does my breath smell?
The breath of human beings connects them with their spirit.
I am at a formal dinner, having drinks beforehand. I have just been introduced to an eminent, older man. No sooner does he open his mouth than I am enveloped in a sheath of putrid breath, a gas so rank it might have bubbled through from the underworld. I smile, respond to his opening gambit, and turn my face so that my ear rather than nose will take the brunt; it even looks like I am paying him especial attention. I hover at a finely-judged distance, and when I turn back to make eye contact, I hold my breath. Once, with a kind of prurient fascination, I make the mistake of checking that it really was so bad. It was.
Why do I endure this onset of Cerberus-breath so indulgently? Because to point it out is simply not polite. But that means a lose-lose situation. If I don’t point it out, it may be polite, but I suffer; if I do point it out, it’s rude, so he suffers, and possibly I suffer even more. It’s a case of what Hegel, had he been at the party, might have nicknamed the failed dialectics of politeness. There are two opposing positions, thesis or antithesis, polite or rude, which we can’t get beyond. We need a further option, an Aufhebung for Hegel (a ‘third way’ if you’re Tony Blair), to move us on. After all, politeness never made anything change.
How do we create the Aufhebung, the heaving of the two alternatives up and beyond themselves? The ideal thing is to be asked. A little abashed, the old man would stop and ask solicitously, ‘I say, old boy, does my breath smell?’ And I would come back, relieved, with the answer ‘As a matter of fact, yes, it stinks to high heaven! Get a mint!’ As an exchange it is both polite and rude and neither; somehow it all feels more mature. And we could have carried on through to dinner without risk of asphyxiation.
We can’t depend on the ideal outcome, however. Why? Because for it to happen, there must be an action of self-knowledge on our part, some moment of doubt or reflection that troubles us enough to ask out loud, ‘Does my breath smell?’ Before I ask someone else, I will, however quietly, have had to ask myself. And to have asked myself, I will have to have had enough self-knowledge to get me there, even in the midst of all the banter. And that doesn’t always happen.
But let’s say I do. Let’s say I do wonder to myself if my own breath is as rank as his. I then come up against another problem, namely that I can’t answer it alone. We’ve all experienced how hard it is to smell our own breath - we might try exhaling into a cupped hand and sniffing, but it’s never conclusive, and, at the time of writing, there is no auto-breathaliser on the market. Paradoxically, I have had enough self-knowledge to know that I don’t know everything about myself. My self-knowledge, patently a good thing - the most important thing in the world, according to the Delphic Oracle - only gets me so far. It gets me to the point of doubting myself.
Some would say that’s enough. Descartes, for instance, argued that if you can doubt, then you know you exist. Famously, he expressed it in Latin as cogito ergo sum, usually translated as ‘I think, therefore I am’, but which we might translate as, ‘I’m worried my breath smells – oh well, at least that means I’m alive.’ No small consolation, but we can go further than Descartes’ cautious position, beyond the relationship with myself to my relationship with others.
That’s because finding out if my breath smells obliges me to ask someone else, to engage a third party. There is in my question a kind of helplessness that puts me in relation to, even at the mercy of, other people. It carries a leftover from being a baby and having everything done for you, and reinforces what’s human about us. I must have self-knowledge, because that’s one of the things that prove we exist, but only so much. If I always knew whether my breath smells, somehow I’d be more - and therefore less - than human. I wouldn’t need anyone. The little gaps in my self-knowledge are precisely where I find other people or they find me. They are already inside me, waiting to be asked, waiting to help and realise the bond. At the point of asking someone if my breath smells, I am already saying implicitly, Look, I am human, like you; part of the deal when it comes to my humanity is that I do not always know everything about myself (talking in my sleep, having my collar turned up, spinach between my teeth), so sometimes I need someone else to complete the picture. In this case, it’s my breath: does it smell?
It might seem like a trivial question, but asking people about your breath proves not only your existence, but your humanity. Except that when it comes to your breath, you never ask ‘people’ in general. You ask someone in particular, and that requires a judgment about how intimate they are. How intimate do they need to be? Surely they need to be very close – a true friend isn’t going to hold it against you if they get a waft of your stale breath. But it might be just as good, if not better, to ask a complete stranger, because there are even fewer consequences. Either way, you can use the question to measure the quality of your relationships. Ask them, and you will draw them in, possibly get them to cross a threshold.
And what exactly am I wanting to know when I ask if my breath smells? Not about odour so much as acceptance, about being in good odour. It doesn’t matter having bad breath when you’re on your own – moping about in your stained pyjamas, you can go the whole day without brushing your teeth, and just hope no-one comes to the door. When you wonder about your breath you are feeling an anxiety about being in society, about belonging. Will you embarrass people? And if so, will you make it the teeniest bit difficult for them to include you? Will they see you ever so slightly as a threat to the social bond, to the ring of confidence forming around them? Will they breathe more easily once you have left?
They might be justified. After all, breathing the same air is as good a definition as any of community. It is almost certainly a definition of intimacy. You could argue that the person whose breath we breathe together – that of our lover – is perhaps the person with whom we conspire most closely (from the Latin ‘con-spirare’, to breathe together, like respiration). Unless you can breathe together you cannot think together, plan together, plot together. Remember, remember Guy Fawkes and his brothers whispering in the vaults of Parliament? If I am prepared to breathe the same air as you, we can act together, commit acts together.
There is something in the air, and much of it comes together in the phrase ‘getting the gist.’ ‘I get your gist’ means ‘I see what you mean; I understand; I know where you’re coming from’. The word ‘gist’ comes from the German word ‘Geist’, a word rich in meanings, one of which is ‘spirit’, as in ‘gas’. Literally, when I say I get your gist, it means I get your gas, I breathe you in, there’s nothing that puts me off understanding you. The details might be obscure for now, you may be speaking a foreign language, but I get you. Your gist – I recognise it, I accept it, and I breathe it in. Nothing in it repels me, on the contrary – the breath is good, and we come together in the spirit of it with a view to an act that binds us.
So good breath makes it possible for us to bond and, bonded, be ready for action, for life. If we didn’t have breath, we wouldn’t be able to do anything. It keeps us alive at each moment of each day. In this sense, breath is quintessentially good – it is a good, and, along with things like water, it is the good. Bad breath betrays that vital goodness. Every breath you take is a renewal of the self, a rebeginning and, way beyond the self, it rebegins the origin of our species, the human being.
I am thinking of Genesis, when God breathes life into Adam, the first man, with the ‘ruah Elohim’ (we assume God’s breath, though that of an old man with a beard, was not smelly). This is breath in its purest form, as the origin of life itself, as the divine spirit that created humanity. Our breath, and the life that is both its cause and effect, remain divine - good, not bad - to the extent that each breath repeats that first puff, that founding inflation, that primal pumping, that bit of yeast (another word related to ‘Geist’) which got the whole thing started.
And if there is a connection between breath and life, there is also a connection between breath and death, and not just because they rhyme. In repeating the very first breath, each subsequent breath tells a story about the age of the world and of ourselves. We sigh when weighed down with experience, when the odometer has clocked a few more miles. When the ‘suspiria de profundis’, the ‘sigh from the depths’ overwhelms us, it is a mark of age that contrasts with the famously pure breath of babies. Because breath keeps us alive, it reminds us that one day we will expire.
So does my breath smell? What’s the answer? I’m glad you asked, it’s brought us closer to each other as human beings of a certain age, and the more it’s possible for us to breathe together the more life we can affirm in the time we have left. And when I ask you, in turn, about my breath, I’m reaching out to you in this shared, but finite, journey.
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