The Call of the Sea

The Fishing Beach at Hastings, Sussex, 1920s?.

As a young lad, I lived in the old town of Hastings, in Sussex, England, with a fine view of the beach where the clinker-built wooden fishing boats hauled out, with their beautifully crafted elliptic sterns, specially designed to give buoyancy when they were pushed backwards into the sea. The beach had a bit of shelter from the prevailing south-west wind blowing up-Channel, in the form of a broken-down harbour arm,- it was straightforward enough to launch and recover the boats when the tide reached the steep shingle part of it, but not easy if it was only on the lower, flat, sandy part. Although the close-knit fishing community tended to keep to themselves, I was welcome enough to take an interest when they were landing and gutting fish, or mending their nets, or indeed making whole trawl-nets, as some old guys would spend long hours doing.

There was big excitement when the boom of maroons summoned the crew for a launch of the lifeboat, and not just the crew, but anyone who was free to help with the launch, because all available manpower was needed to help haul the boat across the beach, by means of long, thick ropes attached on either side. She slid on greased railway sleepers across the flat in front of her shed, was poised at the top of the steep part with sleepers laid in front of her, and with engine running, props turning and crew attached in their positions, was heaved with a mighty ‘all together, heave’ into the surf, and so hopefully through it.

Only on one occasion, the tide was too low and she didn’t make it; and what’s more, we could see the broken-down casualty dragging her anchor towards the rocks half a mile away. The lifeboat broached in the breakers, and the men were reduced to heaving and shoving up to their necks in the water. Some of them rushed off and launched a fishing-boat, which fortunately succeeded in effecting the rescue, just in time. I was about ten at the time, and my first account of this story was one of my very first bits of writing, and is somewhere in the annals of the ‘Worth Diary’.

Looking back today, it clearly belongs to a bygone era. There are not the same tight-knit communities, there are no maroons, no people rushing to the beach, no heaving on ropes, and most importantly, none of that spontaneous action based on clear perception of the situation  and listening to those voices who spoke with the authority that comes from being recognised as knowing what one is talking about. The ropes and the manpower have long been replaced by an elaborate tractor and trailer set-up, that is able to go into the surf, but costing a great deal of money, and that's not to mention helicopters. 'The public' is simply asked to keep out of the way, and preferably put some cash into the collection box. We generally have to turn to sport for the thrill of being caught up in communal effort, and it really isn't the same as real action.

At least the R.N.L.I. is a charity depending on voluntary contributions and community effort. In Ireland even the local rescue outfits have devolved into dependence on the Government, although the same Government has failed to get its act together with regard to the sea, in very many ways. I’m not going to try cataloguing these failures now, but anyone who is familiar with any aspect of the marine scene here will know what I am talking about. It is fragmented into little fiefdoms run mostly by civil servants with little knowledge of the sea, and even less real experience of it. I do not wish to decry the benefits of technology, nor do I necessarily decry the opening-up of old communities,- but some vital elements of them are in danger of disappearing into the past, so we need to figure out how to give them a new lease of life.

In some Irish coastal communities, notably in my experience in Donegal, there is a visceral interest in the sea, but all too often it is left to a very small minority. The cultural and political reasons for this are no doubt complex and diverse; suffice to say that the situation here contrasts starkly with that, for instance, in Brittany and the north of Spain. What is for sure is that it is high time we changed it. Would not many of us prefer an economy which is less dependent on big tech and pharma, and more geared to our marine resources? But what are the deep-seated cultural issues that need to be addressed for us to do so?

Sitting here in Co.Clare on a winter’s morning of driving wind and rain, it is not hard to conclude that, for one thing, the climate is against it. However here am I, just back from a fortnight of pleasant weather in Nazaré, Portugal, working on the Anna M. It really isn’t a big deal getting back and forth, especially in winter, provided one is not unlucky with the weather. Bilbao to Rosslare on Brittany Ferries’ Galicia, car and cabin, cost €273, and of course flying is a lot cheaper. Instead of getting excited and resentful of all the fish they get from Irish waters, which won’t get us anywhere, it is more fruitful to concentrate on building community with our Atlantic neighbours. It is interesting to note Irish skippers buying into the French industry,- boats, quota and all. It may be good for the conflicts concerning nationality to become irrelevent, but it will still be necessary to stand up for local communities and artisanal fisheries.

No doubt they have their struggles with remote power structures on the Continent too. Until very recently, it seemed we were all irrevocably stuck with shadowy powers who were able to manipulate our information and to make puppets of our local politicians, judging above all by the way they handled covid; however, perhaps they over-reached there, and so now at last there may be a change in direction.  It is represented primarily, and amazingly, by the Trumpistas,- though one might ask, what’s to stop them becoming perhaps just more overtly over-bearing? It has been strange and very interesting to watch how the ‘right wing’ in America has transmogrified into the more convincing representative of ‘the people’, while the ‘left’ has largely become the plaything of an obscure power elite. 

In the present crisis in France, is it possible that ‘the left’ and ‘the right’ will manage to coalesce into a coherent popular movement? It would be very sweet, in France of all places, to see that sterile old narrative, beloved of academics and journalists, which opposes ‘progress’ and ‘tradition’, ‘left’ and ‘right’, collapse so dramatically! Not that achieving the right blend of personal and social, and of local and universal responsibility isn’t always a problem and a challenge, as I suppose it will always be until the end of time. To my mind, 'globalists' need to be converted into 'catholics'. It is a problem that God alone can fully resolve,- and for myself, I cannot envisage any path to being fully myself, as an individual, and at the same time a fully paid-up member of humanity, but in the love of Jesus.

    Meanwhile, Anna M continues to progress towards action again next year. I intend to sail her home to the Shannon Estuary in the spring, electric drive or not. We shall fit something here if necessary. At least she is now wired, with lights, fridge, pumps, electronics all powered off three solar panels, thanks to a great fortnight’s work by John O’Mahony, who drove down with me and lived aboard,- and got interested in the electric drive idea. Exactly how it will all work out remains to be seen; this is a work in hand, - but I am calling a meeting, provisionally on Wednesday 15th January, in Kilkee and online, to see what we might make of the Gannetsway Sailing Association, to whose members it is intended to offer dolphin-watching under sail and electric drive in the Shannon estuary and beyond,- next summer.

Please send an email to gannetsway@gmail.com if you wish to be kept informed.

Thank you America.

 

Cloud-face over the Shannon Estuary.

Thank you America, for a really thrilling piece of political theatre (or maybe I should write ‘theater’, but that would be a bridge too far). I am in Ireland after all, where these days the golden rule is to say as little as possible that might upset the apple cart, and we keep our politics boring, impotent and largely decorously irrelevant. Whatever else Trump is or is not, he’s a great showman, and surely his turning of the soil will do some good! He’s not boring anyway, and maybe he will even liven things up here.

I hasten to add that I would not relish the prospect of all that American capital going home.  The pension might become very shabby. We are fortunate in that it affords Fiona and I the leisure necessary to  watch all those pod-casts, - Joe Rogan, Megan Kelly, Jordan Peterson and the rest. What fun it is to feel that we have a ring-side seat at all the drama! What I don’t understand is how busy people who have a family to rear find time to do it; still apparently many millions do so, even while working or travelling I suppose. One must also conclude that they do not waste time looking at newspapers or TV, and I cannot claim I’m sorry about that, even if I worry about putting too much power in the hands of a few billionaires, notably Elon Musk. It is certainly an issue to watch carefully. 

We have had a stern warning, in the way censorship prevailed during covid, and the desire on the part of so many governments, including the putative one of Kamala Harris, to ‘regulate’ the internet, but there is hope in the very nature of the new technology. ‘The Media is the Massage’, and it is a lot easier for anyone to participate in the new media, which has brought a level of intensity to the ‘noosphere’ that everyone who cares about the world has to participate in, and it won’t do to just write it off as ‘globalism’. But now that the owner of Starlink and X is in there with Trump, he may make censorship impossible, or put it on steroids. Too much depends on those men for my liking! Yet they are nothing without our support. To the degree to which everyone is free to participate, we may be hopeful - it’s that First Amendment thing again.

Personally I lost faith in the legacy media, if I ever had any, around 60 years ago, when I tried my hand at working for them. I had for instance  my little go at reporting how the barricades in Derry and Belfast were thrown up in pure terror at the B Specials, who had run amok, shooting up Nationalist areas from their Saracen armoured cars. A sub-editor only has to leave some things out, change other bits round, stick on a misleading headline, and the great British public remain as uninformed and cosy in their prejudice as ever! I met the bloke who produced that excellent little film ‘The War Game’, which simply but effectively tried to convey something of the reality of nuclear war. The BBC pulled it, under Government pressure. But the level of censorship in those days was tin-pot compared to that potentially exercised by Trump/Musk. 

Anyway I decided against spending my life working for that lot in London in my day, and am very glad that I did so, for it would have been horribly frustrating.  Had I taken to the kind of career that my father expected of me, the combination of Brexit and the covid affair would have been a very sorry culmination of it. But was there anything more to that cultural atrophy in London besides what might be expected from the demise of the British Empire, something which afflicted more than Great Britain? 

Such a possibility started to figure in my mind when at my then impressionable age we witnessed the assassination of President Kennedy. One cannot understand the impact it had unless one also understands how tall he stood for peace and justice. It took many years, however, for the realisation to dawn that ‘conspiracy theories’ about the deep state, the CIA etc were likely true, and that President Kennedy was maybe indeed assassinated because he had decided, for instance, to pull out of Vietnam and refused to invade Cuba. I must admit to being delighted that the Trumpistas won so convincingly if for no other reason than that I hope that after all these years, the truth will finally be laid before the world.

I followed Bobby Kennedy jnr into the Trumpista camp. Now I am looking forward to an even more  consequential act in the American political drama! Will ‘The Ducky’, as I like to call him, be willing and able to follow through with his chat, particularly about peace and dismantling censorship? At least the world has already taken one step back from the brink of WW3, but only one step! Will this brash man, who if the mantra ‘we are what we eat’ were true, is mainly hamburger and coca-cola, really be able to get us back to the place of relative peace that prevailed during his first chaotic term of office? Will he genuinely honour the partnership with Kennedy in regard to Big Pharma? 

Will he be true to his words, for instance in not paying attention to windy ideas that speak of winning wars?  Unfortunately, too many people are stuck in a mind-set inherited from WW2, which is about as far as their concept of good and evil gets. It may just have been viable to think in terms of winning wars then, but it is certainly not so today. Well, ‘Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof’, and let’s concentrate on putting a stop to them. Let’s deal with the situation as it is today, dealing with real, flawed human beings. Let’s refrain from demonising them, even when they behave very badly, but concentrate first of all on getting the motes out of our own eyes, and then follow the show very critically!

If Trump lays bare the chicanery of the CIA, that might be a good way of setting about sorting out the Ukraine war. In the case of Israel, he will have to somehow get back to those Abraham Accords. If they had been pursued with vigour and determination, maybe this senseless war in Israel could have been avoided. In the event, there was  no other way that the Israelis could have been expected to respond to the vicious and depraved attack they suffered, as Hamas knew too well, while Biden just bleated about restraint and gave more weapons. If on the other hand Trump’s partnership with the Arabs were to prevail, then perhaps Israel and Iran could be induced to settle down. The present situation only strengthens the position of dodgier leaders there! 

When it comes to the domestic agenda, would not we all love, in Ireland as in America, to see less dependence on multi-national or even national corporate entities, and more localised production and responsibility? Is this a contradiction at the heart of Trumpism? Again, the USA is such a big, multi-ethnic and diverse confederation that maybe the renewal of nationalism there is OK. The nature of the beast will not allow it to turn excessively on itself. Imagine Elon Musk being told he could only operate there! As for silly old GB, the government had to turn round and hire an extra 80,000 civil servants in the wake of Brexit. Here in Ireland, at least most people understand that we need the EU to have any cost-efficient kind of vibrant, modern society, even while we also think that there is a mammoth task ahead to keep it in its proper place. 

What we do not need is the likes of the WHO and the WEF in on the act, though we do have to keep the Planet in mind, while keeping any global institutions answerable. The Catholic Church provides an excellent model in principle, solidarity and subsidiarity being the key words, though God knows we often fail in practice. Well. Fiona is working on the answerability bit for this institution,  while I’m working on concern for the Planet and reducing dependence on oil in my own little way. It’s better not to depend on high-falutin’ ideas handed down by academics, civil servants or even clerics, nor to give in to fear-mongering and the authoritarianism that thrives on it, but let it all be the one thing that authoritarians hate most,- fun! 

Thanks again, America, for the entertainment - your saving grace is indeed that First Amendment, and we at least hear you over here in Ireland. The drama will run and run,- good job one can follow it anywhere. I’m off to Portugal again next week, for another session on the Anna M before Christmas - general election or no general election! Been there, done that, standing for the Christian Solidarity Party back in the ‘90s. Yet if the Trumpistas really shake things up here, by for instance letting Bobby Kennedy loose on the covid vaccines, one wouldn’t know what might happen,- it’s a good job I’m too old to be seriously interested in politics again, but I do enjoy them when the real issues are in contention!

Whose For Old Men's Dreams?

The waves wash in, a storm out to sea. How do the rocks survive at all? .... There's a disturbed and oppressive world out there that one would rather not think too much about, but which nonetheless tugs at everyone's nerves and saps our energy.... Myself straining to jump through the last hoops for getting the old boat out next year, and wondering whether we shall be even more lashed by world events totally beyond our control than we are already, and where the Nazaré Project will stand then! But how does one dare to hold out any hope at all when so many people are suffering so much?

    Probably most of us know people, old and too frequently young as well, who one way or another are cracking up under such strains. On the personal level as well as the macro, it seems like a race against time, to see if we can get to some sort of sanity and viability before the whole situation is lost; and that's rather the way it is with the Anna M. 

    Where is that crucial tipping point, between where one can reasonably expect to turn something round, even an old car, and where one just has to write it off? Perhaps this is the crucial human dilemma, and one just has to hope that one knows how to respond and decides correctly when each crisis comes up! We all like to think we are rational, but how inadequate our reason is! And as for when we reach that final crisis which we all have to confront sooner or later.... But then perhaps we don't have to, and they are right who spend the best part of their time trying to ignore and avoid ghastly reality!

    Still, it is by confronting all these crises that we grow, and there is no other way. For example, in the midst of his  many crises, it is interesting to see how Donald Trump has grown. He was all over the place in his first term as President, about covid and the vaccines for instance. One moment he was calling the pandemic a hoax, and the next he was boasting about how promptly he rolled the vaccines out, though one had the impression he was only playing politics in the latter case. Now he seems to have acquired some ballast, especially since Bobby Kennedy signed up to his campaign. His courage, resilience and determination have also been impressive. I could not have imagined, four years ago, that I would now be hoping for his election.

    President Biden lost me in the moment he stood up and said 'I promise you, the vaccines are safe and effective'! And that's something the Dems are not going to retract, either, no matter what evidence emerges to the contrary. They have revealed themselves as fully paid up members of the global corporate mafia. On the other hand, the Trump clinched matters for me with his answer to a smart MSM interviewer who asked - 'Do you want Ukraine to win the war?' - 'I don't think in terms of winning wars. I just want to stop people dying!' 

    'Foolish old man with his simplistic populism!' the 'sophisticated' types will say, and the possibly more honest of them may go on to say 'Too bad about those people dying, it's the National Interest that counts etc. Forget about morality! The only reality is Power. It's them or us. Too many people on the planet anyway....' In both the cases of the war and the vaccines, this is sadly the logic of the Dems, with Harris as a decorative mannequin to veil the reality with progressive, 'philanthropic' ideas. Pity she wouldn't go away and read 'War and Peace' and a few other great Russian books, but she seems to be proud of her ignorance of Europe and our literature. Meanwhile the authoritarianism and disdain for freedom of speech of 'the Left' stands revealed in all its horror! 

    So, the race is on. Either way, the chances are, for the time being, that we shall shamble on through our crises, hopefully even our failures will contribute to a final victory. Things will get more and more messy, until and unless we manage to order our lives and our societies with new priorities and ways of working that do not depend on the 'Powers', the big 'industrial complexes', those that would enslave us as isolated minions to Big State and consumerism.

     Trump may be able to turn things round somewhat, Harris definitely won't; meanwhile they keep us entertained with a good morality play, but let's remember that it's in our own lives that we can really make a difference! The worse the level of threat, the more urgent it becomes for us to build resilience and autonomy. The greater the looming horror, the tighter we must stick to bright dreams. As we see death coming nearer, the more we must polish up our hope; and for all its elusive nature, we may find that hope does burn brighter with age! At all events, let us keep our heads up, and cherish beautiful little things!

    So anyway, the Anna M  is becoming pleasant to live in again, the carpentry is pretty well finished, and I'm hoping Alec will have the electric motor running by Christmas and she will be in commission again next year. We have clarified the structure of the whole Nazaré Project, which is based on these three legs:-

    a) Aston, Lammas Research and Development (ALRD) is the investment path for the commercialisation of the prototype. As of now it is an aspirational company to be registered in Ireland, though funds and time have already been invested by Alec Lammas to the value of €50,000 (via NazaréNautica) and Joe Aston to the value of €5,000 (not counting approx €65,000 in Anna M - see below).

b) Alec’s company, NazaréNautica, provides the workshop and engineering services in Nazaré, Portugal, which are currently producing the prototype.

c) The 13.6m schooner Anna M has been completely renovated and prepared for the installation of the prototype. She will be used as a test-bed and demonstration vessel, while sailing the West
coast of Europe showing the motor off and selling it. It is intended to refine the concept to the point where newbuilds will incorporate it, for both leisure and commercial fishing purposes, and eventually to transfer ownership of Anna M to a Gannetsway Sailing Association (GSA). 

If you are interested in 'getting in on the ground floor' with an investment, please contact <gannetsway@gmail.com>

    

    

Base Communities of the Gannetsway?

I will be heading back to Nazaré shortly in the old Citroen, for yet another session getting the Anna M ready for sea. The big uncertainty remains as to when we will manage to get the electric motor finished and installed. As has been increasingly the case, I am under pressure  to convince my wife (and my own conscience) that the expense of money and time will not be in vain. Probably the best argument for Fiona is that at least it helps to keep the old man active, engaged and generally compos mentis,- but frankly that does not satisfy me. The hype about that kind of life-style concern may not be without merit, but I need better motivation than that. So why should an old boy like me put himself through all sorts of contortions, physical, financial and the rest, when he could just stay parked some place in a deckchair? 

    Human motivation is a funny, fascinating business, and we do well to constantly question our own. We may agree with Viktor Frankl that mental health depends on our sense of meaning. A quick Google search confirms that for him, 'meaning comes from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty'. That still leaves us with plenty of queries, for instance what might constitute 'purposeful' work and what happens when it appears to clash with 'love'? Maybe I should get around to re-reading Frankl, but I'm thinking that in the end, everyone has to answer such questions for himself. 

    A little voice will say in this case that the only sure thing about an old wooden sailing boat is that she will end up at the bottom of the sea or rotting in the mud. Well, at least the Anna M now has a good chance of outlasting myself, by quite a few years. I hope to eventually pass on the ownership to the long-cogitated Gannetsway Sailing Association, if ever it becomes practically and financially possible, combining opportunities for members to sail, to engage with whales, dolphins and other sea-life, as well as developing and demonstrating the concept of an autonomous boat.

    I have some big ideas in connection with this concept. Most people have at the back of their minds these day that we urgently require more harmonious relationships with nature and with each other,- a more intense and responsible engagement with other people - less consumerism and more activity. Our economies as well as our societies need to be rebuilt from the bottom up, with much more localism all over the globe, perhaps with a beautiful mosaic floor such as the Romans loved, complete with dolphins in there, but I have in mind a mosaic of communities! 

    The Roman bit is important to me, and not just because it happens to be roughly my part of the world, culturally and spiritually speaking.  For all its faults and despite the fact that it crucified Jesus, the Roman Empire provided the physical and political basis for the eventual development of His Church, and indeed Western civilisation. If we are going to avoid the Brave New World of two dystopian, totalitarian blocs everlastingly at war with each other, an alternative has to emerge here in Western Europe, the nations of which are wonderfully complementary.  There are so many lessons to be learned from the past! The psychic and spiritual splits are there to challenge us and to be overcome. Maybe the tension between the northern and southern cultures is a pretty good place to start,- and imagine the effect it could have in America!

    When it comes down to politics and the forthcoming American presidential election, since I have expressed support for Bobby Kennedy jnr, I must say I think he is right to throw his support behind 'the Ducky', as I used to disdainfully refer to President Trump. I still have reservations about him, for instance about his attitude to the EU and Brexit, but I think he has grown in stature and understanding of his basic mission, which is to oppose that descent into dystopia which is sponsored by 'the Blob' and sadly by the modern Democratic party, as was revealed so clearly in the pandemic, with the censorship and suppression of dissent that President Biden presided over. Combined with his toughness and basic if sometimes crude straightforwardness, it seems that Trump and Kennedy really do hold out the possibility of a new start. A very short interview clinched it for me:- a smart msm lady asked Trump, 'Did he want the Ukrainians to win their war?'  He replied 'I don't think in terms of winning wars. I just want to stop the dying!' 

    How practical this is, without pushing the Ukrainians under a bus, I hope we shall soon find out. Trump & Co will probably get it into their heads eventually that we need European solidarity as never before. For all the talk of 'draining the swamp' in Washington, presumably they would not want to do away with the federal Government? In Europe we need federal institutions too. In Britain the Government had to employ an extra 80,000 or so civil servants to cope with Brexit. That doesn't sound like down-sizing the State! But we don't need to get rid of the institutions which have been built up painfully with time, just to make them transparent and truly answerable to their members and electorates. This is not something that any president or political party will be able to bring about of themselves, though they may be able to facilitate it. How about a massive campaign to develop base communities? With solidarity we must have subsidiarity.

    We each have to make a start by bringing responsibility into our own lives, but sometimes the whole paraphanalia of the political and media establishment seems structured to prevent us from doing so. We might understand it as 'saving our souls', and yet it is still meaningful to speak of, for example, 'saving the soul of Europe'. A good place to start may be in demolishing the left wing/right wing narrative, which to my mind mainly serves to divide and disempower people, while diverting our attention from the issues where we really could make a difference. Just imagine how the establishment would hate left and right wing 'populism' to combine! If one must think in dialectic terms, perhaps to be or not to be might suffice? 

    Sailing boats, especially wooden ones, have souls too. Their shape is determined by the elements and the struggle of men with them, as well as by the material of which they are made. I can think of no more exemplary human accomplishment than sailing the sea, nor better combination of skill and endurance, of utility and aesthetics, of immediate practicality and dreams, nor of any better school in all the things that make life really worth living! In other words, sailing the sea is a great training for the anti-zombies so urgently required if we are to escape totalitarianism, and it emphatically should not be left to the mega-rich to play with in their spare time. Not that nature is not capable of looking after herself, and for instance taking out the odd tycoon who thinks he has her taped! Meanwhile, let's keep trying for alternative means to access the great mysteries of the sea.  

       

Springs of Living Water

My old laptop has been sitting on my desk at home, unused and neglected, for over a month now, and is only clunking into life again slowly and reluctantly. I was living in the Anna M in Nazaré for the best part of the month of July, mainly working with my Siberian friend Anatole to finish reconstructing the cabin; a good job for two old men! Meanwhile Alec works on the electric drive in fits and starts, and seems to be slowly getting it together. I just have to take one day, one job, at a time, and do my best to enjoy every moment. After all there are very many infinitely worse places to be, and worse ways to pass the time!

    I cannot say this is not a challenging situation, and I have had to work quite hard to overcome my impatience and even despair as to whether the old boat was ever going to take to the sea again, complete with her autonomous electric drive. I have to keep reminding myself that our bright idea is only like a bucket that we offer to the river of life to fill; when we think we can fill it ourselves, we are quite likely to find something wrong,- rust, holes etc. Yet it is the drama of this very situation which interests me, the interplay between the water of life and our own little attempts to do something with it!

    It is odd how difficult it is for all the world to grasp such universal symbolism as that of living water. Considering how we must all constantly use water and how all life depends on it, one might have thought that it was simple and natural to carry on to the concept of 'living water' with that special quality which cleanses and enables growth - divine grace, the very stuff of life - so unlike stagnant water stuck in some bucket! Instead we are inclined to obsess about whatever ways we may adopt of attempting to subject it to our own purposes. We confuse the water and the bucket, which I am using as a symbol for our own self with all its extensions and accoutrements. The Devil's supreme achievement is to make religion itself one of our ego's or super-ego's self-aggrandizing projects.

    Of course, our buckets are important, but what really counts is the water with which we fill them. Each of us is our own bucket, we must maintain our own vital integrity, but the water is the Thing! This may all seem very abstract, but has very practical application. Jesus applied the term 'living water' to Himself. If we draw our water from His spring, we are likely to be surprised at the results. If we pray to Him and His saints, especially Our Lady, and go to Mass regularly, sincerely offering ourselves to Him, we will find He waters the tender plants of wisdom, justice, peace and joy in our lives.  The same is true for 'our neighbours', the other people in our lives; by genuinely turning to our brothers and sisters, we may find Christ and His living water through them, and thus come to God, who welcomes anyone who turns to Him with whatever bucket that they can lay their hands on, though it may look very different to ours. This is God's way of making us realise that we do not own the water, and must set aside our lethal desires to own and control it ourselves. 

    None of us can begin to make good use of the water  by ourself, so we develop all kinds of more or less conscious systems which we tell ourselves will do so, if possible under our own control; but such systems have developed in complexity and power in lock-step with human societies. When God is left out, they fall into the power of minorities who reflect current paradigms for better or worse. Now and then, they threaten to sweep away our individual buckets in a torrent. The tensions between the individual and society, and between the authentic free water of life and human systems for the application of it,  have existed since the dawn of civilisation, but lately the threat of, in biblical terms, false gods carrying away our true Holy City has become totalitarian and existential on the global scale.

    Something has changed in these last few years, even while the Anna M has been sitting on the land at Nazaré! I think the few big corporations that dominate the modern world have been reaching their apotheosis, even while the realisation is dawning that they are false in their promises and pretensions, to, for example, champion health, freedom, democracy etc. 'Put not your trust in princes'! Unfortunately, the governments of what we like to think of as 'the free world', along with their health 'services', now stand discredited. They preach about 'threats to democracy' and 'disinformation' while engaging in censorship and the suppression of dissenting voices to an unprecedented degree. The medical profession, in its official capacity, though it was one of the few that retained widespread respect, now stands apparently more interested in their own interests and reputation than in the interests of those they are supposed to be serving. The faith of citizens in their 'democratic' governments when it comes, not just to health, but to war and peace, to the handling of their economies and of climate change, has been very severely undermined. In my little world, we see allegedly well-meaning policies resulting in life being made just about impossible for the archetypal skipper/owner fisherman, and coastal fishing communities being destroyed.

    How are we to reverse this dynamic? Where do we begin? Wherever we are, with whoever is around us! One universal feature of evil systems is the way they have of 'depersonalizing'  people. Their victims feel powerless and isolated while free and open communication between them is shut down. We may counter this by renewing our own efforts to think clearly and especially with self-awareness, and to communicate openly and honestly with the other people in our lives. 

    That last bastion of personal relationships, the nuclear family, is under unprecedented pressure; surely it thrives better when not subjected to such cooking, but rather when all kinds of inter-personal communication thrive, across generations and families of different kin. We must put aside the chronic individualism that pervades the world, developing a different idea of personal fullfilment, realising how radically it depends on our relationships. A massive movement to rediscover basic communities is called for, and on such a basis even our politics and whole culture might be revived, with our politicians made genuinely accountable and responsive, and their actions rendered transparent.

   A base community is to my mind one of less than a hundred people, in itself small enough so that everyone can really know each other and eat together now and again, yet in co-operation with other such communities, mutually enriching each other and pushing that accountability and communication upwards, according to the principle of subsidiarity.  Bearing in mind ee cummings' famous saying,- 'new worlds, i suggest, are born and not made, and their birthdays are the birthdays of individuals', it is critical to avoid sacrificing individual autonomy and responsibility, but fundamentally we do have to renew our whole culture.  

   Our basic communities would do everything that they can to produce their own necessities, food, housing, power and heat, and would trade with each other when it comes to commodities, such as wood, wine or olive oil, that on one hand they produce to excess and on the other cannot produce themselves. They could even do their own banking; I don't see why they can't use the common currency, but what a great thing to be able to choose what to fund and on what terms! They would inspire each other when it comes to the higher aspects of culture,- art, music, literature and religion. They may amuse themselves with the very business  of sailing back and forth on the Gannetsway, building boats and so on. What better way is there for people to really get to know each other, to trust each other and work together?    

    We are currently witnessing an interesting political inversion. Forget about 'the revolution'; we must start with ourselves. You could say that the most effective revolutionaries are in fact conservatives. I might say that I have been working at these ideas for over half a century.  I am watching and waiting and working for 'the revolution in the revolution' to happen right now, though I am well used to being accused of romantic idealism,- I persist in restating them. In my remaining active years, I intend to 'give it the welly'!                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Hoping to be back off Culatra this autumn!

              

    

In Search of a New 'Epistemological Paradigm'.

It's over two months since I last posted, during which time Alec has been struggling on to get the famous electric drive made and fitted. I myself spent a little over three weeks in Nazaré in May. I return on July 9th in the hope that the Anna M's long sojourn there is finally coming to an end, and she may even possibly be able to return to the Shannon Estuary this year. We are actually contemplating establishing our administrative HQ in this shed of our John's:-

    In the month of May, our grandson David married Danielle from California, having met while they were both studying in Galway. They had a tremendous wedding here in Carrigaholt, a real village affair with the dances in barns. Now they are in America, which is fine, but what I would like to see is our little community here achieve a thriving economic base that is useful, relevent, interesting and fun, and may attract some of the rising generation to live here. Perhaps I should try, once again, to elucidate my ideas of  'community', to use that much over-worked and ill-defined term.

    Fiona and I came to the West of Ireland half a century ago, as refugees from a society which had lost its spiritual roots and which sought to fill the resultant void largely with various forms of individualistic consumerism. Some people attempt to fill this void with a return to nationalism, which is even less appealing! Was it possible that Catholic Christianity could really find the grace of spiritual renewal? Well, it still hangs in here, with an age-old tradition of community living that could be said to reach back to the fairy rings or raths that abound round about, and from which our townland takes  the name Rahona, or Una's Rath. I cannot think of any better way to prepare for the coming storms than to build self-sufficiency and community right here, though it has to be said there is a terrible lot of work to be done before such aspirations could be widely described convincing and widely applicable.

    Occasionally I feel the need to look around and see how other attempts are faring. In such a spirit, I betook myself to a day of encounter organised by EcocongregationIreland at An Tairseach in the Dominican Convent at Wicklow, on the day of the summer solstice. I was rewarded with a very fine lunch from the produce of their own farm and garden, but we were there to reflect on how our response to Pope Francis' encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si', was getting on. The answer seems to be that in the tumultuous decade since it was published, our faith communities do not seem to have got far beyond 'actions to help pollinators', recycling, tidy-towns etc. This is all very well, but hardly responds adequately to the challenge implied, for instance, in para 107 of the encyclical:- 'It can be said that many problems of today's world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society' !

    Why is it so difficult to bridge the gulf between theory and practice? I find myself taking issue with the way the theory is presented, on all kinds of levels. The subtitle of Laudato Si' is On Care For Our Common Home. The trouble is that so many people, perhaps everyone in some way, do not feel 'at home' in this world at all; hence, when their attempts to do so fail as they so often do, they tend to become discouraged, bored, dejected, disillusioned and in the end downright nihilistic and destructive.  As for those communists who set about establishing an earthly paradise, how terrible were the results! It is impossible to care for that which one does not love, but how does one get to love life and be at peace in this troubled and transient existence?

    When I was a boy, we Catholics used to say a prayer to Our Lady, 'Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, Hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn, then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us, and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of they womb, Jesus....'  One heard a lot less of this exile in a valley of tears once the sixties and the Second Vatican Council got into their stride, but the sad fact is that nobody really got any happier as a result of the overdose of optimism; quite the contrary in fact.

    When one looks around to see who has really brought more happiness and beauty into the world, not to mention peace and harmony with Nature, one finds a curious paradox.  It is those whose hearts are set on the hidden world, the Great Beyond, who are most likely to bring beauty into the world, in the forms of little hints, reflections and gleams of that Other Reality. Yet it was a mighty thing to rediscover that Beyond as after all the actual goal of our earthly pilgrimage, the harvest that is being prepared against the end of time, as Jesus set out in his parables. We recall St Paul's stunning words in Romans,8,22 - 'From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth.'

    It turned out that it was not impossible to reconcile faith in God with science. Behind this sea-change in attitude, behind Laudato Si' and also as acknowledged by the Dominican sisters at An Tairsach in the booklet I was given the other day about their efforts, entitled 'In Communion with the Sacred Universe', there looms the presence of Teilhard de Chardin, - the 'first person in modern times in the West to attempt a synthesis of science and religion'. However, we didn't even get to say a prayer to the Holy Spirit to enlighten our Day of Encounter. The only prayer we did get was one of thanksgiving to 'Our Mother the Sun', since it was the summer solstice. Some people, in rediscovering the holiness of the cosmos, seem to have gone a full circle and reverted to worshiping the Sun! (If they must assign that celestial body a gender, they might however run with any language I know of... le soleil, el sol....!)

    There remains the problem of that radical discontinuity which besets our human condition, leaving us alienated from our inner selves and bedeviling our rather pathetic attempts at community and genuine stewardship. Something seems to have gone wrong, and one might have thought that humanity had discovered that making gods out of Nature does not work very well. We are alienated from Nature, each other, and God. The resulting crisis seems to get more acute with every passing year. 

    Teilhard never really got his head around Original Sin; it was the main reason why the Jesuit authorities suppressed his work for a number of years; indeed I witnessed the havoc caused by his ideas, which bear some bit of the responsibility for the destruction of the once great monastery at Downside in England. Perhaps the Pope might help by spelling out the problems with 'the method and aims of science and technology' as 'an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society'?  How is it to be distinguished from the Science that Teilhard and Christian environmentalists purport to have reconciled with their Faith?  We witness the effects of that idolatrous paradigm, which I label Scientism, not just in the management of the environmental crisis, but also in the repeated attempts to achieve 'peace and justice' with weapons of mass destruction. In the  Covid affair, it has been said that we witnessed the death of science, in the abject failure of the official response of the 'men of science', while genuine scientific debate was stifled. 

    This reflects the intriguing sympathy which is liable to spring up between those who oppose the official narratives, for whatever reason, and however muddled they may or may not be. Exactly what is this commonality between them? It is hardly a matter of religion or ideology, though it does call for some pretty fundmental detachment from official narratives, the 'legacy media' and even mainstream education. A common thread is the rejection of the attitude that claims to address our problems with methods of command and control, that in the era of artificial intelligence threaten to escalate into an horrendous global totalitarianism.  Commitment to personal autonomy and responsibility is a rational response, as is a willingness to improvise and experiment as one eschews the tyranny and over-specialisation of 'experts'.  

    When such rebels do succeed in working together, the difficulties of doing so may be overcome by a remarkable fellowship which springs up between them. We may indeed even encounter Jesus in our brothers and sisters, and through him, the Father. The Dominican sisters are on the right track with their leaning into both community and self-sufficiency, but, like all of us moderns, surely need to get a better grasp of the collision  between creation and our fallen nature. The current crisis of science, which demonstrates that collision so clearly, perhaps provides the key to really getting to grips with our other problems!

    I hope my old boat can provide an example; doing fun things, rebuilding on an old foundation, with limited resources; not starting from a grand and flashy plan, but working prayerfully and cheerfully with whoever shows up and the materials that come to hand.  I may say the greenhouse that I've just built in the month of June was made in a similar spirit. It certainly makes one realise the power of the greenhouse effect! It will be a tragedy if the environmental movement becomes another victim of scientism. There are little ways available on all sides for us to respond effectively to the Holy Spirit, but to do so we have to break out of the diktats of that 'epistemological paradigm'  of command and control!

Back aboard 9th July

               

Golden Yellow

 At a time when we are all oppressed by the appalling wars and threats of greater wars that dominate the world's attention, we are confronted with a choice between trying to reconcile such realities with our own peace and sanity, or simply attempting to block them out. After all, who are we to imagine that we can get any kind of sound understanding of all the terrible things that are happening, let alone do anything about them?

I write in the conviction that they cannot be blocked out, otherwise they are likely to break into our lives with all the brutality of the letter I came across the other day, informing my mother's uncle of the death of his son, Paul Smith, in WWII. For all our inadequacies, even for our own sanity, the horrors have to be addressed. Here, there is no exceptional  knowledge or expertise which can possibly provide the answers. 

After all, experts are people who specialise, and there clearly is no speciality that can cover the issues raised. Furthermore, experts of any kind necessarily have their own hobby-horses, vested interests, and the first necessity here is to free our minds of such interests. How come, we may well ask, do ordinary people frequently have better insights and instincts than the experts?

Such are my excuses for writing about matters about which I merely have the benefit of what might be called a lifetime of intellectual browsing, in the context of a good deal of salt water and some prayer. I am far from claiming to be always right, but I can at least claim to be detached and as honest as possible. My being virtually without power or influence I take to be an advantage, which enables me to offer my thoughts merely as a challenge to my readers to figure out what they think. If we all did this, we might find that 'we the people' all have a lot more common ground, and hence perhaps more power to turn things round, than we realise. We  may also realise that for all the complexity, the basic issues are actually quite simple, while the human race has not been wrestling with them for thousands of years to no effect. Of course, there will also be those who will do their very best to prevent any such realisations occuring!

Three apparently separate matters have devilishly preoccupied me lately, and I suppose many other people too,-  covid, Israel/Palestine and Ukraine. The 'pandemic' aptly set the stage for the other two, in being an extreme case of governmental and corporate overreach, which finally convinced me that the world, democratic or not, was in the grip of powers which do not have ordinary people, their welfare and their rights at heart. This reality is also playing out of course in the above mentioned wars.

So what is wrong? For a start, governments on all sides are in a very bad place, with in most cases national debt completely out of control and chronically escalating, and with a frequently sick, declining and discontented population. What better way to get the people to fall in behind them, to knuckle down and forget about all those impossible problems like balancing budgets and addressing climate change, so we can carry on with old faithfuls like printing money and polluting the planet regardless? We 'the people'  have to insist on addressing the basic problems rather than allowing ourselves to be distracted from them. Giving Varadkar and his mates an emphatic thumbs down in the recent Irish referenda was a good start!

However, there is the very ideology of the nation state to be addressed, which is so  widely taken for granted that most people do not even realise that it is an ideology. Some people claim that the concept is as old as the will of communities to survive, but I think not, at least, not in the sense of these modern states that envelop the individual from the cradle to the grave and determine what he or she can and cannot do and even say, in a mode quite beyond inter-personal mediation. The Judeo-Christian tradition, on the other hand, places our destiny, on the personal as well as the communal level, within the transcendent revelation of the one and only ground of Being. 'My country, right or wrong' erects the state into a false god. Collapsing the tension introduced by an independent and universal church facilitated this. 

It was indeed unfortunate that this process managed to identify itself with a necessary process of emancipation, both for individuals and so that 'the scientific world-view' could develop. It was appropriated by the Protestant Reformation and subsequent Enlightenment thinkers. Then people started asking foolish questions like 'Does God exist?' Faith was reduced to theism, with the French philosopher Pascal proposing his famous wager (that we may as well bet on God's existence for obvious reasons) and Voltaire declaiming 'Si Dieu n’éxistait pas, il faudrait l’inventer'.

Even in France (fille ainée de l'Eglise) the remnant of the Church was largely subsumed into the state. English nationalism took a giant step down this road from 'Good King Harry' onwards, and much the same impulse seems to have driven on into Amerca, even as they all considered themselves 'chosen races'. The Catholic Church, on the surface of things, languished in the fight between these assertive nation states, each considering itself a kind of church. European civilization fractured as faith was separated from reason, spirit from matter. But nationalism and indeed science fed on war. Now that same science has rendered war impossibly destructive, with our societies disintegrating for all kinds of reasons but fundamentally because they thought that they could do without God, so we simply have to put our civilisation and culture together again by rediscovering Him!

A good place to start is to recognise that there is no sense to asking 'Does God exist?' One necessarily finds oneself discussing someone else's idea of God, and they are all very inadequate. But somehow we have to get our feet on the ground of existence. Some philosophers went on to question whether life itself exists. A slap of salt water should be enough to settle that. Then one can go on to discover that good and evil, true and false etc really do exist; they are not mere social constructs. On the other hand, nothing ever gets created unless someone starts with some kind of an idea,- I am scratching my head even in order to construct a bit of a greenhouse! 

What does it take to construct the Universe? But we do have a bit of a problem in acknowledging an intelligence so far beyond our own. It is tempting to avoid doing so, confining  our attention to the more manageable 'power fields', such as a rugby field or a company or even the family or the nation state. Forget God and the Church, let's just concentrate on our parts on whatever little stages we can act, where we have some hope of exercising our will to power! 

The problem is that life becomes so fragmented that it no longer works when the ineffable is shut out; each little part becomes absurd if it has no basis in the whole, and people keep trying to force it into little boxes which they think they can manage. Nationalism is the ultimate embodiment of this will to power, and genuine community is something else, which crushes noone. Perhaps the best we can do is to think in terms of direction of travel, but we must start on the road. This is part of the reason why I opted for Irish rather than British nationality. 

Nowadays however Ireland is facing a choice between following Sweden and Finland into Nato, or holding out for an alternative. Supposing a Russian fleet sailed up the Shannon to seize County Clare with Shannon airport? Unlikely, maybe, but we would look a trifle silly trying to dig out some of the old cannons for the 18th century batteries! But how about a massive cyber attack? So what might Israel's alternative be, to attempting to root out and destroy Hammas in Gaza, not to mention chasing Arabs from the land? And what is Ukraine's alternative, to fighting on against Russia?

One thing is certain, warring nation states are going nowhere but towards mutual destruction. 'Victory' is not possible any longer, in the sense that nation states understand it. So I think in the case of where I live in Ireland, we must hang tough outside NATO, indeed be more assertive about this and advocate its dissolution, on the grounds that it is rooted in the Anglo-American will to power. Maybe we will actually get a new American President who concentrates on getting his own house in order, which I would count a good thing, while hoping it will be Kennedy rather than Trump,- it is too questionable whether the latter is capable of concentrating on anything except himself. I'm hoping the American electorate will spring a surprise on us, just as the Irish just did,- noone foresaw that referendum result coming! 

As for Israel and Ukraine, in both cases, they could start by imagining a future state of affairs where the different ethnicities have their own cantons, free of outside interference,  albeit with appropriate cooperation,- just as indeed the whole world needs to, especially Europe, while throwing off its dependence on the USA.. It is difficult, there will be plenty of set-backs, but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility, and the alternatives are truly dreadful. Considering the technologies of control that are being developed, modern nation states of all hues are threatening to become hideous tyrannies, as they try to hold atomised, fragmented populations together. 

We all need to rebuild community from the bottom up, while developing 'energy fields' that do not depend on national governments in both directions, big and small. I am working at it particularly on the level of our mini community here in Rahona, and on the level of the Gannetsway,- and I am after giving the 'Anna M' a new colour scheme, replacing blue with golden yellow. I would like it to reflect a change in my state of mind, from despondency at the way the world is going, to hope in a new beginning! There's a big effort coming up to get her back in the water.