TeaThe eastern breakwater of Granton Harbor is approximately 1 km long, and swimmers can follow its crooked finger straight into the Firth of Forth, while benefiting from its reassuring presence. One Thursday at lunchtime, I thought: why not, let’s give it a try, and headed to its tip. I felt cold, but as I moved forward, I began to feel strangely warm. I didn’t pay attention to my body’s complaints: the numbness extending from my fingers to my elbows, nor the coldness of my urine. Only until I got out of the water, club footed and clawing, did I realize I was hypothermic.
The irony of this careless exercise was that in my swim bag was a book by Melanie Challenger called Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World. It is an ambitious examination of the knowledge of bodies, a cathartic guide not only to us, but to all living forms around us: from bacteria to chimpanzees. His case is that we have ignored or misread the agency and purpose of bodies, to our detriment; In a way, this is a plea to listen to them. I wish I had read this before my ill-advised swim.
Challenger says her book was born out of “wild curiosity”, and the realization that “the stories we were telling ourselves…were both presumptuous and disjointed”. For them, our focus on souls, genes or minds is a distortion of reality, and we should instead turn our attention to our bodies, which have been marginalized, perhaps because they remind us of our own vulnerability and mortality. It’s not that Challenger denies the importance of genes; The lens she questions is the lens through which we read the world.
Throughout the book she vividly introduces a range of different creatures from slimes to squid, exploring the ways in which they relate to and respond to the world around them. Among other things, Challenger is a poet, and his descriptions are often beautiful. She describes the glacial ice as “glowing blue like an eyeball” and the Humboldt squid as “a lozenge of silver”. She argues that by denigrating or ignoring bodies, we become blind to the sophistication of other life forms, and do not give them the respect they deserve; We mistake machines for consciousness and our consciousness for machines; We destroy habitats without regard for the non-human life that lives there.
Challenger cites an encyclopedic range of scientists and philosophers, but her own intellectual guide is Aristotle (she thanks him in the acknowledgements). According to him, it was Aristotle who first understood the intelligence of the body, although he lacked the science to support his intuition. She brings him to life at several points in the book, gets into his head, and transforms the philosopher – this portrait is based on a collection of texts, translations and commentaries – into flesh and bone.
I’m struggling to think of a book for which I felt more sympathy and enthusiasm for its subject matter: its stance toward the body, its sharp critique of scientific reductionism and misguided metaphors. But as a normal reader I often find myself disoriented, almost dizzy, from the text. I wanted to follow my guide, but as the author became entangled in the dense web of ideas and scientific research, I felt lost, left behind. This is perhaps the risk any pioneer takes: You may cross a line, but can you bring others with you?
When I emerged from the water, completely gray and shaken, I was greeted by two concerned women, experienced swimmers wearing dry clothes, who kept an eye on me, and offered me a cup of tea and some good guidance. I am grateful to them and the way they can silently read their bodies and my bodies, skillfully connecting them to the world around us. In a way this book is an invitation to the reader to do just that; Discard the harmful lessons we have inherited, and turn away from our own self-destruction.
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