The precarious and fragile conditions

All at once, with converging news from different friends who describe some ordeal, I enter a mild terror (yes, there is no such thing, is there?) about the fragile conditions upon which depend, as I suppose, my sanity and self-possession, my self worth: possibilities from which I avert my gaze because I do not want to have to think about how I might cope with them. Thus my sense of well being, dependent upon certain things not happening to me or mine, and so on ...

... and yet this is more than a personal thing, it's a reflection of larger and grosser realities that lie outside the confines of our common world, and by 'our' I mean, of course, something like the European or Western middle class, whose comfort depends, depends, depends upon not knowing the causal conditions of that world, whose reality lies outside it, moral realities of exploitation mainly, in which we collude because we do not protest, and so forth, nothing new here, nothing new ... but the passage from mild disquiet to ruling though not engulfing passion ...

A couple of scallies, guttural of speech, hoarsely calling each to other, their world laid out in the confines of that speech, who nevertheless, within these terms, make judgments about what is plausible and implausible, and aggressively and with indignation maintain their state like any decent man.

We keep returning to the status quo ante, to the condition of the horde or the tribe, with its war lords and the pull on even the most civilised imagination, of primitive violence... that there is pleasure, engulfing joy and delight, in a released savagery, in kicking someone's head in, as the disinhibited youths we read about in the press ... so what is the role of compassion, what is its natural source?

It seems to me that the doctrine of kenosis, the doctrine of God's 'self-emptying', or of Christ's making himself powerless, is precisely a way of fixing or projecting a moral insight about power, particularly about the power over others. When we have someone in our power, so that we can do with them just what we want to do ... power that is in one way or another self-aggrandising or gratifying, is what we have to renounce if compassion, or any other moral virtue that allows others to be, is to emerge or flourish.

A last walk on Papay for a while

Off tomorrow to Kirkwall, thence to Inverness and Lancaster ... walked at high tide along South Wick, the Holm of Papay somewhat battered by the wind and waves ...

St Tredwell's Chapel

I walked down past the Links and across the waterlogged fields to the ruined chapel which is perched on a little promontory-peninsula across from the manse, it was a beautiful, mild, sunny morning, quite different from anything we had been led to expect. You can see the signs of a broch clearly enough, clear enough anyway to my wholly untrained eye, and then above it the ruins of a tiny chapel. The loch was clear and quiet, sea birds calling from time to time and skimming low over the water. Still the utter poignancy of something that simply looks abandoned, once a place of pilgrimage to a slightly lunatic Celtic saint who offered her eyes on a stick to a king who had admired them. Perhaps she was the Christianised version of some more ancient spirit or goddess.

Christmas here was a wonderful experience of harmony. Some times one is just happy and immediately I at least feel uneasy to be in such a state with a tense sense that it can't, won't, last, and that harsher realities will soon make their presence felt. But perhaps I am just beginning to learn to be happy while I am happy and accept it without clinging to it and when it goes to accept that too: he who binds to himself a joy, etc.

Carols

The moon is high in a cloudless sky and we walk down the long farm track, puddles shining in the moonlight, to St Boniface Kirk for carols, the wind vigorous outside, the sea breaking against the rocks ... candles and torches, accordion accompaniment ... some century or other, light in darkness, what counts as darkness, what counts as light, Celtic priests with the vigilance of warriors, alert to every sound in the darkness, to every gleam of light, the form of consciousnesness without which ... not, as I sometimes dismissed them, early muscular Christians ...

Mars in the dawn sky

Well, dawn is a little after nine o'clock these mornings, though the winter solstice has almost arrived, but it has been wonderful to see the rosy fingers at the horizon with a turquoise blue above it and high in the sky the planet Mars.

The pictures are of the New Pier at Moclett Bay where, Jim tells me, pilgrims would land on their way to St Tredwell's chapel at the side of the loch.

The last few days have all been sunny and bright with hardly any wind, and that will surely change in the next day or two. Rosemary flew off to do some shoppping in Kirkwall this morning, Josephine and I wandered off up to the shop ...

...met a trainee GP on the island whose husband did philosophy at Liverpool in the early nineties ...

Back in Papay

We flew in this morning. Jim had left our car at the airfield for us, the heating was on, we have been to the shop and bought some provisions, christmas tree in the hall waiting to be freed from its netting. Josephine has been set up with a bed downstairs. A crowd of North Ronaldsay friends coming in at Kirkwall on the Islander, quick greetings before we board, beautiful calm weather ...

Claudius and Wilfrid

I have to confess to a curious resentment as I read about the occupation of Britain by the Romans, the sense of a conquered and subdued country forced to assimilate Roman ways: curious because it is, after all, nearly two millennia ago. The Irish always point out that the Romans didn't get there so that the old tribal ways endured: they had to wait for the British for their own subjugation. The connection with Wilfrid is that I went to a school, full of boys and priests with Irish surnames, which was named after a man who did Rome's work on the Christians of these isles at the Synod of Whitby. I love the image of the Celtic priests with their tonsures, shaved to behind the ears and the rest of the hair worn in a pigtail.