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