A Bit of Paper.

Two lung-fulls of Irish air, after getting off the 'plane from Portugal, and soon I had to take to bed for 3 days with a shocking chest-cold. Doc says I have also some 'atreal fibrillation' into the bargain and have to start minding the old heart. This has left me prey to some introspection, instead of for instance braving the weather like Fiona with  a respectable family representation for the Pope’s Mass.

En route to the Pope's Mass, by Fiona.

Meanwhile, my sister-in-law Linda has come up with a pretty document, to wit, the Oath of Allegiance sworn by my German great-grandfather to ‘His Majesty King George the Fifth, His Heirs and Successors...’ on the 26th day of September, 1912.

Charles Albert Beck had dodged the Prussian Emperor’s draft and been in America for some years, before returning to his native Reutlingen with the intention of opening a bakery there, and then having to flee to London after being tipped off that someone had reported him as a draft-dodger and he was about to be arrested as such. Little did the poor man realise the catastrophe that was so shortly to materialise, otherwise he would have chosen some other place to open his German bakery. He died of a heart attack in 1915, as far as I know.

Such quaint documents have rattled around in attics down the years since without anyone taking them very seriously. Nowadays, with millions of stateless persons in the world while our own citizenship counts for massive privileges, as opposed to those others for whom the lack of the appropriate bit of paper constitutes destitution and virtual imprisonment or maybe worse, it may be appropriate to take a new look at them and consider carefully their significance (if we do not find it too painful to do so). Fortunately things are not so bad hereabouts (yet?) that one dare not say where one stands now and again, thank God. One of the best sayings to have come from Pope Francis is that ‘one not alone has the right to express oneself, but also the duty’!

Unfortunately I for one have long since ceased to be disposed to grant my allegiance to any of their Britannic Majesties. It is nothing personal; in fact I quite like Prince Charles, but the institution seems to me obsolescent beyond recall; in its political dimension for a start, how is it remotely compatible with the notion of popular democracy, whereby decisions of vital national interest are apparently to be taken by plebiscite? In what way has the Queen managed, or even attempted, to assert her declared authority in Parliament? As for the other dimensions of the Monarchy, the alleged moral and indeed spiritual leadership involved, it all seems a classic box of English fudge, no good and well passed its sell-by date anyway! About the only thing that one might say in its favour is, where are the alternatives? We can only hope that they will emerge in the course of the catastrophic upheavals that no doubt are coming round again. One thing is for sure: the massive inequities cannot go on for ever.

As an interim measure, I swore allegiance to this Irish Republic back in the ‘70s. While I still am happy to support it in law, the Irish Republic has not escaped the chaos of democratic disintegration that has overtaken its bigger Anglophone neighbours, has far too little to boast of in terms of addressing present problems, and has also forfeited much personal spiritual affirmation by taking its cue from the international Liberal Agenda. It's not by any means that I disapprove of the separation of Church and State. However the ‘progressive’ establishment is anything but focussed on the future, and having got the present so wrong is unlikely to be effective in addressing its challenges.

In the seminal matter of abortion, their smug self-satisfaction was gently but very neatly debunked in the words of Pope Francis as he flew home:- 'The problem of abortion is not religious. We are not against abortion for religion, no! It’s a human problem and it should be studied anthropologically. To study abortion, beginning with the religious fact is to skip over thought....There is always the anthropological problem of the ethics of eliminating a human being to resolve a problem.'  

If it is to get its priorities right, democracy needs to be rebuilt, from the bottom up. I am hardly saying anything new. I have spent my adult life watching the decline of the current version, which bases itself on an affirmation of individual autonomy that is of a largely spurious and illusory nature. Actually the very heart of the crisis is in the U.S.A.; the rot really set in there with the Vietnam War and the assassination of President Kennedy, which has appeared to me to be by no means unconnected with his decision to pull out of Vietnam and his refusal to really back the attempted invasion of Cuba. Nobody however has really been held accountable for his murder, and the fact seems like an unexpurgated sin that has dogged American politics ever since, constantly dragging them down.

Whatever about that, the tyranny of the ‘majority’ has to be repudiated, and genuine representatives installed at the higher levels who have proved their worth and sense in the course of real work and achievement at the grass roots. They should be held to account by the communities they represent, newly empowered by communication technology, and by no means merely take their line from some political party or ideology or leader, let alone from the diktats of big money. 

This is the agenda that the European Union must accommodate itself to, if it too is not going to die away in the coming bonfire of vanities! Meanwhile we must work together with whomever we may in good faith, concentrating on William Blake’s ‘minute particulars’ and building up mutual trust and understanding, with a common sense of responsibility for our dire problems, as best we can.

Entretanto, muchas gracias, Papa Francisco, por haber venido. It is a privilege to unite our holy sacrifices with yours, offering up our disasters and miseries and frustrations with those of Our Lord on the Cross, so that we too may participate in the eternal rhythm of death and resurrection. 

As for how my poor old Anna M  is to make her way to new life, I shall be back on the case with the next blog!

Book II. Beyond the Judicious Retreat.

Horseshoe Cottage was a great delight in those weeks of fine weather, and the bay was actually warm enough to enjoy swimming in. This warming climate admittedly has its advantages for some of us. I helped

Ger Kavanagh to finish plastering the outside of our new extension, and then it was time to head for Nazaré and another stint on the Anna M.

Arriving in a heat-wave.

The next and final item on the agenda of fixing the hull had to be tackled, and accordingly I dived under the cockpit floor. There were plenty of nasties there, and the decision was soon taken to rip the whole cockpit and steering out so that they could be tackled properly.

It was rather easier than tackling corruption under the floor of the Church, it has to be said, despite the Master's warning about certain people being cast into the sea with millstones round necks. Still I can't help throwing in my comment that the element of hypocritical hysteria in the stories about things that happened mostly half a century ago is somewhat given away by the fact that they are cast almost exclusively in terms of paedophilia, whereas in the majority of cases it was a matter of homosexual relations with young men. Did anyone ever notice any discussion of the borderline and distinction between them, or of 'the problem of homosexuality amongst the Catholic clergy', in the Irish Times or the Guardian?

The weather became cool for Monday morning, and Stephan Colsman showed up to my delight. He is a joy to work with and very steady, and was refreshed after taking a small boat down through the inland waterways from Germany to Marseille. The cockpit was soon torn apart, also the last remaining rotten ribs, and now at last the Anna M was on her way back to health and strength again. I have well over 2,000 copper nails driven in through the new ribs, with Stephan riveting them on the inside.

It is an odd thing how these cups of suffering have to be drained to the dregs! That lovely cockpit with its beautiful old wheel! We all like to hang on to our illusions, stick to the easy way out, as long as we possibly can. There was a copy of War and Peace in the Calypso when I sailed to England with Alec, if one may talk of 'sailing' when there are always two diesel engines thumping away beneath the floor, so I beguiled the boredom with rereading Tolstoy's epic. I actually enjoyed it more than I did 54 years ago, when I considered his work somewhat heady in comparison with Dostoevsky.

If, in Jungian terms, human perception occurs by way of the four modes of intellect, intuition, feeling and sense, then I suppose those artists will appeal to us most whose work agrees with our own makeup; still, the more they can bring them all into play together, I would say the greater the result, even if so many people these days just don't seem able to cope if they can't put things in their tidy boxes. As a novelist, Tolstoy is perhaps a bit heavy duty in the intellect department. However, I mention him because his portrayal of General Kutuzov and his tactics struck me forcefully; he overcame Napoleon's Grande Armée in the course of much judicious retreating, including even the abandonment of Moscow, much to the consternation of the Tsar and his court in St Petersburg. I somewhat sillily compare it to my abandonment of Anna M's lovely old cockpit, steering wheel and all. It will be gracefully retired on the wall of our new room, and the old boat will find herself being steered at the flick of a button.

Yes, I have been thinking about it long enough, she is going all electric. If I don't do it now, I never will; a case of the old man in a hurry. But it also happens to be a case of a planet in a hurry. At long last it is getting difficult not to be thinking, if the house burns down, and we ever happen to be in any way called to account, what did we try to do about it? Alright, there are always plenty of excuses for sliding out of responsibility. I myself tried not to face the Anna M's need for a drastic overhaul as long as I possibly could; however, I did so before she sank; better late than never!

Indeed, we all have our constraints. One interesting question for me just now is why those Lynch electric motors, if they are as good as they seem to be, are not already much more widely used? Perhaps it is just to do with the fact that Cedric Lynch was a bit of a maverick and eccentric, didn't have the right qualifications or hit the right buttons as he threatened to cut rather a lot of ground from beneath the great capitalist corporations of this world? A bit like the way the drugs industry reacts to homeopathy? But then some people just can't cope with things that come by way of a different mode of perception to what they are used to; they can't even cope with different languages to their own!

To what extent are such blockages maintained and indeed reinforced by certain powerful interests? I think for example of Brexit. I wonder in whose interests it may be to maintain ways of thinking that have led to so much misery in the past, to people maiming and killing each other in vast numbers? Well, here's to all the people who prefer sharing their gifts, listening to each other's languages and enjoying each other's company! There's plenty of that about Nazaré,

Nazare market

which I do enjoy, even if it is a bit too crowded this time of the year. I generally say it's the cars rather than the people who do the damage. It has to be said that I am looking forward to taking that Sherkin ferry again shortly!