FFF XII

Summer has finally arrived in Ireland, and to prove it I even went for a swim yesterday in Horseshoe Bay. With fine weather came a tribe of grandchildren, so

there's not much time for writing; but there's not much to blog about anyway. What is there to say about contented times? I have been meanwhile doing little jobs about the house, while also trying to put money together for the job below in Nazare on 'Anna M'.
There's no wriggling out of the for better or for worse bit in the case of boat-ownership. If your boat is crocked you must try to fix it, and quickly. Boats die if they are neglected. Well now, of the hundreds of people who have sailed aboard Anna M, and even those who just might like the idea of doing so, surely there are some who can afford a few euro to help fix her up? You have the chance of a week's sailing aboard this autumn on the Algarve. Please see last week's blog.... Meanwhile, Anna Legge seems to be taking to life with the Anna M, despite the difficulties. I am hoping she will do some of the things I havn't time for, like driving the Facebook page.

ps - very sorry to hear about the fires in Portugal. Is this our future?

I continue with my account of a life On the Fractal Frontier....


FFF XII I have occasionally encountered strangers in conversation who assumed that my convictions were the result of ‘successful brainwashing’. I hope that I have shown that this is far from the truth, unless one means something very different by the term ‘brainwashing’ to what they meant. They tend to imagine that any faith-based education must be in the line of those madrasas wherein the Saudis for instance indoctrinate vulnerable young men, having them for a start learn off the Qur'an by rote. While we Catholics are capable of understanding that there may be a more positive side to all that than the West appreciates, and that we may even possibly have something to learn from it, nonetheless since Vatican II the lesson has been well learned that faith is a pilgrimage that everyone has to make for themselves, in their own time; besides, Christ himself asserted that, beyond what he tried to convey in his earthly life, that which Holy Scripture reveals, we still have much to learn in the course of the journey. It is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity that enables us to move beyond the notion of a static deity, whose self-revelation has been fixed once and for all; instead we are introduced into a divine community, a nexus of dynamic relationship.
Unquestioned assumptions and unexamined lives are that which may lead one to suspect real brain-washing; victims will refuse to engage when questioned, possibly announcing that 'they are offended!' 'Hallo, yes, sorry about that, but so what?' I am tempted to reply. There seems to be a fierce outbreak of 'offence' these days! Meanwhile our minds tend to be so battered, cluttered and mired in ‘stuff’ that we all actually stand in need of a real brainwash now and again. Perhaps that's been the most important function of sailing in my life. Certainly it was a very positive counter-balance to all that education, when I was growing up. The whole business seemed to have been far too cerebral.
Yet one has to watch out. As privileged members of the ‘affluent society’, we are good at compensating and distracting ourselves. Still sea-faring does tend to underline the imperative of a coherent sense of meaning, of a viable narrative to shape our course, or to put it another way, to find the right pitch for our song, to take responsibility and to face difficult decisions. One way and another, this imperative had impressed itself upon me in absolute terms; any society which tries to do without these 'cardinal virtues' will fail, decaying within and without; and claptrap about ‘Western’ or ‘British’ values fails to fill the bill. Note however that the intellectual dimension is far from absolute. Those who go in poverty, uncompensated by ordinary human consolations, stand in particular need of such hope, and the faith and love that goes with it, as do also young people generally. Luckily for the poor, the uneducated and the young, it is their very poverty which enables them to access more easily the 'divine community' which provides them.
The Golden Age we were supposed to be entering of universal literacy and general Enlightenment was already, in my youth, giving way to incoherence and a pervasive sense of meaninglessness. That was then. Now we have a Big 'Chief of Democracy', for whom wealth is a great deal more important than truth, who has weapons at his fingertips fit to destroy the Earth several times over and wants yet more of them, who expresses himself in banal and ill-conceived ‘tweets’, in denial of the threats posed by over-dependence on fossil fuels and the midst of endless savage acts of violence stemming mainly from the attempt to preserve the wealth of the oiligarchs. We also have for example the bizarre tendency to assume that such contempt for the natural world is to be associated with the denial of the facts of life implied by the concept of homosexual marriage, witness the many references to the DUP at present that begin along the lines: 'The gay-hating, climate-change denying and fundamentalist Northern Irish Party'. Our world is struggling with a very confused and inadequate culture and resultant politics, grossly distorted by massive imbalances in wealth and power, marred with horrendous violence, but for all this rich in new possibilities for communication, sustainability and general flourishing. How is the mess to be untangled?
There was once a time when even the printing press caused horror, churning out reams of material without the sweet mediation of being painstakingly written by hand, with much loving embellishment; and perhaps more importantly therefore without the mediation of an actual human context. With the advent of printing, knowledge could apparently be merely bought and sold; it no longer depended on a community, but on a few bosses; it went on to lose its footing both in our own imaginations and in the physical business of living that may provide us with authoritative and constructive images. Nowadays, with knowledge flickering everywhere, it is frequently at the mercy of interests which have no rationale but their own power; they tend to hate transcendent forms of knowledge that threaten to thwart their aspirations. What ‘sense of purpose’ might we require, besides serving them?

So back in the day, we who had shared that uncertain epiphany at Downside found ourselves fragmented and unsure about how to deal with our newfound words of hope. The digital revolution was still the preserve of boffins with big clanky computers, but Marshal McLuhan’s ‘The Media is the Massage’  was out, and we were aware that there was massive potential for good or ill in the electronic media. 'new worlds, i suggest, are born but not made, and their birthdays are the birthdays of individuals,' wrote e.e.cummings, which is all very well, but they don't just happen and one does have decisions to make! I had clearly blown the opportunity of some kind of Establishment career, of going to the Foreign Office or something as my father had dreamed of for me. (The idea had been attractive at one stage, but how glad I am now that I didn’t go down that road. I really feel for any genuine people there having to cope with the current Brexit mess!)
If my and Fiona's actions had something of the nature of an eruption from the underground, the forces of law and order or whatever were soon on our case. While we were helping to run the Liverpool Simon Community, an open house for the homeless, with me saying I was not going back to Cambridge for my last year there, my father and Fiona's mother teamed up to sort us out. Poor Fathers Sebastian and Christopher in St Mary’s were under the cosh for giving us succour; I vividly recall poor Christopher sucking on his pipe as they laid into him, when he happened to get caught in the line of fire. Well, I agreed to go back and finish my degree, on condition that Fiona's mother would give her consent to our getting 'properly' married. Somehow Sebastian as parish priest managed to get us through the necessary hoops in time for this to happen before the new academic year started in mid October.
It was a low key affair. Poor Isabel, it was no doubt not the wedding she had dreamed of for her daughter, but we were happy. It was simple and to the point, with Mass at St Mary's and a party in 'Ma Boyle's' pub, featuring Guinness and oysters! Back at Cambridge, we were very lucky to be able to rent a little terrace cottage from my college, just across the road. I can't say I followed the course much, but I did do plenty of reading in the year that followed, and even ended it with a 3rd class degree. We had heavy-duty conversations with our small circle of friends, including Dom Clement Birch, a Downside monk who was studying there, while Fiona taught herself to cook from Elizabeth David's books.
Was there any viable way of starting a family in sight? We both started reading books about remote island communities, from St Kilda via the Blasquets to Tristan da Cunha. This was a few years after the volcano erupted there, and the population had to be evacuated to Blighty. I always remembered an interview with one of the islanders when they were going back to their speck of land in the South Atlantic, as most of them chose to do. The BBC man was puzzled as to why anyone would want to go back to live in such a hard and remote place, once they had experienced the delights of modern Britain. Finally, somewhat in desperation, he asked whether they were not afraid of the volcano erupting again? 'At least we didn't make it ourselves!' was the reply. He was referring of course to nuclear weapons. That kind of destruction we have so far been spared. How to survive, and lead an authentic life in tune with the insights we had been given, was as unclear as ever!