Wading into the sublime
Midsummer Melbourne. After almost three hours sitting on trains and buses, and then a walk along a shadeless highway, we made it to the nursing home. Ruth—my wife—and our two kids shuffled into the clinical foyer with sweat-wet clothes and dry tongues. We took five minutes to cool and calm ourselves, then looked for my grandmother, Dorothy.
She is not who I remember from childhood; not the vibrant golfer who served me toast with sprinkles and milky coffee with heaped sugar spoons. She forgets. She weeps. Walking is threatening. But she remains my grandmother, and the trip is as necessary as it is quietly gutting.
Over the afternoon we share photos, watch the kids' antsy shenanigans, give Dorothy chocolates. We talk knitting and beautiful music. A gifted pianist, she can still entertain a room with decades of big jazz played with big hands. Without a moment's hesitation, she names her favourite work: Chopin's Nocturne in E Flat.
Before long, it is time to leave again. Dorothy, who of course misses her late husband and their home, wants to leave with us. And, of course, she cannot. This realization, which occurs regularly between Dorothy and my mother, is merciless. And the feeling leaks into me: I feel cruel as the doors close behind me.
Halfway into our train trip, we stop at the beach. The kids are cheered and, for all the bile in my gut and heat in my face, so am I. The water will make things right—for a little while.
I strip down to my underpants and dive in. Immediately the world is gone. Instead of sun and sky there is just the bay's murky to-and-fro. I swim out, and the sand gives way. I cannot stand, and I am enveloped by water. I grew up by the beach, but this first descent still frightens: as if the world has fallen away. Yet I am also ecstatic. It is sublime. In How to Think About Exercise, I put it this way:
The notion of the sublime was most popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. While the ideas varied, the sublime was summed up neatly by English author Joseph Addison, recently returned from his Grand Tour. "You have a near prospect of the Alps, which are broken into many steps and precipices," he wrote in Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, &c, "that they fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror." In short: the sublime requires both enjoyment and fear.
Irish statesman and scholar Edmund Burke, writing half a century later, saw the ocean as an exemplary case of this sublime. The sea, argued Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, often inspires dread. Most obviously, the sea is immense. Even smaller bays swallow up the swimmer, suggesting a kind of infinity: a greatness that dwarfs the body and boggles the mind. Tom Farber, in On Water, calls it "that vastness where whales would be nothing in the vastness." The sea is often obscure, too: from a frothy bay thick with sand and kelp, to deep ocean reefs where light is dim, our eyes are hampered. The water’s silence achieves the same ambiguity: a muffled world we cannot quite fathom. "The old round of life and death," writes Jacques Cousteau, "passes silently." And not only the sea – David Allan Evans, in his short story 'The Celebration', described the "private, cold, and muddy darkness" of a rural lake. Even if the water is obviously safe, the murkiness works on the mind to imply dangerous or uncanny vastness. "A clear idea," wrote Burke, "is ... another name for a little idea." And little ideas do not frighten.
Burke also noted power’s role in the sublime: the sea’s energy is straightforwardly dangerous. We can drown in a cup of water, but the sea has strong waves and sharp rocks, which overpower strong swimmers and rip skin. "In rough ocean, I have thrown up from beginning to end of a 13-hour swim," wrote long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, "swishing around like a cork ... I would do anything to stop this feeling—and the only thing that will is to be on dry land." The sea is also capricious in this, moving from mirror calm to violent storm in minutes. In short, we are never really in charge. "Wheresoever we find strength, and in what light soever we look upon power," wrote Burke, "we shall all along observe the sublime". The point is not that the sea actually does drown or cut us, but that we know it can, and that we are too weak to stop it. The sublime always requires some hint of danger and pain.
Does this mean we have to drive to the roughest, most treacherous beaches to savour the sublime? No, Burke argued: there is no enjoyment of the sublime without safety. Being picked up by a wave and dumped on sharp mussel shells is not blissful—it simply hurts. Swimming too far and becoming lost provides no joy—it is just terrifying. The sublime comes from the passions of survival, without the desperate need to survive. "When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible," wrote Burke, "but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be ... delightful." In other words, the sublime sea is best enjoyed by a strong swimmer in the surf, or a weak swimmer in the shallows or pool.
But there is more to my aquatic bliss than safe terror. There is also a sense of wholeness; of somehow coming back to where I belong. This is not a retreat from the world of dementia and death: a brief bit of fun, in denial of worldly frailty. Instead, it is a feeling that I am part of this world; that I will not escape until I am gone forever.
The leap into infinity
This is another aspect of the sublime, which the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer described in his World as Will and Idea. Again, from How to Think About Exercise:
Schopenhauer described a storm at sea, with "waves, high as houses ... driven violently against steep cliffs." Anyone watching this is profoundly aware that they are, as Schopenhauer put it, "an infinitesimal dot in relation to stupendous powers". This is not a feeling reserved for 19th-century scholars. "I seemed to shrink and shrink," wrote Australian swimmer Annette Kellerman, "till I was nothing but a flecky bubble and feared that the bubble would burst."
Yet at the same moment the beachgoer feels tiny and powerless, argued Schopenhauer, they also feel "eternal, tranquil". To illustrate this, Schopenhauer introduced the idea of the night sky, with its "countless worlds". His idea was that, in reflecting on the infinity of blackness and stars, we recognize that all the universe’s details are our own invention – the categories of selfish minds trying to survive. The real cosmos is a great whole and we are parts of it; we are, as Schopenhauer put it, "exalted by its immensity".
We do not have to commit to the German’s philosophy to explain his "exultation". The oneness of the snorkeller does not simply arise from reflection; from some otherworldly meditation. We are literally in the sea or pool. Our skin, even in a wetsuit, is constantly in contact with the water. Of course this is true of the air too—only astronauts escape into a vacuum. But we do not normally feel the air. Whereas the water clings to us; every part of our skin registers this thin presence: cool, flowing, heavy. "I love to throw myself into the sea," wrote Sharon Olds in her poem 'The Swimmer', "cold fresh enormous palm around my scalp."
Importantly, this grip does not stop us paddling, kicking, diving—the water is somewhat hospitable, displaced by our mass. It is, in other words, enveloping but accommodating. Again, the air also does this, but the water helps us feel it. Poet Charles Tomlinson evokes the feeling of fluid parting and closing, in 'Swimming Chenango Lake'. The water, torn by his moving body, "flows-to behind him", healing as it does.
In this light, swimming is less a simple asylum from the world, and more a heightened reminder of my place in it. It evokes fear, but also a strange gratitude: for safety and the opportunity to take it all in. It is literally enveloping, and brings to mind the world's immensity and power. Yet it also gives me a chance to distance myself from the show; to reflect on the precariousness and flux of things.
Savouring life
None of this can cure my grandmother—the water is an existential revelation, not a Lourdes bath. The anxiety and guilt will remain.
But the primal joy of swimming recalls the stakes: one life, fragile and thrilling, within an overwhelming world. I will savour what and who I can, before I the waters give me up for good.
