Facing North and FFFVIII.

My effort to fix the 'Anna M' 'leaks didn't turn out very well. For one tide the bilge pump seemed to be very quiet, but then we were hopped off the bottom by a bad wind blowing straight into the dock, which swamped a little speed boat on the pontoon beside us, and we were back to square one. The upshot is that going off-shore to the Azores is out; I shall have to nurse her up the coast and see what can be done in Galicia again. We'll be off this Friday afternoon....

Ger with John Peere in Ayamar, Ayamonte.

Ger made an heroic trip back to Ayamonte on the train to get a new liferaft; the old one was 5 years out of date and too big anyway. The new one goes in the deck-box and we have a much better view forward from the cockpit. I have another problem in that the dongle is working badly, if at all, so this is a hasty note before lunch in Olhao. But what I have below, From the Fractal Frontier, is already prepared.

Madonna of Culatra.

Part VIII Soldiers back from the front, sailors home from the sea, in fact anyone who has recently paid some kind of visit to the fractal frontier, are reckoned to be 'high on testosterone'. As usual in the scientific age, people tend here to use a little superficial knowledge of the way things happen as an account of why they happen, which is a lot easier than grappling with the deeper reasons for them. Things happen by way of a whole lot of different factors on different levels of reality, and we get ourselves into all sorts of trouble by simply alighting on the one that happens to suit our mentality or circumstances at any particular time, and pronouncing that that’s the 'real' one!
Dostoyevski famously stated that ‘it is a perilous thing to fall into the hands of the living God’. The mysterious gift turns out to be a call, which activates the coherence, the person in us, otherwise known as our soul. It undermines the disassociations that we generally deploy in order to maintain control. We are taken out of our comfort zone, exposed to dangerous forces that take us out of ourselves, and caught up into realities which transcend our individuality. Then we may experience something of the exaltation that Teilhard felt in battle.
It is a primeval business, frankly on the whole inappropriate and embarrassing in this age, where machines amplify the possibilities for narcissistic illusions of power and control so effectively. Frequently we settle for expressing ourselves in strictly contained and stylised forms such as sport. But after all human beings change slowly, and what has been established over the millennia can hardly be changed as it were overnight.

We have an inescapable need to know God, but all our concepts of Him fall short, and with half-forms of exaltation, when we become disillusioned, we find ourselves in a dangerous and vulnerable place. Our room, once swept clean of its demon and purged of the dreaded poison of boredom and annihilation, may be promptly reoccupied by him along with the seven worse ones referred to in the Gospels of Matthew (12:44) and Luke (11:25). So when Dom Luke, struggling with disenchantment, appeared to have practically fallen in love with one of his students, and when he subsequently lost his mind and killed himself, could one describe it as anything but the work of a troupe of demons?

It would seem that the ancient Greek philosophers would have taken it very easily in their stride, and indeed there is a bizarre and schizophrenic puritanism at loose in the contemporary world, which looks with horror at the notion of any intense relationship between a mature man and a youth, however chaste and spiritual, while being very proud of its tolerance of homosexuality. But how indeed was this particular visitation of the fractal frontier to be coped with? It is in setting up the battle between morality and feelings that the demons excel.

For right or wrong, Downside was always conscientious, in my experience, in not tolerating feelings such as this. From this distance, I feel very sorry for the likes of Dom Aelred, headmaster at the time, though his demand that I bite not the hand that reared me still rankles. But what, one may ask, was the nature of Jesus' relationship with 'the beloved disciple', who laid his head on Jesus' shoulder at the Last Supper?

It is helpful for a start to remember that demons are fallen angels. What’s more, one is caught up on this busy frontier in the whole mystery of the Cross, whereby our salvation was effected through what appeared at the time to be the ultimate triumph of evil. I particularly sympathise with the state of mind of St Peter and his friends soon after all the devastating heartache of Christ's passion, and even after their encounter with the risen Lord, when they took a boat out and went back fishing. It is one of those vignettes in the Gospels that smack of an authenticity beyond mere human imagination. So many years later, I got my dear friend Patrick Pye to paint a picture for our house of the Lord as they found Him in the morning, cooking breakfast on the shore of the Sea of Gallilee.

It is very difficult to settle down to the same old boring, humdrum business of ‘getting by’ when one has breathed some heady air of  exaltation, any kind of exaltation. Perhaps the default method of coping with this situation is to fall in love. Disappointed in one or another form of exaltation, one turns readily to this other one, that is pretty much always available, especially when one is young. In the darkness where one's sense of self flounders, we instinctively search out some other person in whose eyes perhaps we hope to recover our own sense of self. Even at the best of times, humanity is haunted by a sense of loss, a need to recover some mysterious lost completeness, and disappointments bring it on.

Teenagers are particularly vulnerable. I was more or less continually in love, with at least one person and not necessarily of the opposite sex, from the age of about 14 onwards. In the wake of Luke’s death, I managed it in a more serious manner than usually, in spite of the somewhat unpromising environment of a boys’ boarding school, even as I wrestled with, as it had now become, the sheer impossibility of exam work. I suppose I was fortunate that I already had a place at Cambridge, though that scholarship I was supposed to be working for would have been nice. As a practical attempt to break out of its hot-house atmosphere and to at least make some kind of practical move, myself and a few friends had got involved in the local village youth club, getting to know the lads, who naturally scorned ‘them college toffs’, and helping in some of the activities there.

It was run, I think under the auspices of the British Legion, by one Commander George Beal, a retired sub-mariner who worked for the Admiralty in Bath, and whose wife was rash enough to invite us round to tea. It was St Valentine’s day, 1965. Thus I met their lovely daughter, then a shy girl of seventeen, with bewitching eyes, by the name of Fiona. But actually George was her step-father; her father had been killed in a car crash when she was five. The fractal frontier again, lurking in those eyes!

She occupied most of my thoughts for the last few weeks at school. On the odd afternoon we went walking the countryside, and reading poetry in the Spring sunshine by some hedgerow.... I suppose we both thought it would be all over after I left, but we kept writing letters to each other, and managed to visit each other's homes for the odd weekend. Then Fiona's family moved to Scotland. I was at Cambridge by then. It was a fraught and painful situation for both of us. If we had been sensible, we would no doubt have settled for going our separate ways. Couldn't we agree to part for a few years, till we established ourselves in life? But whatever about Fiona, I came to feel that I had something that was too precious to let go of. I still think I was right!  It was just as well, because devastation is about the only word to use to describe my state of mind for much of my time at Cambridge.