One Thursday lunchtime, the reviewer decided to swim to the tip of the eastern breakwater of Granton harbour, nearly a kilometre long. Despite feeling cold, they seemed to grow warmer and did not notice the creeping numbness in their fingers and elbows. Only upon exiting the water, with club feet and claw hands, did they realize they were hypothermic.
In their swim bag was a copy of Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World by Melanie Challenger. The book is an ambitious examination of the wisdom of bodies, covering all living forms from bacteria to chimps. Challenger argues that we have ignored or misread the agency and purpose of bodies to our detriment, a plea to listen to them.
A Poet's Perspective on Nature
Challenger, a poet, offers beautiful descriptions throughout the book. She describes glacial ice as "blue sheened like an eyeball" and a Humboldt squid as "a lozenge of silver." She contends that by denigrating or ignoring bodies, we are blinded to the sophistication of other life forms and fail to afford them respect. We mistake machines for consciousness and our own consciousness for machines, destroying habitats with little regard for non-human life.
Challenger cites an encyclopaedic range of scientists and philosophers but acknowledges Aristotle as her intellectual guide. She brings him to life, turning the philosopher into flesh and bone.
A Disorienting but Sympathetic Journey
The reviewer struggles to think of a book for whose subject they have felt more sympathy and excitement: the turn to the body, the critique of scientific reductionism and misguided metaphors. Yet as a lay reader, they often found themselves disoriented, almost dizzied, by the text. They desperately wanted to follow the guide but kept feeling lost as the author charged into a dense thicket of ideas and scientific research.
After the swim, the reviewer was greeted by two concerned women who offered tea and guidance, reading their own bodies and the reviewer's skillfully. In a way, the book is an invitation to abandon harmful readings inherited from the past and sidestep self-destruction.
Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World by Melanie Challenger is published by Canongate Books (£20).
