It’s June. I’ve swum out to the nearer buoy, tapped its algae-slimed pate for luck, and now I’m moving in big lazy sweeps, back and forth. The tide is low, and there’s an easy swell. The sun has hardly moved all afternoon, and I’ve lost track of the time: no idea how long I’ve been in the water. Maybe an hour, maybe more? The summer birds shriek in the sky: only here for the breeding season but they are given local names, held in affection as natives. They’re never perceived as ferry-loupers.
This love of birds has come late. As a thrill-hungry child, it was always the big creatures that hooked me, mammals for choice, then reptiles. I still have my battered copy of Jean Dorst’s Field Guide to the Larger Mammals of Africa, illustrated in glossy colour by Pierre Dandelot and published in 1972; and, judging by the very wobbly letters in which I have written my name on the flyleaf, it was given to me when it was new. Maybe a birthday present? It cost sixty-one Kenyan shillings. My first intimations that precise, scientific language has its own poetry came from Dorst’s descriptions. The colour of a lion’s mane varies ‘from silvery blond through ochraceous and rufous to blackish’. The alarm signal of the Thomson’s gazelle is ‘a ruffling or a flicking of the flanks’. The droppings of the spotted hyena ‘when freshly deposited are green in colour but become pure white as soon as they dry into hard balls of crushed bone’.
But my mother loved the birds, and our frequent family trips to Nairobi National Park and Naivasha at the weekend and further afield in the holidays – Nakuru, Tsavo, Samburu, the foothills of Mount Kenya – were governed by birdwatching. A wild swerve that took the car into a ditch in pursuit of one, not long after we arrived in Kenya, meant that any similar accident became known as ‘doing a bee-eater’. We’d stop for an hour at an acacia-fringed waterhole, where, I complained, there was nothing to see – only hornbills, crowned cranes, marabou storks, lilac-breasted rollers, bulbuls, weaver birds… But I was vindicated one day. They had stopped the car somewhere on a shady hillside in Amboseli to ponder the identity of a small brown bird hopping about on the verge. Bored and petulant, I was kneeling on the back seat and looking out of the rear window, as much to assert my lack of interest as to keep watch. My sulks were rewarded by a striped hyena as it lounged nonchalantly across the dusty track behind the car. We’d seen plenty of spotted hyenas by that stage, but this was a first. I yelped, and my parents and sister turned in time to catch a glimpse as its shaggy-maned back vanished into the scrub. I chanted ‘I have seen a striped hyena’ all the way back to the River Lodge.
The striped hyena ‘is not as noisy or aggressive as the Spotted Hyaena. Almost entirely nocturnal, it usually remains hidden by day in dense bush…’ We never saw another.
Dorst gives the common English name and the Latin name in the heading for each entry, but below that there is the French, the Swahili and the German – Striped Hyaena, Hyaena Hyaena, Hyène rayée, Fisi, Streifenhyäne. Spotted Hyaena, Crocuta crocuta, Hyène tachetée, Fisi, Tüpfel- or Gefleckte Hyäne. I was learning all three foreign languages at school and I seized avidly on these words, proof that what we were doing in lessons had some meaning in the wider world. Mostly Dorst’s descriptions are cool and neutral, but sometimes they can send a chill rippling up your spine.
The Spotted Hyaena follows pregnant female antelope and snatches the freshly born young, sometimes killing the female herself when she is in a helpless condition… it can become bold and even dangerous to man, attacking human beings sleeping in the open and causing serious mutilation by biting off the face.
Why didn’t that give me nightmares?
Birds only started appealing to me once we were back in Britain and adjusting to closer horizons, lower skies, tamer landscapes. What else was there to look at here but little brown birds?
From Eynhallow I can hear the screaming of the Arctic tern colony, the sea swallows. These fragile-looking creatures, each weighing no more than an apple, have one of the longest migrations of all. Over a thirty-year lifespan they fly the equivalent of three trips to the moon and back. They crave light, spending our winter months in Antarctica and travelling north again to arrive in Orkney in the spring. So neat and spiky, with their black caps, their sharp ever-open beaks, their forked tails. They hover over me and shout: it’s as though anger is the fuel that drives them. They’re pickie-ternos in Orcadian.
The terns share Eynhallow with the fulmars. A single bird glides by, up close and curious, dipping its metre-wide wingspan, swooping past my ear once, twice, three times: I can see the bead-black eye glinting in the pure white head. Sometimes the fulmars fly so close to the unpredictable waves that they have to lower their yellow feet, like a plane’s undercarriage, and regain height with a rapid paddle against the water. Foul maa is a term from Faeroe, the foul-gull, named for its habit of spewing fish oil when disturbed. It’s said to be the only Faeroese word that has entered English. They look like gulls from a distance, but eye-to-eye there’s no mistaking the bull neck and the salt-excreting naricorns on the beak that mark them out as close relatives of the albatross. Out at sea for most of the year, they come to the cliffs to breed and, wings braced, they ride the wind that buffets the Orkney shoreline all summer long. In the 1990s one of the females from the Eynhallow colony was identified, at over fifty, as the oldest known seabird in the world. They swoop past my head on their great stiff wings, close enough to touch.
They share the sky with the gulls, the white maas. Every bird has a different strategy for evaluating something unfamiliar in the water. A tern hovers low and skreeks; fulmars do their up-close-and-personal inspection; a gull will fly curiously towards my bobbing head then turn abruptly, jinking away at the last moment, reluctant for some reason to enter my airspace.
Higher up, the sinister B52 bomber outline of a bonxie, a great skua, pauses for a couple of minutes, wondering if I am worth pursuing. They breed on the northern limit of my viewshed, up on the Rousay heathland. Like the terns and the fulmars, they come back in with the spring, having wintered off the Atlantic coasts of Iberia and Africa. That heavy dark shape always brings a frisson: they’ll dive-bomb hikers on the moors who come too close to their nests. They are muggers, kleptoparasites: they attack other birds and make them drop or vomit up their catch. I’m nervous with this one hovering low over me. I lie on my back, kick vigorously with my legs, splashing high. It’s a classic prey response, trying to make myself look bigger than I am, more of a threat.
A shag cruises by only a couple of metres away, then suddenly up-ends and dives. Scarfie.
Closer to shore a raft of eiders hoots and coos. Dunter.
I strike out for the second buoy, the black, cylindrical one, further away but still well within the embrace of the bay, safe from the rosts tearing in from the Atlantic past Westness and Costa. I can feel them though, in the tug and play of the water; I can hear the roar of the surf; see the outline of the waves they throw up. I know I am part of something much bigger than myself. I feel as though I am dissolving.
In their letters, Freud and his friend the French writer and visionary Romain Rolland explored the idea of the sensation océanique, the oceanic feeling, the sense of being without boundaries, one’s physical and psychic integument dissolving, microcosm and macrocosm becoming one. Rolland, who came up with the phrase, proposed this as the wellspring of all religions.
Freud, typically, rejected the idea that there was any real spiritual underpinning to the oceanic feeling, arguing instead that it was the natural state of a feed-on-demand, breastfed baby, who has no sense of difference between herself (only Freud said himself) and her mother; and that when an adult experiences this sense of unbounded, floating integration, she is regressing to a more primitive sense of self, one that should have been left behind at weaning.
Freud also said he had never personally experienced the oceanic feeling. Why was he so ready to label and classify something he could not comprehend?
I like to say it in Rolland’s original French rather than English – sensation océani
que – for the sake of the onomatopoeia, the complex pattern of sibilants and nasals evoking the hiss and splash of the waves, and the mmmnnn of the well-being I am experiencing right here, right now, as well as the sense that my consciousness is tugging and flowing with swell and breeze and tide and current, that I am up there in the birds looking down at this strange shape in the water that is not a seal, just as much as I am down here looking up at them, their silhouettes distinctive as signatures against the summer sky.
Rolland suggested that the sensation océanique underpinned all religious experience. Freud rejected the idea: too passive, he said, and much too pleasurable. Instead, he sought the explanation for the religious impulse in a quest outside oneself, that pilgrim passion for a land beyond, like the love of islands and deserts that fired the early Church. Religion isn’t about satisfaction in the here and now; it has its roots in that longing which St Augustine (Freud’s example) thought could only be satisfied by coming to rest in God. God? said Freud. No. God’s just wish-fulfilment, a projection, a divine all-powerful source of ultimate authority on to whom one can dump all one’s anxieties and responsibilities. ‘God’ is an illusion that moves in to fill the space left by weaning, when the baby first realizes she is alone in a threatening world. The oceanic feeling is no more than a neurotic adult’s way of pretending to herself that danger isn’t real.
But I know the danger is real; instead, I’m looking critically at the idea that danger is important, that loss of identity is threatening. Swimming here is salutary for thinking about the dissolving of boundaries, between self and other, body and world, life and death. You have to cross borders in order to grow and change, step over the limes, Latin for threshold or border. Hadrian’s Wall was the limes of empire: for all the Romans’ claims to have conquered Orkney we remain ultra-liminal, over the edge. There are particular Northern Isles words for liminal times and spaces. That ambiguous, tricky time between sunset and true dark: grimlings. The hours around summer midnight when orange-green-blue sunset segues seamlessly into blue-green-orange dawn: simmer dim. Tang is the seaweed that grows above the low-water mark, in the inter-tidal border zone, while ware grows below it. Grey seals give birth above the tideline and their pups have a few days as pure creatures of the land, their fur as white as the fatty milk they drink. But common seal pups must learn to swim almost as soon as they leave the womb: they are born between tides, among the tang, in the liminal space between the masses of weed thrown up the beach by the highest wave and the tumble of winkle shell and urchin fragment left by the quietest wave at slack water, just before the tide turns and starts remorselessly in once more.
I reach the second buoy. Again, the ritual thump on its hollow cylindrical side, claiming the territory for my own. I swim around it, dodging its massive, weed-thick chain. When the surface of the water is at eye-level, my familiar view appears different. The wild rosts flanking Eynhallow stand proud of the horizon: backlit and solid-looking, their surf could be mistaken for distant islands, wavering in the haze. The beach looks far away. Suddenly I feel very small.
I swim again in a circle around the buoy, reluctant to start back just yet. The buoy is something to cling to, just in case.
Oh, hello.
This encounter always triggers the same response: a little twitch, a suppressed gasp, a course of adrenalin. Flush, heart-pound, tremble.
Do you feel the same?
How long have you been watching me?
The seal is perhaps four metres away. A common seal, a small one, young and puppy-like. Only the top of its head and muzzle are visible: dark reflective eyes you could drown in, converging nostrils. We make eye-contact. It sinks lazily and then dives, the arc of its back and its rear flippers briefly visible above the water.
I tread water and hold my breath, but not as long as the seal does. There is no hint above the water of its whereabouts: I imagine it circling me, drifting through the tangles of Laminaria with occasional power-thrusts of its hind flippers, eyeing my pale, dangling limbs. Seals see well in the air, but even better below, their underwater vision as acute as a cat’s on land, drawing in whatever light is available, although when they dive deep they enter permanent twilight-to-darkness.
Freud dismissed the oceanic sensation because he thought the ego maintains a clear line of demarcation between itself and the outer world, the dissolution of that border being a sign of neurosis. He only allowed one exception: ‘At the height of being in love the boundary… threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that “I” and “you” are one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact.’ Being in love, therefore, is primitive, regressive, infantile – and that’s bad. Healthy psyches are meant to shrink into themselves, form a hard carapace, creep into their shells and stay there, build a defence against the dangerous world. That’s what being a grown-up means.
The seal resurfaces a little closer, lifts itself a bit higher out of the water, and now I can see the speckle-dapple of the throat, the holes of its ears, the backlit ruff of whiskers around its muzzle and above its eyes, still shedding their sparkling drops of brine. It’s assessed me from below the surface: now it wants another look at my face. We gaze into each other’s eyes for an endless moment, until I feel a wild vertigo; and then it dives again. What’s going on here?
To work out what kind of creature I am, what I’m doing in the water, what threat or food or entertainment I represent, this seal is relying not only on vision but also on its whiskers or vibrissae, that braced fan radiating out from its face like rays of sunshine, creating an aura of extended awareness. Around ten centimetres long, they grow continuously; and they are fed by ten times as many nerve fibres as a land animal’s. The vibrissae radiate consciousness into the space around the body: twitching, feeling the water flow, picking up information from my every kick and wriggle.
The old consensus was that the seal’s own movement in the water overrode incoming movement-messages from other creatures, whether predators like orca, prey like fish or shrimp, other seals, or a curiosity like me. The whiskers were only useful if the seal was still, hiding or lying in wait.
But new research blows this out of the water. Bandage a seal’s eyes and put headphones over its ears, and it will still track minute movements of objects, its head twitching left or right as it senses the stirring of the water. A blindfolded seal in the Arctic can find the breathing hole in the ice, dead centre, every time. There is a complex interaction between the movement of the tracked object, the speed of the seal, and the shape of the whisker, which is not only ten times as sensitive as a land animal’s, but very different in structure. Seals’ whiskers have a corrugated shape from root to tip, bulging periodically like beads on a string, but flattened in section. Whereas a flat, straight whisker would flap, the undulating shape is remarkably stable. Rounded whiskers, like those of a sea lion, create distracting vortices in their wake; the seal’s whiskers are more sensitive to movement in the sea than the sea lion’s by at least an order of magnitude. The vibration caused in the seal’s whisker is precisely attuned to the vortex wake of the creature it is sensing – my friend here will have spotted my erratic breaststroke from a long way off. The seal’s whiskers are like an orca’s capacity for echo-location: an extra sense which we struggle to comprehend. What can it possibly be like to be attuned to the water and the life within it in the way that a seal is?
Reading the Rolland–Freud correspondence again, my heart goes out to Romain Rolland. He makes himself so vulnerable in his brave letter, describing intimate and powerful experience, offering it to his friend as a gift. This is what I’m feeling, this is what it’s like for me, this is real. And Freud slaps him down. I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you’re wrong. Back in your box. Because Rolland’s emotions are inappropriate in Freud’s paradigm, they are denied. I’m fighting the temptation to over-identify with Rolland: thoughts, ambitions, emotions offered in good faith, all lost somehow in a vacuum of inc
omprehension. It’s not just poetry that gets ‘lost… in translation’, love seems to, as well. And good intentions.
If I experience the sensation océanique in the water, does that mean I’m neurotic? In love, even? Can you fall in love with the sea, or with the seals? And I wonder whether my marriage would have been happier if my husband and I could have accepted each other as members of different species with alien but equally valid ways of engaging with the world. Can a seal understand echo-location, or an orca make sense of vibrissae?
I stay afloat, waiting for the sleek speckled head to re-emerge. When it does, the seal is much further away, perhaps twenty metres, heading westward. It looks over its shoulder at me one more time, then ducks again. This time it’s for good. I wait nonetheless, still treading water. Slowly the dizzy, druggy sensation retreats, my heartbeat slows: I am back in my own skin, looking out through my own eyes. I am cold, tired, needy, small. The sun stands still in the sky – it could be two in the afternoon or eight in the evening. In high summer, an Orkney afternoon lasts for ever.
*
I ran three miles – first into the wind, then with it behind me. Then to the sea, glorious sunrise, breakers backlit white-gilt. No one around so once in I slipped out of my Speedo and swam with it bunched up in my right hand. Those few square inches of Lycra do make a difference to the experience of cold... but also to the sensuality of the water. Exhilarating wrap-around ice-champagne. No seals but lots of gulls in the air, shags in the water, ringed plovers along the tideline, hoodie crows hopping and pecking at the kelp. Swimming underwater: a colour for which I have no name, green stabbed with gold.
*
I’m listening again for the voices that once populated the shores of Evie, Rousay, Eynhallow. A hectoring laird and a well-meaning one, a science-minded poet, a stoical fisherman, crofters round the fire, a pompous minister, the Latin chant resonant within a fine stone kirk, a Norse skald singing his gory dream of battle…
Swimming with Seals Page 10