Arcadia Scotland

• “How different things are in the sea, in which every inch of my skin tingles and thrills, where I am tossed and buffeted, taken to new places – out of the comfort zone, as the pedagogical jargon has it, into the learning zone, touching on the margins of the panic zone.”  Victoria Whitworth Swimming With Seals

We were delighted to invite Victoria Whitworth to give a talk the other evening to our Arcadia Scotland students at the Edinburgh Center which you can see here!

 In reflecting on this book, it is incredibly hard to describe as it is so rich and beautifully written with so many seams of thinking and levels of writing and to pick only one fails to do it justice:- from the personal memoirs from Kenya to Orkney; the landscape and nature of Orkney; the practicalities and descriptions of open sea swimming; and perhaps most interestingly, the author’s complex motivations and deeply self-reflective answers to the questions:- “why swim with seals”; and particularly - “why did this particular author decide to swim with the seals”?

There are deeper philosophical reflections on Freud and the distinction between pleasure and pain and the nature of the self.  And most personally, the nature of sadness.  The author presents the ambiguities that lie between grief and depression. Interspersed through all of the book are beautifully written descriptions of swimming (which started as a series of Facebook posts that formed the genesis of the text), the history of Orkney - the mythologies from The Little Mermaid to the Orkney Sagas and the origin of the Selkie tales. 

And what also seeps through aspects of the text is the experience of being a woman in relationship to so many of these strands of thought and reflection. The book often provokes the following questions sometimes explicitly, sometimes in my view implicitly asking:- If it were a man conquering Everest, would we judge him differently, or question his motives for risk taking behaviour? If it were a man finding pleasure in pain, would we be impressed at his conquering of the bodily and his noble virility? Is the reality of the gender specific pain such as childbirth, menstruation, or peri-menopause in a womans’ life somehow to be judged differently by society and brushed under the carpet (as raised in the author’s discussion of the Little Mermaid and the similarity to the author’s own foot pain as a partial result of pregnancy), or is to be merely seen as some kind of divine punishment - embarrassing and to be hidden? Why can’t a woman be given a voice about all aspects of being a woman - and why should she not be given the freedom to confront all aspects of her existence in the way that best suits her?  This text is so very raw – very open.

I can’t but help look at the book as a male white ‘philosopher’ and in a traditionally western way pick a series of male white philosophers – perhaps it is their philosophy that reminds me most of the ‘arguments’ and ‘conclusions’ of the author that emerge from my reading of this text. It is after the confrontation of a very difficult situation swimming off the north of Iona that there is developed perhaps a deeper layer and strand for the author’s expressed motivations for swimming from the initial desire to alleviate foot pain arising from pregnancy - to the deeper desire to annihilate self - to an almost transcendental move to a oneness with nature and the breaking down of what the author argues are artificial boundaries between pleasure and pain – yet it is the intensity of both pleasure and pain that give us an awareness of living.  This is all set up prior to the Iona ‘incident,’ but this is really developed and taken further in the second half of the book.  The author frames some of this discussion in the context of Freud, but it is also other thinkers that come to mind.

Spinoza argues for a theory of unity of the universe  where God is to be equated with nature and it is the ‘oneness’ or unity of being that should be the foundation to our metaphysical thinking. Hume argues for a theory of the unifying identity of self as a ‘fiction’ where all that is real to us is the meaning that we artificially layer onto our series of experiences. The identity of self should in some sense be only seen as the artificial ‘linking’ of our experiences (or at least according to Hume we have no experiential evidence to believe otherwise). And finally, Sartre argues for a distinct strand of existentialism where it is through our constant confrontation and acknowledgement of our freedom to choose to die, wherein the value and intensity of our living occurs in our choice to live. According to Sartre, our existence very much preceeds our essence and so much of the meaning that others ascribe and layer over us - and if we blandly accept this is fundamentally an act of ‘bad faith.’ 

What interweaves through the text is a ‘don’t judge me’ attitude, but take whatever ‘I’ am as who I am and please acknowledge the complexity of my intentions and motivation. Accept and acknowledge the reality of my experiences – or at least my memory of these experiences! Yet the book also seamlessly switches to the historical and descriptive modes and offers a quest for a different kind of truth through history, archaeology and language. Although even as the author acknowledges, perhaps these are almost a checklist and what really matters is the fundamental truth of your experience of the world and this is most real when you put yourself into a new and challenging environment. It is the difficulty and challenge - and yes, even the pain that is to be embraced as you are your experiences so why numb your experiences to the humdrum background of monotonous everyday mundanity. This book could almost be seen as a polemic for study abroad.

In the talk at the Center, Victoria presented this book as very much a prose poem as a snapshot of memories in this period of her life. As a reader, one can take so much from this with the delightful passages which Victoria discussed as punctuation, or could perhaps be seen as offering a rhythm of waves on a beach.  There are no chapters – just sections, and it is a book I can wholeheartedly recommend. Everyone should just ‘dive in’ and if you find it a bit raw at times – in the words of PIXAR’s Dory (interestingly the mother is killed of quite quickly in this story – just typical!):“just keep swimming. . . just keep swimming. . . just keep swimming. . .”