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.