Crossing the Minch

On reading Adam Nicolson's piece Sailing and Freedom, after a nights sleep this painting was imagined. I felt him crossing The Minch on the edge of the Wide Atlantic. It seems to me this short essay is at root about a paradox: how the acceptance of submission conjures in us freedom. His use of metaphor for this .. around the disciplines of preparing for a sailing voyage and the non liberty of the sailing boat, which conversely generates an 'ocean of freedoms.' "It is the freedom that comes from submission but what sort of freedom is that? It steps beyond Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between negative freedom, which is the freedom to do what you feel like doing, whatever the consequences; and positive freedom, the sense of freedom that comes from fulfilling the best of your self, or even your true self. It is more like the idea expressed by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, which he has called 'situated freedom' and which sees free activity as grounded in the acceptance of our defining situation. The struggle to be free… is powered by an affirmation of this defining situation as ours."
[Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society, Cambridge Up, 1979, pp.154-166]. And from a combination of a muddle of different translations of Homer's Odyssey Book XIII…..As the stern lifted on the swell, the dark wave of her wake
Foamed behind her, and she ran on safe and sure.
Not even the circling hawk, the swiftest of winged birds, Could keep up with her…

- TH