Living in Bubbles?

It is one of the major thrills of sailing, denied to those who simply start their engine when the wind gets slack, to be in a becalmed boat when a gentle breeze picks up, and the trail of bubbles reappears along the side. One of  my best childhood memories is of peering over the side of a small sailing boat, down into the water gently rippling by, and at a little trail of bubbles appearing beside the bow and being left behind in the wake. Each bubble has its own unique integrity, different from any other, apparently sufficient unto itself; and yet they form a trail, a string, a chain; together they live in the wake until they fade and pop.

Whale-watching in 2005

     Present circumstances are unfortunately just right for the mentality of those who would rather prefer the image of a chain to that of a trail. They get nervous about people who are outside of the box that they are supposed to be in; it is worse when they get to don some kind of uniform, worse still when they wield real political power. How distressing and daft are the stories in the news of people who have crossed oceans in a small boat, only to be told somewhere on arrival that they cannot land!

     You may describe it as a bubble or box, but living in a boat is indeed a bit like living in one. "Isn't it very claustrophobic, shut up in a boat in the ocean!" said one of my adult grandchildren. "But it's all about being in the ocean, and nothing could be less claustrophobic!" I replied. Still, one is couped up in the boat, and moreover, however reluctant one may become to arrive, one does not really belong in the ocean, and we do have to have a destination, or else we are merely adrift until we pop; meanwhile, one needs to understand the sea and the sky, as well as being well organised aboard; our lives are inevitably all part of some system. If we recognised this, we may be able to drop the talk of living in 'bubbles', and think of ourselves as each sailing our own boat, even as we follow the Golden String*? Then again, having just been out in the garden trying to defend my broad beans from the present nasty summer gale, I might think about 'pods' or 'bunches'.

     Anyway, I would like to think that there are plenty of people out there who have been managing to use this extraordinary time of lockdown to consider what they are at and where they are going, and at the same time, where we are. At such times as when we are lucky enough to be relatively free of the usual struggle for survival, we have extra time to examine the framework, structure and purpose of our lives; all too rare an occurrence, it has to be said! 

     This cannot be merely an individual matter; yet we are all too inclined to fall back on ready-made answers, the familiar left or right wing formulae, tribalisms of one kind or another. I would not wish to deprive them of all validity, but it is most important to do some thinking for oneself now and again, and examine our habitual reactions. We must at least seek to understand where the other bunches are coming from, and as Robbie Burns had it, 'to see ourselves as others see us!' As a sailing boat makes progress by virtue of the opposing pressure of wind and water, so a person of catholic disposition makes progress by listening to all sides of an argument, even when disagreeing with them. It has been called 'loving our enemies'.

     Spells of peace and quiet in isolation, quietening the clamour both within and without, are necessary for us to dispose outselves to listen and to hear, dare I say, to pray? We cease to drift as we begin to feel the pressure of the wind, indeed, the Spirit. The land that we are aiming for appears in the empty ocean.... But all too soon, we find ourselves back to trouble and strife!

      In this world, we rarely find ourselves in the blessed zone of equilibrium and sufficiency. In terms of wealth, there is genereally one set of problems 'below' this zone, and another 'above' it. It's the same with the wind for a sailor. In the big picture, having too much money is surely rather like having too much wind, and believe it or not, having too little wind can be every bit as bad as too little money, especially if the sea is disturbed by distant turbulence. In Sherkin we have been living a lovely quiet life recently, but one does feel the turbulence from afar.

     It seems that until lately, the program was relatively simple; that pandemic had to be reined in so that health services would not be overwhelmed and so on. Now we have to raise our gaze and see where we are going. The situation has been more or less stabilised, but the virus is not going to disappear any time soon. If it is anything like colds and 'flus, it will erupt with increased ferocity next winter. People long to 'get back to normality', but that does not seem possible; there is no going back to where we were.

     Yet neither is it easy to imagine how life will work with this virus around. 'Social distancing' seems highly problematic. Can it be seriously intended that, for instance, there should be no more crowding onto buses and trains? How many jobs simply cannot be undertaken while conscienciously keeping 2 m from other people? Not that people are taking it too seriously, from what I see. It could not possibly be done in a fishing boat, for a start! Do we want our lives micro-managed by technocrats anyway? Maybe they just reckon that if they ask for two metres, they may get one, and at least it will not be their fault if it all goes wrong. 

     Before ever the pandemic came along, mediation between individuals and the state was weakening; its technocrats were closing in on all sides.  It seemed to me that the life I led, and on the whole loved, as a fisherman, was becoming impossible, and surely this is true for all sorts of small farmers, artisans and traders; the people I have tended to regard as 'the salt of the Earth', living as St Paul had it 'peaceful and religious lives', or as the Spaniards have it, 'en paz y en la gracia de Diós!' Not of course that this is the first time that the human race has been confronted with impossible situations, existential crises; only perhaps the global scale of things now and technology give it a new edge.

     Would we really want to go back to where we were? Can we tolerate yet more and more wealth being siphoned off to play financial markets, 'invest' in useless things like gold or bitcoin, or waste on arms, or buy property that the owner has no real need of? Environmental pollution out of hand and threatening to destroy the planet? More and more people forced into precarious living? Less and less real job satisfaction and peace? Even solidly productive people denied the possibility of a place of their own to call home? More and more problems of mental health? The individual more and more isolated, in danger of being crushed? Apparently less and less awareness of the presence of God?

     There very evidently needs to be a massive rebalancing and restructuring on the practical level, where the matters of wealth and land must be in play; but can we expect the states to undertake it? Or supranational organisations? NGOs or individuals? Or all of them together? How can it possibly happen? How about the Universal Church lighting the way? Hmmm, how about starting with the practicalities and seeing if some directions of travel might work? After all, when one has been 'lying to' during a storm or a calm in the ocean, one is inclined to head off on whatever course is easiest according to the wind and the waves, so long as it is generally in the right direction!

     The restructuring will entail much more emphasis on empowering small communities as well as the individuals within them. These are not mutually exclusive, but complementary; and not to be understood as undermining the state or international organisations; rather all will be empowered to be more effective in their proper roles. We are back to the Principle of Subsidiarity, upon which the EU is founded, even if it has a long way to go in practising. Particularly in these coronvirus times, national states are inclined to bite off more than they can chew. In the words of Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno,  'the State has been overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties - to the great harm of the State itself.' This is before they get around to trying to repay all the money they are borrowing, perish the thought!

     We all like spending a lot more than paying. A favourite trick of politicians and pundits is to magic the paying bit away, to hive it off on someone else. For responsibility to be taken effectively, it has to be located from the start at an appropriate level. There are indeed some problems that can only be addressed on the continental level, more on the national level, and even more on the local and personal levels; having started on the appropriate level, you then need to get the different levels working together. The new communication technology offers possibilities for making this happen that were unimaginable in the past, but we are up against institutionalised structures that are hard to change. To unpick them, we have to start by addressing the situations of the multitudes trapped in disempowerment, while deprived of the basic ingredients of human well-being and dignity, - food, meaningful work, housing, clean air, access to nature and so on.

     So to get back to bubbles, how about redirecting the billions being currently mopped up by the rich and powerful to financing a new kind of society? I would even say, to  picking up a trail that was departed from in England some 500 years ago, when King Henry VIII despoiled that nation's monasteries in order to follow his favourite pastime of making war on his French, Scots and Irish neighbours and to buy the allegiance of his barons. The subsequent establishment of the illusion that this was all for the people's good and general enlightenment was surely one of the greatest propaganda coups  of all time, even as they loosed a tide of beggars on the world!

     No doubt King Henry found great relief from his inner demons by heading off in splendid style to have a go at the French, but there is plenty of English history written to make out that his wars were all about defending his great Reformation from that nasty Pope in Rome.  Ah well, the great British Empire was on the way, and some people have been living on this myth ever since!

     Some of those monasteries had become too rich and powerful for their own good, but the concept that they engendered, of a society focussed on a community that functioned as the local centre for prayer, art, liturgy, learning, education, production and welfare of all kinds, health care and hospitality, where at least work, accomodation and subsistence in a humane and dignified context was guaranteed for all, seems to me one very well worth revisiting! We have a daily reminder of that ruined legacy, a couple of fields away from our cottage here on Sherkin. It is past time to disestablish the bloated industrial cities and put an end at last to the misery and insecurity that goes with them. I'm still dreaming of bubbles, trails, pods, boats, whatever; however we choose to imagine our future lives, we may surely do well to call that legacy to mind!

*Sherkin Abbey.

     *cf 'The Golden String', by Bede Griffiths.

      

Boring!?

A teenage grand-daughter complains that the Coronavirus is ‘boring’, and please can we stop talking about it? One can readily appreciate her point of view; it must be very tiresome for a youthful social butterfly to be confined to quarters, hearing the same old doom and gloom day after day. Even our youngest daughter, who promptly baled out of her job in Blighty at the beginning of the lock-down and made off home to Ireland, where she is lucky enough to have family with plenty of space, takes the line ‘why should she spoil a great chance for a holiday with her little girls by listening to the same old ghastly news?'

Baltimore Beacon from Sherkin Lighthouse.

But surely it is going to have a huge impact on the world? Can we possibly begin to make any sense of this hugely confusing moment, or begin to see what might lie ahead, and if there is any unlikely chance that we may be able to influence it? As for my dear wife, she invariably finds some job for me whenever I get my head stuck into such little problems. And as for this blog, it started out nearly five years ago as a sailing blog. How did it end up involving all this other stuff, first Brexit and The Ducky, now Coronavirus?

Public concern in the Anglosphere has lurched from blanket coverage of the one mega-story to the other. Now we can see the continuity more and more clearly, and apparently to a quite extraordinary extent in the USA, what with The Ducky shamelessly trying to exploit the frustration of those chaffing at the restrictions of lockdown, as if everybody doesn’t find it difficult.

For any sane society or individual person, obviously it is very difficult to get the right balance between responsibility and prudence with regard to the virus, and ‘opening up’ both their personal lives and that of the economy. For this reason if no other, we need to struggle with the mountain of frequently dodgy information. But then there is evidently a sad need to combat powerful interests who seek political advantage from setting the one against the other, and posing as the champions of freedom. Here again we find the continuity not alone between The Ducky phenomenon and Brexit, but also between them and the present political struggle. It even appears, unbelievably but as only the Americans can manage, the false dichotomy will set the terms of the forthcoming presidential election.

One way or the other, at whatever cost it turns out to be, we shall get through it; but I for one doubt if I shall see a return to my happy, carefree cruising days. Of course, I cannot just blame the pandemic; there was a crisis coming, the dear Anna M, 50 years old and made of wood, was going to need serious money, which I have not got, - a situation which I avoided thinking about as long as I possibly could. Boring? Well yes, and worse; but after all, what was going to happen only spending more and more time in whatever pleasant corners I could find, ‘kicking around waiting to die’ as my father memorably put it at about my own present age!

So come on, the very meaning and direction of our lives is brought inexorably to the fore in this present situation. Whatever else it may be, this can hardly be described as boring! Personally, I intend to at least go down fighting for a new life for the old boat, and in the process to make a little contribution to a new life for the old world. On both counts, a life without oil seems more desirable than ever, - without the noise, fumes, pollution and money that it involves. While we are at it, there are some more aspects of our old way of life which the pandemic highlights as past their time.

For a start, it highlights the danger of the trend to ever bigger cities, invariably the hotspots for this disease; conversely, the advantages of living more scattered and self-sufficient lives in the country. Personally, I voted with my feet on this matter 47 years ago. How fortunate we are now, to live in a beautiful place with plenty of space and a good garden! More especially with contemporary communications, I see no good reason for anyone to live in a city, except perhaps in the spirit of one going to war, for as little time as possible. Still, there will be demand for them, so let our cities be redesigned, with minimal noise and fumes!

Easter Lilies.

There will remain the little problem of making a living; and I for one disagree with those left-wingers of this world, who apparently think that one can simply print unconscionable quantities of the stuff and get away with it, and who also are quite happy to cede almost total control and responsibility to the state. Yet again, however, we should not buy into the opposite. Indeed this crisis is showing up the right-wing nonsense and hypocrisy also, with governments of every stripe tossed into the bottomless pits of debt. At issue between them are perhaps only certain variations as to who is enabled to get their hands on all that dosh, and who will have to make some show of paying it off, though eventually it is bound to be largely discounted, one way or the other. What that will involve is another story!

It is a good time to recall ‘how few the things are, the which if a man lays hold of, he is able to live a life which flows in quiet, and is like the existence of the gods!’ - as Marcus Aurelius put it long ago. Shelter, heat, food, clothes .... they can all be produced at home in the country, and it is fun to do so, and who would not rather eat fresh, home-grown vegetables, say, than those supermarket ones produced far away in dodgy conditions? But one does still need money for what one cannot produce, and of course there are certain little problems like access to land.... But the revolution in communications has to be a game-changer, enabling one to communicate, cooperate, source and sell products so much more widely and effectively from home. Time I was getting back on track with the Sherkin-Nazaré Alternative Power Project !