Walking Ahead

Am I walking a little ahead of you 

so that no snake will bite

your sandalled foot? 

John Berger

Page 44, 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos', 

A Manner of Searching

“Drawing is anyway an exercise in orientation and as such may be compared with other processes of orientation which take place in nature.

When I’m drawing I feel  a little closer to the way birds navigate when flying, or to hares finding shelter when pursued, or to fish knowing where to spawn, or trees finding a way to the light, or bees constructing their cells.

I’m aware of a distant, silent company. Almost as distant as the stars. Company nevertheless. Not because we are in the same universe, but because we are involved – each according to his own mode – in a comparable manner of searching.

Drawing is a form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself."

Page 149, ‘Bento’s Sketchbook’, John Berger

Hold everything dear

Hold Everything Dear
For John Berger

....the paths they make towards us and how far we open towards them

the justice of grass that unravels palaces but shelters the songs of the searching

the vessel that names the waves, the jug of this life, as it fills with the days
as it sinks to becomes what it loves

memory that grows into a shape the tree always knew as a seed

the words
the bread

the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door

the yearning to begin again together

the people in the room the people in the street the people

hold everything dear

19th May 2005, Gareth Evans
From 'Hold Everything Dear, Dispatches on Survival and Resistance', John Berger

To be Desired

"In the Louvre in Paris there is a Bathsheba painted by him (William Drost, Rembrandt's disciple) which echoes Rembrandt's painting of the same object painted in the same year.

She is not looking at the spectator. She is looking hard at a man she desired, imagining him as her lover. This man could only have been Drost. The only thing we know for certain about Drost is that he was desired precisely by this woman.

I was reminded of something of which one is not usually reminded in museums. To be so desired - if the desire is also reciprocal - renders the one who is desired fearless. No suit of armour from the galleries downstairs ever offered, when worn, a comparable sense of protection. To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody can reach in his life to feeling immortal."

Page 26, 'Bento's Sketchbook', John Berger

Closer

 "A loved one is also singular, distinct, separate. The more closely one defines, regardless of any given values, the more intimately one loves. The finite outline is a proof of its opposite, the infinity of emotion provoked by what the outline contains. This is the deepest reason for the frequent elongation of Modigliani's figures and faces. The elongation is the result of the closest possible definition, of wanting to be closer."

Page 105, 'Modigliani's Alphabet of Love'. From 'The Sense of Sight', John Berger

The far side of the lilac

For Kavya, who sends me these beautiful lines from a cold country, saved by the bright sunshine she revels in:

“To make the most of the sun’s warmth, sparrows flock the bush (lilac colored flowers bloom out of it in Spring) bordering my window. The leaves of the lilac bush have never withered. No, not even in harsh winter. They, just like the sun and the sparrows, want to keep me in high spirits. I often wonder where do the sparrows and the geese hide when it snows. They come back the very next day it stops snowing.” (Indeed, where do they hide?)

My favorite passage on the lilac, from Berger:

“Perhaps lilac is the most abundantly feminine of flowers. It came from Eastern Europe and was imported into the West in the sixteenth century. A Slav flower.

Among the mountains here, the lilac trees flower at the time when the first cuckoos sing. Cuckoos and lilac come as a pair. The cuckoo is pure impudence. Later when he falls silent after mating, he eats grubs and caterpillars-even those which are poisonous for other birds-with impunity.

The scent of the lilac, you once said, is not far from the smell of cows in the stable. Both are smells of peace and procrastination.

The days are becoming long, and in the evening I sit in the kitchen reading without a light. On the windowsill is a jug with a flowering branch of lilac, which I cut in a friend’s garden. It is pale purple, the color of a much-washed ultramarine blue shirt….

….The walls of the house are thick, for the winters are cold. On the window embrasure, close to the windowpanes, hangs a shaving mirror. As I look up now, I see reflected in the mirror a sprig of the lilac branch: each petal of each tiny flower is vivid, distinct, near, so near that the petals look like the pores on skin. At first I do not understand why what I see in the mirror is so much more intense than the rest of the branch which, in fact, is nearer to me. Then I realize that what I am looking at in the mirror is the far side of the lilac, the side fully lit by the last light of the sun.

Every evening my love for you is placed like that mirror."

John Berger
'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos '

Photo by Kavya.

A View of Delft

A view of Delft, by Johannes Vermeer

In that town,
across the water
where all has been seen
and the bricks are cherished like sparrows,
in that town like a letter from home
read again and again in a port,
in that town with its library of tiles
and its addresses recalled by Johannes Vermeer
who died in debt,
in that town across the water
where the dead take the census
and there are no vacant rooms
for his gaze occupies them all,
where the sky is waiting
to have news of a birth,
in that town which pours from the eyes
of those who left it,
there
between two chimes of the morning,
when fish are sold in the square
and the maps on the walls
show the depth of the sea,
in that town
I am preparing for your arrival.

Page 100, 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos' by John Berger

Photo from Google Images

Hand

There will always be suffering
It flows through life like water
I put my hand over hers
Down in the lime-tree arbour.

Nick Cave (Australian musician)

Quoted in 'Another Side of Desire', from 'Hold Everything Dear, Dispatches on Survival and Resistance' by John Berger, 2007

All that is left

"Month by month, millions leave their homelands. They leave because there is nothing there, except their everything, which does not offer enough to feed their children. Once it did. This is the poverty of the new capitalism.

After long and terrible journeys, after they have experienced the baseness of which others are capable, after they have come to trust their own incomparable and dogged courage, emigrants find themselves waiting on some foreign transit station, and then all they have left of their home continent is themselves: their hands, their eyes, their feet, shoulders, bodies, what they wear and what they pull over their heads at night to sleep under, wanting a roof.

In some photos taken in the Red Cross shelter for refugees and emigrants at Sangatte (near Calais) by Anabell Guerrero we can take account of how a man's fingers are all that remain of a plot of tilled earth, his palms what remain of some riverbed, and how his eyes are a family gathering he will not attend."

Page 114, 'Ten Dispatches about Place', from 'Hold Everything Dear, Dispatches on Survival and Resistance' by John Berger, 2007

Lying on our backs, looking up at the night sky

Once in a Story

We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes returns them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

The problem of time is like the darkness of the sky. Every event is inscribed in its own time. Events may cluster and their times overlap, but the time in common between events does not extend as law beyond the clustering.

A famine is a tragic cluster of events. To which the Great Plough is indifferent, existing as it does in another time.

Page 8, 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos', John Berger

A Sense of Peace

"What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of your feet are scattered like gravel.

It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough."

The ending of 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos', by John Berger

Hold Everything Dear

"There are 8000 political prisoners in Israeli jails, 350 of them under eighteen years old. A period in prison has become a normal phase to be undergone, once or several times, in a man's life. Throwing stones can lead to a sentence or two and a half years or more.

Prison for us is a sort of education, a strange sort of university. The man speaking has glasses, is about fifty and is wearing a business-lunch suit. You learn how to learn there. He's the youngest of five brothers and imports coffee-machines. You learn how to struggle together and become inseparable. Certain conditions have improved over the last forty years - improved thanks to our hunger strikes. The most I did was twenty days. We won a quarter of an hour more exercise time each day. In the long-sentence prisons they used to mask the windows so there was no sunshine in the cells. We won back some sunshine. We got one body-search removed from the daily routine. Otherwise we read and discuss what we read, teach each other different languages. And come to know certain soldiers and some of the guards.

In the streets it's the language of bullets and stones between us. Inside it's different. They're in prison just as we are. The difference is we believe in what's got us there, and they mostly don't, because they are just there to earn a living. I know of some friendships that began like that.

The stance of undefeated despair works like this."

Page 16, 'Undefeated Despair', from 'Hold Everything Dear, Dispatches on Survival and Resistance' by John Berger, 2007

Philosophy

"Philosophy is really homesickness, it is the urge to be at home everywhere."

Novalis

Page 54, 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos', John Berger

John Berger

Artist, art critic, novelist, painter and author, John Berger has always fascinated me. He spans the world of words and lines/form with the same ease, and effortlessly builds bridges between the two. Modigliani, Goya, Mayakovsky, Leopardi, Danilo Dolci, Caravaggio, essays on leaving home, storytelling, art, colors, food, feelings, poetry.....one can never predict what one will come across in his books. He has written so much about seeing and sight - and he amply proves that if one can truly see, there are no boundaries to what worlds one can enter.

"Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman."

"That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe."

"The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget."

"The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying."

For more excerpts, click the label 'John Berger' below this post.

*Photo from Google Images

The Returning Point

"Originally home meant the center of the world - not in the geographical, but in the ontological sense. Mircea Eliade has demonstrated how home was the place from which the world could be founded. A home was established, as he says, "at the heart of the real". In traditional societies, everything that made sense of the world was real; the surrounding chaos existed and was threatening, but it was threatening because it was unreal. Without a home at the centre of the real, one was not only shelterless, but also lost in non-being, in unreality. Without a home everything was fragmentation.

Home was the centre of the world because it was the place where a vertical line crossed with a horizontal one. The vertical line was a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the earth to other places. Thus, at home, one was nearest to the gods in the sky and to the dead in the underworld. This nearness promised access to both. And at the same time, one was at the starting point and, hopefully, the returning point of all terrestrial journeys.

The crossing of the two lines, the reassurance their intersection promises, was probably already there, in embryo, in the thinking and beliefs of nomadic people, but they carried the vertical line with them, as they might carry a tent pole. Perhaps at the end of this century of unprecedented transportation, vestiges of the reassurance still remain in the unarticulated feelings of many millions of displaced people.

Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but, also, undoing the very meaning of the world and - at its most extreme - abandoning oneself to the unreal which is the absurd."

Page 55,
John Berger - 'And our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos', 1984

The space for hypocrisy

"...In a village, the difference between what is known about a person and what is unknown is slight. There may be a number of well-guarded secrets but, in general, deceit is rare because impossible. Thus there is little inquisitiveness - in the prying sense of the term, for there is no need for it. Inquisitiveness is the trait of the city concierge who can gain a little power or recognition by telling X what he doesn't know about Y. In the village X already knows it. And thus too there is little performing: peasants do not play roles as urban characters do.

This is not because they are 'simple' or more honest or without guile, it is simply because the space between what is unknown about a person and what is generally known - and this is the space for all performance - is too small.

That is why the village's continual portrait of itself is mordant, frank, sometimes exaggerated but seldom idealized or hypocritical. And the significance of this is that hypocrisy and idealization close questions, whereas realism leaves them open."

Essay: The Storyteller
Chapter 2: Leaving Home

from 'The Sense of Sight' by John Berger

Living a story

"In all pre-industrial societies people have believed that living is a way of living a story. In this story one is always the protagonist and occasionally the teller, but the inventor of the story, the designer of the plot, is elsewhere. People who believe this, and who lead the story of their life in this way, are often natural storytellers.

Just as, if they happen to be shepherds who spend a great deal of time alone, championed only animals and the spirit of the landscape, they are often natural poets: poetry being that form of language which addresses itself to that which is beyond speaking."

Page 261, Sicilian Lives

John Berger, The Sense of Sight

Once in a Poem

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.

Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

A message weighing nothing

"The post office at Auxonne is small and the postmistress has blue eyes. I have been there only twice.
The first time was to send you a parcel; as the postmistress weighed it on the scale, I imagined your hands opening it.
"Four kilos, three hundred grams."
In a parcel, wrapped by hand, there is a message weighing nothing; the receiver's fingers may unkot the string which the sender's tied.

In the post office I saw in my mind's eye your fingers untying the knot I tied at Auxonne....."

John Berger

Berger

“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Once in a Poem

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been.

Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.


John Berger