• The Poetic Dependencies of the Airborne Narrative: Subjunctive and Optative Possibilities
• Lorenzo Servitje (bio)

It is an interesting, frightening time for those who study health or practice medicine, especially related to infectious disease. While airborne has been in the common lexicon for several decades (reinforced by films like Outbreak [1995] and bioterrorism discourse surrounding 9/11), today fomites, aerosol, and droplets are matters of semantic and scientific Facebook disagreements among family, friends, and strangers. This is not unrelated to debates about the efficacy of masks and the degree to which they are claimed by some to cause hypercapnia and hypoxemia. At stake here is the capacity, efficacy, and danger of breath.

My training as a literary scholar and my fondness for Priscilla Wald’s ever-relevant “outbreak narrative” would normally incline me toward considering breath in narratological terms, something like “the airborne narrative”—which might be the story of the (developing) academic and public discourse surrounding SARS-CoV-2’s mode of transmission, along with the politics that co-constitute what we do with that knowledge (or lack of it).¹ It might also describe the emplotment of human and nonhuman actors in this uncertain moment. But because time, matter, bodies, and space have for so many of us been radically altered, perhaps something other than conventional narrative logic is in order.

In “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Ezra Pound defines a form that might express some of the uncertainty and angst of the moment: the image, “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”² In that vein, what might William Carlos Williams’s confounding imagist poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” help us to understand about the complexity of this radical alteration?³ What does [End Page 242] the poem’s condensation of language, thingness, and formal dependency reveal about breath, air, and human dependency in this moment? Appropriating its form with some contemporary content might look something like the following:

The Fluid Medium

So much dependsUpon

A fluidmedium

Dynamic withflecks

depositing inairways

While a complete, declarative sentence, my reworking—like the original poem itself—foregrounds matter and density; it also forestalls, or at least makes us work for, closure and meaning.

If syntactically speaking the crux for Williams is “a red wheel / barrow,”—on which “so much depends”—then consider what the crux in mine is not: the virus itself. To discover what it is, we must unravel a similarly (copied) dense sentence of recursive modification. Like Williams’s poem, mine has seven of its eight lines—everything after “So much depends”—operating as a prepositional phrase adverbially modifying “depends.”⁴ This drives our focus away from the ontological object that has captured our attention (the virus as a thing in itself) and asks us to reflect instead on the fluid medium, on air. What does it depend on, and how does that affect those ominous dynamic flecks—be they in droplet or aerosol form? We might, then, consider the role of that which is in between the lines, yet immersed in air: breath, and the human machines (with airways) that produce, diffuse, and vortex the fluid medium and the environments in which they are all entangled. What do all the above depend on and what depends on them?

Focusing on the agency, vibrancy, or animacy of air itself is appropriate given the increasingly acknowledged role of aerosol transmission in SARS-CoV-2, and even given just a more nuanced understanding of [End Page 243] what the glazing world of droplets actually entails.⁵ Unless one happens to suffer respiratory distress, or breathlessness, we don’t really think about the material inputs and outputs of this autonomic process: As Jane Macnaughton notes, “So entangled is breath in everything bodies are, experience and do that it gets taken for granted, lost from view and is rarely a direct focus of attention.”⁶ Perhaps that is changing. Given the acceleration of climate change, the attention required to produce justice in the social determinants of health, given the way breath has been stifled for so many Black bodies—by police or the virus, among other means—breath must “be understood in...

• 空中叙事的诗意依存：虚拟和可选的可能性
• 洛伦佐·塞尔维耶（生物）

对于那些学习健康或从事医学，尤其是与传染病相关的人来说，这是一个有趣而可怕的时期。虽然空气传播已经在通用词典中出现了几十年（通过像Outbreak [1995]这样的电影和围绕 9/11 的生物恐怖主义话语得到加强），但今天，污染物、气溶胶和飞沫是 Facebook 家人、朋友和朋友之间语义和科学分歧的问题。陌生人。这与关于口罩的功效以及某些人声称它们导致高碳酸血症和低氧血症的程度的争论不无关系。这里的关键是呼吸的能力、功效和危险。

我作为文学学者的训练以及我对普莉希拉·沃尔德 (Priscilla Wald) 始终相关的“爆发叙事”的喜爱通常会让我倾向于用叙事学术语来考虑呼吸，比如“空中叙事”——这可能是（发展中的）学术和围绕 SARS-CoV-2 传播方式的公共讨论，以及共同构成我们利用这些知识（或缺乏知识）所做的事情的政治。¹它也可能描述了人类和非人类行动者在这个不确定时刻的部署。但因为时间、物质、身体和空间对我们许多人来说已经发生了根本性的改变，也许不同于传统的叙事逻辑的东西是有序的。

在“Imagiste 的一些不该做的事情”中，埃兹拉·庞德定义了一种形式，它可能表达了当下的一些不确定性和焦虑：图像，“在瞬间呈现出一种智力和情感复合体的东西。” ²在这种情况下，威廉·卡洛斯·威廉姆斯 (William Carlos Williams) 令人困惑的意象诗《红色独轮车》(The Red Wheelbarrow) 能帮助我们理解这种彻底改变的复杂性吗？³这是什么[尾页242]语言，物性，和正式的依赖的诗的冷凝揭示的气息，空气，在这一刻人类依赖？用一些当代内容来挪用它的形式可能看起来像下面这样：

流体介质

这在很大程度上取决于在

流体介质

有斑点的动态

气道沉积

虽然是一个完整的陈述句，但我的修改——就像原诗本身一样——强调物质和密度；它也预先阻止，或者至少让我们为，结束和意义而努力。

如果从句法上讲威廉姆斯的症结是“一个红色的轮子/手推车”——“非常依赖”——那么考虑一下我的症结不是：病毒本身。要发现它是什么，我们必须解开一个类似（复制）的递归修改密集句子。就像威廉姆斯的诗一样，我的八行中有七行——在“这么多依赖”之后的所有内容——作为介词短语作为副词修饰“依赖”。⁴这使我们的注意力从引起我们注意的本体论对象（病毒本身就是一种事物）上转移开，并要求我们反思流体介质，即空气。它取决于什么，以及它如何影响那些不祥的动态斑点——它们是液滴还是气溶胶形式？然后，我们可能会考虑介于两者之间但仍沉浸在空气中的角色：呼吸，以及产生、扩散和涡旋流体介质的人体机器（带有气道）以及它们所在的环境纠缠。以上所有依赖什么，什么依赖于它们？

考虑到气溶胶传播在 SARS-CoV-2 中的作用日益得到认可，甚至只是对[End Page 243]飞沫的玻璃世界有更细致的了解，关注空气本身的能动性、活力或活力是合适的包含。⁵除非有人碰巧遭受呼吸窘迫或呼吸困难，否则我们不会真正考虑这种自主过程的物质输入和输出：正如 Jane Macnaughton 指出的那样，“呼吸如此纠缠在身体的一切事物中，体验并做到这一点理所当然，从视野中消失，很少直接成为关注的焦点。” ⁶也许这正在改变。鉴于气候变化的加速，在健康的社会决定因素中产生正义所需的注意力，考虑到如此多的黑人身体的呼吸方式——警察或病毒，以及其他方式——呼吸必须“被理解。 ..