Everything is Breath
Vanitas with Candles, Food, and Bones, by Neal Auch
The curtain rises. The stage is dimly lit and covered with trash. There are no actors. Now a human voice cries out—a child’s voice—and the lights come up. For a few seconds we hear the sound of someone breathing. And then the lights fade away. One last cry of anguish. And the curtain falls.
This is the entirety of a play called Breath by Nobel prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. Beckett was famous for his minimalist approach to storytelling. But even by his standards, Breath is a remarkably stripped down piece of work. To some extent, Beckett’s Breath is a joke. Like John Cage’s 4’33” or Marcel DuChamp’s Fountain, the play is meant to provoke the audience and, in doing so, to challenge the boundaries of what can be considered art. Also like 4’33” and Fountain, the play isn’t just a joke—it’s making a very interesting point. With just a few seconds and no actors, Beckett is able to tell an entire life’s story. We are born crying in pain. And we die just the same. And in the brief moments between the first breath and the last, there is nothing but rubbish.
Arguably, Beckett’s Breath is hardly even a play at all. It’s true that the soundtrack and the act of performance add to the experience; however, at its core, Breath has more in common with still life than it does with a typical theatre experience. Breath is really just an arrangement of inanimate objects. We might disregard this pile of rubbish if we saw it in an alleyway; however, because it has been placed on a stage we are now forced to reckon with what it might mean. The same is true of still life. The bowl of fruit on your kitchen counter is just that—a bowl of fruit. But a painting of a bowl of fruit is something entirely different. The artist has made conspicuous choices regarding composition, lighting, colour palette, etc. And this intentionality encodes meaning and invites contemplation.
The basic grammar of still life is this: any object can stand in for whatever concept it is most strongly associated with in the mind of the viewer. And so it is that the book becomes knowledge, the flower becomes beauty, the clock becomes time, the dice become chance, the bones become death… Sit with this idea for a moment, and deeper resonances emerge. Flowers are beautiful, of course. But they are also notoriously short-lived. And so the flowers, like the bones, come to represent death. Early painters of floral still life were well aware of this duality of meaning. Indeed, some 17th-century Netherlandish flower paintings explicitly incorporated text referencing Isaiah 40:6-7: “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades…”
Food, in the context of still life, might represent nourishment. But, as with the flower, there is also death lurking here. The meal does not last long, after all. Soon enough, everything at the dinner table either ends up in the rubbish bin or is repurposed into faeces. Again, early still life painters understood this duality perfectly well. In his 1614 book Sinnepoppen (“Emblems”), the Dutch moralist Roemer Visscher spelled out the metaphor explicitly, depicting a bowl of fruit along the text: “Soon ripe, soon rotten.”
It is no coincidence that these symbolic explorations of inanimate things seem to trend deathward. It is an ironclad law of physics that every inanimate thing is transient on a long enough time scale. And so, with a little imagination, we can easily infer a message about death into almost any arrangement of inanimate things. Unsurprisingly, the idea that human mortality might be expressed through the ruin of objects was anticipated in the book of Ecclesiastes. “The silver chain will snap, and the golden lamp will fall and break; the rope at the well will break and the water jar will be shattered. Our bodies will return to the dust of the earth, and the breath of life will go back to God, who gave it to us.”
There is still another connection between Beckett’s Breath and the book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes opens with the famous refrain: “Vanity of Vanities! All is vanity!” This mantra is repeated many times in Ecclesiastes, and it forms the philosophical bedrock upon which the text is constructed. This refrain is also the reason we refer to the most death-haunted still life paintings as “Vanitas” art. But it’s worth meditating on the use of language here. After all, not every translation uses the word “vanity.” Some translators prefer to say that “all is meaningless,” or “all is useless,” or “all is futile.” The Hebrew word at issue is “hebel” which, taken literally, means something closer to “vapour” or “breath.” The phrase “all is breath” certainly speaks to transience and the fleeting nature of life. But there is also a nod to life’s incomprehensibility here. Breath is formless, invisible, impossible to hold on to. Both metaphorically and literally, our lives are nothing but breath. All is breath.
The curtain rises. The stage is dimly lit and covered with trash. There are no actors. Now a human voice cries out—a child’s voice—and the lights come up. For a few seconds we hear the sound of someone breathing. And in these seconds we have time to contemplate the rubbish. This arrangement is, after all, the most important part of the play. Several versions of Breath have been adapted for film and each inherits a unique mood based on the director’s decisions regarding the contents and composition of the trash. During Breath’s short runtime, we are presented with one person’s unique interpretation of what remains when useful things have come undone.
And so we contemplate the ruins.
And we listen to the breathing.
Now the lights fade away.
One last cry of anguish.
And now the curtain falls.
I Wrote a Book!
If you enjoy this kind of philosophical analysis into the meaning of still life, you might enjoy the book I wrote on the subject.
The book is 412 pages, contains about 250 full-colour still life pictures, and about 27k words of analysis. There’s also an inexpensive e-book version available, if that’s your thing.
Vanitas with Flowers and Bones, by Neal Auch