The Language of the Sea.

I left Dublin early the other morning, and was in Nazaré in good time for lunch, all at my ease and at little cost. That such a thing is possible has to be accounted a massive triumph of technology, capitalism and indeed enlightened politics. I might even sum it up as a triumph of the ‘New Puritanism’ that I was giving off about last week, understood roughly speaking as the doctrine that ‘we are ourselves grace and to Hell with Nature’.

I would very much rather effect the same journey in a contraption made of pieces of wood held together with bits of copper, taking about a week, in considerable discomfort, with a lot of effort and costing a fortune. The first way is boring and the second enthralling. I am these days back to enjoying myself banging copper nails through the planks of the Anna M. Am I mad or what? What’s going on?

Well in contemporary culture we tend to think we love pleasure, and never was there ever so much desperate seeking for it, but the truth is in puritanical style we don’t really ‘do’ it at all. There really is very little of it in an aeroplane; we just hang in there buoyed up by the thought of getting where we reckon we will at last catch up with that fugitive pleasure; and to tell the truth, very delighted I am to be suddenly delivered from the agonisingly slow spring of Ireland to the warm, bright sunshine here, where I can work away in the open air in a t-shirt.

And the fish are drying.

There is another drawback to that flying though,- the guilt of leaving a trail of co2 injected into the atmosphere, of realising the environmental cost of producing that lovely aluminium (as anyone who knows Aughinish on the Shannon estuary will indeed realise), and also of zooming past all those people without relating to them as fellow human beings. Guilt is a funny business, but those who  refuse to recognise it are the ones who suffer from it most of all. What chance have they of changing their ways? And yet Nature is in the way of taking very serious revenge for our failure to treat her with due respect!

‘I doubt the end o’the world is in it!’, our old neighbour in Donegal used to say. ‘The day of God’s wrath is at hand!’ is the cry that echoes down the ages, but nowadays we have a new and scientific version, based on facts and all that. What on earth can we do about it though?

Well, we can try to minimise our carbon footprint, work with natural materials, relate to Nature as much as we can and all of that. Slow down a bit, and one’s relationships start to come to life again. Even taking the local bus both in West Cork from Baltimore to Skibbereen, or as I do here in Nazaré going to the boatyard, one finds oneself welcomed back by the same old handful of people. Better again is the camaraderie one finds at boatyards, especially working at wooden boats. But what is the inherent quality and indeed morality of working with them, rather than ‘planes for instance?

Proper order, something people need and indeed crave more than they realise, is to be found embedded in the use of natural materials and the ends to which they are being put. I don’t say there isn’t a sense of order required to make a ‘plane do its job properly, but it is not something that the individual operative has to ‘sign up’ to; he must just follow procedures as ordered. As for results, well, enough already said above!  

Mother Nature, at close quarters on the Sea, may rock you tenderly sometimes, but she is a hard mistress too, and quickly punishes any laziness or shortcoming or foolish notion. Anyone connected with the Sea has some understanding of this. We are all the subjects of that Queen, but look, there is real pleasure and satisfaction and companionship in such subjection, which is actually egalitarian in that none is spared her rigour and the lash of her anger, and it also calls forth every skill, strength, ingenuity and adaptability that any of us can possibly muster.

Sound tradition, respected though not slavishly followed, remains an important factor in the lives of real seamen. Related to it is the understanding that every successful human undertaking has to begin with a good concept. The concept must come first, whatever the mechanics of implementing it. The vital, dynamic interplay between concept and construction is full of fascination. Every proper craftsman and creative people in all walks of life know of this, and hence should have little difficulty in believing in God, so long as He is not associated with that dreadful alienation our culture is suffering from. ‘In the Beginning was the Word’.  

However we have become estranged from It; neglecting the concepts that we take for granted,  we leave them to ‘experts’, and allow them to be drowned out with mere noise. This saves us the trouble of responsibility and commitment, and saves us from the terrible realisation that we are merely treading air, while we do our best to enjoy ourselves, on the whole rather unsuccessfully, for we are thus threatened with becoming outright zombies.

There could hardly be a greater condemnation of Brexit for instance than the simple lack of an honest, convincing or even plausible concept behind it. The best the Brexiteers can come up with appears to be Mr Rees-Mogg blathering on about Trafalgar, Waterloo, Agincourt and Crécy! Now we are hearing it will be a matter of ‘Ambitious Managed Divergence’. But Convergence, the establishment of genuine human solidarity, is the prime project to which we are summoned by the Word, not to mention by the very conditions of life in this our modern world. As for the ‘ambitious’ bit, it looks more like arrogance to most people, and the ‘managed’, well if what we’ve seen so far is anything to go by….

Concepts are mediated by language, which is our principal means of getting handles on them. Every language is of course important, but there is an immediacy and vitality about the special language of the Sea, making it high in the interests of a true seaman. Communicating across language barriers involves clarifying our concepts, hence the great value of working across them. It is a big part of the real interest and fun of travel. Anyway if we want the good ship Earth to come through the coming storms, we have no choice but to look anew to our concepts of what we are supposed to be at aboard her! Unfortunately it’s the one thing some people just hate doing, and will go to any lengths to avoid having to. Well indeed, I sometimes do wonder about this trying to be true to the 'concept' of the Anna M!

Anna M's galley, and a lot of new copper.

The New Puritans

As I contemplate the political psycho-drama unfolding in England, it seems to me that there are forces at play way beyond the usual semi-rational discourse of contemporary democratic politics. I mean one expects politicians to prevaricate, dodge uncomfortable truths and make outlandish claims such as Mrs May's 'carrying out the Will of the People', but since WWII we have generally managed to hang on to a semblance of rational discourse. In the case for Brexit, this seems to have evaporated. However, I must beware of the ‘Cambridge Syndrome’!

I was reminded of it on my recent trip to England, when I spent a few hours in Cambridge and briefly visited my old college there, Jesus, for the first time since I left in 1968. It is an intellectual state in which one assumes a detached and superior attitude to all those benighted people who actually believe anything at all, with the possible exception of what may be posited as scientifically proven. It being difficult enough to grasp one’s own subject properly, one should be very chary of expressing actual convictions of a more general character, and anyway, one must not give hostages to fortune when it comes to the serious matter of cakes and having them or not! At the risk of making a fool of myself, however, I am going to attempt to lay out my understanding of some of the historical factors at play in the aforementioned psycho-drama.

Let us go back to the medieval set-up, that among other things created those ancient universities and their system. The king who ruled the temporal set-up did so in the name of God, who, whether or not one actually believed in Him, was certainly the archetype behind the kingship. His Majesty claimed to rule in the light of universal and transcendent truths. In the knowledge that there was a mighty gap between the divine order and its pale earthly image, the Church tried to insure that the latter did not stray too far from the former; she spoke in the name of Christ, the door through whom alone the Creator could be approached.

With the Renaissance, the earthlings became intolerant of any such constraint; the tension between ‘grace’ and nature was strained to breaking point, and the culture began a long process of fragmentation, occasionally outright disintegration, as when England fell into civil war (which, let us recall, was precipitated by an Irish rebellion). Admittedly simplifying matters, we may say that the Cavaliers were catholics (with a small c) trying to hang on to the old alliance of nature with grace, with the puritanical Roundheads claimed to embody grace themselves, while nature could ‘go hang’.

Oliver Cromwell’s lot may have laid the foundations of English democracy, but meanwhile they disgraced themselves most viciously in Ireland and Scotland. Here in Sherkin Island we have a monument to this, in the form of the despoiled friary. While England managed to row back on his extreme puritanism, to this day it constitutes a dominant note in English and indeed perhaps more strongly in North American culture, many of whose founder members were Puritans. Somewhat similar forces erupted on the Continent with the French Revolution.

While such a culture is in theory committed to individual liberty, in practise it tends to control such liberty with savage repression; lacking a means to access divine grace, it conceives some arbitrary Deity who deals out His favours to individuals and nations alike according to his inscrutable will. Nowadays such a Deity is likely to be conceived as evolution, genes, d.n.a. or suchlike, but the principle is much the same, though there is even less point in trying to engage in a loving relationship with It! ‘Sauve qui peut!’ becomes the rule of life, - the survival of the fittest.

The notion that ‘if God wants something done, He sends for an Englishman’ was deeply ingrained in the days of Puritan ascendency; the English were the new chosen race. The Americans caught the same disease, possibly an even worse case of it, though of course 'the Anglo-Saxons' are not alone in it. If we are to seriously address the problems the whole world faces today, this attitude is a serious handicap. We can only do so on the basis of equality and partnership. The New Puritans of today have come to the conclusion it is not even worth trying, though they try to cover their tracks with spurious talk of partnership. What a nerve, when rejecting all the work that has been going on for the last 50 years! Once again, Ireland may become the first and biggest victim of their march to some New Jerusalem! Still, there may be an answer, like Spring!

 

The End or the Beginning?

So dear Patrick Pye has died, and as Noirin his widow says, we hope he is being led by his artistic master, El Greco, to his encounter with the Lord. So instead of heading for Portugal, Fiona and I have to change course back towards Dublin. I am tempted to say, ‘greater love hath no man….’

A Consultation with Patrick Pye.

It was Rory who introduced me to Patrick, having announced his intention of doing so as we yarned on the roof of the Liverpool Simon Community, in between the odd bout of trying to fix the leaks. The original alcoholic Jack-of-all-trades, Rory had also spent whiles helping Patrick with his stain-glass windows; he hailed from Boharnabreena at the bottom of the hill that led to Patrick’s studio at Piperstown, and he quickly perceived the common ground between Patrick and myself, in that complex territory where English, Irish and Catholic identities meet.

When I was young, we English Catholics and our frequently Irish priests used to pray regularly ‘for the conversion of England’. Such prayers quietly fell by the wayside when we came all over ‘ecumenical’, inclusive, progressive and all things cuddly. Maybe such a miracle was quietly deemed impractical anyway. As a teenager, my father pointed out Moonraker to me in Fowey Harbour; newly in from the Azores, Patrick's father Peter Pye had bananas slung up the back-stay. Unfortunately Patrick's mother was not the sailing type, and was by then bringing up their son by herself in Dublin. Her family had come to Ireland to try to convert the benighted Papists into Protestants. As it turned out, painting turned Patrick into a Papist. When in due course I got around to climbing that hill into the Dublin Mountains, and to sharing with Patrick our common aversion to the ‘plastic’ culture of modern England that we both reacted against, the big question was whether Ireland and/or Catholicism actually offered any viable alternative.

It had occurred to me anyhow that it was a much more inviting prospect to rear a family within a society that was on the way up than in one that was on the way down. A little bit either way may make the difference between spending life relishing new possibilities or kicking against contracting ones. I was asking myself if Ireland might offer a way out of spending my life banging my head against the brick walls of England! It turned out that the English, with their remaining grace and resilience, actually held on to civilisation with better success than I anticipated. However, it happened around this time fifty years ago that Britain started to do away with its babies, and losing a fifth of a nation's population is hardly a recipe for success. Now there are signs of decline everywhere one looks.

In Devizes, where we have just visited, the pavements are still deep in last year’s leaves, ‘because the Council hasn’t got the money to pay anyone to sweep the streets’. In Bungay, the lead story in the local paper is about cuts in health facilities. The cuts are making outright oppression necessary. Here in Hertfordshire, I heard from a parent about the system of fines for ‘unauthorised absence’ from school, the legacy of one Mr Michael Gove's time as Secretary of State for Education under Mr Cameron.

Who, one might ask, is entitled to authorize children to be absent from school? The child’s parents? Apparently not in this society, for they are the ones being fined ‘£60 if they pay within 21 days, £120 if between 21 and 28 days’; otherwise they face prosecution. Well how about doctors? No, apparently they are too busy to get involved in playing Big Brother, indeed refusing to do so. Anyway, how are harried parents, having to keep down two jobs to maintain the roof over their heads while also trying to look after sick children, supposed to find time to wait for hours to see a doctor in order to get a bit of paper?

It all gives a taste of the kind of society that one of the leading Brexiteers advocates! We are pretty much back to the days of putting people in prison for the crime of not having a roof over their heads at all. Maybe not quite there yet, for a notable feature of London in this cold, damp weather is the number of people sleeping rough; but we shall get there if they have their way. They won't have to have those pesky Continentals muscling in on the Welfare State; just get a load of 'guest workers' in, suck the life out of them and then send them home. All sold to the public on the ticket of 'controlling immigration'!

As far as our Irish national culture is concerned, it is all too probable that Ireland will follow a similar trajectory to Britain's,- I would say especially so if abortion becomes legal. In such a situation of decline, politics becomes a matter of codding the people into believing things are going to get better, while the politicians become servants of the smart crowd who think in terms of command and control, and slipping away into the sunlit paradise of wealth. It remains however just possible that with the rest of Europe we will remember the basis of our Catholic culture. Patrick showed how it may be done!

Meanwhile, I play my little game of turning the dream of sailing boats and exotic places on its head. That too can play a part in our redemption! I did not succeed in selling it to the extent of making the Fundit scheme work, but the offers for sailing on the Anna M still stand, somewhere on the Gannetsway between the south of Spain and Ireland. Email me direct if you are interested on the said Way at gmail.com.

Robins

There was the odd fine and calm morning in Sherkin lately, with a touch of Spring in the air; daffodils bravely budding and a robin chirping out perkily from a tall branch, with its funny little intermittent bursts of song: ‘Here I am still…, I stuck it out..., I SURVIVED…,  Spring is coming…, Bring it on…!’ I wonder where he was hiding through the vicious long, wet and windy nights?

Some species of birds have well established migration routes, others are committed to staying put; even members of  the same species may follow a different strategy; I read, to my astonishment, that some of our robins head for southern Spain for the winter, though most of them tough it out at home in the north. Out at sea, one encounters the odd brave little migrant, some landing exhausted on the deck. Small song birds like robins fly with the same bursts of energy as their song, taking them up and down as they fly. What possessed them to head out across the waves? What informs their reckless instinct?

Neither option could be called the easy one; each calls for a different kind of courage, which seems to boil down to different temperaments. Do individual birds actually make such drastic choices? How can a little Irish robin know that there is another, warmer land across that bleak, unfriendly sea? It seems one might have to consider quantum mechanics or something, to begin to find an answer!

Or maybe we might even look within ourselves to do so? For me there is something very special about that ancient ding-dong between Ireland and the Iberian peninsula, promising release from the suffocation of dreary northern weather and dreary northern quarrels too, with their ghastly politics and their spiritual aridity; a realignment or rebalancing that might even help us to get creative again, instead of apparently being stuck in unmitigated negativity!

Such toing and froing has been working well for myself and Fiona, but I would hate it to be completely dependent on squashing into those wretched aeroplanes! We are on the wing again now though, in London before we head for Portugal and take up the battle to save our big bird, the ‘Anna M’, and make her fit to sail up and down for another while. If you would like to associate yourself with this effort through the Fundit scheme, there are only a few days left….

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https://fundit.ie/project/restore-the-anna-m-1