Swimming With Seals

"Victoria Whitworth is an early medieval historian who has also written some wonderful historical novels. Swimming With Seals tells us the story of her literal immersion in the seas off Orkney. The book originated as a series of Facebook posts – but there is a clear and arresting theme linking them. She has, no doubt because of her professional background, an appreciation of the way that the past is always present that we don’t have. So when she is swimming in the sea off Orkney, she is marinated in substances from all the millennia. The sea is a soup of the Precambrian, the Jurassic, the early medieval, benighted modernity, and everything before and in between. Swimming in it connects her with the place, Orkney, which itself is an amalgam of all these times, none of which ever passes away. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter For me the real fascination of Whitworth’s book is the fascination of writers like Alan Garner: the continued inhabitation of material objects by the continually resonant past; a past that can still speak to us. For Whitworth, the past is still present in the natural creatures, which of course were shaped by the past. These creatures speak with the authority of many millennia. This isn’t really a book about swimming at all, but a book about how we are controlled by the voices of the dead; about how the whole of life is necessarily a seance. That’s a humbling perspective. I like to think of myself as a self-created being: autonomistic, atomistic. Whitworth’s reflections tell me that that’s ludicrous. Why am I talking to you now in the way that I am? Answer: because I’m descended from a mollusc. Answer: because I’m channelling my dead parents, both human and non-human. I’m not a self-created being. If I saw myself consistently that way I wouldn’t be as noxiously arrogant and presumptuous as I am. I don’t know whether the authors would acknowledge that ancestry explicitly, but I expect there is some debt owed. I see these parts of their writing as the descendants of longer-dead ancestors like Emerson and Thoreau, who talked in much more explicit terms than Deakin does about the need to be redeemed by the natural world. The more explicitly we acknowledge our need for redemption, the more complete our redemption will be. “I’m channelling my dead parents, both human and non-human. I’m not a self-created being” I’ve been re-reading Emerson and Thoreau just recently, (going back to the discussion we were having before). They not only foreshadowed but expressly explicated many of the tectonic ‘discoveries’ of modern nature writers. It’s rather embarrassing. We’re always leaping out of the bath, shouting ‘Eureka’, only to hear Emerson and Thoreau saying, laconically: ‘But surely you’ve read what we said?’"