The eastern breakwater of Granton harbour is almost 1km long, and swimmers can follow its crooked finger, heading straight out into the Firth of Forth, while benefiting from its reassuring presence. One Thursday lunchtime, I thought: why not, let’s give it a go, and headed for its tip. I felt cold, but, as I progressed, I seemed to grow strangely warmer. I did not notice the complaints from my body: the creeping numbness which proceeded from my fingers to my elbow, nor the coldness of my pee. Only by the time I exited the water, club footed and claw handed, did it hit me that I was hypothermic.
The irony of this reckless exercise was that in my swim bag there was a book by Melanie Challenger called Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World. It’s an ambitious examination of the wisdom of bodies, a rhizomatic guide not just to our own, but also all the living forms around us: from bacteria to chimps. Her case is that we have ignored or misread the agency and purpose of bodies to our detriment; in a way it is a plea to listen to them. I wish I had read it before my ill-advised swim.
Challenger notes that her book was born out of “wild curiosity”, and a sense that the “stories we were telling ourselves … were both presumptuous and unconvincing”. For her, our focus on souls, genes or minds is a distortion of reality, and we should instead direct our attention to our bodies, which have been marginalised, perhaps because they remind us of our own vulnerability and mortality. It is not that Challenger denies the importance of genes; what she questions is the lens through which we read the world.
Throughout the book she vividly presents a range of different organisms, from slime to squid, exploring the ways in which they relate and respond to the world around them. Among other things, Challenger is a poet, and her descriptions are often beautiful. She describes glacial ice as “blue sheened like an eyeball” and a Humboldt squid as “a lozenge of silver”. By denigrating or ignoring bodies, she argues, we are blinded to the sophistication of other life forms, and do not afford them the respect that they deserve; we mistake machines for consciousness and our own consciousness for machines; we destroy habitats with little regard for the non-human life that resides there.
Challenger cites an encyclopaedic range of scientists and philosophers, but her own intellectual guide is Aristotle (she thanks him in the acknowledgments). According to her, it was Aristotle who first grasped the intelligence of bodies, though he lacked the science to support his intuitions. She brings him to life at several points in the book, entering into his head, and turning the philosopher – this figure based on a collection of texts, translations, and commentaries – into flesh and bone.
I struggle to think of a book for whose subject I have felt more sympathy and excitement: its turn to the body, its trenchant critique of scientific reductionism and misguided metaphors. But as a lay reader I often found myself disoriented, almost dizzied, by the text. I desperately wanted to follow my guide, but I kept on feeling lost, left behind, as the author charged into a dense thicket of ideas and scientific research. This is perhaps the risk run by any pioneer: you can cross a frontier, but can you bring others with you?
When I got out of the water, corpse-grey and shaken, I was greeted by two concerned women, experienced swimmers in dry-robes, who kept an eye on me, and offered me a cup of tea and some sound guidance. I’m grateful to them and the way they could quietly read their own bodies, and mine, skilfully relating them to world around us. In a way this book is an invitation to the reader to do something similar; to abandon the harmful readings that we have inherited, and sidestep our own self-destruction.
• Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World by Melanie Challenger is published by Canongate Books (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
