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!