The Radical Act of Breathing
By Max Bernstein
I nearly died the day I was born. My parents tell the story of my birth, including details of the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around my neck. My mother pushed me out quickly, leaving both of us bruised. Since that indelible day, I can count at least four occasions when, gasping for air, I nearly drowned. Twice as a toddler and twice as a young adult.
One of my earliest memories is looking up at the surface of a pool as I struggled to stand on its tile bottom. I was frozen; time moved slowly. I was hypnotized by the rays of the sun penetrating the water’s surface, while bubbles of carbon dioxide floated away from my lungs. That could have been it, if my fully clothed mother didn’t jump in. To save me, she sacrificed her silk blouse, fabric-covered beaded necklace and 1988 perm.
As a teenager, my friends and I drifted along a sun-lit lazy river in the rocky gorges of the Zoar Valley in Western New York, floating in two-dollar gas station innertubes, blissfully unaware of the day’s forecast. It reminded me of when I was a child and I would float in the bathtub, entranced by the feeling of calm, controlled weightlessness.
A deafening crack of thunder should have been adequate warning, but we continued to drift until a flash flood violently pulled us out of our reverie. Disoriented and separated from any kind of horizon, we were dragged above and below the surface of the gray water. My deflated innertube wrapped around my neck and my head smashed against a rock on the river’s bottom.
Panic set in as I lost my ability to recognize up from down. Time slowed, and I wondered how long before I would lose consciousness or worse. Suddenly, I felt someone grab my shirt, and recognized my friend pulling me to shore. As the rain continued to pound down, we lay coughing and hollering on the river’s edge. The temperature dropped, and we saw our breath in the cold air.
I have always been a strong swimmer. Yet somewhere, deep in my unexamined subconscious, these past experiences caused me great anxiety, making me tremble at the thought of losing control, slipping down, drowning. Again and again, these thoughts would be triggered playing water polo in high school gym class, running out of breath doing laps or sitting in a small, leaky fishing boat while it slowly filled with water.
At 29 years old it occurred to me that if I was increasingly convinced the water wanted to swallow me up, perhaps I should shift my perspective from fearing its strangle to welcoming its expansive embrace. While working in Australia, I trained in a pool and in the ocean to receive scuba certification to dive the Great Barrier Reef. I will never forget my first underwater breath one meter down, in the shallow end of a pool. My body was overwhelmed by simultaneous terror and delight. I had conquered a fear and acquired a superpower.
The ocean has since become a teacher to me, creating tremendous opportunity for study, reflection and some kind of informal meditation. I have come to see the sea as a body, to be hypnotized by its rhythms, and to feel it miraculously breathe. I have become unified with this ancient place from which our ancestors emerged.
The sea, while endangered by the careless activities of man, has remained largely untouched. Its spaces are vast and full of the unknown, and the parts that are known remain wild and unpredictable. As less and less of the world’s unknown spaces survive, they become more precious, more critical to our sense of wonder.
The ocean’s vast horizon makes me intimately aware of my profound insignificance, and its dangerous depths also remind me of the challenge to stay alive—to keep breathing. Maybe that’s why scuba diving has become so important to me. It reminds me of the need to breathe—the need to keep presence of mind at all times, to avoid any inconsequential meanderings. It’s not only an empowered response to my terrifying thoughts of drowning, but a metaphor for the agency we have to stay alive through the simple but radical act of breathing.
The last year has led me to understand how profoundly the act of breathing has been challenged in our world. Look no further than wildfires along the West Coast and the horrors of COVID-19. For myself, learning to breathe under the ocean has been a gift in these uncertain times, a secret weapon—a source of agency and grounding to avoid drowning.
Max Bernstein is an artist, designer, musician, performer, diver and professor of media design at ASU’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Their research and productions explore intersections of liveness and mediation, cinematic futures, queer futurism, anthropomorphization of the anthropocene, post-human philosophies and the body.