Introducing: Wild swimming
In the many things you can read about the writer Iris Murdoch, it’ll come up again and again that she was an avid swimmer. In 1993, she reviewed the cult classic non-fiction book, Haunts of a Black Masseur, about people obsessed with water. “I am not in the athletic sense a keen swimmer,” Murdoch wrote, “but I am a devoted one.” Several years later, when Murdoch started to disappear into Alzheimer’s, her husband wrote an elegy that opened with the details of a shared ritual — one she loved and mentioned often in interviews and essays — of stealing off a roadway in Oxford and slipping into the River Thames. They went undetected “like water rats,” he wrote, quoting her.
“Iris was never keen on swimming, as such. She never swam fast and noisily or did fancy strokes. It was being in the water that she loved.”
Since I came back from Ireland about two weeks ago, I’ve had this strange sensation of something pivoting very slowly and densely inside me. Like a big barge turning at an angle – hard to detect, then impossible to ignore. In the crush of the workday, sometimes I forget to look at what’s happening. But when I’m walking, when I’m on the bus by myself, it comes into focus: The view from a swim I did in Coumeenoole bay, off Ireland’s craggy western coast. Part of the Wild Atlantic Way, the bay is technically too rocky for swimming. But the signs with the symbol of a drowning man are tiny relative to the expanse of water. And no one cares, anyway, when the weather’s good.
Treading water past where the waves broke, I turned left to see the bluffs leading out of Dingle town, carpeted by grass and blue empty sky. Looking right, I saw towering, jagged rocks left moored by centuries of erosion. The water was freezing but I felt it only in my toes, which scrunched into one another.
I remember thinking to myself that it didn’t feel like I was escaping anything or blocking anything out. It felt, all of a sudden, like what I worried about a lot — good, bad, right, wrong — was actually very simple. Like it could all be forgiven. On the beach, my mom yelled at me to wave, and I did.
Work had been tough in the weeks before vacation. There’d been an election, different editors, the boiling Bangkok heat. One night, sinking onto the bathtub of my hotel room, I wondered if I could shower sitting down. Instead, I called Ruairi and cried. When I flew out of Singapore at the end of that week, I didn’t want to think about anything ever again. I was so tired.
This job is immersive, which I recognize is necessary. But it makes it hard to disengage. Thinking about accountability day and night has made me combative, ungenerous, sometimes cruel in my personal life. Almost all the time, even when I’m trying to sleep or when I'm surrounded by people I love, there’s a current in my brain that goes: people are literally dying and dying and dying. It’s charged, refueled by the images of fires and limbs and babies and thermobaric bombs – in my memory and in my iPhone. It’s sustained by the men in suits paid money to lie; the 18 missed calls begging for help; the voice messages on Signal saying in broken English: Don’t text, she’s been arrested.
I had this conversation recently, asking someone, how did you know they were children? He said back through a translator: The skulls were so small.
All of this makes me feel like I need to be sprinting. Or come to a complete stop. Either way, no one slow walks through catastrophe.
If previously, my default was to just keep going, now I think I’m getting dangerously close to flaming out. Big barge ... Pivoting. If I can’t more frequently find myself back to the feeling of swimming off the coast of Dingle, I know I’m going to have a psychic break or otherwise deaden myself to what’s still good and joyous about life.
The swimming really helps. When I think about my perfect days this year, I think about swimming in Senegal, at Popenguine, where the waves were too big and where Rach got a bruise; and in Bali, near Ubud, at waterfalls emptied of tourists scared of a little rain. Every time I enter open water, I feel so straightforwardly happy. I feel clean and excited and maximally myself — a person miraculously, briefly alive on this planet.
And so I want to start something new, a concerted effort to lead myself back to that feeling, not as an escape but as a way of carrying on. To mark this new phase, I’m changing the name of these little email updates away from Reb’s Reads because let’s be honest, she reads some depressing shit. Like Lizzo making music “in the business of feeling good,” I want in the coming months to deliberately do things, and consume stuff that reaches toward how I feel when I’m in the water, which is free and happy. And I want to share it with you.
Introducing: Wild Swimming.
Books
I finished recently two books that you’ll find if you google “burnout”
Enchantment by Katherine May
Saving Time by Jenny Odell
I liked them both enough for what they are, which are extended literature reviews on why we – people who live relatively securely in cities – feel so incurably tired and isolated. They’re both products of the pandemic, which they portray as a watershed moment, a position I’ve never found relatable. Parul Sehgal writing in the New Yorker savagely suggests that reading Odell’s book is a waste of time, calling it a piece “of hectic history and dutiful structural analysis, every sentence turtled against the arrows of social critique.” I agree. But maybe because my attention span is so shot, I still found the book fun and accessible, like a long Wikipedia entry. Sometimes you need to be told that your ambition is a sad self-own, and these books do that quite a bit.
(Reading Odell on the airplane)
Fiction has been hard for me. All I’ve managed recently is the novel Checkout 19 by Claire Louise Bennett, which is so bizarre and fantastical, almost like Calvino; and the short stories of another Claire, Claire Keegan, specifically Small Things Like These and Foster, which have at their powerful emotional core… moral people, which I love. Both Claires, incidentally, live in Ireland – the former in Galway and the latter along the Wicklow/Wexford border.
Essays
I really liked this essay, Bad Waitress, by the writer Becca Schuh in Dirt Magazine. It talks about work, money and opportunity outside the tired “structural analysis” that Odell and so many others fall into. Someone on Twitter also recently brought back this Jezebel classic: Just give it 7 seconds
“Life is a painful and excruciating misery, made worse by the fact that we have a boundless capacity to put our feet into our mouths. Simply by existing, we’re all humiliating ourselves all the time. Why are you making it worse by replaying that time you called someone Ryan but his name is Matt? Oopsies, you did a weird thing, shove it way down deep down inside of yourself, and move onto the next inevitably weird thing you will do.”
Not an essay but I've also been obsessed with the unfolding saga over the Orcas. Do you guys know about this? The Orcas teaching one another how to flip and sink boats, and meeting with one another in strange places, presumably to scheme? The joke, of course, is they're going to kill us.
Music
Just one song. The happiest song in the world. We blasted it every single day in Senegal: L'ours by Christopher Mae and Youssou N'Dour.
(Edit: Actually, according to Google translate, it's about climate change. The last line is there's no more room on my ice cube. Oh.)
Signing off now with an embarrassingly happy photo and a floating excerpt of text from Cormac McCarthy (RIP). I hope you're all feeling okay.
Love, Reb
