From the Fractal Frontier, V.

Fiona and I are enjoying a very few days of calm at Horseshoe Cottage, before I head south again next week to bring the Anna M home for the summer. I use such moments of peace on the Gannetsway to look back, at the risk of sounding a bit like Peig  Seyers – ‘I am an old woman now, with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge' -  with her litany of death and hardship on the Blasket Islands.

I was astonished to discover that my two oldest grandchildren, even during their school days at an Irish speaking school in Dingle, had never read Peig, who has apparently been banished from the curriculum nowadays. Their Irish teacher said that though her language may be beautiful, her stories were all too miserable for young people. I call that sad! It’s over forty years since I read her, but what I recall is the courage and resilience and sheer joyfulness that shined through the writings of those people, living as they did so close to the ‘fractal frontier’.

I have been recounting how my family history was affected by the tide of evil that swept Europe in my parents' and grandparents' time. After WWII, when I grew up, life settled down in England as the demons appeared to be banished.  Yet of course the old Irishwoman, who never spoke a bad word of anyone, was spot on in her reply to the wag who asked her what she thought of the Devil: "I'll say this for him - he's never idle!" 

        Wait, there is a message of hope in all this. That security you may think you missed out on was superficial, and the cracks that are opening up in it these days will yield new life. That old Devil is beaten, forever!

From the Fractal Frontier, V.

I’m sorry that I shall have to carry on referring to that terrible double-act event, as I see it, World War parts I and II. It had most radically marked the generation who brought me up!  In trying to understand Teilhard and his legacy, I revert again to firstly considering his experience as a stretcher-bearer for 4 years during World War I; I shall have to quote the following passage at some length. It also expresses in a dramatic way what I mean by the Fractal Frontier.

‘I'm still in the same quiet billets. Our future continues to be pretty vague, both as to when and what it will be. What the future imposes on our present existence is not exactly a feeling of depression; it's rather a sort of seriousness, of detachment, of a broadening, too, of outlook. This feeling, of course, borders on a sort of sadness (the sadness that accompanies every fundamental change); but it leads also to a sort of higher joy . . . I'd call it `Nostalgia for the Front'. The reasons, I believe, come down to this; the front cannot but attract us because it is, in one way, the extreme boundary between what one is already aware of, and what is still in process of formation. Not only does one see there things that you experience nowhere else, but one also sees emerge from within one an underlying stream of clarity, energy, and freedom that is to be found hardly anywhere else in ordinary life - and the new form that the soul then takes on is that of the individual living the quasi-collective life of all men, fulfilling a function far higher than that of the individual, and becoming fully conscious of this new state. It goes without saying that at the front you no longer look on things in the same way as you do in the rear; if you did, the sights you see and the life you lead would be more than you could bear. This exaltation is accompanied by a certain pain. Nevertheless it is indeed an exaltation. And that's why one likes the front in spite of everything, and misses it." (The Making of a Mind, p. 205.)

Sitting in the comfort and security of English middle class life in the second half of the 20th century, what could one possibly make of this exaltation in the midst of what now appears to most of us as mere senseless carnage?  Yet at the time it appears to have been not unusual. Teilhard himself ventures to speak for his comrades, and whole nations after all had sent their young men off to that war with great enthusiasm. One thinks of Padraig Pearse’s apparently repulsive words:-  ‘the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed by the red wine of the battlefield’.

A generation later, men like my father seem to have had an ambivalent attitude. Theirs had indeed been a different kind of war; technology was more advanced, and the gung-ho sense of glory had dissipated, despite the fact that it could be more convincingly represented as a struggle between Good and Evil; but Dad fought the war out of a reluctant sense of duty, with absolutely no enthusiasm, as far as I could make out. On one of those rare occasions when he said anything about it, he told me with a quiet pride that he never consciously killed anyone, only popping off a few rounds in the general direction of German patrols in France early in the war. Luckily he always managed to be where the fierce fighting wasn’t, not just in France as I have recounted, but for example kicking around in the desert sands of Palestine with a few lads waiting to ‘stop’ the Germans if they came down through Turkey to attack the Suez canal and Egypt. They were what was known as a ‘tripwire’. Fortunately it didn’t happen.

It always puzzled me that the great British army never made use of the fact that he spoke good German, especially at the end of the war. I can only conclude that either he just kept quiet about it, or the Army was remarkably slow to recognise something useful in the line of communication. Anyway he always seems to have been an odd bod after his regiment was blown apart early on. He had three pips on his shoulder towards the end of the war (going by a photo, denoting a captain I think but I never heard him refer to it), but I would say he couldn’t wait to get out of the army and settle down to the married life that had been so brutally interrupted, just as it was beginning in 1939.
Down at Rye harbour when I was growing up, he belonged to a little community of sailors with small boats, tied along the old wooden jetty that had been built during the war for RAF sea-rescue boats. The highlights of  the season (holiday cruises excepted) would be the odd sail over to Boulogne of a summer weekend. There would be a bit of commerce on arrival with a purveyor of duty-free booze, a convivial meal Chez Alfred, a trip to the boulangerie in the morning for croissants and baguettes, and maybe Mass if my mother was of the party, then back home again to a final session boozing and yarning in the boats before another week’s work began. Here if anywhere, these men whose consciousness was so heavily shaded by war might try a bit of living with their memories, and also assuage their vague loss of and need for exaltation.

One of the more notable members of this little fraternity was Jack Hilton, an Anglo-Irishman who had a nice wooden ketch built by Tyrell’s of Arklow. He had been a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, had a farm in Sussex which judging by his hilarious accounts of his dealings with his bank manager was of doubtful profitability, and a certain air of never having succeeded in settling down after his experiences in the skies. One Friday evening in the dark, when my Dad and myself (aged about 14) were making our way along the wooden catwalk to the boat in preparation for an early start the next morning, what should we encounter but policemen pulling something heavy up from Hilton’s boat. The headlights of their car revealed the bloated red face of poor Jack, who had killed himself in his boat by taking the exhaust pipe off his engine and leaving it running….  So much for Never, in the field of human conflict, was so much owed by so many to so few!
Perhaps, however, Jack Hilton was finally unhinged by the fact that his friend Jack Merricks, who owned a beautiful little pilot cutter, had recently been washed off his boat and drowned on the dangerous  Rye bar while trying to rescue another yachtsman. When I think about it, he was the first of a rather long list of people, whom I have known personally, who have died at sea. How come this by no means puts me off sailing? Even as we try to domesticate the sea, venturing on it if possible only when the sun is dancing on little waves, do we not in a way still relish the odd wee taste of its destructive power?
There was another Anglo-Irishman in that little community in Rye harbour, who let their stiff upper lip relax as they sat around in their little boats in jeans and sweaters, drinking and smoking their pipes and chatting; mind you they were a far cry from the gin-palace mob who have largely taken over the image of yachtsmen today. He was a James Hamilton, whose father had been a small land-owner in Rosbeg, Co Donegal. Jimmy had plenty of tales of an idyllic childhood in that magic place, but it ended with his father taking to drink, and his uncle being shot dead by the IRA in the barber’s shop in Ardara, when home on leave in British army uniform. He made a voyage to Australia before the mast on a sailing clipper, then aged 18 was called to the trenches shortly before the end of the First World War. After the war he became a police officer in East Africa, and had plenty of stories about that too. There was nostalgia in him, but a remarkable absence of bitterness and indeed a zest for life, which he seemed to have picked up long ago on that wild and rugged coast of Donegal. He never went back there however, because ‘it is all so different now’.
Exaltation, enthusiasm à la Teilhard, was now constrained among those men to being out on the sea on a breezy day; the brotherhood that went with it now largely confined to their fellow sailors. The nearest that I myself can come to making sense of the afore cited passage from Teilhard is to substitute my early experience of fishing for his infinitely more dreadful experience of the Front. But any kind of exaltation was rare indeed in the grey post-war years of England, while the great British Empire was melting away like an ice-berg in the North Atlantic. I fear that cynicism and indifference have only increased their chilling hold on the numbed souls of men since, as indeed Teilhard foresaw they would. Where can we now find the motivation to undertake the massive task of building the new global civilisation that he also foresaw, and that the ‘onward march of technology’ demands?  It seems to me that we are going to have to take our chances again on some version of the Fractal Frontier!

Peig's village on the Great Blasket.

Spring Us A Change!

On Sherkin.

Fiona and I flew home to a cool though dry Ireland, but then over Easter the sky cleared and the Auld Sod stretched her limbs to the bliss of Spring. After some frantic work to prepare Horseshoe Cottage, thankfully helped by Ger from Cork, we were able to welcome two daughters and their eleven children, and inaugurate the new sun-room, unfinished but

Backgammon

serviceable. For this weekend we have come together with more of the family in West Clare, to christen our John and Andreea's new daughter, Iris.

This week I am taking a break from the autobiographical stuff, to post a comment on the political situation in the north-west of Europe, particularly the off-shore islands and France, what with the election there and the forthcoming one in Blighty, and the problems on this island, especially in Ulster.  

The English Problem (and the French, Irish and Scottish ones....)

The Irish may have the better part of Ireland, the Scots and the Welsh sort of have Scotland and Wales, but somewhere along the road to Empire, the English kind of lost England. Scratch most so-called English people, and you find that few of them are really English at all. Pace the ‘we got our country back’ crowd, this process barely involved the EU at all. It’s just that when one was effortlessly superior and busy being British, it was unnecessary and even slightly embarrassing to refer to the English bit. Nowadays, with even the Scots threatening to jump ship, one is having to ask oneself whether after all there might be any mileage in simply being English?

One used to be able to refer to one’s ‘kith and kin’, but this implies a rootedness in place which has largely gone by the board. This is a process which has been going on for a matter of centuries. Before the great scattering, one knew the people one was involved with from childhood, or at least one knew their families. Wider connections tended to be carried on the back of these personal ones. With the breakdown of this set-up, a lot of things in the line of religion, tradition and morality broke down. Into the gap galloped ideologies of Left and Right, but much good they did! Yet clearly, it is impossible to simply go back to that old rooted society. On what basis, then, can authentic identity and community be reconstituted?

This is no esoteric problem. It has often been pointed out that to have a democracy, one must have a demos, a ‘people’. The contemporary crisis of democracy translates into the question, what in fact constitutes a people? Since neither physical place nor race is adequate any more, as society has become more complex and multicultural, the problem has become sharper.  For a hundred and one reasons that the reader will be able to call to mind, it is of the utmost urgency to rebuild the sense of community and social solidarity, at every level; this calls for genuine participatory democracy and social solidarity. The alternative is ever more manipulation and exploitation.

How are we to discover in ourselves the ability to respond to our fellow citizens, to be response-able, to take ownership of our lives, and commit them as appropriate? One way or another, the big structures of society have to be re-rooted in personal relationships; this is how the Catholic idea of solidarity relates to that of subsidiarity. Somehow the macro-world has to be replanted in the micro, the bigger structures grow out of the more basic, and people have to prove themselves in practical, inter-personal and face-to-face community building before they are let loose on a more amplified level. This is all very well in theory, but how might it work in practice?

We have to get away from a winner-takes-all, confrontational style of politics to a consensus-building one where everyone’s voice is heard, every story taken into account. This in turn calls for the maximum degree of personal encounter and involvement. In practice local authorities have in recent years been increasingly emasculated in both Ireland and Great Britain. This may have been driven at least in part by the inadequacy of local authorities to deal with the complexity of modern life. The regional level of political power, between local and national, can help here. It has been neglected and needs to be revivified. In England’s case, four regions come to mind: the South-East or Greater London, the South-West, the Midlands and the North.

In Ireland too, greater regional authority would help. Of course, it would have to be in Ireland that the most northerly bit finds itself in the ‘South’. The present Irish border is a gerrymander, and a good place to start building a stable political set-up would be to reconstitute the province of Ulster; when faced with a blockage, it’s a good idea to start by clearing away lies and anomalies. In this case it would be easier to recognise a genuine physical and cultural entity in a restored nine county Ulster. The other three provinces of Ireland could also do with their own regional authorities, and the Scottish dimension comes into the equation as well.

In England it is unlikely that the Tories will go along with this kind of thinking. They are too heavily invested in the status quo. They fail to see, as career politicians focussed above all on retaining power, that their authority and effectiveness would actually be enhanced in the context of effective subsidiarity in both directions; that is, at both the regional and the continental level. As things stand, they are exhausting themselves trying to do everything themselves, and doing nothing well. They are indeed well into the classic formula for dodgy regimes: that of blaming Johnny Foreigner and looking for a good enemy, thus to distract the people. It is a sorry situation, and perhaps it is time for a Celtic Federation of Ireland and Scotland (and Wales and Cornwall, Brittany and Galicia?) to find an alternative way!

Subsidiarity is indeed a two-way street, with the various levels both informing and empowering each other. Only by all levels effectively ‘firing’ together can the challenges of a globalised world be met, and action really be taken to secure our tattered world with respect to sustainability, globalisation, automation and unemployment, climate change, ocean management, refugees, calling international finance to account, war and peace, etc, etc.

Chess.

Photographs (of better games than politics) by Ger Kavanagh and Fiona.

The Best and the Worst of Times - FF IV

The fortnight since Fiona came to Guadianaland has been the most

fabulous since we first came here three years ago. The early rains followed by generous sunshine seem to have been perfect, and now with the afternoon temperatures climbing into the high twenties, the hillsides are a riot of wild flowers, and one walks along the riverside path as if in an enchanted garden. The visual impact is reinforced with exquisite scents, laden with orange blossom, while our ears are serenaded with constant birdsong. We especially enjoy the golden orioles, the hoopoes and of course, the nightingales, that fill the air with their glorious song also through the calm and spectacular moonlit nights, even as we sit in our candlelit cabin on the smooth water.

Alcoutim from Sanlucar (and spot the 'Anna M').

There is nowhere better to be for these delights than our mooring, but still we have spent some time at Sanlucar and at Alcoutim, and have been getting to know the 'expat' scene better. Most of them sailed into the river in the first place, then got stuck in 'the Guadiana Glue'; and a very interesting crowd they are. One guy is of Eastern European Jewish stock, whose mother managed to get to England while most of her family was murdered. Another guy had a Dutch mother but a German father, which was no fun at all, growing up in Holland after WWII!

Fiona chatting with Alex.

By and large the British suddenly find themselves very insecure and upset, not having any idea where this crazy Brexit is going, and very angry at finding themselves deprived of the status of members of the European Community, through no will of their own. It appears likely to cost them dearly in terms of reduced pensions, as well as health and driving insurance and so on; they could also find the money they have invested in property severely devalued. For many, this would be their life savings, or they might even have loans on it.
There are also less tangible losses, especially in terms of basic goodwill. After all, they mostly realise that the Spaniards and Portuguese have had to exercise not a little generosity and patience in sharing their countries, even the way things have been until now. One has had this way of coping with problems, as indeed with Gibraltar and Northern Ireland, known as the European Union!

Steve with his log house.

Has the sense of security that my generation enjoyed gone for good? Was it perhaps only a passing moment, an exception to the usual human condition? What steps can we take to remedy the gathering sense of insecurity? Is the retreat into nationalism any kind of rational response? What alternatives are there? We are going to find ourselves increasingly exposed, I think, to that 'Fractal Frontier' of which I have been writing. Have patience while I look back on my life; in the end I think some answers may emerge to the above questions!

PS Since I wrote the above, we have returned to Sherkin. Here's wishing you all a Happy Easter. 

I am looking for crew for the sail north from the Guadiana to Sherkin, or part of it, in late May/early June. There is the possibility of leaving/joining in Galicia.

Fractal Frontier IV

We baby-boomers born just after WWII tend to be regarded as a privileged generation these days. We have indeed enjoyed peace and rising prosperity in Europe, while there are grounds for doubting that these can be sustained in the future. But even though the dark memories were thrust away and on the whole ignored, they coloured our culture with a sense of brokenness in the years when I grew up. They were still only too close. In my family there was additional poignancy because my father was a quarter German himself, and seemed to me to have been particularly scarred by the war, though he hardly ever referred to it. His mother, my grandma, would however talk about Germany quite a lot, and it particular would be at pains to speak of her fond memories of visits to her cousins in Baden-Wurtemberg, of the beautiful culture there and the fun they all had at the wine harvest. There was also French blood in the family.

My father too spoke of his fond memories of his German cousin, and how he had canoed down the Rhine with him in the thirties. He also occasionally spoke of how he had been to a Nazi rally with him, had refused to do the Nazi salute, and been told by that cousin's mother that he must go home to England before he got them into trouble. 'There will be war', she had said sadly; 'they only think of war!' Her son fought all the way through it, Russian front and all, and then killed himself in a motor bike crash soon after he came home.

My Grandma maintained that those southern Germans had little time for the authoritarian and militaristic Prussian Emperor. Her father had left Germany as a draft-dodger at the beginning of the century. He made some money in America, and then went back to Reutlingen, intending to open a baker's shop there, but although this was years after the event, someone reported him as a draft-dodger, and someone else in the Town Hall warned him. He went to London and opened his German shop there. Back in those days, German things were fashionable there. Nobody imagined the catastrophes that were to come. Before they did indeed come, he had done well, but then of course he had to close. He died of a heart-attack in 1916, soon after my father was born.

Grandma had married a thorough-going Englishman, and now of course had to hear how the Huns were the Devil incarnate. She was the only one of my grandparents that I got to know well, and one thing that particularly interested me was that she did not buy into the prevailing myth that the struggle against them had been an archetypal battle between Good (us) and Evil (them). She would make dark remarks about the British not being perfect either. If she was alive now, I think she would be saying that if they put a fraction of the effort that they put into winning the war into building the peace, things would be different indeed. Anyway, it is rare to find an Englishman who can understand that it was no fun for the Germans to suddenly find themselves under threat from East and West, and it was a bit rich of the British to complain that they were out for world domination. Having set about 'ruling the waves', was it really so surprising that others wanted a slice of the action too?

The Astons, my paternal grandfather's family, had been as I make out 'upwardly mobile' lower middle-class Birmingham businessmen, of Baptist and socialist convictions. My great uncle Aston, as I learnt from his diary, had great hopes of the Labour Party. My grandfather was found to be too good at fixing aeroplanes to be sent to fight, and spent the war in Essex doing that. Grandma seems to have found the situation demoralising; at any rate she fell out with him and they were divorced. He died just before I was born. My father had a poor relationship with him, and evidently had a difficult time as Grandma struggled in London, working as bursar for Bertram Mills Circus. She managed however to send him to public school and to put him through Cambridge at Selwyn College.

So Dad was a victim of the 'German problem' before ever WWII came along. At Cambridge he read history and law, flirted with communism, decided then that though he was agnostic, in his words, 'if one was going to be a Christian one may as well do it properly and become a Catholic'. Afterwards he joined the Indian Army, looking for a bit of adventure more than anything else, as far as I make out. He met my mother, whose father was in the tea business in southern India, but they decided there was no future for the British there, and Dad got a job back in England through family in a needle business. There they were a few months, newly married, when my father was called up.

He spent several months kicking around northern France in the ‘phoney war’, but was lucky enough to be sent back to England to do a 'gas course' on Salisbury Plain just when the blitzgrieg came through. Having taken a destroyer back to Cherbourg and a train up towards the front (in a horse box with chevaux 8, hommes 20 written above the door), he was told to forget it and given a party of waifs and strays to shepherd back home the way he had come, because ‘his lot had been wiped out’ by a direct hit on the mess or something; so ironically, he owed his life, and hence I owe mine, to the fear of gas warfare.

He was to describe to me when we sailed back to Cherbourg in his boat, in one of those rare moments when he said anything about the war, their dispirited tramp through the streets, being booed by the French, who were feeling sorely let down. I never discovered until after he had died how his comrades in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment had been in the rear-guard of Dunkirk, and had the misfortune, surrounded and out of ammunition, to have to surrender to an SS unit, who unlike the bulk of the German army took Hitler’s orders to take no prisoners seriously, rounded them up into a barn and massacred them with machine guns and hand grenades. He never mentioned this. Such were the scars he carried in his soul, poor man!

The hope that such things could never happen again were of course eventually invested in that European Community. My father did not forget the humanity of those on the other side in the war, profound though his disgust was at the way they were misled. I would love to hear what he would say about these smarmy soi-disant patriots like Mr Farage! I like to think that my feelings of disgust and sadness at the way they are misleading their countrymen would have been something for us to have in common!

Chapter III 'On the Fractal Frontier'.

Morning Calm in Alcoutim

It doesn't seem much like it this morning in Alcoutim, but, says Mr Alistair Heath, in words grandly blazoned on the front page of the Daily Telegraph web-site for some considerable period:-

‘We must leave the EU quickly – it is falling apart faster than I thought’

The odd thing about Mr Heath is that he does not appear to realise that the whole world 'is edging ever-closer to the abyss', as he puts it, and the United Kingdom is pretty well to the fore. Actually one might just question the 'ever-closer' bit; human life has forever been on a knife-edge, and arguably it has been a tad closer to the said abyss on a few occasions in the past; however, more than ever, we are all in this together.

Meanwhile, the alternative, which we may presumably describe as 'peace and prosperity', is a difficult project that calls for everyone's active participation. If there is one political entity more than any other which could be said to embody this project, it is that same EU. Both in the intentions of its founders and the spirit in which it functions, it is an effort to build the peace.

I elaborate in the third chapter of my autobiographical musings below; it's my little effort to inspire care for and joy in this wonderful world, while engaging in an old man's serious business, which is enjoying it, with the flowers in full bloom and the birds in full song!

On the goat track to Sanlucar.

 'On the Fractal Frontier' Chapter III.

The short-hand headlines of history, 'the Reformation', 'the French Revolution' tend to be set up as immutable facts of our past, from strange times when some evidently thought it necessary to die for their beliefs. What has, for example, St Thomas More having to lay his head on the executioner's block got to do with us? We tend to consider that we are superior to the lot of them, from our vantage point of enlightenment, and that it is ridiculous to imagine that some such protagonist had a lot more right on his side than others; thus there is little scope for seeing those dramas of the past as ongoing stories in which we too have our parts to play.  It is a surprise when such old conflicts show beneath the surface of the present, the Reformation for example mysteriously re-emerging in terms of contemporary economics and politics, dividing Britain from Europe and to an extent northern from southern Europe, not to mention in our own little microcosm of Ireland, even in simple terms like attitudes to money and financial responsibility.

Meanwhile British upper class Catholics, such as those who support an institution like Downside, sometimes evince a certain inclination to protest their loyalty to the country's Establishment somewhat too loudly. The long years of persecution could be said to have done their job. Despite the fact that England was largely Catholic for a thousand years before the Reformation, Catholics in England seem to sometimes feel the need to prove their loyalty, untainted by regard for nefarious Latin wogs like the Pope or the King of Spain. Still, the school colours were in fact taken from the red and gold of Spain, to which country or its Belgian possession Catholic gentlemen used to send their children for education in penal times. When the (Downside) Community of St Gregory was eventually able to establish itself England, it had to tread carefully indeed; hence just one strand of what one might call the schizophrenia of the place....

However, in the atmosphere of protest that was sweeping the West in the ‘60s, one was inclined to be agin every kind of establishment, British, European, even Western in general. That war in Vietnam was a watershed, for my generation at least. One particularly startling development was that it suddenly became all too plausible to consider that the 'Anglo-Saxon' knights of righteousness, far from being as they imagine themselves to this day as the guarantors of world peace, were in fact themselves about the biggest threat to it! In the knowledge that England had more or less passed the baton across the Atlantic, we who prided ourselves on some genuine enlightenment had to take a new look at the British Empire, not to mention the budding American one!

I was of course greatly abetted in this by the fact that most of my best friends happened to be Irish, even if I myself only had one Irish great grand-mother, on my mother's side, a Madden from Co Monaghan. Growing up with a thoroughly English identity, I now have to apologise to my old Irish friends for my condescension. How was it possible, having down the years treated the Irish so appallingly, for the English to patronise and look down on them? How could we have been so blind to the fact that the great British Empire could be said to have begun with the savage subjugation of Ireland and Scotland?

We who had grown up with atlases of the world painted in vast swathes red, along with some blue for the French and a few other bits and pieces of colour for the dodgier colonial powers of Europe, finally came to recognise that the days of our supremacy were coming to an end. We had been educated with attitudes of racial superiority that were becoming ragged even before the Great War, but only now and still perhaps only by a minority was it being admitted that they were in shreds. Moreover, many remained caught up in the great dream of progress, education (our way) and democracy for all, still causing a great deal of grief despite being an improvement on what went before.

The Empire may have been theoretically replaced with an approach of pragmatism, enlightened self-interest and living for the day, but this wasn’t working out very well either, as plenty of the men who educated me understood, while despite so much oppression, others still clung to a backward looking nostalgia, as they do to this day. Yet many of us put our hopes in some kind of new consciousness being born. Was the prime focus to be American, European, or something else? All were probably naive and rather confused, but at least the 'Beautiful People'

A Beautiful Person.

tended to have this in common: a conviction that for anything worthwhile to emerge, that might save the world from further catastrophe, it had to come from people who were capable of thinking for themselves and were true to their own hearts and minds. Our naivety stemmed from a failure to realise the power of the forces at work that remain fiercely opposed to any such thing, and the many different guises they come in.

Anyway, the combination of events and circumstances had the effect of destroying my confidence in the whole system I had been educated in, and making it extremely difficult to go through with getting my degree at Cambridge. The idea of swotting up authors, going into an exam and churning out four essays in three hours, was anathema to me. It was to recruit even literature in the service of the System, the Empire, or whatnot; exploiting and devastating our intimate inner consciousness. Accordingly the level of awareness, the quality of engagement with reality in that supposedly prestigious university, seemed to me pathetic. One great thing that can be affirmed about Downside in those days is that there was some serious questing going on. If there was any serious intellectual life at Cambridge, it was over specialised and truncated, but more of that later.

It was looking as if the counter-culture's Brave New World would have to be again put off for another day. Some of my friends took to drugs. As, by the eighties, grim ‘realism’ had overtaken so many more, as they applied themselves to the serious business of making money, we who see ourselves as survivors even well into the 21st century may be forgiven with still wondering about what might have happened, had we succeeded in getting our act together; could the world have been spared the subtle spread of new tyrannies and the severe trials that it is now undergoing?

After that generation, the System did appear to become more sophisticated, even sensitive and humane. It gradually changed its spots, donning the clothes of the liberal and progressive. In this year of 2017, it is actually hard to know which of the two great American parties is the most dangerous, while drugs have tended to become more subtle. The rebels are as much of a counter-culture as ever, though bizarrely this current American president seems to be trying to steal some of their clothes. The orderly current of life may seem to have been largely restored in places like Downside and Cambridge. I remain sceptical, yet I hope to be spared the fate of the old men who simply shake their heads and bemoan the chaos of our time. It would seem to be too late for Downside to take up the place it once had within English Catholicism; I think it had its chance, and blew it. More of that anon!

Through all the turmoil, it seems to me that the Catholic Church has been travelling more or less in the right direction. The least trendy pope of recent times, Pope Benedict, had this to say in 2011 - I quote from the National Catholic Reporter:  ‘during a July 24 vespers service in the Cathedral of Aosta in northern Italy, where the Pope took his annual summer vacation July 13-29, toward the end of a reflection upon the Letter to the Romans, in which St. Paul writes that the world itself will one day become a form of living worship, the pope said, "It's the great vision that later Teilhard de Chardin also had: At the end we will have a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host. Let's pray to the Lord that he help us be priests in this sense," the Pope said, "to help in the transformation of the world in adoration of God, beginning with ourselves."’ The great gift of Teilhard and other Catholic thinkers of the 20th century was to help us to love God and to commit ourselves to the troubled journey of humanity in one movement of the heart and mind!

Across that gulf of chaos, Christ crucified, a renewed humanity is indeed arising. Meanwhile our ideas of ‘chaos’ have embarked on a massive modification in the half century during which Benedict himself must have been pondering the conundrum of Teilhard.  There has emerged, along with other radically new concepts in physics, that bastard child of mathematicians and physicists known as ‘chaos theory’.  One of its main protagonists, Benoit Mandelbrot, invented the word ‘fractal’. He took it from the Latin fractus and frangere, meaning ‘broken’ and ‘to break’. His new word worked in both French and English (he ended up with dual French and American citizenship). His background adds to its resonance, for Benoit Mandelbrot was a Lithuanian Jew who was born in Warsaw in 1924. Anticipating the Nazi invasion, his family moved to Paris when he was aged 11, then when war came to Tulle in the Corrèze, south-central France. He was lucky indeed to escape the death-camps, not to mention the fate of the 97 victims of the Waffen SS, who were hanged from the balconies and lamp-posts of that town in 1944.

This appalling incident was but one small instance of a flood of horror that had engulfed Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. In such outbreaks of ‘chaos’, marked by such gross inhumanity, where could we possibly find hope? Well we did; and thanks largely to Catholic statesmen, it found political expression in the European Community.

And it finds another kind of hope every Spring!

Dad's Army Strikes Again, and F.F.II.

'So, as Britain leaves the European Union, and we forge a new role for ourselves in the world, the strength and stability of our Union will become even more important… And when we work together and set our sights on a task, we really are an unstoppable force.'

Or she might have said, 'the only way I can think of pulling this country together is to find a good enemy, one that everyone of us (and that includes the Americans) might believe in! Maybe, if the Arabs won't do, that old EU will!'

How Mrs May could come up with words like that, in Glasgow of all places, is beyond me. I suppose we have to be thankful that it wasn't in Belfast! She really seems to think she can take 'Great Britain' back to some mythical time when that country was not disunited and dysfunctional, but ruled the world while everyone knew their place and had jolly lives doing what they were supposed to do. I have to pinch myself to believe that yes, I really did grow up there! It is a good time to try to remember what is was like....

The Fractal Frontier and the Making of a European, II.

There was a monk at Downside in Somerset where I went to school by the name of Dom Luke Suart. He was a scientist by training, a chemist. He suddenly found himself teaching sixth-formers religious instruction in the early 1960s, when another monk had said to the Abbot that he felt he was not getting through to the boys, and could he be given a break? Luke, whose watch-word was to ‘seek’, had recently been ‘lit up’ by Teilhard de Chardin, who had provided him with a basis on which he claimed to reconcile his scientific knowledge with his faith as a Catholic and calling as a priest. Now he set about applying Teilhard’s vision of a world in evolution, stretching towards its consummation 'when Christ will be all in all', to religious instruction.

I do not know whether or not he realised that the Vatican’s doctrinal office had recently concluded that Teilhard’s  'works abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine... For this reason, the most eminent and most revered Fathers of the Holy Office exhort all Ordinaries as well as the superiors of Religious institutes, rectors of seminaries and presidents of universities, effectively to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers'. One suspects that Abbot Christopher Butler must have been aware of this.

Dom Luke however was very intolerant of anyone who manifested the tendency of ‘cabbages’ not to think for themselves.  What’s more, this was the 1960s, and a very different world was emerging to the one represented on the wall of the long corridor down which we used to walk to the room where he taught. It was lined with photographs, five rows high if I recall aright, of young men who had left that school to die shortly afterwards in the battlefields of France. If any of them had there objected, unlikely as it may have been, that even if they did manage to gain a few yards of mud it was hardly worth leading men over the top into a hail of machine-gun bullets which would inevitably mow them down, it is to be supposed that they would have been disgraced as a coward and shot as a traitor. ‘My country right or wrong’ had been the cry, not ‘Hold on now Sir, but what are we trying to achieve? Are we just trying to see if we can make the Hun use up all his bullets?’.

One is inclined to suspect that the chaps reared to thus serve the British Empire in schools like that had only been encouraged to think for themselves within strictly limited parameters. I happened to think that probably in both the world wars there had been a genuine clash of civilisations, and for better or for worse, the emergence of the liberal democracies of today depended on their self-sacrifice. But now memories of the wars were already fading, and the most popular narrative of the new generation was that at long last we were finally emerging from that long, dark tunnel of conformity, when whole generations of young men had simply been sacrificed to the hidebound notions of a bygone age. 'The times they were a’changin’. Please get out of the new way if you can’t lend a hand'….

The headmaster when I went to Downside, Dom Wilfred Passmore, taught history by dictating notes at breakneck speed, for us to scribble down and subsequently regurgitate in essays. He would mark these with a dash of his pencil wherever we got one of the points from his notes in, and add up the dashes to produce a mark. The one redeeming feature of his classes was that he would be delighted to cover the material which he needed to for the syllabus with five or ten minutes to spare, put his feet up, and initiate a real discussion. I remember him starting one such session by recounting how shocked some Benedictine fathers in Rome had been when he was showing them pictures of the school, and they had come across some photographs of boys in the CCF carrying the old First World War rifles we used to parade with. “You mean you train your boys to carry guns?” Such discussion however was in the line of playful relief from the cynicism of the essential work, which was to train us to regurgitate all that stuff, for the purpose of passing exams and ‘getting on’, with a minimum of imaginative or critical engagement on our own personal part, keeping whatever thoughts we may have of our own to one side, while maybe even enjoying a little jazz!

It seems such men still did not realise that they were playing with fire. Dom Wilred, otherwise known as Pod, was pushing the limits of his eccentric kind of pious cynicism with regard to education and in particular the exam system, successful though he still was. A few years later, his successor was having to cope with the likes of a revolt on the morning before a general parade of the 'Combined Cadet Force', when the cricket pavilion where the visiting officer was to take the salute was daubed with ‘Make Love Not War’, and the uniforms were thrown into the swimming-pool. These were the years, it should be remembered, when the Civil Rights Movement had set the Southern USA ablaze, and pictures of nonviolent black protesters being savaged by cops were flashed across the world's tv screens, while the Rev Martin Luther King received his Nobel Peace Prize.

There was a resonance between those beaten and murdered 'Negros' and our own poor inner selves, as there was (and remains) a resonance between militarism and an oppressive class system. Even Downside was not immune to the fundamental shifts taking place in the spiritual and sociological basis of Western civilisation. England was taking its time about recognising it, but the wars had knocked the stuffing out of the class system, of which the racial segregation in the USA was but an extreme example. It had been taken for granted in the past that there were in society ‘officers’ and ‘other ranks’, and while it was mostly admitted that access to promotion from one to the other was desirable, the basic set-up was taken for granted on all sides.

The advantages were not entirely one way. The ‘other ranks’ remained to a large extent rooted in their own communities, even when they went to war in their local regiment. Officers were expected to lead their men ‘over the top’, the young ones that is, and also to be able to communicate and to think for themselves, in judicious amounts, and therefore to be educated. At the same time they had to be 'loyal'. It was expected that they could move around wherever in the world the Empire required them, and suitably represent it, while keeping the natives in order; so if for example Catholics were to take their place in it and serve it, the odd outfit like this was needed to train them up as ‘Catholic gentlemen’. Your working man, if he was not utterly ground down, was perhaps more free to think his own thoughts! He did not have to don the spiritual straight-jacket of 'bearing the white man's burden'.

People had been thinking their own thoughts somehow, and now the class system had lost its aura. Probably some sort of class system is inevitable, but it can only work satisfactorily with an underlying sense of solidarity and basic equality. When these are absent, the whole idea of service breaks down. Anyway the middle class ‘public servants’ and backbone-of-the-country types, doctors, solicitors, gentlemen farmers were beginning to be priced out of 'public school' education. It was more the slick city financial wheeler-dealers and cosmopolitan super-rich who could afford those fancy fees, that kept on going up as the cheap manpower provided  by monks became scarcer. It may have retained its appeal in terms of climbing the social ladder, but it was becoming more and more difficult to identify it with any kind of idealism, rather than the gospel of 'enlightened self-interest', let alone with the vocation of a monk.

In fairness, those who battled on in the system were determined, one must suppose, to ‘go down fighting’, upholding certain values in a world which stood in desperate need of them. How could someone steeped in Gregorian plainchant and even polyphony call that jazz racket 'music', let alone rock? Dom Wilfred went on to become Prior and then Abbot. Dom Luke, on the other hand, had found his religious instruction course suppressed, had suffered a ‘nervous breakdown’, and fighting off the effects of heavy sedation, had jumped out of a window and killed himself. This fact only emerged ‘sideways’, because many of the monks in private conversation had too much integrity to go along with the official story that Luke had died of a heart attack or something. But this in itself exacerbated the growing opposition between ‘the establishment’ and the ‘radicals’, so characteristic of those years. Their failure to reconcile their differences has left us with the extreme polarisation we suffer from today.

I found myself in a difficult if not untenable position as head boy in my last term, even to the point of wondering at one point whether I too should jump out of a window. I had been a good son of the set-up, and suddenly found I had lost faith in it. I said something, no doubt naively, to the Head Master, about the matter having been handled most unsatisfactorily by trying to sweep it under the carpet, and I was merely told not to ‘bite the hand that reared me’!

By extension of course one got cross with the Church.  Any child of the ‘60s was bound to despise the methods of the Reverend Fathers of the Holy Office. The painful admission that actually they did have any kind of a valid point, with regard to Teilhard for example, was to come very slowly, much later.  However some of my more cynical and down-to-earth friends had rapidly concluded that Dom Luke was for the birds, if not mad, and Teilhard much the same. Personally I was both attracted and repelled by Luke’s teaching, but marginally more the former, and I went on to read anything by Teilhard that I could lay my hands on. Only recently, half a century later, do I feel I have resolved in myself the conflicts this situation evoked. I shall return to the tragedy of Luke, but there's more that needs to be said about its wider context first.