Beware of Greeks....

"How sweet 'tis to roam by the sunny Suir stream,
And hear the dove's coo 'neath the morning's sunbeam.
Where the thrush and the robin their sweet notes combine
On the banks of the Suir that flows down by Mooncoin.

Flow on, lovely river, flow gently along.
By your waters so sweet sounds the lark's merry song.
On your green banks I'll wander where first I did join
With you, lovely Molly, the Rose of Mooncoin.

Here I am at Mooncoin, Co Kilkenny, where we have the use of a more convenient place for Fiona to recover from her hip operation. No gannets, but still the tide flows not far away in the beautiful river Suir. We have had some perfect evenings for wandering on its banks, though I fear a contemporary swoon with lovely Molly is hardly on the cards; the sweet notes of the thrush and the robin, the lark's merry song  are being drowned out by the ghastly roar of jet skis and speed boats zooming around in circles, which one can hear a mile away. I wonder if there are any larks left nowadays anyhow. I vividly recall how the sky would sometimes ring with them in my boyhood, and I would peer up, enchanted, trying to spot those blythe spirits, but now for years I have heard none.

      Yet there is still much beauty in the world. Our Luke and David are taking a spin to old haunts in Co Donegal, and send back photos full of memories for me, such as this one of Malin Beg Uig. It is very peaceful here, but the Uig is wide open to the south; still, sometimes in fine weather I would leave my fishing boat there, to save the steam down from Teelin when salmon fishing. One day, with engine trouble, I just managed to get into the Uig, where I managed to find a mechanic to fix it. We were moored a little to seaward of where the punt is in Luke's photo, and a breeze got up from the south to send a jopple in. The mechanic, very delighted to get his feet back on concrete, leaped ashore with alacrity which combined with a wave to tip myself into the sea. John and Jerry, the crew, were on the slip. John was afraid I would drown and rushed to help me out. Jerry laughed and said 'Do ye think we'll get rid of the fecker that easily?' This English public school-educated (albeit by catholic monks, which makes quite a difference) bloke was evidently a bit of a 'Greek' to him!

    Our favourite berths for a drift were off Malin Mor or Glen Heads, but of course you had to compete to get to the good spots. I started off with the second-hand traditional half-decker Cnoc Mor, double-ended, clinker built; a Viking boat with a diesel engine plonked in it. It was the lively evenings with a fresh breeze that were good for fishing with those old 15mesh deep nets, which the fish could see and easily dodge beneath in calm weather, and besides it was illegal to fish in daylight. On this basis, the fishery had been the mainstay of many a livelihood for years, with a nice country home and a biteen of land!
 

     After clattering down past Carrigeen Head and Slieve League a few times, the water could be seen squirting up between the boards under the cuddy floor as the Cnoc Mor bounced off the waves. The question was, when I came back aboard to her in the afternoon on the mooring in Teelin, whether the water would have got into the reduction gear, and I would have to change the oil in it as well as pump all that water out. It took a while to get around to such a sophistication as an automatic electric pump, and even then, it didn't always work!

    Eventually I managed to finance a new, semi-displacement Ocean Tramp, built of GRP, the Screig n'Iolar. She let no water in, and could batter down to Malin Mor Head in half the time. These were boom times, in the '70s. Too bad there were 65' trawlers, financed by BIM, coming out of Burtonport and shooting up to 20 miles of nets. Enlightenment also meant that, instead of being rewarded with a bounty, fishermen were now to be breaking the law if they were to cull the seals. The upshot of it all was that before long we were feeding more fish to the seals than we were landing. 

     Technology 'came to the rescue', with nets becoming available which were much harder for the fish to see, and deeper too; they worked in daylight, but were illegal. Some fishermen took to hoods and slash hooks to fight off the Navy's ribs, and there were shots fired at fishermen; but now the game was up. Between such travails, pollution in rivers and whatever was happening on the high seas beyond our ken, the coastal salmon fishery was destroyed. If you want to eat salmon now, you will have to settle for a pale shadow of the real thing, reared in a polluting fish concentration camp.

    'Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes'’ - Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts - was Virgil's take on The Iliad and those clever Greeks. The problem is as old as European civilisation. Even the Greeks themselves, as the story of Prometheus shows, were aware of the problematic nature of mankind's technological aspirations; however, St Paul tells us how the cross of Jesus was mere folly to them. From Galilee, that other great source of our civilisation, we hear Jesus saying, according to St John, 'It is the Spirit that giveth life, the flesh availeth nothing!' However he also said 'Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you,' affirming humanity's quests, only insisting that they be grounded in the Spirit. Europe and the Catholic Church have been struggling to get the right balance ever since.

    In the last couple of centuries, the tension has been building. Our civilisation now generally thinks with the Greeks, that the Cross is mere folly. We glory above all in our technological prowess. We pride ourselves on asserting 'the flesh'. We complain that the Church of Christ is life-denying, even while paying lip-service to wisdom. Meanwhile, while we tend to put our faith in sanitizer rather than holy water and our churches stand empty, our city is busy destroying itself. But unlike Zeus, our God is not bent on punishing us, and perhaps even science itself might come to our help?

    I am thinking of the new physics, and the revelation that while Newtonian or Greek physics, or however one describes viewing the world as made of fixed and static particles, has a certain utility, things are not actually like that. We are now told that the world is an interplay of infinite energies, a dance of waves that may have its rhythms but is not constricted by time or place; at least, such is my very limited understanding of quantum physics. So yes, even science might come to realise that the spirit alone availeth, and we might even find believers again who can cast out devils and heal the sick!

    We will find no new hope unless we repent of foolish ways of thinking. We have to start by debunking the idols and learning to love our enemies. Considering what a dreadful wreck we have been making of the world, especially for those on the wrong end of our extravagant fantasies, we might even learn to understand where the likes of the Taliban are coming from. We might at last learn a bit of humility. We do need leaders with a sense of context, not 'meritocratic' experts who make it by fiercely swotting, concentrating on their limited sphere of expertise, proud of their 'scientific objectivity' while it has a curious habit of aligning with certain financial and commercial interests.

    We might even learn to listen to the likes of those 'backward, uneducated, conservative, deplorable' people who ask, while they watch the surge in Covid infection following hard on the roll-out of vaccines, does it not appear that there must be a connection? How can the great and good be so sure that the vaccines are not pushing the variants? Are they not rather something in the line of a Trojan Horse? Well, no doubt it will take 20 years or so to be sure, one way or the other. Meanwhile, it's looking to me like another case of the 'war on terror'. It has taken 20 years or so for the realisation to dawn that it has only succeeded in pushing terrorism deeper and wider; but many still refuse to recognise this even now. Give us a break!

The 'Anna M' entering Teelin Bay, by Nutan

     

One of Them.

            

Beating to the Fastnet Rock

     August blues, the summer and also our life on Sherkin are slipping away. We are in the 'no man's land' between houses. Recovering from cancer treatment, my sense of the shortness of life is sharpened again. I look back over the last  half century, that in one sense has slipped away so quickly, and in another seems a long time. 

      All along, ‘America’ has been ‘fighting the good fight’, expending unimaginable amounts of blood and treasure in the noble cause of democracy and freedom. Don’t we all love that cause? But in spite of vastly overwhelming military superiority, it has been a story of failure. After Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, is it not about time we asked ourselves why do things keep turning out like this? Is there some underlying epistemological mistake? Do we need a different approach? Any chance of a reboot? 

       It should take no great wisdom to realise that bombs and bullets do not win hearts and minds, and even that ‘if a man were to try to buy love, contempt is all he would gain’. While from time to time lip-service is paid to such sentiments, one must conclude that our managers are not really interested in them, but that what really interests them is money and power. Never mind your hearts and minds; this kind of power bases itself on fear, and naturally finds an enemy very useful, both to provide cover and to put the wind up supporters and victims alike. Fear and hatred of an enemy enable the extortion of vast amounts of money, and after all the purpose of doing so is served by one great long failure much better than by quick success!

 

      Now it seems we are embarked on another kind of war, against that diabolical virus! Again, success is proving elusive. Again, the rich are very much better off than the poor, and the mega-rich are making vast amounts of money out of it. This time there is an even bigger power-grab going on, while fear of that alien enemy is proving a very useful tool indeed to some people. Again, the Powers will be boasting that things are going fine and victory is just around the corner. But supposing we were really serious about winning all these wars, how might we set about it? There was that talk about loving your enemies, though apparently it did not get very far.

  

         Against a deluge of propaganda, where does a layman such as myself start? It is only by sifting and comparing the statements of experts that we can make some kind of a start. Mr Paul Reid, chief executive of the Health Service here in Ireland, while celebrating the ‘phenomenal’ take-up of vaccines on the radio, professed to be "very conscious" to ensure that parents and guardians of 12- to 15-year-olds "think about it carefully and receive the right advice about vaccination.” 

 

          How can anyone honestly think it in the interest of such youngsters to be vaccinated?  According to the HSE itself, ‘The risk of severe Covid-19 illness for children is low, with a hospitalisation rate in Ireland for those with no underlying conditions of less than 1 in 100,000.’  The notion that it will prevent them spreading infection to their seniors only makes some kind of sense if one thinks in terms of ‘herd immunity’; it’s precisely that sort of thinking that we who see life in personal terms must reject.

 

         Anyway according to a report in the Guardian on 11/08/21, Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said in evidence to MPs that Reaching herd immunity is “not a possibility” with the current Delta variant, and the fact that vaccines did not stop the spread of Covid meant reaching the threshold for overall immunity in the population was “mythical”. 

          Each individual  has their own circumstances and their own immune system. A rational response to the virus involves  considering the circumstances in which people are living and also the state of their personal immune systems. What makes some people’s immune system so much more effective than other’s might indeed involve considerable speculation, but does not seem to figure in the societal response to the pandemic.

 

         For my part, in refusing a vaccination, I am also declining to be part of any herd. I am aware that sooner or later I will probably run into some coronavirus, just as I reckon to run into a cold or flu every winter. I do not deny that this covid is more of a challenge. I hope to be able to overcome it, with the help of God and his gifts, in which incidentally I include medical science as well as homeopathy. At all events, as I replied to someone who complained that ‘I was one of them’ - the anti-vaxers - , ‘Somebody has to do it’!  However long it takes, I expect that the war on the pandemic will eventually transpire to be yet another dreadful mistake, and I hope that there will be someone around to show that there is another way! 

 

 
 

Farewell to Sherkin

photos by Fiona

     August is here, and a glorious summer is going into decline. It seems it will be our last summer in Sherkin, and a precious memory it will remain, while Fiona and I are taking the opportunity to move to the third house of a clachan in West Clare, where our two eldest sons live with their families in the other two. We shall be 'blow-backs' there, since we lived there for 18 years or so before we moved to Sherkin. The move may be described as 'circling the wagons' for our old age and indeed the difficult times ahead for all of us, but I am hopeful  it will facilitate in various ways the practical ambitions that have been outlined in this blog. It may also be described as another step in over half a century's quest for a more sustainable way of life, involving wider and deeper family and community engagement.

    We are sad to be leaving Sherkin and its people, where we have had a very happy 16 years, and especially so since we are only lately enjoying the improvements we have long worked at; but such is this life, mainly a matter of journeying, rather than actually arriving!  I enjoy a strong sense of being on a quest, ever since the 1960s, which might also be described as a great circle. Intimations of the Apocalypse have always haunted humanity, but we are pretty good at pushing them to the back of our minds most of the time. Perhaps youth and old age share an enhanced liability in failing to do so, and my life has coincided with an historical circle in this respect. Those who chose to think about things suffered great dread then too, more from nuclear catastrophe than anything else, but by 1970 the realisation was gaining ground that our civilisation was on an unsustainable trajectory anyway.

    Not that the widening gyres commenced there of course. Dread of disaster took on a more universal, total nature with the advent of the technological age and the First World War. As the London-Welsh poet David Jones put it with gentle under-statement in his preface to In Parenthesis, his most evocative account of life in the trenches:- 'That our culture has accelerated every line of advance into the territory of physical science is well appreciated - but not so well understood are the unforeseen, subsidiary effects of this achievement.' Yet how could one possibly describe the mechanised hell of that kind of warfare as an achievement? 

    Perhaps Long Covid is like Post Traumatic Stress, in that it leaves the sufferers unable to suppress anxiety and dread? Maybe a problem they share is that they find themselves no longer believing in the doctrines of Supreme Scientific Progress! Well, the first thing my father did when he had come out of the army and regained a bit of freedom, after the Second World War, was to find a little sailing boat. It is surely to the engrossing engagement which sailing involves with the more manageable chaos of the sea, leaving little space for more remote anxieties, that it owes much of its therapeutic quality; even if this chaos overpowers us, at least it does so naturally, and gives us a fighting chance to overcome it!

    But where may we find a thorough-going alternative to the doctrine of Scientific Progress, that still conditions so many minds? Is it possible to come to satisfactory terms with it, as indeed we might say that the Catholic Church has been attempting to do, especially since the Second Vatican Council. Here as in so many ways, the hopes of the 1960s faded; fifty years later, it may be much more generally acknowledged that, for instance, the ‘3.4 million aircraft sorties and 30 billion pounds of munitions, which killed some 2 million civilians and wounded 5 million more'* did not constitute an intelligent response to the threat of communism in Vietnam, let alone a humane or justifiable one. As for threatening to blow the whole world to bits.... The question today is, are our responses to current threats, such as the pandemic and climate change, any more intelligent? Am I so very far astray in thinking that throwing vaccines at the pandemic is not unlike throwing bombs at communism?

    Can anyone seriously imagine that our culture, let alone our politics, are on a radically better footing today? We must at last really try to understand what was behind those monumental blunders, for as is often said, those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are destined to repeat them. Theology might be described as the attempt to codify the lessons of the human journey; as such, it is the Queen of the sciences. Indeed one mighn't think so, from the way some of its representatives carry on, but in truth it is supremely concerned with how we are to live in harmony with each other and with nature, while discovering that such an ability comes as a gift from Beyond, and the more we cling to our own limited notions of it, the more elusive it becomes. Meanwhile, many bright sparks really think it is just about angels dancing on pins and so on!

    This move I hope heralds more movement in the practical effort to get that old schooner of mine back in the water, with an electric drive.The blog did not set out to stray so far into the strange business of trying to take an holistic view of life, but it is not for nothing do we use such language as 'embarking on a voyage' when it comes to shaping up to such times as ours.

*https://tomdispatch.com