The Last Post of Book I.

Anna M at Sherkin Island in 2010, by John Aston.

Deliberately going to live on a remote island says something both positively and negatively. Well, it is a common human experience to feel alienated from one’s society, and surely nothing new.  The pain of being ‘cut off from the herd’ goes a long way towards explaining why human beings can so passionately embrace both light-heartedly absurd group enthusiasms, like those of football supporters, or more sinister ones of a political, ideological or even spiritual nature. But what might constitute a sane and rational response to a sense of alienation? Well, what causes it in the first place?

Not being heard, for a start. Certain things are important to you, but the world ignores them and shrugs them off. One’s questions go unanswered, even unacknowledged. If one digs to discover why, there is resistance, resentment that the question should be insisted on. How dare you disturb me, demanding that I respond to awkward queries and challenging my assumptions? Most people, most of the time, are too lazy to examine themselves in any radical sense.

Eventually however, one comes up against the final questions. What is to be done about this or that dreadful problem? What is it all for anyway? What is the point of living? Yet perhaps the world was never more determined not to answer them. Even the liberal contemporary establishment seems to experience them as a dangerous threat. One is inclined to conclude that they fear there is no point in living, though maybe they merely fear that any answer to such questions would constitute a threat to their ability to do as they please and to live without anyone being able to hold them accountable.

The Irish Constitution begins however, ‘In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred’. No doubt the secularists would change this preamble if they had a chance, but why bother, once the meaning has been sucked out of it? And what meaning can it possibly have, if one cannot agree where such authority, the basis of such accountability, is to be discovered? Not alone have they spent their major efforts in discrediting its traditional seat, but nowadays they tend to deny the very existence of any such authority. Hence the refusal to face those ‘final questions’; unfortunately however, human life becomes simply impossible without some viable answers to them, and, while our human societies will always be of a provisional and unsatisfactory nature, they cannot thrive at all without a basic consensus in these matters.

The results of that refusal are plain to be seen all about us, and the more dramatic victims include such youngsters as the 23 year-old grandson of a friend of mine, who died of a drug after a party the other day. They are victims of us all when we refuse to answer the questions they are actually schooled these days not to pose. Does one spend one’s life getting more and more frustrated and crotchety, trying to work a system that has lost its way, or maybe does one try to strike for something new? At which point, is one merely taking off into a fantasy land? How does one avoid falling into some kind of schizophrenia? What kind of connection must one maintain with what is called ‘the real world’, ‘as long as we are in this body’?

St Paul’s answer was faith, in the Lord and also in the ‘great act of begetting’ that He has initiated and continues to sustain; but we must have signs and symbols of this Faith, words and structures to give it effect! There has been a widespread attempt in recent centuries to do so primarily on a national basis, but today it is no longer possible to maintain the fiction that our lives function primarily on a national basis. Hence it is not just wrong-headedness that has sucked the life out of, for instance, that Irish Constitution. No amount of huffing and puffing by, for instance, Brexiteers, will put life back into national myths. On the other hand, they are right when they say that institutions like the EU can be hopelessly remote from 'the action'.

This can take place on all sorts of different scales and levels at the same time, and the trick is to somehow integrate them. While I believe that the Catholic Faith is vital to this process, it is not helpful just to throw it at people, off whom one knows it will probably bounce, as some kind of abstract system; nor is it designed in such a way, being thoroughly earthed in physical process. One does not cast pearls before swine, but one does try to plant little seeds.

Catholic social teaching proposed the idea of subsidiarity. This is not to be envisaged in merely regional terms; zones of concern of one kind or another are equally relevant. One of my particular interests is Fisheries Policy, and how this may be made more functional and, as a quid pro quo, accessible for fishermen; less a matter of dysfunctional 'command and control'. This fits my approach of coming in sideways to the big questions, with what Hilaire Belloc called ‘the common sacrament of Mankind’- the Sea, which teaches with an authority that nobody who experiences it at all can deny.

Taken from the Sherkin Lt. Ho.
by Jamsie Durrant.

Belloc sailed his little boat about the British and French coasts with no engine. I am hoping to get the Anna M  back in the water with an electric drive that will be primarily an extension of the power of the sails, but this will nonetheless involve a slowing down, even one might say, a limitation of one’s horizons. Sometimes anyway breadth is only achieved by a lack of depth. My limited energy, I expect, will be fully stretched upon the Gannetsway, from Scotland to south of Spain. Digging deep in this zone, and with the help of the powerful action of the sea, I try to discover and expose that wonderful pearl, that buried treasure that makes life worth living, and may yet enable us to avoid destroying this beautiful world, through a combination of boredom, laziness and disgust.

Where do we start? One possibility is by doing our best to reply honestly to the least of questions that are sincerely put to us, promptly and without evasion. How can the Common Fisheries Policy be made to work? How can we really wean ourselves off fossil fuels, fast? That's just a couple of the more salient questions relevant to the Gannetsway. Diving down deep into the sea, let us seek those shimmering answers! For they are there yet. These are William Blake's minute particulars if you like, without which good intentions become vacuous or even worse. However if Faith means anything, it involves the conviction that the answers are there for those who seek them!

This post is bringing to an end the first Book of Sailing the Gannetsway. I am looking for a publisher to bring out a printed edition. There will be more to come, after a few weeks' break, as we discover whether the Anna M makes it to a new lease of life as an electrified, autonomous sailing boat....