There is a period, one might call it the long 1960s, when modernism’s old injunction to make it new had become so timeworn that many found the new new in an act so monotonous and mundane as barely to be an act at all. In short, they turned to the breath.

While this turn was part of a larger discovery of the body that has become almost synonymous with the 1960s, it was not reducible to it. For within the economy of the body and its operations, the breath holds special value. The Arabic ruh, the Chinese qi, the Greek pneuma, the Hebrew ruach, the Latin spiritus, the Sanskrit prana, the Tibetan lung, the Yoruba emi, and the Zulu umoya all refer in varying ways to both breath and spiritual energy. Across diverse languages and cultures, breath marks a line between animate and inanimate, spirit and body.Footnote ¹

A number of critics have recently turned their attention to the breath, none more insightfully than Nathaniel Mackey.Footnote ² In his 2018 lecture “Breath and Precarity,” Mackey points to the 1950s and 1960s as a time in which “breath was in the air, a pneumatic turn that was diagnostic and symptomatic both” (5). This turn had distinct connections to African diasporic traditions, conditions, and practices, and above all to “black music, particularly the music of wind instruments, a radical pneumaticism in which the involuntary is rendered deliberate, labored, in which breath is belabored, made strange” (8).

But while “radical pneumaticism” may have been most palpable in Black music, the turn toward it was shaped by currents from many directions. In the American poetry scene, Mackey points to Charles Olson’s seminal 1950 manifesto “Projective Verse,” in which the poet urged his readers to reject the reigning conventions of form and measure in favor of “certain laws and possibilities of the breath” (239)—an injunction subsequently taken up by such poets as Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Jorie Graham, and Mackey himself. More broadly, breath was in the air because anxiety was in the air—an anxiety with different timings and tenors for different communities, but also with a broadly collective quality Mackey dubs “the Cold War jitters” (6). Mackey mentions “the threat of nuclear annihilation” as perhaps the “most obvious” factor (6), to which one might add a growing awareness of the ways in which invisible pollutants were toxifying the atmosphere.Footnote ³

In the long 1960s, then, it was becoming clear that there was a politics of respiration.Footnote ⁴ To attend to breath, to breathe anew, meant reimagining and reembodying the self and its relations. And to become more aware of the breath was also to become more aware of the sharp disparities between different people’s abilities to breathe freely, or at all. If breathing on one hand points to the human condition at its most universal, on the other it points to the fact that that condition is often unequally distributed and violently denied.Footnote ⁵

“A certain universality resides in these black particulars,” writes Mackey, “precarity being a widely human condition” (17).

This shift to universality—including the philosopher Achille Mbembe’s recent call for a “universal right to breathe”Footnote ⁶—necessitates further inquiry into connections between pneumatic particulars. Inspired by Mackey, one might ask what occurs when particular patterns of precarious respiration enter into conversation with other such patterns, and to what universality they might jointly point.

What might arise, for example, when Black particulars speak alongside Jewish particulars, whose own wrestle with precarity draws on rich Hebraic traditions of divine breath?

What might this “certain universality” sound like when these different particulars con-spire with one another?

The “widely human condition” embodied in the breath, for all its commonality, is still located with special intensity in certain places, people, and times. When one listens less for meaning, even for “poetry” or “music,” one may better discover these points of special intensity, where strong currents encounter interruption, transformation, and resistance. Listening less for harmonies and dissonances may reveal combination tones.

A combination tone does not exist in space and time. It is a psychoacoustic illusion that exists, if it can be said to exist at all, only in the mind of the listener. It comes about when two pure tones sound simultaneously, producing, sometimes, the effect of a further tone or tones.

One can attempt to create combination tones by stacking different tones on top of one another and paying close attention to the resultant, “unreal” sound in the inner ear.

This essay is such an attempt. It presents, as simultaneously as possible, two very different artists who almost certainly knew nothing of each other, yet whose explorations of breath, taken together, help us better hear, think, and feel what might be meant by radical pneumaticism and what might be made possible through it. The older by six years is Paul Celan, the Romanian-Jewish German-language poet whose work marks a turning point in postwar European poetry. The younger is John Coltrane, the North Carolina–born saxophonist and composer whose work marks a turning point in postwar American music. In the current academic galaxy, these two artists exert enormous gravitational pull in separate systems, and they have never before, to my knowledge, been considered together. But an attention to the breath connects them, and it begins around the year 1960.

In Darmstadt in 1960, Celan received the Georg Büchner Prize for German-language literature, and the speech he gave on that occasion has since been dubbed The Meridian.Footnote ⁷

The Meridian is a prose poem as much as a work of poetic theory as much as an expression of thanks and fury. It invites readers to a “radikale In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst” (“radical calling-into-question of art”; Gesammelte Werke 3: 192–93; Selected Poems 405), a questioning that is the purview of poetry. Poetry’s method, its way of questioning, Celan says, has a name; he calls it a “breathturn.” “Dichtung: das kann eine Atemwende bedeuten. Wer weiß, vielleicht legt die Dichtung den Weg—auch den Weg der Kunst—um einer solchen Atemwende willen zurück?“ (“Poetry: that can signify an Atemwende, a Breathturn. Who knows, perhaps poetry follows its path—also the path of art—for the sake of such a breathturn?”; 3: 195; 407).

The word for “breath” that Celan uses throughout the speech is Atem, entirely avoiding the other common German word for breath, Hauch. Of the two words, Hauch is the more misty and mystical; tellingly, it was favored by the German occultist (and influential anti-Semite) Alfred Schuler when describing ghostly auras (Hansen 361). Atem, by contrast, “strongly connotes the physical process and product of breathing, the air taken in and expelled by lungs, nose and mouth in the circuit of respiration” (Lloyd 183). At the same time, Odem (a variant of Atem) is the word Martin Luther used to translate the Hebrew word ruach, the breath with which God blew life into Adam, “und blies ihm ein den lebendigen Odem in seine Nase” (“and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”; Lutherbibel 1. Mose 2; Bible, Gen. 2.7). Resisting the otherworldly, Atem’s corporeality encompasses both human and divine.

But this “breathturn,” what is it? Corporeally, it is the moment between an in- and an out-breath. But more metaphorically it is also, for Celan, a space of openness and possibility—a space of “perhapses” and question marks.

As this tentative, probing list of questions continues, the one thing, perhaps the only thing, that becomes clear is that the breathturn holds open a space for an art-less Perhaps that points toward freedom.

At New York City’s Village Vanguard in 1961, Coltrane’s quartet played a new composition called “Chasin’ the Trane.” The music is visceral; it is also pulmonary. Coltrane’s saxophone howls, shrieks, wails. It draws from and draws attention to the breath and the spirit and the breath as spirit.

Most jazz aficionados became familiar with the piece only when it was released on vinyl, as the entire B-side of the album “Live” at the Village Vanguard. There the contrast with Coltrane’s earlier sound is starkly apparent. Where the A-side tracks “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” and “Spiritual” demonstrate Coltrane’s lyricism and mastery of bebop changes, “Chasin’” pulls the whole structure apart. The opening suggests a meandering improvisation on Coltrane’s part, though just what he is searching for (a melody? a chord progression?) is elusive. After about four minutes he seems—not to find it—but rather to collapse, or perhaps ascend, into a condition the music critic John Tynan famously labeled “anti-jazz,” a whirlwind marked above all by extreme acts of breathing that only grow in intensity across the sixteen-minute length of the performance (Tynan). “Trane you blows too long,” grumbles one anonymous critic in Amiri Baraka’s paean to Coltrane, “AM/TRAK” (Transbluesency 191). That critic might as well have been Ira Gitler, once a champion of Coltrane’s music, who dismissed these blasts as “yawps” and “squawks” when reviewing the album (Review).

This was Coltrane’s turn to what was sometimes called the New Thing, but which might also be called the Pneumatic Thing. “There are places where his horn actually sounds as if it is in need of repair,” concluded Gitler. “In fact, the solo could be described as one big air-leak.”

Around 1960, Celan began to decisively distance himself from an aesthetics of musicality. Celan’s earlier poems, including his best-known poem, “Todesfuge” (1952; “Deathfugue”), exhibited a lyricism that led them to be rejected by some critics as overly aesthetic if not aestheticist, and embraced by others for roughly the same reason. Poems from the early collection Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952; Poppy and Memory), for example, were singled out by two prominent reviewers for their “absolutely musical effects” (with comparison to Wagner) and their quality of being “effortless and almost singable” (Holthusen 387; de Haas 33). By the end of the 1950s, when “Todesfuge” in particular was becoming canonized for study by German schoolchildren, Celan took pains to distance himself from such melodiousness.

A telling moment comes in Celan’s answer to a 1958 questionnaire sent to writers and philosophers by the Paris bookstore Flinker. The survey asked about work in progress, but Celan’s response queried the question itself. German poetry, he writes, “mißtraut dem ‘Schönen’, sie versucht, wahr zu sein” (“distrusts ‘beauty,’ it tries to be true”). The language of German poetry, “die unter anderem auch ihre ‘Musikalität’ an einem Ort angesiedelt wissen will, wo sie nichts mehr mit jenem ‘Wohlklang’ gemein hat, der noch mit und neben dem Furchtbarsten mehr oder minder unbekümmert einhertönte” (“wants to locate even its ‘musicality’ in such a way that it has nothing in common with that ‘pleasing sound’ that continued to play, more or less unconcerned, alongside the greatest horrors”; Gesammelte Werke 3: 167).Footnote ⁸ Musicality, then, without euphony. By December 1966, Celan was protesting that “Auch musiziere ich nicht mehr, wie zur Zeit der vielbeschworenen Todesfuge, die nachgerade schon lesebuchreif gedroschen ist. Jetzt scheide ich streng zwischen Lyrik und Tonkunst” (“I don’t musicalize anymore, as at the time of the much-vaunted ‘Todesfuge,’ which by now has been threshed over in so many textbooks. I now distinguish sharply between poetry and music”; qtd. in Huppert 320). To be identified as “music,” and more specifically as German music, was to be incorporated, willy-nilly, into the great tradition. Celan’s ironization of this tradition was already inherent in the title of “Todesfuge” itself, with its invocation of Bach’s great art, but by the mid 1960s it was clear that that ironic distance was no longer enough.

What replaced it is something that might barely be considered music or poetry at all. Something not dependent on horizontal development but on what one might call vertical stacking and compression. In Celan’s poems, it can come across as dense coding of individual words, each of which is charged with almost limitless significance and double, triple, many-multiple meanings, and each of which does not so much develop a theme as form (potentially) a network of combinations with other words in the same poem. In a 1966 conversation with the Austrian poet Hugo Huppert, Celan referred to his compositional technique as one of “Mehrdeutigkeit ohne Maske” (“ambiguity without a mask”) that attempts to show things “in mehreren Aspekten und Durchdringungen” (“in several aspects and permutations at once”; qtd. in Huppert 321). “In Paul Celan,” the poet Jean Daive remarked in his memoir of Celan’s last days, “spirituality is made of densities (structures of densities). The densities are superimposed. Their meanings are superimposed” (48). Daive dubbed this technique of superimposition Celan’s “vertical sense” (34).

Partly influenced by the jazz musician and theorist Albert Ayler (who famously proclaimed that “[i]t’s not about notes anymore” [qtd. in Bivins 33]), Coltrane began aggressively experimenting with amelodic solos around 1960. In a 1958 issue of Down Beat, Gitler dubbed the new style “sheets of sound” and the name stuck (“Trane” 17). The style was based around arpeggios and scales played so fast and so hard that notes and chords would seem to stack on top of one another and hit the ear as a single, densely packed force of sound. In the words of the jazz historian Mark C. Gridley, “Coltrane devoured the tune’s chord changes, trying to acknowledge every note in every chord and every scale which might be compatible with it. He played so fast that he frequently succeeded in that demanding task” (229). The result was often heard as mere technical virtuosity, simply “playing scales” at astonishing speed. But this was to miss the emotional range and power of these runs, which complemented their theoretical sophistication. Coltrane put it this way:

It was almost as though, through running all the changes of European harmony as fast as he could, Coltrane was trying to finally compress the whole tradition into a single obelisk of sound and sense. “He could have just stopped after his explorations of Western harmonies with ii-V-I resolutions,” said the musician and composer Charles Tolliver. “If anyone ever exhausted all the possibilities of running chord changes, he did” (qtd. in Ratliff 149).Footnote ⁹ Or as Miles Davis once admonished Coltrane: “You don’t have to play everything!” (qtd. in Williams 230).

This attempt to play vertical sheets of sound in which “every note in every chord and every scale which might be compatible with it” resonates with Celan’s own technique of “undissembled ambiguity” that attempts to show things “in several aspects and permutations at once.” For both artists, there is an extension of conventional language to the breaking point by investing each element of the form (every note, chord, scale, word, line) with equal significance. The result, for both artists, is less a formal pattern, much less a development of a musical or poetic idea, than a collection of supercharged sounds. This shift of attention to sound-as-such opens listeners’ ears to the unheard sound of breathing.

If one were to look for an apogee of pneumaticism in Coltrane, one might well find it in the first section of Meditations (1966). The section is entitled “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost,” and it opens in a storm of sound, coming from all directions and without apparent sense. An overblown saxophone quivering between a pair of notes for minutes at a time, a clashing tangle of drums and cymbals, forces and vibrations more than rhythms, Coltrane apparently repeating the same simple combinations like an incantation.

But then, as one’s ears adjust, a certain structure starts to emerge. One notices that the breathy saxophone quavers, played by Coltrane’s new band member, the twenty-six-year-old Pharoah Sanders, constitute a simple harmonic relation (a perfect fifth: A♭ to E♭). A certain polyrhythm takes shape from the two drummers, Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali. And just as one begins to notice these things, something else arises: a melody, of all things.

This is forty-five seconds in, and the melody is played by Coltrane. It is simple, so simple that one may hesitate even to call it a melody. Perhaps it should be called a gesture toward a melody. What it is, more precisely, is the first, second, third, and fifth of a series of major chords: in other words, the fundamental building blocks of Western music. The sound is so basic, almost so childlike, that it can at first sound as though Coltrane is simply warming up his instrument. But there is a tune here and certainly a structure. In technical terms, Coltrane typically uses the fifth as a pickup to the first, second, and third, each played three times in succession, before returning to the first degree of the scale. After every iteration Coltrane shifts the key, generally by descending a major third. In other words, what listeners are given is an étude in basic harmonics that echoes Sanders’s own radical simplicity and that reaches out from the sonic cataclysm that surrounds and threatens to engulf it—as indeed it does at various points during Coltrane’s and Sanders’s solos, which begin around 02:20, when Coltrane’s increasingly fast changes dissolve into something like atonality and Sanders’s drones and trills ascend into screams, shrieks, and howls, all abetted by a rhythm section whipped up into polyrhythms too dense to dissect. By about the 10:30 mark order begins to reassert itself, first with Sanders’s perfect-fifth trills and then with the return of Coltrane’s basic melody. About 12:00, the music slowly dies down and transitions to a very different musical idea. This transition lasts for about a minute, after which “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” has come to an end. At this point the worst of the storm has passed, and none of the four subsequent sections of the suite—“Compassion,” “Love,” “Consequences,” and “Serenity”—will match the ferocity of this one.

If one were to look for an apogee of pneumaticism in Celan, one might well find it in a handful of poems in and around the publication of Atemwende (1967; Breathturn), such as the poem “Keine Sandkunst mehr.” Here it is in its entirety:

Like “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost,” this poem can initially bewilder. But listen to it long enough and a certain structure starts to emerge.

Looking at the opening line, it is worth recalling that Celan’s first poetry anthology was entitled Der Sand aus der Urnen (Sand from the Urns), the implication being that that art, that book, that mastery is now finished. John Felstiner in his edition suggests the presence of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “A Throw of the Dice” and the “central Eighteen Prayer of Jewish liturgy”—both of which, too, are empty, mute, incomplete (Celan, Selected Poems 220). This lack leads to a skeptical questioning of song itself—“what does it know”?—before the work freezes (“Deepinsnow”) into vowel sounds. This freezing also recalls an important image for Celan, that of the “Atemkristal” (“breathcrystal”), which at once solidifies and preserves, in utmost fragility and impermanence, the material trace of life. (According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, “the ‘breathcrystal’…is nothing but the configuration of pure, delicate geometry that falls from the soft nothingness of the breath” [124–25].) The poem, in short, enacts what it describes: the crystallization of breath.

There are also traces of musicality here. Until the final lines, the verses have an almost declamatory quality to them by virtue of their rhythmic structure, which favors pairs of heavily accented syllables, such as “Sandkunst,” or feet where the accent falls hard on the first syllable, such as “Meister”; through the fifth line, almost all the feet can be easily scanned into spondees and trochees. The declamatory quality of this rhetorical structure is undergirded by alliterations, word repetitions, and insistent rhymes (“kein” and “dein”). This regular meter and exaggerated lyricism then loosen significantly with the three-syllable feet of the sixth line (“Dein Gesang, was weiß er?”) before freezing up in the closing three lines, the last of which is a mere vibration.

Celan’s poetic devices, like Coltrane’s chords and changes in Meditations, have a textbook simplicity to them. And just as the potency of Meditations partly lies in the dissonance between these fundamental musical structures and that which threatens or promises to overwhelm them, so too the power of “Keine Sandkunst mehr” lies in witnessing the endurance and the collapse of the “art” that this poem itself enacts.

The question the poem poses—“Your song, what does it know?”—is central to Celan’s oeuvre. The answer is not that the song knows nothing. What the song knows, at a minimum (which is perhaps all one can ask of it, in the end), is its dying breath (“I—i—e”) and the encounter between the reader and this cry.

For Celan, as for Coltrane, radical pneumaticism entails a shift from melodicism toward something more harmonic, a set of relations so densely stacked as to compact sound and sense into explosive cellular units. “To get to the ‘late work,’” writes Pierre Joris of Celan, “we have to come to terms with the development away from a poetry of flowing musical lines and lyric melody, as they reign supreme in the early collections, to one consisting of terse, often single-word or -syllable verse-structures, thus from a predominantly horizontal to an ever more vertiginously vertical axis” (16). This shift from horizontality to verticality marks both Celan’s and Coltrane’s work at this point in their careers, and it opens up a space for breath.

Just as it would be wrong to call Meditations simply a work of sound art, so it would be wrong to consider any of Celan’s works simply sound poems. In the late work of both Celan and Coltrane, musicality does not so much vanish as dissolve or crack up into sound, and ultimately into breath. For all of its resistance to convention, poetry, as Celan puts it in The Meridian, still has to take “den Weg der Kunst” (“the path of art”; Gesammelte Werke 3: 193; Selected Poems 406). Shards of lyricism remain.

The apparent cacophony of “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” may be “palpable, visceral, painful, challenging, scraping, scouring,” as Nat Hentoff put it in his liner notes for the album (3), but it is also something hermeneutically complex: it is a reduction and dissolution of Western musical structure. The reduction can be found in the stripping of the music to its simplest component parts: to the perfect fifth that Sanders repeatedly trills and to the highly conventional note relations and chord changes that Coltrane executes. The dissolution can be found, first of all, in its polyrhythms, which are so complexly overlaid and rapidly changing as to be all but indecipherable. And it can be found in the frenetic near atonality of Coltrane’s solo and—to an even greater extreme—Sanders’s. These are rhythms and tones that explode the idea of meter and note.

And then there is a place, or rather a sound, or more precisely an act, where both the reduction and the dissolution can be heard at the same time. That act is breathing.

Breathing is generally invisible. It is also, on Meditations, inaudible, in the most literal sense. At no point in the recording, at least to my ears, can listeners hear one of the musicians catch their breath, a remarkable feat in and of itself given the sheer power of the horn duo. Baraka once contended that Sanders had mastered the art of circular breathing (“Pharoah Sanders” 341), which would indeed hide the audible breath, though whether Sanders used this technique at the time of Meditations is unclear. Regardless, the breath is, in a certain sense, absent from the recording.

And yet few works of Western music focus the attention so closely on breath.

Because listeners do hear the breath. It can be heard through the distinctive way Coltrane and Sanders play their instruments. Their breaths, conveyed through their tenor saxophones, hit with such unrelenting force from the opening bars of the recording that one has to have well trained ears not to hear it.

But don’t all wind instruments rely on breath? Is breath not simply a medium for the creation of music? Why is breath particularly central to this work?

Part of the answer lies in its “sheets of sound” approach, what the composer Steve Reich called Coltrane’s “harmonic stasis” (qtd. in Johnson). This lack of forward development, most obviously apparent in the avoidance of melody or even regular meter, diverts the listener’s attention from the issue of musical progression (how chords resolve, how themes develop, and so on) to the issue of sound as such. And attention to sound as such highlights timbre—that is, the particular character of the sound, that thing that makes Sanders’s tenor sax A♭ different from McCoy Tyner’s piano A♭ or indeed from Coltrane’s own tenor sax A♭. And that thing foregrounds, especially on this track, the timbre of breath.

For both Celan and Coltrane, then, the turn to breath is not simply a turn to sound but more deeply a question posed to musicality after musicality has been “mastered.” In their work, breath asks musicality why, with mastery, it has died.

In his notes to The Meridian, Celan recalls his mother’s advice: “‘Was auf der Lunge, das auf der Zunge,’ pflegte meine Mutter zu sagen. Das hat mit dem Atem zu tun. Man sollte es endlich lernen, im Gedicht diesen Atem, diese Atemeinheit mitzulesen” (“‘What’s on the lung, put on the tongue,’ my mother used to say. It has to do with the breath. One should finally learn how to read this breath, this breath unit, in the poem”; Meridian 108).

To read poetry for the breath, as Celan enjoins readers in this fragmentary draft toward The Meridian, is to read for a thing at once immaterial and corporeal. In Genesis, God gives Adam life by breathing into him, and poetry too must be inspirited. Gerald L. Bruns writes “that for poets like Celan the corporeality of language—the idea that poetry is the flesh and breath of language—is not a metaphor” (“Language” 44). There is a sensuous non-sense to poetry that cannot be heard by those attuned only to meaning. Or as Celan put it in conversation in 1966, “Ich übte noch das Versteckenspiel hinter Metaphern. Heute, nach zwanzig Jahren Erfahrungen mit den Widerständen zwischen dem Innen und dem Außen, habe ich das Wörtchen ‘wie’ aus meiner Werkstatt verbannt” (“I used to play a game of hide-and-seek behind metaphors. Today, after twenty years’ experience with oppositions between inner and outer, I have banned from my studio that little word ‘like’”; qtd. in Huppert 319). He was pointing to a poetry that feels the poetic word not as metaphor or simile but as breath on the cheek. In The Meridian, Celan associates this mode of attunement with the character of Lucille from Georg Büchner’s play Danton’s Death, a secondary figure who

Lucille here stands in for the one who perceives somatically and is therefore peculiarly open to the shape, sound, and touch of life. As Celan puts it in a note toward The Meridian: “Atem: Das Gedicht bleibt, wenn Sie mir auch einiges Kritikerwelsch verstatten, pneumatisch berührbar” (“Breath: The poem remains, if you permit me a little critical jargon, pneumatically touchable”; Meridian 108).

The breath-filled timbres of Coltrane’s and Sanders’s horns can be most readily heard in their techniques of overblowing. While nothing new in experimental jazz circles (and occasionally heard in mainstream jazz as well), overblowing was uniquely vital to the late Coltrane style. And no one performed it with more intensity than Coltrane’s newest ensemble member.

Sanders would begin at the peak of Coltrane’s most exuberant overblowing and climb upward from there. Writing of a more mature Sanders in 1981, Baraka described him as a pioneer of the art of musical breathing, a discoverer of a whole new form of saxophone performance—a form in which the breath becomes dissociated from the musician and plays the instrument virtually by itself. Baraka writes that “Pharoah has advanced the science of breathing so far that in recent appearances he can take the horn away from his mouth and the air he has filled up the horn with will continue to play the horn” (“Pharoah Sanders” 341). While not yet at this level of virtuosity, there are sections of Sanders’s solo on “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” in which the musicality of the sound lies mainly in the different timbres of the overblowing effects Sanders achieves, which range from single high squeals to trilled notes to sudden descents into deeper registers. The solo is an improvised composition of timbre; it is also an improvised composition of breath.

Celan’s Fadensonnen (1968; Threadsuns), published soon after Atemwende, extended many of the earlier volume’s experimental methods to or beyond the breaking point. Most reviewers found it a step too far (Rosenthal 36). The poet and critic Helmut Mader, for instance, previously a strong supporter of Celan’s work, spoke for many when he wrote that “die Gefahr, in der Atemwende schon deutlich, hat sich nun zum Extrem hin entwickelt. Die unverständlichen Gedichte überwiegen. Nicht wenige entziehen sich in ihrer strikten Verknappung jeder Möglichkeit einer Interpretation” (“the danger, already clear in Atemwende, has now gone to the extreme. Incomprehensible poems predominate. In their strict brevity, not a few elude any possibility of interpretation”). Similarly, the literature scholar Peter Horst Neumann, also an admirer of Celan’s earlier work, dubbed the poems in Fadensonnen “Dokumente ästhetischen Scheiterns” (“documents of aesthetic failure”). Others were even sharper in their criticism.Footnote ¹⁰

Some of Coltrane’s most devoted admirers, including two members of the so-called Classic Quartet (the bassist Jimmy Garrison, the drummer Elvin Jones, the pianist McCoy Tyner, and Coltrane), could not follow his radical pneumaticism. Tyner was perhaps the most alienated by Coltrane’s new direction, commenting to an interviewer that “I didn’t see myself making any kind of contribution to that music. At times I couldn’t hear what anybody was doing! All I could hear was a lot of noise” (qtd. in Porter 266; see also Wilmer 42). He left the group in late 1965. In January of 1966 Jones followed suit, offering similar reflections: “I couldn’t hear what I was doing any longer. There was too much going on, and it was ridiculous as far as I was concerned” (qtd. in Balliett 464).

Let me briefly return to the Celan poem introduced above, the one that asks what your song knows.

One way of glossing this might be as follows: the song is not over yet, not necessarily. But the poem arrives at a point, an inflection point perhaps, of the radical questioning of song.

What is the song that comes after the song that no longer claims to know?

This issue of knowing and not knowing returns in another poem, “Wenn ich nicht weiß, nicht weiß” (“When I don’t know, don’t know”), from 1966. Here are the first ten lines:

The poem opens with an almost incantatory repetition of simple phrases that evoke a mental landscape of losses: loss of knowledge, of the other, of the Thou. With The Meridian in mind, one might say that this poem opens breathlessly. And continues brainlessly, singing of a Thou-less tribe (“Your song, what does it know?”). This bleak portrait culminates in “a word without meaning”: “Ashrej.” The word is deeply ambiguous. Most literally, it is a Hebrew blessing that opens many psalms. But it also connotes (in both Yiddish and German) a Schrei, or scream.Footnote ¹¹

At its most extreme, overblowing produces a saxophone scream. Coltrane’s solo on “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” first ascends into such shrieks around the three-minute mark and then builds to a lengthier passage of such effects (roughly 04:20–06:50) before handing the solo off to Sanders. Pneumatically speaking, Coltrane’s ceiling becomes Sanders’s floor.

More forcefully than any other kind of overblowing, these screams draw attention to the straining of the body—the chest, the lungs, the mouth—for the production of breath. As the musicologist Zachary Wallmark notes,

One can start, then, by saying that the saxophone scream is a singular expression of corporeal “energy and noise,” a violent exhalation of air.

Of air and of pain.

“I’ve never heard anyone express hurt as Sanders does,” writes Don DeMicheal in his 1966 Down Beat review of Meditations. “It is not pain or sadness or melancholy or loneliness—it is a profound, gut-deep hurt.” DeMicheal heard in this audible suffering a universal human anguish (the “wrenching torture chamber of humanness”), but others heard something else as well: the torment of racial injustice in America. By the mid 1960s, the hope and promise of years of civil rights protests were giving way to an impatience and a fury exemplified by the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965. That same year saw Malcolm X’s assassination; three years later, the world would witness the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the meantime, African nations were throwing off the yoke of colonization; over the course of Coltrane’s life, thirty-six of them would declare independence. And in 1966, the year of Meditations, Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton founded the Black Panther Party.

Coltrane’s and Sanders’s saxophone screams are impossible to dissociate from the crackdowns and uprisings in the streets of the very cities they were performed in. Indeed, they are impossible to dissociate from centuries of enslavement, oppression, and resistance, up to and including the last words of Eric Garner and many other Black Americans murdered by police violence.Footnote ¹² In Mackey’s phrase, “Black music says, as does an allied, radically pneumatic poetics, that breath, especially imperiled breath, matters” (18).

A Holocaust survivor and child of victims of the Holocaust, Celan makes no explicit reference to that genocide in The Meridian, yet the work is saturated by its memory. One vein of this saturation runs through a particular date, repeated four times over the course of the speech (Gesammelte Werke 3: 194, 196, 201 [twice]; Selected Poems 407, 408, 412 [twice]). That date is the 20th of January, and Celan quotes the opening of Büchner’s 1836 novella Lenz: “On the 20th of January Lenz walked through the mountains….” Paralleling these references, readers are repeatedly told to be “mindful of dates” (3: 196 [twice], 198; 408 [twice], 410).

The 20th of January, as scholars have noted and as some in his Darmstadt audience would have known, was not only the date of Reinhold Lenz’s mountain journey; it was also the date at which, during the Wannsee Conference in 1942, the “Final Solution” was settled on by Nazi officials. It is in this light that passages such as this one, from about midpoint in the speech, should be read:

The poem refuses to forget its dates or allow readers to forget them; it bears them in mind. It bears them, too, in its lungs, in what Celan calls “der Luft—in der Luft, die wir zu atmen haben” (“the air—the air we have to breathe”; Gesammelte Werke 3: 192; Selected Works 405). The phrase, which appears in The Meridian, cannot help recalling the lines from “Todesfuge”: “dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft / dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken” (“you’ll rise up as smoke to the sky / you’ll then have a grave in the clouds”; Selected Poems 32; 33). To breath the air in Germany in 1960: What air is this that must be breathed? And yet one must breathe.

What is called for, at least by the poem, is a manner of observation that cannot be improved with more perfect instruments. If any trace of prayer remains in Celan’s writing, it remains in this attentiveness.

In its attentiveness to the breath, Meditations, like many of the works that follow from Coltrane’s 1957 “spiritual awakening,” testifies to his relentless spiritual quest. In his liner notes, Hentoff quotes Coltrane on the album’s relation to the profoundly hymnic A Love Supreme (1964):

Such statements, to say nothing of the titles of compositions such as A Love Supreme and Ascension, encourage listeners to hear the overblowing effects of “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” in the light of Christianity generally and African American Christianity in particular. While Coltrane explored a wide variety of spiritual traditions, his roots, as the grandson of two AME Zion Church ministers, were in the Black church, and Sanders recalled that his “whole demeanor reminded me of a minister” (qtd. in Friedman). (It is similarly no accident that Ayler, who inspired Coltrane’s turn to free jazz, was a Pentecostal.) As Eric Nisenson writes, Coltrane’s saxophone screams were also “resonant of the black church at its most intense moments” (189–90).

In his book Blackpentecostal Breath, Ashon T. Crawley describes a Pentecostal practice sometimes called “whooping”: an improvisational expression and exhalation of the third person of the Trinity—that is, of pneuma, a word that appears over 250 times in the New Testament, where it is generally translated as “Holy Spirit.” Pneuma is double-sided, indicating at once an utterly material force of air moving through lungs and an utterly immaterial quality of divinity (Crawley 40; Kärkkäinen 25). Similarly double-sided is whooping, which Crawley describes as simultaneously intensely corporeal and ecstatic (42–43), a doubleness that enables it to “aestheticiz[e] the gap between the fact of breath and the lived experience of breathing” (48).

There used to be a rumor about the title of the first section of Meditations, according to which Coltrane was the Father, Sanders the Son, and Ayler the Holy Ghost (Nisenson 186). The rumor is perhaps two-thirds true. Coltrane was certainly a father figure to Sanders at this stage in their careers, a relationship that was one of the wellsprings of their collaboration. But Ayler’s influence on Coltrane was not nearly so central as to elevate him to equal status in this trinity. The real name of the third person is right there in the title of the track: it is pneuma.

These are the opening lines from “Benedicta” (1963). The title recalls the praise of Mary: “Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui” (“Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb”; Biblia sacra, Luke 1.42; Bible), which is followed by an epigraph citing a Yiddish folk song from the Vilna ghetto, which translates as “So will you go up into heaven one day, / And question your God should it all be this way.” The third and fourth lines reference a Hebrew prayer (“Blessed art thou O Lord our God and God of our fathers”), while the fifth evokes, of course, the Greek breath-spirit and the Holy Ghost.Footnote ¹³ Latin and Yiddish, Hebrew and Greek, Christian and Jewish, blessing and protest: the poem offers a welter of references: languages, cultures, and religions all packed so tightly together as to almost fuse but not to fuse—to compress rather into highly charged interrelations that quiver between harmony and dissonance.

And in the midst of it all, two dashes. In his book Paul Celan, Felstiner reads them as standing in for the word ruach (178). Perhaps. But they also are something, as opposed to standing in for something: they are an absence of words that is also word-like. If these dashes gesture toward the (invisible) word ruach, then they also suggest an inhalation and exhalation in which a breathturn lives in the blank space between the first and the second dash. After which pneuma arises.

In an interview for Israeli national radio in 1969, Celan would refer to Jewishness as “eine pneumatische Angelegenheit” (“a pneumatic matter”; “Mikrolithen” 945; Microliths 211).

If, as Mackey suggests, “[h]orns are prosthetic lungs” (15), then the saxophone is a fundamentally different sort of instrument for pneumatic expression than the pen or the typewriter. When Coltrane (over)blows, medium is message. Some of this directness of expression may be captured in manuscripts, where the shape and spacing of the writing might suggest the author’s quality of breath. But the process of writing, even writing by hand, is not primarily pneumatic; one must read the breath into writing in a manner and to a degree that is not true when listening to wind instruments. This difference becomes more pronounced when it comes to the printed poem, which, through the process of mechanical reproduction, is always at least one remove (typically many) away from its moment of composition. While the printed poem may still embody breath, it does so less directly than the horn, even the horn captured on recording, because of the fundamentally pneumatic nature of that instrument.

It is perhaps for this reason that, as Mackey argues, “[t]he ‘New American’ poetics of breath…was primarily a figurative, theoretical discourse” that “offer[ed] no consistent or comprehensive practicum” (6). And it is perhaps for the same reason that Celan’s Atemwende never became a practical technique for writing in the way that, say, overblowing or circular breathing became ways of playing the saxophone. When one speaks of “breath” in written (as opposed to oral) poetry one cannot help speaking at least partly in metaphor, gestured to through such devices as caesurae and visual spacing, which means that the (written) poetic breath necessitates translation and interpretation in a manner and to a degree that the saxophonic breath does not. In this sense, Bruns’s aforementioned claim that “for poets like Celan the corporeality of language…is not a metaphor” (“Language” 44), as well as Celan’s similarly stated aspiration, must be qualified by an awareness that there is no poetry (not Celan’s, not even Walt Whitman’s) that can wholly corporealize the written word. The desire is real but utopian.

The written poem that seeks to give expression to the breath, then, is in a more ironic condition than the wind instrument that seeks the same. The former is more subject to the demands of meaning and thus more harried by necessities of translation and interpretation. But the difference is one of degree rather than of kind, especially when the written poem (or poetic essay) is read aloud, and in the end poems and horns may find their own means to whoop, to gasp, and to hold.

Pneuma may open up a new avenue for encounter or it may collapse into a dead end; it may yield both by turns or it may produce a condition in which the issue of clearing and closure is ultimately undecidable. And no one was more aware of this ambiguity, more troubled and driven by it, than Coltrane himself. For Coltrane, avant-garde experimentation was not a solution to the puzzles posed by Western harmonics (including jazz)—the intricate games of tension and resolution, system and hierarchy—but an urgent attempt to break through it into something unknown and unnamed. On more than one occasion, he suggested that this direction, or lack thereof, had become a kind of fixation (Ratliff 145).

“Chords have become something of an obsession for me,” Coltrane told a French jazz critic in 1961, “which gives me the impression that I’m looking at the music through the wrong end of the binoculars” (Coltrane 133). Coltrane’s “obsession” results in a concentration of form that reveals a new world but that also can become even more tightly circumscribed, more microcosmic, than the world it sought to comprehend. “Coltrane had pushed jazz harmonies as far as they could go,” writes the jazz historian Martin Williams. But he adds that “such complex, sophisticated knowledge set its own trap, and Coltrane, still a vertical thinker, careened around like a laboratory hamster trapped in a three-dimensional harmonic maze of his own making” (230).

Is this verticality a trap or a release? Is there a point at which so much compression explodes?

As Celan’s Meridian nears its end, its language and logic become more fragmented and less sure. Question marks and dashes proliferate.

“Meine Damen und Herren, es ist heute gang und gäbe, der Dichtung ihre ‘Dunkelheit’ vorzuwerfen.—Erlauben Sie mir, an dieser Stelle unvermittelt—aber hat sich hier nicht jäh etwas aufgetan?—” (“Ladies and gentlemen, nowadays it’s common to blame poetry for its ‘obscurity.’—Allow me here, abruptly—but hasn’t something suddenly become open?—”; Gesammelte Werke 3: 195; Selected Poems 407).

What if one were to read each of those dashes—not unlike Emily Dickinson’s—as its own breathturn—as a portal, perhaps?

This reduction and dissolution of aesthetic form recalls one more Celan poem, from 1967, “ST Ein Vau.” Here is the complete poem, the closest Celan ever came to pure gesture and pure sound.

One could, of course, continue to interpret. One could note, for example, that the opening suggests the word Stein (“stone”), and that the third line begins with a beating (“schlägt”). Or that the odd ejaculations without vowels (“pf,” “mps”) remind readers that Hebrew has no vowels, a gesture that may be doubled by the thought (according to Bruns) that “Vau” could reference “waw,” the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet (On the Anarchy 19–20).

One could note all this, and yet…at this level of dissolution readers are barely even sifting through fragments anymore. The poem’s conclusion, which is also its whole second half, is its “seven-wheel” (Sieben-Rad) of O’s: empty vowels, empty sounds, empty shapes, empty mouths. But also, perhaps: openness, possibility.

Radical pneumaticism invites encounter. The attempt is utopian but placed in space and time.

Breathing is an act that must always, every time, be renewed, and never in quite the same way. It is an act whose intimacy connects the self with another and whose privacy creates and draws from a common atmosphere. And it points to a line that cannot be traced, the blessing-scream between death and life.

For Celan and Coltrane, radical pneumaticism marks a crisis of aesthetic mastery and a consequent shift from meaning to materiality, music to sound, progress to stasis. And yet this stasis is not lifelessness but a space held open for a time. If this holding-open offers itself as a new kind of meaning and music, then it is one that must be heard with other ears.

And the breath can also fail.

“Und alles, was er blies, das war verlorn” (“And everything he blew upon was lost”): the line appears at least twice in Celan’s posthumous fragments. It comes from the Romantic treasury of folk songs Des knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic Horn) and is marked in Celan’s copy of the book.Footnote ¹⁴ The song concerns “a hunter who blew his horn well” (“Es blies ein Jäger wohl in sein Horn”) but whose playing brings loss (Arnim and Brentano 36). In the course of the hunt he accidentally drives “a black-brown gal” (“ein schwarzbraunes Mädel”) out of the undergrowth, and his dogs kill her (36). Anticipating Celan’s rejection of the “Wohlklang” of his own “Todesfuge,” the tale suggests a peril in the hunter’s very musicality (“wohl in sein Horn”). As the horn blower’s art couples with the violence of his dogs, his vitalizing breath (recalling the “lebendigen Odem” of Genesis) brings unintended death. As Celan writes in 1959: “wie [alles das,] ein Atemzug, wie [[ein] das] <jedes> Wort in welcher Richtung gesprochene Wort…. ‘Und alles, was er blies, das war verlorn’” (“like a breath, like each word spoken in whatever direction…. ‘And everything he blew upon was lost’”; “Mikrolithen” 659 [brackets in original]; Microliths 133).Footnote ¹⁵

It is tempting to think of Celan as the artist of the absence of breath and Coltrane as the artist of breath’s presence. The caesuras and fragmentary lines that riddle Celan’s poetry often manifest a suspension between in- and out-breath, while Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” offer a full-throated response to the call of so many breathless Black bodies. And yet there are presences, too, in Celan’s breathturns, and absences in Coltrane’s blasts. Consider the pair of dashes before “Pneuma” in the poem “Benedicta,” dashes that hold space for the exhalation and inhalation of the poet’s (and reader’s) breath. Or consider the moments when Coltrane could no longer play the horn.

In concerts in 1966 and 1967, Coltrane would occasionally reach an impasse, or a breathturn, perhaps. At such moments he would take the instrument from his mouth and try something different. Sometimes he would cry out. Other times he would pound his chest. The drummer Rashied Ali described it this way: “I’d say, ‘Trane why you do that, why you beating on your chest and howling into the microphone?’ He’d say, ‘Man I can’t find nothing else to play on the horn.’ He exhausted the saxophone, he couldn’t find nothing else to play…. He ran out of horn, he ran out of the horn” (qtd. in Tell Me 08:35).

“[D]as Gedicht zeigt, das ist unverkennbar, eine starke Neigung zum Verstummen” (“[T]he poem unmistakably shows a strong bent toward falling silent”), says Celan in The Meridian (Gesammelte Werke 3: 197; Selected Poems 409). But then, soon thereafter, he speaks of poetry’s irrepressible outward gesture, its vulnerable need to converse.

“Aber steht das Gedicht nicht gerade dadurch, also schon hier, in der Begegnung—im Geheimnis der Begegnung? Das Gedicht will zu einem Andern, es braucht dieses Andere, es braucht ein Gegenüber. Es sucht es auf, es spricht sich ihm zu.” (“But in just this way doesn’t the poem stand, right here, in an encounter—in the mystery of an encounter? The poem wants to reach an Other, it needs this Other, it needs an Over-against. It seeks it out, speaks toward it”; Gesammelte Werke 3: 198; Selected Poems 409). The gesture Celan speaks of here is an improvisatory act that opens a space not for resolution but for speaking otherwise. In a draft of The Meridian Celan considers the “Rhythmus im Gedicht” (“rhythm of the poem”) as a series of “Sinnbewegungen auf ein Unbekanntes zu” (“sense-movements towards an unknown”). “Der Fremde ist der Horizont des Gedichts” (“The foreign is the horizon of the poem”), he writes, as he moves out toward a horizon himself in these drafts (Meridian 119). Encounter lies, he further considers, “im atemgetragenen Gespräch mit dem Anderen” (“in the breath-carried conversation with the other”; Meridian 119).

The mystery of an encounter arises in the space between expiration and inspiration. This is not necessarily the space of the moment, at least not the shared moment. It is sometimes the point in space and time at which two points connect across space and time: two languages, two figures, greatly distanced, whose encounter can only be utopian.

Who share not a single spirit but a breath-carried conversation toward something hoped for and unknown.