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Authors: Adam Nicolson
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passionately and honestly and forth-rightly describing his night’s adventures, it became impossible to see him as a victim or an incompetent. He became, somehow, more like the man we wanted to be.
Soon his conversation was ranging widely over the passions of his life. He made us all some coffee - this man who had been all night within earshot of his death - sat back in the corner of the cabin, the mugs steaming on the table in front of us, the rain hammering on the deck outside, and began to lecture me. ‘Adam, listen, no, listen, you must listen,’ he said his arms crossed tightly over his chest, his huge, unshaven and distinguished head drawn back like a bow to gather the energy for what he was about to say. ‘What is important in the relation of man to the world is the hand.’
‘The hand?’
‘Yes, the hand,’ and Herve held up one of his huge hands as an exhibit, some diesel and grease smeared on it, callused at the base of the fingers, before catching hold of my wrist and holding mine up in turn. ‘As longas the hand is the shaping organism of an enterprise, or a relationship, as long as it is the hand which governs your connections with the world, those connections are healthy, living and warm.’ He sat back with a huge smile. A philosopher had been washed up on our shore. Ruskin was having coffee on the
Auk.
‘Technology!’ he went on loudly. ‘It is technology which is the great destroyer, which comes between the hand and the world, which interposes its own cold deadness between the heart and the world. Why else, Georges, are you a sailor? You are a sailor because you need to feel the reality of the world in your hand.’
George looked like he’d been given a new dad. The sterilising effects of technology were ‘terrible, terrible’, Herve said. The fishing crisis would not have occurred if technology hadn’t displaced the hand. The hand was the natural regulator. The hand understood when enough was enough. The early Irish and Breton saints had cast themselves on the waters, relying on no more than the sheets of their sails on windy days and the oars in a calm, both the ultimate in hand technologies. Those saints had stripped off the padding of the urban world and had
exposed
themselves to what was, tothe nature of things. Truth was in nakedness like that and he quoted William Blake:’ “The body is the eternal imagination of the soul.” You know that, Adam, don’t you? Let us be clear about it. Let us define our positions. You must know that your body, your physical being in the world, is the full and beautiful condition which your soul has imagined for you?’
‘I do,’ I said.
‘And which parts of the body are always naked? Where are you naked, Adam? Your face’ - he held my chin - ‘and your hand’, which he then grasped, smiling straight at me. ‘I love the English,’ he said. ‘When the English are like you, I love you.’
All this, somehow, seemed of a part with his near-wreck the night before. The way in which he had swept past the trauma of the night as if he were already intimate with death and was scarcely disturbed by meeting it again; his vigour, honesty, culture, commitment, his passion and his subtle, responsive mind, his frank belief, his praying to the great Breton saints, his half-broken and yet vital presence, his love of food and of this life, combined with his air of being on the margin, not like the rest of us: what was this but the soul of the Atlantic shore?
If one of those early Irish Christians, a ghost from Skellig Michael, looking for vision on a distant rock, had strolled into your life, he would surely have been like Herve Mahe. Here, sitting with us on the
Auk,
was St Brendan himself, the man of truth, the pilgrim in the world, the stander outside the norm, a prophet of wildness and of the spiritual edge. He rolled seamlessly on to a story about one of those saints. It was clearly a set piece. Scothine, Herve said, was a man of great holiness and
Soon his conversation was ranging widely over the passions of his life. He made us all some coffee - this man who had been all night within earshot of his death - sat back in the corner of the cabin, the mugs steaming on the table in front of us, the rain hammering on the deck outside, and began to lecture me. ‘Adam, listen, no, listen, you must listen,’ he said his arms crossed tightly over his chest, his huge, unshaven and distinguished head drawn back like a bow to gather the energy for what he was about to say. ‘What is important in the relation of man to the world is the hand.’
‘The hand?’
‘Yes, the hand,’ and Herve held up one of his huge hands as an exhibit, some diesel and grease smeared on it, callused at the base of the fingers, before catching hold of my wrist and holding mine up in turn. ‘As longas the hand is the shaping organism of an enterprise, or a relationship, as long as it is the hand which governs your connections with the world, those connections are healthy, living and warm.’ He sat back with a huge smile. A philosopher had been washed up on our shore. Ruskin was having coffee on the
Auk.
‘Technology!’ he went on loudly. ‘It is technology which is the great destroyer, which comes between the hand and the world, which interposes its own cold deadness between the heart and the world. Why else, Georges, are you a sailor? You are a sailor because you need to feel the reality of the world in your hand.’
George looked like he’d been given a new dad. The sterilising effects of technology were ‘terrible, terrible’, Herve said. The fishing crisis would not have occurred if technology hadn’t displaced the hand. The hand was the natural regulator. The hand understood when enough was enough. The early Irish and Breton saints had cast themselves on the waters, relying on no more than the sheets of their sails on windy days and the oars in a calm, both the ultimate in hand technologies. Those saints had stripped off the padding of the urban world and had
exposed
themselves to what was, tothe nature of things. Truth was in nakedness like that and he quoted William Blake:’ “The body is the eternal imagination of the soul.” You know that, Adam, don’t you? Let us be clear about it. Let us define our positions. You must know that your body, your physical being in the world, is the full and beautiful condition which your soul has imagined for you?’
‘I do,’ I said.
‘And which parts of the body are always naked? Where are you naked, Adam? Your face’ - he held my chin - ‘and your hand’, which he then grasped, smiling straight at me. ‘I love the English,’ he said. ‘When the English are like you, I love you.’
All this, somehow, seemed of a part with his near-wreck the night before. The way in which he had swept past the trauma of the night as if he were already intimate with death and was scarcely disturbed by meeting it again; his vigour, honesty, culture, commitment, his passion and his subtle, responsive mind, his frank belief, his praying to the great Breton saints, his half-broken and yet vital presence, his love of food and of this life, combined with his air of being on the margin, not like the rest of us: what was this but the soul of the Atlantic shore?
If one of those early Irish Christians, a ghost from Skellig Michael, looking for vision on a distant rock, had strolled into your life, he would surely have been like Herve Mahe. Here, sitting with us on the
Auk,
was St Brendan himself, the man of truth, the pilgrim in the world, the stander outside the norm, a prophet of wildness and of the spiritual edge. He rolled seamlessly on to a story about one of those saints. It was clearly a set piece. Scothine, Herve said, was a man of great holiness and
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