Tuesday 22 January 2008

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.

Tuesday 15 January 2008

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 ...

Monday 14 January 2008

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.