Saturday 25 March 2017

Living on the Fractal Frontier, I.


Walking Across the Guadiana
This weekend, with the Festival do Contrabando - Smuggling Festival - on to bring out the tourists  as well as to have some fun, there is a walk-way across the river from Alcoutim in Portugal to Sanlucar in Spain. There was a time when you got into trouble for trying to cross to the other side, or even communicate with someone there! Dictators and other authoritarians must try to close people down, so that they can control them better. But look, when you value the different culture across the river, you actually appreciate your own better as well!

Pity it's poor weather this weekend. Actually I can't be bothered with going to town. These secular festivals turn out to be mainly about money, and they don't work nearly as well for me as the traditional ones that fall in with the rhythms of the Church's liturgical year. It's not a matter of thinking we should go round with long faces during Lent; indeed I have to report that I have been enjoying not a few moments of outright bliss lately.

Am I then indifferent to the state of our poor world? No, but I have been looking at crucifixes all my life, and mulling over the story of Christ's death and resurrection. From knowing people whose life was a testimony to it, humble people mostly, living hidden lives, and from all sorts of little signs, I have come to believe in his resurrection myself.
If you are depressed by, for instance, the Duckie and Brexit, you might consider that, being so far from what the world really needs, they are actually capable of showing us the way that must ultimately prevail. Has the world not being living in a kind of vortex of falsity, and as we are sucked deeper into it, is there not a possibility that even in this sorry world we shall get another chance to get our heads above the waves, another good breath of the air from above?
I think there's more than a possibility of it. In fact, in a myriad quiet ways, it is happening all the time. But there's a river to be crossed, a transition has to occur. The zone where this takes place, I have called The Fractal Frontier, and I called this book, from which I am going to post extracts each week, 'Living on the Fractal Frontier'. 

It will eventually become clear why it might have the sub-title 'The Making of a European'. It's not at all that I would wish to limit it to the European context, but there is no getting away from the fact that for me, at the least, this continent provides the focus for what is happening. In fact does not the whole world have to live with the results of our tortured European quest and, whatever way people respond, do they not do so more or less in terms of the questions it has raised?

This first section is mainly 'setting the scene':-
On a fine and gentle day, as a young lad, I used to love to lie on the deck of my father’s sailing boat, chin on the rail, watching the water sliding past her planks. Here it flows smooth and steady, there suddenly at the bow it explodes into chaotic swirls and a myriad sparkling drops. Fluid dynamicists are fascinated with that very process, whereby the orderly passage of water, which can be described in terms of a linear equation, transmutes into explosions of chaos beyond all possibility of linear rationalisation.  Such is the condition of our vessel's progress, as she butts into the waves. Here is a mystery; waves are waves the world over, but no two of them are the same. There is a pattern to them, and yet they are ever-changing and in their particulars unpredictable.
After all, scientists had tended to assume, in their hay-day since the 18th century, that if you had enough facts, you could understand anything, and then predict how it will behave. Like the planets in the sky, everything is said to chug along according to the laws of Nature or God if you must, envisaged as that Great Genial Watchmaker up there somewhere, who set everything up, but now just leaves it all to work away, a massive mechanical system. If only we could understand those laws, and assemble enough facts, we could predict and control the functioning of economies and societies, and even the behaviour of the individuals of which they are comprised!
One can understand how the Victorians loved this way of thinking, as they set themselves to command and control the planet, but now that so many of their fantasies have gone up in smoke, you'd think we should have learnt better. Yet only the other day I read an article in the Irish Times by some learned gentlemen priding himself on being a hard-headed old cynic who didn’t believe anything that had not been ‘scientifically’ demonstrated. By whom, I ask, for he can hardly have empirically verified everything himself, and therefore he necessarily takes a great deal of ‘scientific fact’ on some kind of faith? He appears in fact to be far more uncritically committed to his own kind of priests than any Catholic is to the Pope. Then again, one might ask, on what does he base his own personal decisions in matters of love, or justice, or aesthetics, those hardy old 'transcendentals' that even the likes of him presumably have to grapple with sometimes? Or does he not reckon to take any such decisions, renouncing all responsibility in favour of the processes of the biochemical machine which he presumably imagines himself to be, or maybe delegating them to the wonderful electronic extensions of it which we are all so fascinated by today?
Of course there are plenty of scientists of a more subtle turn of mind. They understand the difference between how and why, and also they realise that every time you pin down a fact, you raise a host of additional questions. Then there are the artists, who at least have the decency to despair should they be so worn down as to suspect that maybe there is nothing else to life but the mechanistic way of looking at it. A good 19th century novelist like George Eliot would content herself with bemoaning all those unfortunate people ‘whose lives are determined in much the same way as the tie of their cravat’, despite any extravagant little outbreaks of youthful idealism.  Yes, we know the guys who become middle-aged in their twenties, their lives seemingly all predictable and going according to plan, but also, thankfully, we meet some who startle us with their youthful sparkle into old age. What is their secret?
Our youngest girls, back in the day!
It is something that blesses children nearly automatically, if their childhood gets any chance at all. There is spontaneity, delight, enthusiasm; qualities that no machine is capable of. There is also humility: the simple acceptance of one's dependency. Then along come those devastating attacks of boredom and frustration in adolescence.  One flounders around for an explanation of life, for that famous sense of meaning. It seems the imagination has to be stretched like an empty balloon, before inspiration may take place. But all too many give up when they have hardly begun. Then they are left with a terrifying void, and dare not even look into it. So that’s what makes teenagers plug into one distraction or another so compulsively!
There was a whole school of 19th century French poets such as Baudelaire who made a virtue of boredom, positively revelling in their ennui. Indeed this struck a chord in me, as a teenager; at least it was a protest against the ordinary humdrum conditions of life. It was one thing for my father and the many like him, having spent their young days amidst the officially sanctioned explosions of war, to settle down and make the best of some unsatisfying job, simply because it paid the mortgage and had a pension at the end of it; but for us, the sixties kids, to go straight into that?
I was fortunate to encounter some who did not give the impression of simply making the best of a bad job. Many of them were in a religious vocation. I am still in the process of realising just what a profound influence in my life has been that of my mother’s sister, Sister Mary of the Resurrection, an enclosed Carmelite nun.  Her way of life, warm humanity and humour spoke of a different order of reality to the everyday worldly one that so oppresses us. She and other nuns maintained a good-humoured, bantering dialogue with my father about the big questions of life and death; they made a fascinating counterpoint, which I suppose formed the basis of my intellectual and spiritual quest, soon to be massively reinforced by my encounter with the monks at Worth and Downside when I went to school with them. From a young age it seemed to me that one had to find an answer to the question as to whether death is the end of everything or not. There is no getting away from it, but to put it another way, what else is there to life beyond mere survival, beyond 'getting by' and 'putting a brave face on it'?


Far beyond any debate, I saw that anyone who truly affirmed the reality of eternal life was vibrantly alive right where they were. They had some perception which suffused them with this special vibrancy, even while they were like us, fish swimming in the water of time and space. Most of us are barely able to so much as perceive that other world above the surface, while some people seem to have taken a bait hanging down from above. Should one bite, one feels the tug of a hook in the mouth, as the Great Fisherman cannily reels one in, up towards the surface…. A painful business in some ways, which would relentlessly detach us from our natural environment, and yet this response to an impulse from elsewhere, the yes to God, nevertheless brings us back to the vivid life, the blessing of childhood. While it did seem to me there was a good deal of fun to be had back down in the water, yet the conviction grew within me that in the end everything depended on that reality above the surface, or if one wants to look at it the other way around, below the surface, but anyway beyond what I am calling the ‘fractal frontier’.

How does one set about tuning in to those vibes from beyond? As for myself, in an extension of the relationship between my mother and her sister and my father, along with my contemporaries I inherited in the very structure of society and education an opposition between the rational scientists and the romantic, intuitive artists. Like little boys pulling something to bits to see how it works, the scientists were trying to understand how their chosen bit of reality does so. To avoid total chaos they have to compartmentalise everything. It would be an interesting exercise to chart the explosion of specialities that has mushroomed up in the last century or so. In this analytic way, they do indeed find out some how, but the why has to come from establishing connections, from fitting things together again, which as we all know from childhood experience, is a lot harder than pulling them apart. In this task, our reason needs all the help it can get from intuition.

Let us not however fall into the fashionable trap of dismissing the search for truth and meaning, in the broad and ultimate sense, and especially the expression of conviction with regard to answers. In reaction to materialism, people of a spiritual bent frequently embrace Buddhism or something; they seem to suspect that the very impulse to set oneself up as a judge of what is true and what is false is but a disease of the ego. Indeed, one observes some spectacular cock-ups in this regard, usually by anyone but ourselves, and surely there is something pretentious about imagining that one may do so single-handedly. We have to recognise our severe limitations. Yet are we not free and rational beings, and made in the image of God, gifted by him with autonomy? We may understand then that he, our creator, is of His nature consistent; even if he does 'write straight in crooked lines', his truth cannot by definition contradict itself.
This 'image of God' business is problematic. Human beings have since the beginning been busy making images of God for themselves, and of course very many of them were bizarre, to say the least, and it's justly said 'Not that, not that'. However, we Christians believe that God came to our rescue by becoming one of us. Now in Jesus we know what the image of God really is, in the terms of our own nature; and how else might we truly know him? But the doctrine of the incarnation takes us even further, much further. St John tells us, and our Creed affirms, that everything that came into being came through him. An astonishing claim, how could one take it seriously? Yet upon reflection it turns out to be the only possible way that one can take God seriously at all. Atheists are surely quite right to throw out the notion of that paternal watch-maker up there, poking His fingers into the works now and again.
The whole of creation is God expressing Himself in love, which transcends all our knowledge. It comes from beyond that fractal frontier. It can be difficult to accept this, but if we creatures are to respond to Him with love, it has to be so.  Jesus, crucified and risen, is the only hope of vindicating the love of God, of overcoming all the snags in the way of faith.  But hooray, truth along with faithfulness do indeed exist, though we must find them through that Cross; God is good and is someone who loves us and to whom we can relate in love ourselves.
So often we can only perceive a shadowy and somewhat chaotic impression of the Truth, but He never ceases to send out vibes, wanting to be perceived by us even in the minute particulars of our lives, though in the form of harmonics which are universally recognisable. They have gradually embedded themselves in humanity by a bizarre yet coherent process throughout the course of history, including our own personal stories. At a critical juncture they actually burst through into our world in the person of Our Saviour, who gave it a mooring here, a home, in his Church. We can only imagine such a scenario on account of the pains God Himself has taken to reveal it; yet our reason may check its consistency, fine tune our reception of it, and hopefully allow that it does indeed have the measure of all the facts at our disposal, and above all it answers the deepest needs of our hearts.
Are needs not there to be met? Why not be kind to ourselves? But if we cannot do so, despairing of the reality of truth, we are left with a most awful shipwreck; with our entire culture on the rocks, its constituent parts broken, fragmented and useless. There is nothing to do but dredge through the remains to see what might be salvaged; so we have the massive tendency of twentieth century artists to spend themselves in a desperate effort to see what they might trawl up from the subconscious, turning against all rational discourse. No, that’s not what I’m at, with this talk of life on the fractal frontier. We are indeed challenged to rise to a different level beyond the mundane and comfortable, but while beyond reason, not in opposition to it. Speaking culturally, we may expect something is up when we find scientists who are not at odds with artists, even better, when for both of them the knowledge and praise of God is supreme. The love of God is no luxury; upon it depends the health, vitality and happiness of individuals and whole cultures alike.
For children, for simple people, it may come simply 'for such is the Father's will'. The better off and the more intelligent we are, the harder it becomes to claim that simple gift!   This is no arbitrary assertion of the Father's will. If one thinks about it, it has to be so, reason good and quite simple. He would not be God if He did not reconcile all things in Himself, and demand this quality of reconciliation, this harmony and holiness of us; but the more bits and pieces we have about us, be they property or ideas or experiences, the harder it becomes to fit them all together. Adult life becomes a struggle for integrity, for ever being lost and found until hopefully we finally achieve it in Heaven. To discern the reality of Heaven and of Hell, we only have to look under our noses, to recognise the misery of disintegration and the joy that is in the gift, indeed is the very presence, of Him alone who can reconcile and hold all things together.
I was inclined to think that I had most of this pretty much sorted by the time I was 18; I was doddling along splendidly when 'stuff happened'; a big wave all but wrecked my fragile craft. The ‘orderly passage of water' had exploded. However, I still have not given up that voyage, that quest for integrity, even as I struggle to keep the water out of this lash-up of bits of wood in which I am sitting!

Waves hit the Clare coast, by Luke.






Saturday 18 March 2017

The Sense of Direction.


Here I sit now, back on the Rio Guadiana and comfortably ensconced in the Anna M, but painfully aware of the tragedy at the Blackrock, Co Mayo, where a rescue helicopter has crashed. My thoughts and prayers are with those who lost their lives, and with their families. What a terrible and sudden thing it was!
Algarve cistus.

Having seen at close hand the value of those rescue helicopters and also the difficulties under which they operate, I can imagine what happened only too well.  I know that great big lump of rock and what it might do to a helicopter on a dark night, for all the modern technology. I will say what you are unlikely to read in the papers; they appear to have flown into it.*

I will also say something you will certainly never read in the papers, let alone hear on RTE, but which I nonetheless feel should be said, and I know that many people will be thinking to themselves. One would indeed rather not say it so close to the tragedy, but if it is not said now, when will it be said, and do we not owe the dead the homage of learning from them? I say it as a close observer of men and women, of their particular strengths and weaknesses, the dynamics between them and their potential effects, and also with knowledge of tense, critical situations; a mother has no business piloting a rescue helicopter, and it’s doubtful if any woman has. I'm afraid that the privilege of giving birth does involve some drawbacks, but there’s a fat chance of that being recognised as a fact of physiology these days! Meanwhile, let us hope that those brave flyers now see a brighter path.

*An apology to the Press: they have now eventually recognised it!

Achill Hd, taken from Anna M in 2015.

Now that that’s said, I may as well be hanged for cow as a calf, and say that this Mrs May looks like crashing the UK because she is not really looking where she is going. She is too busy trying to look good in the wonky mirror of her support. One might call it prioritising reactive awareness over clear strategic thinking, in other words of looking where one is going! It’s not that we don’t all need both of them, but women do tend to excel in the one and men in the other, and whether we can see our way or not, a sound sense of direction is essential! I recall the story of a friend who was sailing the Anna M towards some rocks in Roaringwater Bay; I said, 'we must tack!', and he said, 'but she's sailing so beautifully!'.

Equally the Duckie does not illustrate what I mean by a sound sense of direction, nor what I might even dare to call manliness;  in fact he seems worse than Mrs May in being too busy reacting, without thinking out where he is going; which is not to say there is no direction to him. After all cramming an administration with generals, bankers and fossil fuellers, and setting about demolishing just about everything except walls and weapons, is a pretty strong statement of intent! You might call it a desperate attempt to assert direction where it's lost, and indeed perhaps the best hope of recovering it is a good dose of feminine receptivity!

It is all frankly mad, and confusing. ‘Let’s get rid of everything that gets in the way of making money’ seems to be the bottom line of Tories and Trumpites alike. The EU for all its shortcomings does point a different way; less Punch and Judy politics, rather more real effort to build solidarity, openness and consensus, and to take our big problems in hand at whatever level may be appropriate, rather than refusing to see them.

I visited the country of my birth on my way here from Ireland. I was relieved to find plenty of people there who are thinking more or less like me; sometimes from a distance it can seem as if the place has drifted off into some parallel universe. I’ll give the example of a neighbour of our Mary Emma in Lancashire, a sound farmer’s daughter who works as a rep for an agricultural finance company. She finds herself as baffled as myself by the fact that 80% of English farmers voted for Brexit, in spite of the fact that most of their actual disposable income comes from the EU. “I know, I see their books!” she said.

They seem to think that the British Government will make it up. Really, a Tory government, in straightened circumstances, with a declining income, a depreciating currency, health, social services and education going to pot, while according to Reuters busily ‘embarking on a 178 billion pounds equipment-buying programme for the Ministry of Defence’....?

As for the effects of tariffs and so on, it is impossible for anyone but an expert to begin to get their heads round the possible commutations of whatever might be agreed with the EU, but the general drift seems likely to involve higher tariffs on imports from and exports to Europe, lower tariffs (eventually perhaps) on imports from the USA, New Zealand etc, while trade with Europe will involve additional transaction costs (in the region of 5%, according to a report I read for the National Farmers’ Union). In the main, neither farmers nor consumers are going to benefit; more tasteless mass-produced food in the supermarkets, produced in big agri-factories, is what can be expected.

However, I have had enough of banging on about Brexit; there comes a point where you have to let it all go. What I want to embark on is a bit of an autobiographical account, to show among other things why I am passionately committed to the European project, for all its faults. I will be drawing heavily on a little book that I have already written, which I called Living on the Fractal Frontier.. I shall try to post extracts of it on a weekly basis for the next while.

Preface.

“What were those two up to?” is a question that has no doubt occurred to all our nine children one time or another, not to mention quite a few other people and indeed to ourselves. Yet after all it was not so very unusual to ‘drop out’ of middle class life in the 1970s and attempt to live a more basic kind of life, ‘back to nature’ and all that. Quite a lot of literary mileage has been made of such attempts, not alone in modern times. However, if the fact that Fiona and I reared nine children on the basis of coastal fishing and subsistence in the west of Ireland were to be worth a book in itself, it would probably be better coming from herself.
My concern here is rather to spell out the intellectual, emotional and spiritual circumstances that led us to make the rather drastic life-change that we did. It’s not either that I wish to vindicate that decision. No, but I do happen to think that in the wake of the ruin of so many of the castles that have been erected since, this is as good a time as any to take another look at those times, up to fifty years ago and more, at their hopes and fears, at their few successes and their many failures.
When I was reproached with ‘dropping out’, I was wont to reply that actually we were trying to ‘drop in’. While it is true that we were rebelling, against a synthetic culture that seemed to have lost touch with its spiritual roots and to be even then bent on self-destruction, more importantly we were trying to recover some sense of reality, to discover an authentic inner dynamic for our own lives. The air was thick with 'alienation', like a head of steam that had been building up in the minds of artists and intellectuals as the 20th century 'progressed', and finally boiled out into a wider culture. A great hunger for 'authenticity' was upon us.

On the face of things, we did not succeed very well, but at least we made an effort; it was actually a serious and ambitious project, and perhaps it is one that needs to be taken up again now more urgently than ever. We had a great deal more in mind than merely substituting pitch-pine and muesli for formica and corn flakes!....

The need to secure the spiritual foundations of civilisation does not go away, however much one might like it to. Knowledge of the future is for God alone, but even should our role be only a matter of keeping our heads held high, of 'staying awake' and of hanging on to the freedom to watch and pray, this remains something that has to be worked at, for as long as life endures. In this spirit I ask myself, if some at least of our grandchildren will be believers, whether they will be the bearers of a new phase of Christian civilisation, or a remnant struggling to survive in the hills, or (as seems to me quite probable) both of these at once?
But is there in fact any sane and realistic way to look ahead, and to commit our lives to what may be becoming?  Or is the very attempt perhaps an absurd over-reach, and should we be concentrating all our energy in the present moment, ‘leaving its direction to God’? The fact is that this famous present moment is a process, and hopefully one of becoming; it therefore necessarily involves direction, for which we must take some kind of responsibility.  It is by no means a merely passive affair, but commits us to some degree of action. The essence of our human dignity is that we are free and able to respond to Divine Love, in whatever way we may be called.
Gwen knows where she is going!




Friday 3 March 2017

Our Real Friends in the World.

Sanlucar  de Guadiana.

Sailors by nature tend to be people who enjoy different peoples, places and languages. Being used to watching one country disappear over the horizon, and then another one appear, conditions us to realise that their cultural aspects are secondary to the fact of their rather improbable existence; each is but another stage for divers players, albeit with different scenery.

Meeting the inhabitants of those countries soon helps us to realise that their differences are relatively superficial; deep down human nature is much the same everywhere, even while being tugged and torn between good and evil tendencies as universal as fair weather and foul! Admittedly, the moral climate, like the physical one, differs from place to place, but they all have their own advantages and disadvantages. It is wonderful at once to discover the variety, the differing perspectives, and the underlying universal meanings. This kind of thing accounts for much of the pleasure I take in sailing along the Gannetsway. The places that are special to me, such as Sherkin and Guadianaland, are at once remarkably distinct and remarkably open.

It may seem easier to know where one stands with those who speak the same language, but here is a lot of code that saves us the trouble of actual perception. Once one does manage to cross the language barrier, one is perhaps more likely to arrive at a better understanding concerning real meaning. This process actually works as something of a lie detector too, because to communicate across languages involves precisely finding common ground in reality. One knows that one has to make an effort to understand the other person, and how they perceive us. Lies so often depend on euphemisms and short-cuts that lazily skate round awkward facts, and in our own culture it may be easier to deploy the many handy mechanisms which it furnishes to help us avoid them. Sea-faring is a school of truth because it does not favour that kind of laziness.


Like the sea, the truth is often inconvenient and far from comfortable; however its successful manipulation is the prime preoccupation of dodgy psychopaths in their quest for power. Yes indeed, Mr J.Edgar Hoover, as you said, ‘truth-telling is the key to responsible citizenship’, just as the judicious manipulation of certain truths was key to your long career in charge of the CIA! That would not seem like a problem to anyone who can convince himself that he is on the side of the angels, but what if one is in thrall to the Devil?
With men like that, anything can be justified in terms of their concept of the
'national interest' in whatever war they happen to be prosecuting. War they must have, since this is what gives them their values and identity, their standard of right and wrong and their program for action. All too often, it is also what makes them rich, while many thousands of lesser mortals die in the battlefields.


In the 20th century very many people evidently lost all sense of themselves as persons apart from the role their country found for them. My country right or wrong! remains a powerful cry today. A devastating sense of insecurity compels some to look in the mirror of their country, in order to see themselves writ large, but when the mirror seems to be in danger of breaking, they panick. Those who help them keep the mirror together are good, those who threaten it are bad; and so they may even come up with foolish remarks like ‘our real friends in the world speak English!’ (Mr Nigel Farage in Washington lately.)


Mr Farage has found a friend indeed, a President who actually embodies the current paroxysm of nationalist narcissism. Duckie could hardly give a clearer indication that his claim to represent a genuine new deal is bunkum than his recently stated intention of increasing 'defence' spending by $54billion. We may believe in a genuine new deal when a President announces a massive reduction in expenditure on arms and also in their export, or even begins to pay down the national debt. I will not be holding my breath; it seems likely that it is impossible for the USA to ween itself off such drugs.

"I'm the king of debt. I'm great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me," said Duckie in an interview on CBS last June. "I've made a fortune by using debt, and if things don't work out I renegociate the debt...."

"How do you renegociate the debt?"
"You go back and you say, hey guess what, the economy crashed," Trump replied. "I'm going to give you back half."

Such is Mr Farage's 'real friend', who boasts about 'keeping his promises to the American people'! Unfortunately those dudes evidently live in a parallel universe to, say, that of the plain people of Ireland, who are still smarting from having to pay off debts that largely weren't even their own. I guess there are still a few Americans who believe debt is something that sooner or later, one way or another, has to be repaid, but Larry Kudlow in the National Review said, referring to Duckie's recent speech to Congress, "That is optimism. That is leadership. And that is greatness." A bit like our own Celtic Tiger eh? I can only see that as fawning and deluded nonsense, and I would hope that few of my countrymen have memories so short that they cannot see through it!


Such narcissism is less likely to hold up between those of different nations and languages. Our real friends are those who help us see the truth, a process that involves triangulating from points of reference beyond ourselves. That is why Europe today is a more promising entity than the USA, and also because Europe, and especially the Germans, remember too well how such trips as that end!
Europe must take up the age-old task of trying to weave the rope of human society around that Core which is at once its true heart but also utterly Other, beyond all our stupid human illusions, and even beyond our somewhat feeble efforts to understand what's up in this strange world!


***

In this blog, I am going to give the commentary on what is currently happening a rest, while I concentrate on writing a book about how the sea and other aspects of life taught me to see things as I do, and also to love the idea of a United Europe. It may even be called The Making of a European. I would love to be able to make certain people understand that we Europeans are here to stay, and why! I will post extracts as I go along, together with brief notes and photos if I'm doing some sailing.

Spring morning from Anna M.