you wait in stillness; you speedrun the katabasis and then the return to the everyday. One last thing: the choice of a special time. In nearly all of the cases above, something has to be special about the timing of the held breath; something needs to be right about the background, the situation, in a way that would be difficult or impossible to set up yourself.

Now - make a wish. Keep that breath held just... a bit... longer... and let it out. The time is past. The wish lives in the world, now, for better and for worse.

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