by an old mooring
a few steps
carved out of rock
go down to wateras if you might
step down into the sea
into another knowledge
wild and cold— Thomas A. Clarke, The Hundred Thousand Places
I remember the last moments of my childhood.
I was young, and my family had a holiday house by a lake in the mountains. One winter night, as I was walking home along a path by the shore, I came across an old jetty - half collapsed, but strong enough to bear my weight as I climbed to the end, over the dark and still water.
Somehow I knew that this moment was a test. It was a test that no one else would witness or understand. But I could not deny or ignore the call to get into the water and dive down beneath the obsidian ripples.
Looking at the black surface, my heart was up. I knew that it would be freezing. People died in this lake - one neighbor had had a heart attack. It was deep and unforgiving.
I had had a taste of that fear before: one morning I had dared myself to swim around a bouy a few hundred meters out, without realising how taxing the swim would be in freshwater. Moving over the depths on the way back, feeling my breath go, I knew I had no choice but to keep swimming.
But this night, my task was different. It was no feat of endurance, but a simple act of daring. Alone, without anyone knowing where I was or what I was attempting, I had to slip down into the dark. There would be no rescue.
I stripped and jumped. The cold slammed into me, spiking my heart rate, causing my body to immediately demand oxygen. I surfaced and breathed until I was shivering but basically calm and had a measure of control. Then I dived.
At the bottom, perhaps ten meters down, I stopped. Everything was still. I ceased moving, releasing all tension in my limbs, floating in place. The only sounds were heavy, deep, and slow - the water itself, gently pressing against my skull. It was utterly dark.
Raw adrenaline gave way to a steady energy. It hummed in my chest, intense but controlled.
I knew I was in a space where death was possible. I could die here. I was not unsafe - there was no immanent threat - but I was in-safe. I lacked all protection and supervision, totally alone with the forces of the environment I inhabited.
In that moment, responsible for my own life, I knew that I had crossed a threshold. Intentionally risking my life in order to meet the demands of existence was not the activity of a child. Perhaps I was not yet a man, but my childhood was over.
I kicked back towards the surface.
I reflect on those moments more than any other from that period of my life. I hope that as my son grows older, I will have the strength to allow him to risk his own life, even in the pursuit of ideals I don’t fully understand.
Heidegger believed that it was only in the existential Angst brought about by a confrontation with Nothingness that man can enter into an authentic mode of Being, and that only an acceptance of death - the coming of the Nothingness - could bring this anxiety to the requisite heights.
In Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time, existence is a miracle that cannot be appreciated unless one is willing to stretch one’s thoughts beyond the limits of what exists, to consider that which lies beyond Being. One must focus one’s mind on that inconceivable void without which the concept of Being would be meaningless: the Nothing.
In intensifying one’s awareness of Nothingness, one is able to summon the intense existential Angst that is necessary to feel the primal astonishment that the fact of our Being deserves.
We are able to become suddenly self-aware that we are here. Only under the power of these intense emotional states do we become ready to grapple with the significance of our existence.
In great despair… when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms.
— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
The strength that we derive from this experience can be used to break us out of the ‘normal’ modes of Being that we have unquestioningly adopted from those around us. Heidegger calls this unthinking mimetic activity ‘inauthentic’ - the ‘way of the they’. In this fallen state, man ‘becomes blind to all its possibilities, and tranquillizes itself with that which is merely actual’.
Conversely, by grappling with the terrifying fact of death and Nothingness, we gain the perspective and power to shake the bonds of petty social expectations and their crass explanations, and instead to hurl ourselves into an authentic way of Being. To enter into a new dimension in which we are able to give our existence a meaning and intentionality that we believe to be more important than the reflexive continuation of present norms.
Death opens up the question of Being ... It is the shrine of Nothing and the shelter of Being.
At a time when social norms are utterly corrupted, like our own, we should be seeking these experiences that force a confrontation with Being, both for ourselves and for others. Only then will we have the power to wake our fellow men from the slumber of modernity. They must encounter the full fact of their mortality, the wild, the divine in all its power: the mysterium tremendum.
It is my belief - my experience - that the plunge into great and cold bodies of water can initiate this experience.
Thirty years ago, Roger Deakin, the late, great nature writer, set forth on a journey to swim all of the forgotten waters of the British Isles. He found, to his surprise, that merely entering these waters - the rivers, lakes, lochs, ponds, moats, aqueducts, and flooded quarries of an ancient land - threw him into a space that was utterly separate from the profane existence of those around him.
To swim is to experience how it was before you were born. Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb. These amniotic waters are both utterly safe and yet terrifying, for at birth anything could go wrong, and you are assailed by all kinds of unknown forces over which you have no control. This may account for the anxieties every swimmer experiences from time to time in deep water. A swallow dive off the high board into the void is an image that brings together all the contradictions of birth. The swimmer experiences the terror and the bliss of being born.
So swimming is a rite of passage, a crossing of boundaries: the line of the shore, the bank of the river, the edge of the pool, the surface itself. When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world, in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim.
— Roger Deakin, Waterlog
The bold act of physically entering a space that few would think to explore initiates a resonant parallel in our thought. While the land is built, inhabited, used - the waters will always be alien, unyielding, mysterious.
There is a feeling of absolute freedom and wildness that comes with the sheer liberation of nakedness as well as weightlessness in natural water…
They allow us to regain a sense of what is old and wild in these islands, by getting off the beaten track and breaking free of the official version of things… access to that part of our world which, like darkness, mist, woods or high mountains, still retains most mystery.
There is no way to tame or modernize the encounter with cold, harsh, wild waters. The step out of modernity will be a painful one, and it is fitting that it should be initiated with a painful task. Perhaps - if this act is accompanied with righteous philosophical and theological teachings - this could represent the first encounter that many will have with a sacred mode of being. There is no denying the power present in these forces.
For modern consciousness, a physiological act - eating, sex, and so on - is in sum only an organic phenomenon… But for the primitive, such an act is never simply physiological; it is, or can become, a sacrament, that is, a communion with the sacred.
— Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane
The role of water in this transition is undeniable; it is no accident that this element plays a central role in the practices of the faith that has defined the West.
At the very dawn of creation
your Spirit breathed on the waters,
making them the wellspring of all holiness.— The Liturgy of the Easter Vigil
Perhaps the wild waters will serve as our ‘waters of rebirth’, to make of us new men.
…when the stain of my past life had been washed away by means of the water of rebirth, a light from above poured itself upon my chastened and now pure heart; afterwards, through the Spirit which is breathed from heaven, a second birth made of me a new man.
— Cyprian of Carthage, To Donatus
I implore you, then, to find a body of water near you - dark and wild - to breathe deep, and to take the leap into Nothingness.
I will leave you with an excerpt from one of my favorite poems: ‘At the Fishhouses’, by Elizabeth Bishop.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Thank you for reading. I’d also like to thank
, whose essay The Photographer played an important role in inspiring this essay.Becoming Noble is in the top three philosophy publications on Substack in terms of engagement (likes and comments). The only publications with more are normie-friendly with tens of thousands of subscribers. I really, really appreciate each of you that is responsible for this engagement - thank you.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
This is a great piece, swimming in open water as an affirmation of the awe inspiring nature of existence.
I can relate to the examples of being in open water. During the Covid lockdowns when the pools were closed, I swam every morning in the Thames. The sense of freedom, along with facing the trepidation of the darkness of the water below, felt such a contrast to the safety-obsessed stance playing out in the world outside of this sacred body of water. When life was being constrained to a limited range of acceptable behaviours, when even going for a run was met with disgust from some members of the public, swimming alone in the Thames as the early morning sun dappled through the trees felt like a true and sincere celebration of existence.
Always impressed with your blend of prose and sources Johann. As someone who guides others on such wilderness journeys, I appreciate your comment about the merging of righteous teaching in what I like to call, "The Cathedrals of the Wild". This is exactly what we do at mountainsmove.org, and your diving anecdote speaks to the spiritual rebirth that happens when we finally vacate places and attitudes of comfort in search of the Creator. This is a critical step in experiencing humility for those you refer to as the New Nobility. Your writing, as always, expresses it so well.