breath,
air, smell: actualized in the eatfree revolution, this semantic cluster invaded the food-centric idioms (“you are what you breathe”), rethinged the traditional pneumatic imagery (“short of breath,” “stale air,” “hyperventilate”). A deeper shift reflected by language (with somatic Change just a trigger) may have been the newly stimulated — whipped up, some sigh — intensity and immediacy of psychic life. ■ Books, memories, poetry, math; families, circles, minds and bodies you thirst; roads, forests, islands and winds — your air is whatever “convinces you to carry on”: what you inhale, daily, to keep living and willing, the exclusive mix you’re filtering in — airwhaling — wherever you travel in the world. (Oh the chocking pain of gasping — groping — in the airless frost!) By extension, capitalized Air is the entirety of personal airs of all living minds — very unsolidly material but as vital as breathable atmosphere; it is “the predicate of civilization,” our world’s live meaningdom, the all that matters as it is perceived, imagined, understood by very much everyone: from the core of encoded knowledge to unrecordably fleeting mental pulses, from basest feelery spasms to as-yet-undiscovered global consciousness trends.