Boat People on the Rio Guadiana

I fished the mooring up out of the mud easily enough. It feels different this year, mainly the difference between a new place and one you already know, I suppose. We were also here a bit earlier last year, and I think the weather was better. Also, we had a fellow Irish West Coast man nearby, and several people preparing to cross the Atlantic, who are missed. 

However we soon settled back into the river life. The temperature is perfect, neither too hot nor cold, and the calm and sunny days are all the more appreciated after a couple of windy and wet ones. There is no shortage of things to do; I always remember Molly Bevan's saying that if you manage to get one job done every day beyond mere survival, you're going ahead! Here, with heavy rain forecast, I am looking to fix deck leaks, and that fitting for the running back-stay had a fractured bolt as well as inadequate bedding- It's surprising how quickly a morning goes by with that sort of lark. 

I also spent a lot of time simply moving the filter for the cooling-water intake. There wasn't one at all when I came to the Anna M, apart from a perforated plate on the outside of the hull. That may well have been adequate; I only have to clean the filter about once a year, but the fact is I find quite a few little bits of this and that in it, which are surely better there that in the heat-exchanger or the Jabsco pump. I bunged that filter in a handy press, under pressure at the time, but now want to use that press for an ice-box. I'm thinking of putting a wood stove in where the old fridge is. I am very lucky that Fiona does most of the work of boat-keeping!

Besides the jobs on the boat,  there is this writing lark, and of course the dreaded internet takes up a lot of our time. It works well here, via our Vodafone dongle. Technically, they seem to be a good outfit, but I find dealing with the money side of it difficult. At present, a whole lot of payments we have made by internet banking seem to have gone missing. I am still getting to know my way round this Chromebook set-up, but am pleased enough. There seems to be more shape and coherence to Google than other internet giants, and I feel less manipulated and more in control.

Other activities include praying and dreaming and just looking at the river life around us. There is a funny kind of autumnal spring going on at present; it's a still and perfect morning after those three days of wind and rain, which have freshened the parched land up no end. As the sun came above the high hill opposite us, it lit up thousands of moths flying high above the river, shining against the dark hill-side. You cannot see them at all against the bright blue sky. They were zooming around in an ecstatic burst of life; but oh, so short! All of a sudden they began crashing down onto the surface of the river.

Now and again we go ashore, mainly to shop and maybe walk. Here is Fiona in Alcoutim, Portugal, with Sanlucar, Spain, behind her: -

This living in our boat, a little bit of Irish territory perched between two other countries, along with the fuss about Scotland and Catalonia, has jogged me into thinking about the idea of ‘The Nation’. It does rather shape our lives, and there's no better place for reflecting on it, as old man river drifts by regardless.

So long as peace and security are maintained in our part of the world (and money still arrives in our bank-account), for my part I’m usually inclined to be content, along with perhaps a majority, to let a minority of people wrangle and agonise about these things. However, there are so many people in the world with no peace and security, no pension, not even freedom of movement, thought or belief, nor even the right to life itself! Maybe we had better consider more attentively what ‘the Nation’ really means to us, and how those goods might be more widely shared and solidly secure.

Perhaps the most accessible basis for the concept is as an extension of the family. A viable nation is a kind of magic circle within which hopefully everyone can at least understand each other, even when they disagree, and they build up a sense of shared mutual responsibility and loyalty. But it should also be remembered how fundamental to such concepts are the Bible stories of a chosen people, on pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God.

There does indeed exist a visceral tendency to erect myths and shared narratives, with varying degrees of truth attached to them, in order to reinforce our human solidarity. I think these myths go bad in the absence of true religion. Anyway they are enacted and reinforced with all sorts of bizarre rituals, some innocent enough, such as rugby matches. Then there are the more sinister enactments, the warfare for which the rugby matches are perhaps a substitute, and which if anything has taken a more sinister turn with the annihilation of perceived enemies in distant places by operatives looking at screens in comfortable offices. A generation reared on computer games seem to be carrying their power fantasies over into the little matter of some distant ‘terrorist’s’ life or death, or that of anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of his phone … in the name of their nation! 

Lies always do damage to solidarity. The better the national myths are grounded in reality and justice, the more secure will the nation be. Although Pilate’s famous question to Christ - Truth, what is that? - represents the prevalent attitude among the worldly powerful, national narratives are in fact generally founded on territorial, racial and cultural realities, even when, as is so frequently the case, they are expressed in the terms of the victorious in bitter conflicts of the past. The fact that the myths are at best one-sided and frequently downright false is raised by the disaffected at their peril.

The tendency of states to become totalitarian needs to be balanced by an effective transcendent language of justice and truth, such as is generally conceived as a religion. Deprived of such terms of reference, nations have a dreadful propensity to fall back on finding enemies or aliens in order to bolster their identity; this seems to be indeed a psychological necessity, and the only way out is to rediscover those hardy perennials, Heaven and Hell!

How can we assess the aspirations to statehood of the many suppressed nations who have their own story to tell? When we have a genuine shared grasp of justice and truth, we can afford to be more relaxed about the whole business. In the absence of such spiritual cohesion, the process of endless jockeying for power and disintegration will be more acute. Usually the disruption of changing existing arrangements is costly, and beware the minority who profit from it, aspiring maybe to be bigger fish in a smaller pond! In fact provided the people can communicate with and respect each other, a degree of cultural and linguistic plurality enriches a nation-state.

As a Catholic of English background, I maintain the conviction that the narrative of national emancipation and freedom achieved by the Reformation was very far from the truth, and that the main beneficiaries of it were the members of the plutocratic establishment centered on the king, who set themselves up by robbing the church and enforced their rule with a reign of terror. Such has proved to be the true story of all too many revolutions and ‘liberation movements’.

Apart from those who heroically resisted, the mass of English people acquiesced only to show their disaffection by further using the protestant ethos to set up whatever new denominational identity that they could find to suit their temperament. With the Church suppressed or fragmented, the stage was set for the British Empire, empires generally being based upon an attempt to combine the functions of state and religion.

In Great Britain, firstly the Christian religion was largely ditched, and then the Empire, in favour of a narrative of technological and material progress, which while apparently evading the old problems, in fact finds itself nowadays bereft of coherence or even any terms of reference other than those dictated by the market, much as its fundamentalist adherents try to establish them in terms of ‘objective scientific fact’.

Whether the high priests, the politicians and technocrats and media bosses, try to disguise them with such ‘facts and statistics’, or simply invoke ‘the national interest’, the criteria for allowing or refusing access to the magic circle are in fact predominantly economic. Nationality provides a useful fig-leaf in order to justify levels of discrimination that would not be tolerated within a genuine nation. Ask the refugees about it, or those living in terror of drones visiting destruction from the sky!

Such is the situation we are stuck with, and will continue to be stuck with until that narrative of material and economic progress is exhausted and finally breaks down. We try to survive in this awkward situation by indulging in all kinds of technologically enhanced fantasy to an unprecedented degree. It may however be possible to make that breakdown less traumatic by anticipating it, and preparing in whatever small way we can for a new paradigm.

We have to begin by jettisoning the fantasies, ‘smashing the idols’, and setting about reconnecting with our forebears, with a history that has a future hope as well as a past, with physical reality and not least, with our own nature and bodies and our immediate friends and relations and, in the broadest sense, our neighbours; we may thus find it possible to rescue the rather beautiful related ideas of family and of nation, and even the family of nations, might I add, the Church!