On the Dream Side, FFF XVII.

Every decent boat has a story, one might almost say is a story; the men who built them, the dreams they started with, the people who sailed in them, the adventures they had are all woven together with those bits of wood. Yes bits of wood, for there's really not much chance of weaving anything into one of your hard synthetic hulls! But of course there is the decline too that is part of being alive and which synthetic things just try to ignore, pretending to do away with all that tedious maintenance, until they are just scrapped. At this stage, my old boat is fighting for her life, but she'll get through. There's plenty enough life in her yet to see me out, I think. Happily, boats have a similar life-cycle to human beings!

New ribs at last!

It's that old fractal frontier again though, as I wrestle with the difficulties of getting things done. This Alec Lammas who is doing the job reckons that 'Portugal is the land of broken dreams!' He reckons that's why he likes it too; 'it's what makes it so real'. Well I'm still fairly confident that he is being real about this job, but the time frame is being sadly stretched! At least we can chat about boats and people who we have in common, always intriguing to discover. In this case there is Graham in the Peel Castle and John Clouet on Guernsey, both of whom Alec knows, and he has sailed in the Leenane Head since she was bought and converted by a Breton guy.
She was a Zulu, a class of boat built for the Congested Districts Board at the time of the Zulu war, in the Isle of Man I think. I remember watching cattle being slung out of her in Cleggan, in the days when she was old Paddy O'Halleron's cargo boat, in and out to Inishbofin. I fished a couple of turbot seasons around those parts. The grassy sward round Cromwell's Castle provided a good spot to sort out nets that had got horribly twisted in a storm. Talk about dreams! I remember offering Paddy 'a penny for his thoughts' as he watched a hoard of young back-packers come up the steps on the old stone pier at Cleggan. "I was thinking of watching islanders come up those steps with their shoes tied around their necks, and them going walking as far as Derry to get a boat to Scotland and the tatty hockin'."

Well there's one good thing about this lark today; it's very simple and congenial living in the Anna M even without her saloon, and in this little boatyard of Nazaré.

Strange terrain of the dunes to the southward

It's warm but not too hot and I have a fine tent over the cockpit and its table; the fractal frontier could hardly come any better. Even if I am damned alive about the job in hand, the memories come welling up for these dispatches!....

While Fiona and I were living in London, moving to Somerset and having two more children, the Downside situation rumbled on. Peter, Kevin and Anselm were back in residence there, though Sebastian had gone to the States. Our other special friends, among that last generation who had held out a promise for the future of the monastery there, were Tom and Clem, and also Rod and John near our own age. They all left in the end. It was of course part of the much bigger crisis of Catholicism world-wide, not to mention the world itself!

In England a deal had been struck since the penal days of violent repression. ‘Keep it to yourself, religion is a private matter’. If it helps you to lead an upright life, without running foul of society in general, that is fine and you will be left alone. But meanwhile, whatever about the Catholic Church, English society at large had found itself in trouble. In trying to make sense of our faith, we needed also to address that society; indeed we did (and do now more than ever) have something urgent to say to it, something big, and it had seemed just possible that Downside could provide a basis for doing so.

My own idea at least continued on from the kind of project we had contemplated at Liverpool. We did not have a clear agenda, but I thought we could gradually move away from the Public School, post-imperialist one, in favour of a place where young people of all backgrounds could spend at least a year considering where they and their world might be going, and maybe developing alternatives to what was on offer.

When I was born in 1946, Britannia was bloodied but unbowed. Her Empire had survived the war, and indeed there was perhaps a more general confidence that she brought Goodness to the world, leading the benighted peoples to the Light. Now that such an attitude was being severely called into question, some folks had to try to figure out rather more clearly what the Light actually is, beyond mouthing slogans about ‘democracy’ and so on, or succumbing to the compulsion to wage endless futile wars allegedly to promote it.

Behind this political crisis lay the even more fundamental multiple crises of capitalism and technology, and of the whole culture of the industrial world. Catholics were inclined to think it back at least to what Freidrich Heer, in his book The Intellectual History of Europe, described thus: ‘The inner European struggle first crisis in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the national languages superseded Latin and with it the ancient, Catholic metaphysics and grand form.’

There existed a particularly Catholic temptation of trying to go back to that past. There were also plenty of other fantasy worlds that one might envisage escaping to. Many of our contemporaries employed drugs to try to find an alternative to what is considered the ‘real world’ of business and power politics, competition, ‘getting on’ and warfare. We however had glimpsed other possibilities, and although we ‘dropped out’, we eschewed those drugs. We were trying to realise the belief that Christ really did offer another way, and not just on the personal and individual level, but in all aspects of human life, even the economic and political ones!

It was time to reaffirm, as even the official Roman Catholic Church had by now done with the Second Vatican Council, that salvation, ‘the Good’ or whatever you called it could not be simply applied to poor brute humanity from the top down, by one imperialistic system or another, be it whatever mixture of the transcendent or the worldly.

In the case of the British Empire, this mentality, while losing credibility, found a new lease of life by hitching itself onto the American one. Not of course that this called itself an Empire. Part of the special complication of our times is that we have become too sophisticated to give things like that their proper names. A sense of history and of where names come from is largely lacking; the old folk cultures were more informative. Admittedly one should beware of labelling things, but surely it is helpful to recognise the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or Anglo-American culture as Calvinistic? Heer shows how Calvinism also eventually infected Catholicism through Jansenism. It has often been hard for people to keep faith with the goodness of God and of creation; it was especially so in the conditions of the nineteenth century.

I like to think of myself as a simple man, trying to find his was through the jungle of reality with a few basic truths. I hope I do not oversimplify when I say that Western civilisation emerged within the ‘Caesaro-Papist’ kind of imperialism, but when this became over-stretched, the nation state was erected as the new bearer of salvation. This was done most successfully by Calvinism, which also managed to salve the consciences of the rich as they put the people through the hell on earth of famine, industrialization and Dark Satanic Mills. The tender Mother of God was squeezed out of men’s imaginations, only a few backward peasant girls still had room for her, and helped Catholics not to forget her!

Now we have got to adapt to a world in which the nation state in its turn can no longer cope, mothers and fathers alike are all over the place and the rich don’t appear even to have any coherent thoughts beyond their own power and money, but meanwhile those Dark Mills have to be done away with and a new harmony with nature and with each other has somehow to be found.

The Austrian Professor Heer, as anyone who reads that book of his which I referred to above will understand, was far from a sentimental Romantic type. He managed to get himself imprisoned by both the Nazis and the Communists in his time. However he most elegantly  sets out some of the above problems, in words that very much resonated with Fiona and myself.

‘Modern society is constructed out of prohibitions and compulsory demands, which are all more or less abstract and which offer far less freedom for good cheer and happiness than the customs of the old world did. It was easier to laugh and sing and dance in the old society, because people were tied to each other by flexible, tangible bands. Men could be cheerful in the fields, because they trusted nature. They knew that everything in the world and the world above was animated. As Walter von der Vogelweide called his walking stick Herr Stock, so they gave names to cows, trees and objects. A few names for houses and the names of boats are all that remain of the old world. Everything else has been stripped of its living dignity and reduced to mere matter.

'Two characteristics marked the ancient community’s healthy relationship to its environment: a strong sense of colour and form and a highly developed communal memory. When the industrial revolution invaded the village, the people very soon lost their sense of colours and forms. The local handicrafts began to disappear and the fine regard for design which had been part of their houses and tools died out. The marvellously firm colour compositions of the local folk costumes were also conspicuous manifestations of the communion of man in his community with nature and things. Inorganic and unsuitable houses were placed in the midst of the village. Girls lost the firm taste for what is beautiful in the forms and colours of their wardrobes. At the same time the people lost their memory….’

Yes indeed, and he wrote that in about 1950! I added to myself, even if they still put names on boats, for the first time ever men are making them inorganic and on the whole more and more ugly, but we haven’t got back to the sea yet…. We were still struggling with the idea of trying to mount a response to such problems at Downside, though more and more it had the feel of some kind of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast or of Kafka’s Castle; an incoherent maze of a place whose denizens had lost their way. Despite the soaring neo-gothic abbey church, with its tower still etched on my imagination, my favourite part of the sprawling buildings was actually the stone-yard, with its practical old buildings and workshops. Amidst its heaps of building materials, it also boasted an old-fashioned printing press and a fine astronomical telescope; this happy combination was much more to my sense of sanity than the acres of playing fields for rugby and cricket.

It could only have happened at Downside; during WWII a Fleet Air Arm plane on a training flight actually crashed into a crowd of boys while they were watching cricket, killing nine of them. This tragedy still lurked in the memory of the place when I was there. At least it did have a communal memory for it to lurk in, but I do wonder if there is anything left of it today, and if so, whether all this that I have been writing about has any place in it? I observe that if a community loses its history, it loses also its future!

By now we had been living a while nearby, and I used to enjoy long conversations with Peter, who managed to survey the disintegration of our dreams with penetration but also humour and charity all round. He had come close to being elected Abbot, but it hadn’t happened. Lucky for him, maybe! He went teaching in an ecumenical theological college in Birmingham. Kevin went off to marry a dear French teaching nun whom he had met at Liverpool, and another school had the benefit of their dedicated service. Sooner or later all our friends in the community left. Peter Tom, Paul and Anselm had an outfit going in Wales for a time, where they tried to finish the education of lads with problems who had been thrown out of mainstream schools. It didn’t last. Anselm reared a family while teaching adults in Liverpool, but I won’t run ahead with his story. Perhaps the very best that may be said for all of us is summed up in the last paragraph of Heer’s great book:-

‘Language is being reborn in the work and suffering of a few silent individuals. Out of their struggle, a handful of words will emerge, which will be Europe’s contribution to the One World which has begun to take shape on all the continents of the earth. A few words will be a great gift. In them a thousand years of experience will be condensed. They will bear the knowledge and conscience of European man to all mankind. They will be the harvest of a millennium in which men have listened to the WORD, tried to understand it and to answer when it has spoken.’
I wish, but it does sound rather grand! Fiona and I, now that Bella and John had joined Luke, had a mighty struggle on our hands, with little room for grand ideas. If I could only make her happy, rear our children well, and lead some kind of authentic life, I felt I would be doing well. I had made a start in re-educating myself after all that heady stuff. Still, one has to hang to a basic orientation, or one will surely come to grief. How about addressing the problem from the other end, bottom up?

The Igreja de São Gião, behind the dunes, has quite a shelter; someone seems to have a dream for it! It is said to be Visigothic, VIIth century, and on the site of a Temple to Neptune.