To Nazare and FFFIX.

Rounding Cape St Vincent.

Will the 'Anna M' make it home this year at all? At the moment it seems doubtful. We had a straightforward passage from Olhao to Nazare, but by the time we arrived she was leaking too badly to go on our way northwards. Now she is on the concrete. She also has her engine out. Ger has flown home to make sure Scamp is not forgetting him. Anna is quite pleased with her new gaffe. Joe is sad, his sailing so curtailed. 

Tough times in the Executive Suite!

However, once one can get at that leak, it may not be very hard to fix it. It is just beside the port rear engine mounting, where there are 2 or 3 cracked ribs; so no matter what one did with it in the line of caulking, it would not last until they are fixed. Meanwhile, once that engine space is cleaned up, it will be another Ryanair flight for me!

'Home', in a photo given me here in Nazare by Dodi Stiller.

Herewith the IXth despatch 'From the Fractal Frontier'.

There was more to that devastation than the tragedy of Dom Luke. In the community at Downside I had encountered an eccentric and intelligent bunch of monks, of very varied character. As my housemaster in Barlow there was firstly Fr John, with a scar in his cheek from a German bayonet; he had made a dramatic escape from a pow camp back to England. He was shy, kindly and straightforward. After two years, he was succeeded by Fr Raphael; here was a representative of the post-war generation, bright but 'uncooked' by the war and not quite realising yet how difficult the changing times were becoming. Of those who taught me religion before Dom Luke, there was Christopher the artist (who then left Downside itself for the parish in Liverpool, and like most of my friends, subsequently left the community), Oswald the Jungian psychoanalyst (who died of a heart attack before long), Illtyd the theologian (a brilliant scholastic but rather dry for a schoolboy). 

There was also quite a substantial Irish presence in the community, most of whom I think had hoped to form the basis of a new foundation near Gorey in Co. Wexford, which however did not happen. They brought a colourful dimension to the place, and included a West Cork man by the name of Leander Donovan, whom I only got to know through my dear friend Ken, he being a fully fledged member of the Irish contingent, that unfortunate little tribe who were packed off on the old Inishfallen to receive a 'superior' education, albeit Catholic, in a foreign land. Dom Leander however impressed one as actually being a real monk, as well as being great fun, malapropisms and all. By now a pattern had become established in my life, of having Irish friends and being attracted to their country.

What did the monks all have in common? If one is to become a Benedictine monk in modern England, it is unlikely that one will think very highly of the 'consumer society' and its values. I imagine they mostly had a more or less obscure hope that they were educating youngsters who might help to find a new direction, but there were very different notions of what such a beast might look like. After all the Second Vatican Council was promising to renew the Church, though such a promise was already looking problematic. Could it have anything to do with, for
instance, finding a way forward for 'Catholic Ireland'?

As for Downside, the divisions in the community found inadequate expression in such matters as the use of the vernacular in their liturgical office, such tensions being dumbed down into the familiar narrative of conservatives v progressives. In the aftermath of Luke's death, the more articulate of the enfants terribles in the community were despatched to join Sebastian and Christopher in the Liverpool parish; best to let them go and start their brave new world up there at St Mary's in the docklands, a good long way from Downside, but funnily enough, kind of on the road to Ireland!

I was soon hitching up that new motorway to visit them. It was a shock to find little interest at Cambridge in such matters that engaged me so profoundly, and to be expected to go back to the business of studying literature in a purely superficial fashion, from the outside, an author a week and an essay at the end of it – just learn to churn out the expected dope, four essays in three hours when it came to the exams! 

Sebastian introduced me to such books such as 'Deschooling Society' by the American Jesuit Ivan Illich, which confirmed the sense I had that the 'training' of conventional education was positively sinister in some of its effect; it actually schooled one in the 'disassociation of sensibility', in the atrophy of one's personal consciousness, with a resultant side-lining of our own personal creativity and conscience with regard to whatever tasks may be required of us. As far as I was concerned, Luke had gone down fighting that sort of stuff, and whatever else I was going to do, I was not going to fall in with it.

I managed to coast through part 1 of my degree, in French and Spanish, mainly on what I had learnt at school. It was easier in Spanish than in French, as I was less deeply engaged with Spanish literature, so I got a 2:1 in it. However I baulked at churning out the old stuff with regard to some French writers who had really interested me. In one exam paper, of the four essays in three hours variety, I settled for offering one decent essay. They gave me a third, which was I suppose nice of them. It was after all a more constructive kind of protest than what the lads in Paris were up to, hurling cobble-stones at les flics, some of them getting their own heads bashed in for their trouble!

There was only the one place where the turmoil in my head could be expressed and understood, and that was St Mary's in Liverpool. The first time I made the journey there, fresh air (or whatever it was that blew in from the Mersey across the dusty streets) had only penetrated the stuffy ecclesiastical gloom of the parochial house on the top floor, where Sebastian and Christopher were installed. It was wonderful to find myself listened to and understood there. Shortly afterwards Sebastian was made the parish priest, and they were joined as I have mentioned by three young monks, enfants terribles or otherwise described as flower children, Peter, Anselm and Kevin.

Facing North and FFFVIII.

My effort to fix the 'Anna M' 'leaks didn't turn out very well. For one tide the bilge pump seemed to be very quiet, but then we were hopped off the bottom by a bad wind blowing straight into the dock, which swamped a little speed boat on the pontoon beside us, and we were back to square one. The upshot is that going off-shore to the Azores is out; I shall have to nurse her up the coast and see what can be done in Galicia again. We'll be off this Friday afternoon....

Ger with John Peere in Ayamar, Ayamonte.

Ger made an heroic trip back to Ayamonte on the train to get a new liferaft; the old one was 5 years out of date and too big anyway. The new one goes in the deck-box and we have a much better view forward from the cockpit. I have another problem in that the dongle is working badly, if at all, so this is a hasty note before lunch in Olhao. But what I have below, From the Fractal Frontier, is already prepared.

Madonna of Culatra.

Part VIII Soldiers back from the front, sailors home from the sea, in fact anyone who has recently paid some kind of visit to the fractal frontier, are reckoned to be 'high on testosterone'. As usual in the scientific age, people tend here to use a little superficial knowledge of the way things happen as an account of why they happen, which is a lot easier than grappling with the deeper reasons for them. Things happen by way of a whole lot of different factors on different levels of reality, and we get ourselves into all sorts of trouble by simply alighting on the one that happens to suit our mentality or circumstances at any particular time, and pronouncing that that’s the 'real' one!
Dostoyevski famously stated that ‘it is a perilous thing to fall into the hands of the living God’. The mysterious gift turns out to be a call, which activates the coherence, the person in us, otherwise known as our soul. It undermines the disassociations that we generally deploy in order to maintain control. We are taken out of our comfort zone, exposed to dangerous forces that take us out of ourselves, and caught up into realities which transcend our individuality. Then we may experience something of the exaltation that Teilhard felt in battle.
It is a primeval business, frankly on the whole inappropriate and embarrassing in this age, where machines amplify the possibilities for narcissistic illusions of power and control so effectively. Frequently we settle for expressing ourselves in strictly contained and stylised forms such as sport. But after all human beings change slowly, and what has been established over the millennia can hardly be changed as it were overnight.

We have an inescapable need to know God, but all our concepts of Him fall short, and with half-forms of exaltation, when we become disillusioned, we find ourselves in a dangerous and vulnerable place. Our room, once swept clean of its demon and purged of the dreaded poison of boredom and annihilation, may be promptly reoccupied by him along with the seven worse ones referred to in the Gospels of Matthew (12:44) and Luke (11:25). So when Dom Luke, struggling with disenchantment, appeared to have practically fallen in love with one of his students, and when he subsequently lost his mind and killed himself, could one describe it as anything but the work of a troupe of demons?

It would seem that the ancient Greek philosophers would have taken it very easily in their stride, and indeed there is a bizarre and schizophrenic puritanism at loose in the contemporary world, which looks with horror at the notion of any intense relationship between a mature man and a youth, however chaste and spiritual, while being very proud of its tolerance of homosexuality. But how indeed was this particular visitation of the fractal frontier to be coped with? It is in setting up the battle between morality and feelings that the demons excel.

For right or wrong, Downside was always conscientious, in my experience, in not tolerating feelings such as this. From this distance, I feel very sorry for the likes of Dom Aelred, headmaster at the time, though his demand that I bite not the hand that reared me still rankles. But what, one may ask, was the nature of Jesus' relationship with 'the beloved disciple', who laid his head on Jesus' shoulder at the Last Supper?

It is helpful for a start to remember that demons are fallen angels. What’s more, one is caught up on this busy frontier in the whole mystery of the Cross, whereby our salvation was effected through what appeared at the time to be the ultimate triumph of evil. I particularly sympathise with the state of mind of St Peter and his friends soon after all the devastating heartache of Christ's passion, and even after their encounter with the risen Lord, when they took a boat out and went back fishing. It is one of those vignettes in the Gospels that smack of an authenticity beyond mere human imagination. So many years later, I got my dear friend Patrick Pye to paint a picture for our house of the Lord as they found Him in the morning, cooking breakfast on the shore of the Sea of Gallilee.

It is very difficult to settle down to the same old boring, humdrum business of ‘getting by’ when one has breathed some heady air of  exaltation, any kind of exaltation. Perhaps the default method of coping with this situation is to fall in love. Disappointed in one or another form of exaltation, one turns readily to this other one, that is pretty much always available, especially when one is young. In the darkness where one's sense of self flounders, we instinctively search out some other person in whose eyes perhaps we hope to recover our own sense of self. Even at the best of times, humanity is haunted by a sense of loss, a need to recover some mysterious lost completeness, and disappointments bring it on.

Teenagers are particularly vulnerable. I was more or less continually in love, with at least one person and not necessarily of the opposite sex, from the age of about 14 onwards. In the wake of Luke’s death, I managed it in a more serious manner than usually, in spite of the somewhat unpromising environment of a boys’ boarding school, even as I wrestled with, as it had now become, the sheer impossibility of exam work. I suppose I was fortunate that I already had a place at Cambridge, though that scholarship I was supposed to be working for would have been nice. As a practical attempt to break out of its hot-house atmosphere and to at least make some kind of practical move, myself and a few friends had got involved in the local village youth club, getting to know the lads, who naturally scorned ‘them college toffs’, and helping in some of the activities there.

It was run, I think under the auspices of the British Legion, by one Commander George Beal, a retired sub-mariner who worked for the Admiralty in Bath, and whose wife was rash enough to invite us round to tea. It was St Valentine’s day, 1965. Thus I met their lovely daughter, then a shy girl of seventeen, with bewitching eyes, by the name of Fiona. But actually George was her step-father; her father had been killed in a car crash when she was five. The fractal frontier again, lurking in those eyes!

She occupied most of my thoughts for the last few weeks at school. On the odd afternoon we went walking the countryside, and reading poetry in the Spring sunshine by some hedgerow.... I suppose we both thought it would be all over after I left, but we kept writing letters to each other, and managed to visit each other's homes for the odd weekend. Then Fiona's family moved to Scotland. I was at Cambridge by then. It was a fraught and painful situation for both of us. If we had been sensible, we would no doubt have settled for going our separate ways. Couldn't we agree to part for a few years, till we established ourselves in life? But whatever about Fiona, I came to feel that I had something that was too precious to let go of. I still think I was right!  It was just as well, because devastation is about the only word to use to describe my state of mind for much of my time at Cambridge.

Battling the Leaks in Olhao, and FFFVII.

We got as far as Olhao and the weather went on the bum; a strong WSW wind has been blowing here for 4 days. However the drying berth was free and the tides at the spring, so we haven't been losing time; we scrubbed her bottom and I had a session of one of my very favourite pastimes, 'battling the leaks'. Yes real ones. I might tell the politicians it's just one of those wars that have to be fought though they are never won! Here is 'Anna M' with her nice clean bottom:-

and here is the weapon I used for caulking-

It only cost EUR3.50, as a builder's chisel, and a friendly man in a workshop wouldn't take anything for doctoring its edge as the photo shows.

Meanwhile, apart from the wind bothering us, life is very pleasant here in Olhao, and there is an excellent eating house beside the docks where we can get out midday nosh for Eur 5 including plonk. But sadly, having anchored just off the markets for years, this time I was moved on by the maritime police. And so, little bit by little bit, our freedom is being taken away!
The forecast is not good for sailing north next week. We may have to go by the Azores.

Photos from Olhao by Ger Kavanagh.

As to politics, Felicitations aux Francais et bonne chance a M. le President Macron, but boy will he need it! The political question now is whether there is any chance of stemming the tide of reactionary nationalism in Great Britain? C'mon Tony, I'm afraid you'll have to do it, and maybe Ken Clarke will help. Let's have a Grand Coalition of those from any party who are opposed to Brexit, and make sure there are never any two such candidates in any constituency, even conservatives when they are committed bona-fide remainers! You can worry about how to form a new Government when you have won the election, and after all it is never more than a fairly small minority of the electorate who actually vote Tory, even when they get a so-called landslide.
These are dire times; it can and must be attempted. Anyway we need a new approach to politics, especially in England. The fact is that the Labour Party under Mr Corbyn hasn't a chance; he has too many people annoyed by ducking the central issue, besides which the whole style of old-hat socialism is not going anywhere. Meanwhile the USA under the Duckie is a menace; it is vital that Europe stands together to resist his bullying. One might say that Mr Blair is the wrong man for that, but after all he may well have learnt from his mistakes, and there does not seem to be anyone else around with the stature to do the job.



From the Fractal Frontier, Part VII   Teilhard de Chardin’s thought had been heavily influenced by Henri Bergson, who before the Great War had proposed a more spiritual concept of evolution than the dreary materialistic ‘survival of the fittest’ version attributed to Darwin. Bergson was half Jewish, and died of pneumonia as an old man, after being forced to queue for hours in Nazi Paris, in frigid conditions, to register as a Jew. In his will he stated that he had intended for some years to become a Catholic, but had not done so because he did not want to be seen as turning his back on the Jews; however he asked that a Catholic priest would say a prayer for him at his funeral, which was done. Also taught and strongly influenced by Bergson was the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, whose novel Zorba the Greek came out as a film in 1964, that went down very well with us youngsters of those times, and indeed exudes a flavour of them.
We were enthralled at the affirmation of spontaneous, natural human life in the strong and autonomous person of Zorba. We were dying for the individual at last to be free to express himself, but we had all also been profoundly shaken and scared by the Cuban missile crisis and the strong possibility, as it appeared, that civilisation itself could be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. This has been described as 'the world's most dangerous moment', though it seems to be losing any such dubious status these days; but occurring as it did just when I was beginning to think seriously, its effect on me for one was extremely profound. It greatly compounded the urgency and the poignancy of the situation of my generation, if they were any bit aware. Maybe there is any even more pervasive atmosphere of anxiety now.

So what of Teilhard and Dom Luke? I think the big deal about Original Sin was in the main cover for the fact that the Old Guard could not cope with a renewed Catholicism that actually affirmed our basic human aspirations, enabling us to love God and also His creation, including our own inner selves, in a single movement of the heart and mind. Stuck in defensive mode as they were, they did not take kindly to the opening up of their inner hurts and problems, despite the fact that it went with opening up both our minds and hearts to each other and thence to God. At Downside, those members of the community who 'came to grief' simply disappeared as far as the Establishment was concerned; they might as well have been thrown out of a helicopter like some South American dissidents!

Of course, one of the most serious charges one can lay against Catholic prelates was their tendency to cosy up to despots like General Pinochet; but Downside was to have an old boy who became a priest and suffered torture for getting on the wrong side of him. All that sort of thing rumbled on in the background of the 1960s and '70s. We remembered Franco too, but including the fact that if one was a priest or committed Catholic, one had little choice but to get on his side of the line, unless one wanted to be shot. This dichotomy cried out to be resolved.
In its essence, Teilhard's teaching was straight out of the Bible, the story of the opening up of our hardened hearts to God's love, of Jesus' teaching of the great crop or catch being prepared in our midst; it was elaborated most powerfully by St Paul in the letter to the Romans. ‘The whole of creation groans in one great act of giving birth’, as it ‘waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God’, of those who, steeped in the knowledge of His love, were to actively participate in the completion of His creation.
Here at last seemed to be a resolution of that old impasse, not to mention of my poor Dad’s problem about the Catholics heading off in their own little boat. “There is no such thing as individual salvation!” was Luke’s provocative phrase, which I eventually rephrased for myself “you can’t go to Heaven by yourself.”  There is just the one crop being prepared in the world, even though not of the world, which is to be gathered into the one barn, even if it was also described by Jesus as a mansion with many rooms. Then again, we were eventually offered it in the form of His body, the temple of God; we are to be built into it like stones, with Himself as the corner-stone. How many images it takes to try to describe such a mystery! It is beyond description yet so central and basic that images of it pop up all over the place; but the best is the one Jesus specially adopted, that of bread and wine, with ourselves as grains of wheat or grapes.

Because we are actually talking of a community of Persons, it is possible for each human person to find a place in it with no loss of true individuality. It is after all in relationship that we discover our personship; this is a most important principle. Teilhard indeed posited that the guiding principle of evolution was the unrolling of complexity/consciousness, and what is that but personalization? Hence the supreme importance of being true to oneself. Evil systems try to deprive us of our personhood, short-circuiting out the difficulties posed by human freedom and autonomy. Their ministers do not therefore consider themselves or anyone else ‘worthy of eternal life’, in St Paul's words;  God's servants on the other hand seek to help us all into it, so that every last scrap of loving humanity may find fulfilment in God. But should any prove devoid of all love, what can they do but fall away into the abyss of nothingness?

Rather to my surprise, I found many echoes of all this all through the literature I was studying, in French, Spanish and English. Myself and a friend translated a play of Camus’, Les Justes, for a drama group around this time. I don’t recall it very well, but I do remember being amazed to discover how even the writings of existentialists like Sartre and Camus, supposedly very far from Catholicism, in fact shared much common ground with it when one gets down to actual substance. However their starting point is generally one kind or another of frustration, the frustrations of humanity in their search for fuller life. They catalogue the many forms this frustration takes; how, baulked themselves, many people are apt to resent the flowering of others, seeking to stifle it because it evokes desires in themselves that they have had to suppress. But whether they bemoan its absence or celebrate its many forms, the writers of Europe are above all concerned with that very integral flowering of the individual-in-relationship which Christ lived and died in order to promote.

There was a truly extraordinary level of interest in that Religious Instruction course of Luke’s, but it has to be said that it had what was mostly seen as an increasingly whacky dimension. Breaking out of that rigid, buttoned-down way of life that indeed the whole of Western society was attempting as a new dawn of freedom and self-expression seemed to be dawning came with a new exposure to one's own inner needs and demons. Very often it was accompanied by the outbreak of emotions that were finding new scope; they were frequently disorderly. When good Pope John opened the windows, more of a gale came in than anyone had bargained for!

Dom Luke developed an inner circle of devotees who seemed to think that they were about to change the world. Among them one in particular evidently aroused emotions in him that he didn't quite know what to do with. Outside the 'inner circle', there were not a few like myself who were at once fascinated and repelled. He was becoming more and more 'wired'. I arranged to meet him to try sort out my conflicting reactions, but I was about three minutes late, and he had already been and gone. A few days later, he suffered the nervous collapse that led to his death.

Travellers on the Gannetsway, with FFFVI.

A brief sojourn in that alien dimension,

Ger Kavanagh, who took the photos for this post.

inside a jet, brought me back across Biscay to the south of the Iberian Peninsula with Ger Kavanagh from Cork. We travelled on by train to Vila Real de Sto. Antonio, and were picked up by another Irish Ger with my shipmate from the sail down last autumn, Anna Legge. Back in Guadianaland, the problem is to tear them away for the long and bumpy road back. The very good news here is that our

The 'Mew Gull'.

neighbour Chris on the Mew Gull, battling cancer with his own battery of alternative treatments, is in fine form and doing well.

Anna Legge.

We head off on an utterly different 'plane', one that challenges us, brings us alive to each other and to nature; not your dull passive package merely being humped over the miles! It's a good shake-up that I feel I need a couple of times a year, to stay in some kind of trim, both physically and spiritually! I'll be bringing you the story of how we fare this time. Meanwhile, below is Chapter VI From the Fractal Frontier.

The writer.

From the Fractal Frontier, VI.

To my father and many of his generation, the Britain of the 'swinging sixties' was actually rather like the cruise ship Costa Concordia, after she hit the rocks, but before she was finally wrecked; still looking fine, but fatally holed below the water-line; sophisticated, equipped with all the wonders of technology, her passengers given over to vacuous and self-indulgent entertainment, her captain oblivious to his hubris, as she steams along proudly with an illusory self-sufficiency. How much more apposite is this image in these days of Brexit, even if she didn't quite sink yet!

As for Catholics, we have long harboured the thought that the image of a big gash under the water-line applies to human society in general, calling it ‘original sin’, which is as old as humanity. Some used to consider that those of modern times who carry on as if it hadn’t happened, enthusiastically celebrating the wonders of their ship, were guilty of ‘modernism’. If only they would realise that God had arranged a special rescue boat for Catholics, namely the Barque of Peter! The best one can hope for in this world is to take to get safely into this lifeboat (and perhaps if one is lucky find a way to live out one's days here below as comfortably as may be).

Looking wistfully from his sinking ship into (what I think the likes of my old man tended to regard as) that happy place of comfort and consolation, a rose garden wherein Catholics are wont to claim that they may swan around in God’s love, he clung to his rather grim stoicism. The idea of anyone thinking that God should favour His chosen ones in that way did have a tendency to outrage him, and this was perhaps the principal reason he never became a Catholic. But I mention the above caveat in brackets because he failed to admit that it might be easier to go down with the ship than to face the rigours of the sea in any alternative craft, that the 'rose garden' image was far from the truth, as anyone who gazes upon the Crucifixion of Our Lord must admit.

In fact opening one's heart and mind to God involves opening it also to the whole of his creation, especially all those other difficult human beings, those unfortunate refugees and foreigners in general. This can actually put one in the way of much trouble and pain. But there was my mother to bring into my life the warmth, the actual trust in that famous love of God’s, which was what made it actually liveable; however she brought this from some place very far removed from most contemporary culture, and it was questionable whether it was serviceable at all as a viable alternative in that stormy sea.

My father, though by no means oblivious to the gift she brought, still never tired of perversely trying to make her see that her faith, above all her trust in God’s providence, was on dodgy intellectual ground, not to say 'for the birds'! What possible evidence was there that God cared for anyone? If He exists at all, He is guilty of a sublime indifference to individual human beings and their sufferings. Anyway the whole thing was unscientific and incredible to a stolid, 'realistic' modern mind, and besides He certainly hadn’t helped the faithful of Ireland and Poland over much….

Into this deadlocked situation, Dom Luke, struggling with his own parcel of pain, brought le P. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose faith had been tried and tested during the four years he spent as a stretcher-bearer and priest in the trenches of World War I (where he earned the Croix de Guerre for bravery under fire). He had reconciled his faith not alone with the horror he witnessed there, but also with his scientific training and the theory of evolution. He foresaw the global civilisation that was coming into being with modern technology, and offered us a way of engaging with its scientific and technological culture, even up to a point vindicating and embracing it in God’s name.

He was aware that it was in danger of coming to grief, but his attitude was quite different to those old Roman clerics grumbling away, complaining of the dangers of modernism; equally to the likes of my somewhat dyspeptic and cantankerous father, and again nowadays to those Brexiteers. It is a strange turn-up that they should all evince a similar attitude, and we find the old collision showing up in yet another acute form in contemporary politics! Now in the year 2017 we surely need to get a handle on this; to find a language that can reconcile these old conflicts. Our culture might even have to revisit theology!

‘Ambiguities’, the revered Fathers of the Holy Office had complained of, and I do not deny that they did have a point. Teilhard does not seem to have properly thought through original sin, just as progressives tend not to recognise it or indeed sin in general. In their enthusiasm they are inclined to pass it by. Perhaps for instance it is true to say that Teilhard failed to acknowledge the simply diabolical tendency of humanity. Nowadays however it is rather the so-called conservatives who do not seem to understand what danger our race is in.

Meanwhile those of us who believe in the the future must seek to apply (with Pope Francis) a more profound and exalted commitment to it. For those who must search for an intellectual basis for this, a good place to start is indeed the Pope's fellow Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Here we may find new grounds for commitment and indeed for exaltation, and the fact is that such ecstatic involvement is something we must have, or else we are liable to die of boredom and despair, quite probably destroying the world with our own hands. Could this be what God wants?Anyway, for of all the ills that afflict humanity, is not boredom the worst and most intolerable? And conversely, is not beauty the ground of our salvation?

Waiting to Go!

From the Fractal Frontier, V.

Fiona and I are enjoying a very few days of calm at Horseshoe Cottage, before I head south again next week to bring the Anna M home for the summer. I use such moments of peace on the Gannetsway to look back, at the risk of sounding a bit like Peig  Seyers – ‘I am an old woman now, with one foot in the grave and the other on its edge' -  with her litany of death and hardship on the Blasket Islands.

I was astonished to discover that my two oldest grandchildren, even during their school days at an Irish speaking school in Dingle, had never read Peig, who has apparently been banished from the curriculum nowadays. Their Irish teacher said that though her language may be beautiful, her stories were all too miserable for young people. I call that sad! It’s over forty years since I read her, but what I recall is the courage and resilience and sheer joyfulness that shined through the writings of those people, living as they did so close to the ‘fractal frontier’.

I have been recounting how my family history was affected by the tide of evil that swept Europe in my parents' and grandparents' time. After WWII, when I grew up, life settled down in England as the demons appeared to be banished.  Yet of course the old Irishwoman, who never spoke a bad word of anyone, was spot on in her reply to the wag who asked her what she thought of the Devil: "I'll say this for him - he's never idle!" 

        Wait, there is a message of hope in all this. That security you may think you missed out on was superficial, and the cracks that are opening up in it these days will yield new life. That old Devil is beaten, forever!

From the Fractal Frontier, V.

I’m sorry that I shall have to carry on referring to that terrible double-act event, as I see it, World War parts I and II. It had most radically marked the generation who brought me up!  In trying to understand Teilhard and his legacy, I revert again to firstly considering his experience as a stretcher-bearer for 4 years during World War I; I shall have to quote the following passage at some length. It also expresses in a dramatic way what I mean by the Fractal Frontier.

‘I'm still in the same quiet billets. Our future continues to be pretty vague, both as to when and what it will be. What the future imposes on our present existence is not exactly a feeling of depression; it's rather a sort of seriousness, of detachment, of a broadening, too, of outlook. This feeling, of course, borders on a sort of sadness (the sadness that accompanies every fundamental change); but it leads also to a sort of higher joy . . . I'd call it `Nostalgia for the Front'. The reasons, I believe, come down to this; the front cannot but attract us because it is, in one way, the extreme boundary between what one is already aware of, and what is still in process of formation. Not only does one see there things that you experience nowhere else, but one also sees emerge from within one an underlying stream of clarity, energy, and freedom that is to be found hardly anywhere else in ordinary life - and the new form that the soul then takes on is that of the individual living the quasi-collective life of all men, fulfilling a function far higher than that of the individual, and becoming fully conscious of this new state. It goes without saying that at the front you no longer look on things in the same way as you do in the rear; if you did, the sights you see and the life you lead would be more than you could bear. This exaltation is accompanied by a certain pain. Nevertheless it is indeed an exaltation. And that's why one likes the front in spite of everything, and misses it." (The Making of a Mind, p. 205.)

Sitting in the comfort and security of English middle class life in the second half of the 20th century, what could one possibly make of this exaltation in the midst of what now appears to most of us as mere senseless carnage?  Yet at the time it appears to have been not unusual. Teilhard himself ventures to speak for his comrades, and whole nations after all had sent their young men off to that war with great enthusiasm. One thinks of Padraig Pearse’s apparently repulsive words:-  ‘the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed by the red wine of the battlefield’.

A generation later, men like my father seem to have had an ambivalent attitude. Theirs had indeed been a different kind of war; technology was more advanced, and the gung-ho sense of glory had dissipated, despite the fact that it could be more convincingly represented as a struggle between Good and Evil; but Dad fought the war out of a reluctant sense of duty, with absolutely no enthusiasm, as far as I could make out. On one of those rare occasions when he said anything about it, he told me with a quiet pride that he never consciously killed anyone, only popping off a few rounds in the general direction of German patrols in France early in the war. Luckily he always managed to be where the fierce fighting wasn’t, not just in France as I have recounted, but for example kicking around in the desert sands of Palestine with a few lads waiting to ‘stop’ the Germans if they came down through Turkey to attack the Suez canal and Egypt. They were what was known as a ‘tripwire’. Fortunately it didn’t happen.

It always puzzled me that the great British army never made use of the fact that he spoke good German, especially at the end of the war. I can only conclude that either he just kept quiet about it, or the Army was remarkably slow to recognise something useful in the line of communication. Anyway he always seems to have been an odd bod after his regiment was blown apart early on. He had three pips on his shoulder towards the end of the war (going by a photo, denoting a captain I think but I never heard him refer to it), but I would say he couldn’t wait to get out of the army and settle down to the married life that had been so brutally interrupted, just as it was beginning in 1939.
Down at Rye harbour when I was growing up, he belonged to a little community of sailors with small boats, tied along the old wooden jetty that had been built during the war for RAF sea-rescue boats. The highlights of  the season (holiday cruises excepted) would be the odd sail over to Boulogne of a summer weekend. There would be a bit of commerce on arrival with a purveyor of duty-free booze, a convivial meal Chez Alfred, a trip to the boulangerie in the morning for croissants and baguettes, and maybe Mass if my mother was of the party, then back home again to a final session boozing and yarning in the boats before another week’s work began. Here if anywhere, these men whose consciousness was so heavily shaded by war might try a bit of living with their memories, and also assuage their vague loss of and need for exaltation.

One of the more notable members of this little fraternity was Jack Hilton, an Anglo-Irishman who had a nice wooden ketch built by Tyrell’s of Arklow. He had been a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain, had a farm in Sussex which judging by his hilarious accounts of his dealings with his bank manager was of doubtful profitability, and a certain air of never having succeeded in settling down after his experiences in the skies. One Friday evening in the dark, when my Dad and myself (aged about 14) were making our way along the wooden catwalk to the boat in preparation for an early start the next morning, what should we encounter but policemen pulling something heavy up from Hilton’s boat. The headlights of their car revealed the bloated red face of poor Jack, who had killed himself in his boat by taking the exhaust pipe off his engine and leaving it running….  So much for Never, in the field of human conflict, was so much owed by so many to so few!
Perhaps, however, Jack Hilton was finally unhinged by the fact that his friend Jack Merricks, who owned a beautiful little pilot cutter, had recently been washed off his boat and drowned on the dangerous  Rye bar while trying to rescue another yachtsman. When I think about it, he was the first of a rather long list of people, whom I have known personally, who have died at sea. How come this by no means puts me off sailing? Even as we try to domesticate the sea, venturing on it if possible only when the sun is dancing on little waves, do we not in a way still relish the odd wee taste of its destructive power?
There was another Anglo-Irishman in that little community in Rye harbour, who let their stiff upper lip relax as they sat around in their little boats in jeans and sweaters, drinking and smoking their pipes and chatting; mind you they were a far cry from the gin-palace mob who have largely taken over the image of yachtsmen today. He was a James Hamilton, whose father had been a small land-owner in Rosbeg, Co Donegal. Jimmy had plenty of tales of an idyllic childhood in that magic place, but it ended with his father taking to drink, and his uncle being shot dead by the IRA in the barber’s shop in Ardara, when home on leave in British army uniform. He made a voyage to Australia before the mast on a sailing clipper, then aged 18 was called to the trenches shortly before the end of the First World War. After the war he became a police officer in East Africa, and had plenty of stories about that too. There was nostalgia in him, but a remarkable absence of bitterness and indeed a zest for life, which he seemed to have picked up long ago on that wild and rugged coast of Donegal. He never went back there however, because ‘it is all so different now’.
Exaltation, enthusiasm à la Teilhard, was now constrained among those men to being out on the sea on a breezy day; the brotherhood that went with it now largely confined to their fellow sailors. The nearest that I myself can come to making sense of the afore cited passage from Teilhard is to substitute my early experience of fishing for his infinitely more dreadful experience of the Front. But any kind of exaltation was rare indeed in the grey post-war years of England, while the great British Empire was melting away like an ice-berg in the North Atlantic. I fear that cynicism and indifference have only increased their chilling hold on the numbed souls of men since, as indeed Teilhard foresaw they would. Where can we now find the motivation to undertake the massive task of building the new global civilisation that he also foresaw, and that the ‘onward march of technology’ demands?  It seems to me that we are going to have to take our chances again on some version of the Fractal Frontier!

Peig's village on the Great Blasket.

Spring Us A Change!

On Sherkin.

Fiona and I flew home to a cool though dry Ireland, but then over Easter the sky cleared and the Auld Sod stretched her limbs to the bliss of Spring. After some frantic work to prepare Horseshoe Cottage, thankfully helped by Ger from Cork, we were able to welcome two daughters and their eleven children, and inaugurate the new sun-room, unfinished but

Backgammon

serviceable. For this weekend we have come together with more of the family in West Clare, to christen our John and Andreea's new daughter, Iris.

This week I am taking a break from the autobiographical stuff, to post a comment on the political situation in the north-west of Europe, particularly the off-shore islands and France, what with the election there and the forthcoming one in Blighty, and the problems on this island, especially in Ulster.  

The English Problem (and the French, Irish and Scottish ones....)

The Irish may have the better part of Ireland, the Scots and the Welsh sort of have Scotland and Wales, but somewhere along the road to Empire, the English kind of lost England. Scratch most so-called English people, and you find that few of them are really English at all. Pace the ‘we got our country back’ crowd, this process barely involved the EU at all. It’s just that when one was effortlessly superior and busy being British, it was unnecessary and even slightly embarrassing to refer to the English bit. Nowadays, with even the Scots threatening to jump ship, one is having to ask oneself whether after all there might be any mileage in simply being English?

One used to be able to refer to one’s ‘kith and kin’, but this implies a rootedness in place which has largely gone by the board. This is a process which has been going on for a matter of centuries. Before the great scattering, one knew the people one was involved with from childhood, or at least one knew their families. Wider connections tended to be carried on the back of these personal ones. With the breakdown of this set-up, a lot of things in the line of religion, tradition and morality broke down. Into the gap galloped ideologies of Left and Right, but much good they did! Yet clearly, it is impossible to simply go back to that old rooted society. On what basis, then, can authentic identity and community be reconstituted?

This is no esoteric problem. It has often been pointed out that to have a democracy, one must have a demos, a ‘people’. The contemporary crisis of democracy translates into the question, what in fact constitutes a people? Since neither physical place nor race is adequate any more, as society has become more complex and multicultural, the problem has become sharper.  For a hundred and one reasons that the reader will be able to call to mind, it is of the utmost urgency to rebuild the sense of community and social solidarity, at every level; this calls for genuine participatory democracy and social solidarity. The alternative is ever more manipulation and exploitation.

How are we to discover in ourselves the ability to respond to our fellow citizens, to be response-able, to take ownership of our lives, and commit them as appropriate? One way or another, the big structures of society have to be re-rooted in personal relationships; this is how the Catholic idea of solidarity relates to that of subsidiarity. Somehow the macro-world has to be replanted in the micro, the bigger structures grow out of the more basic, and people have to prove themselves in practical, inter-personal and face-to-face community building before they are let loose on a more amplified level. This is all very well in theory, but how might it work in practice?

We have to get away from a winner-takes-all, confrontational style of politics to a consensus-building one where everyone’s voice is heard, every story taken into account. This in turn calls for the maximum degree of personal encounter and involvement. In practice local authorities have in recent years been increasingly emasculated in both Ireland and Great Britain. This may have been driven at least in part by the inadequacy of local authorities to deal with the complexity of modern life. The regional level of political power, between local and national, can help here. It has been neglected and needs to be revivified. In England’s case, four regions come to mind: the South-East or Greater London, the South-West, the Midlands and the North.

In Ireland too, greater regional authority would help. Of course, it would have to be in Ireland that the most northerly bit finds itself in the ‘South’. The present Irish border is a gerrymander, and a good place to start building a stable political set-up would be to reconstitute the province of Ulster; when faced with a blockage, it’s a good idea to start by clearing away lies and anomalies. In this case it would be easier to recognise a genuine physical and cultural entity in a restored nine county Ulster. The other three provinces of Ireland could also do with their own regional authorities, and the Scottish dimension comes into the equation as well.

In England it is unlikely that the Tories will go along with this kind of thinking. They are too heavily invested in the status quo. They fail to see, as career politicians focussed above all on retaining power, that their authority and effectiveness would actually be enhanced in the context of effective subsidiarity in both directions; that is, at both the regional and the continental level. As things stand, they are exhausting themselves trying to do everything themselves, and doing nothing well. They are indeed well into the classic formula for dodgy regimes: that of blaming Johnny Foreigner and looking for a good enemy, thus to distract the people. It is a sorry situation, and perhaps it is time for a Celtic Federation of Ireland and Scotland (and Wales and Cornwall, Brittany and Galicia?) to find an alternative way!

Subsidiarity is indeed a two-way street, with the various levels both informing and empowering each other. Only by all levels effectively ‘firing’ together can the challenges of a globalised world be met, and action really be taken to secure our tattered world with respect to sustainability, globalisation, automation and unemployment, climate change, ocean management, refugees, calling international finance to account, war and peace, etc, etc.

Chess.

Photographs (of better games than politics) by Ger Kavanagh and Fiona.