O my beloved
how sweet it is
to go down
and bathe in the pool
before your eyes
letting you see how
my drenched linen dress
marries
the beauty of my body
Come, look at me.
Poetry’s impulse to use metaphor, to discover resemblance, is not to make comparisons (all comparisons as such are hierarchical) or to diminish the particularity of any event; it is to discover those correspondences of which the sum total would be proof of the indivisible totality of existence. To this totality poetry appeals, and its appeal is the opposite of a sentimental one; sentimentality always pleads for an exemption, for something which is divisible.
Apart from reassembling by metaphor, poetry reunites by its reach. It equates the reach of a feeling with the reach of the universe; after a certain point the type of extremity involved becomes unimportant and all that matters is its degree; by their degree alone extremities are joined. Anna Akhmatova:
I bear equally with you
the black permanent separation.
Why are you crying? Rather give me your hand,
promise to come again in a dream.
You and I are a mountain of grief.
You and I will never meet on this earth.
If only you could send me at midnight
a greeting through the stars.
To argue here that the subjective and objective are confused is to return to an empirical view which the extent of present suffering challenges; strangely enough it is to claim an unjustified privilege.
Poetry makes language care because it renders everything intimate. This intimacy is the result of the poem’s labor, the result of the bringing-together-into-intimacy of every act and noun and event and perspective to which the poem refers. There is often nothing more substantial to place against the cruelty and indifference of the world than this caring.
From where does Pain come to us?
From where does he come?
He has been the brother of our visions
from time immemorial
And the guide of our rhymes.
writes the poet Nazik al Mal’-ika.
To break the silence of events, to speak of experience however bitter or lacerating, to put into words, is to discover the hope that these words may be heard, and that when heard, the events will be judged. This hope is of course at the origin of prayer, and prayer—as well as labor—was probably at the origin of speech itself. Of all uses of language, it is poetry that preserves most purely the memory of this origin.
Every poem that works as a poem is original. And original has two meanings: it means a return to the origin, the first which engendered everything that followed; and it means that which has never occurred before. In poetry, and in poetry alone, the two senses are united in such a way that they are no longer contradictory.
Nevertheless poems are not simple prayers. Even a religious poem is not exclusively and uniquely addressed to God. Poetry is addressed to language itself. In a lamentation, words lament loss to their language. Poetry is addressed to language in a comparable but wider way.
To put into words is to find the hope that the words will be heard and the events they describe judged. Judged by God or judged by history. Either way the judgment is distant. Yet the language, which is immediate and which is sometimes wrongly thought of as being only a means, the language offers, obstinately and mysteriously, its own judgment when it is addressed as poetry. This judgment is distinct from that of any moral code, yet it promises, within its acknowledgment of what it has heard, a distinction between good and evil—as though language itself had been created to preserve just that distinction!
We woke up in a friend’s house where there was a piano. We had slept on a mattress on the floor. The piano was in the room below. The two children of the house were playing an exercise before going to school. An exercise for four hands. Sometimes they stumbled and began the phrase again.
If ours were the eighteenth century, when questions opened idly like doors onto gardens, I might ask you: Do you remember? But in our century, when only evil and indifference are limitless, we cannot afford unnecessary questions; rather, we need to defend ourselves with whatever there is to hand of certainty. I know that you remember.
The two children were playing lightly and dutifully and the notes filled the house. You were lying with your back to me, your breasts in my hands. Neither of us stirred. The music commanded a little listening and we listened—just as one can gaze at the wallpaper in a hotel room without really looking at it. Waking up to that music played lightly and dutifully by the children before going to school was the nearest we shall ever be, my heart, to waking up at home before we left.
A VIEW OF DELFT
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.
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 our 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.
Source Notes
The poem by Yevgeny Vinokurov is from Daniel Weissbort, ed., Post-War Russian Poetry (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 103. Translation by Daniel Weissbort.
The quotation is from Danilo Dolci, Sicilian Lives, trans. Justin Vitiello (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), p. 209.
The poem by Cafavy is from Poems by C. P. Cafavy, trans. John Mavrogordato (London: Hogarth Press, 1971), p. 79.
The poem by Anna Akhmatova is from Daniel Weissbort, ed., Post-War Russian Poetry (New York: Penguin Books, 1974). Translation by Richard McKane.
The poem by Nazik al Mal’-ika is from Issa J. Boullata, ed. and trans., Modern Arab Poets: 1950–1975 (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1976).
A Note on the Author
JOHN BERGER was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative in form and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include the Booker Prize-winning novel G, To the Wedding and King. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger) and the internationally acclaimed Ways of Seeing. He lives and works in a small village in the French Alps, the setting for his trilogy Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa and Lilac and Flag). His collection of essays The Shape of a Pocket was published in 2001. His latest novel, From A to X, was published in 2007.
By the Same Author
Fiction
The Foot of Clive
Corker’s Freedom
A Fortunate Man
Seventh Man
The Trilogy: Into Their Labou
rs (Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag)
Photocopies
To the Wedding
King
Here is Where We Meet
From A to X
Poetry
Pages of the Wound
Non-Fiction
A Painter of Our Time
Permanent Red
Art and Revolution
The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays
The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles
Ways of Seeing
Another Way of Telling
The Success and Failure of Picasso
About Looking
The Sense of Sight
Keeping a Rendezvous
The Shape of a Pocket
Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger)
Selected Essays of John Berger (ed. Geoff Dyer)
Bento’s Sketchbook
Also Available by John Berger
G.
Winner of the Booker Prize
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize
In this luminous novel, John Berger relates the story of G., a modern Don Juan forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century as Europe teeters on the brink of war.
With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, top reveal the conditions of the libertine’s success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumlation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through the liaisons with him. Set against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi’s attempt to unite Italy, the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War and the dramatic first flight across the Alps, G. is a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in the turmoil of history.
‘The most interesting novel in English I have read for many years … It is one of the few serious attempts of our time to do for the novel what Brecht did for drama: to reshape it in the light of twentieth-century experience … A fine, humane and challenging book’
New Republic
‘A rich and pleasurable reading experience’
Guardian
‘To read G. is to find a writer one demands to know more about. Not to sit at the feet of his aphorisms or unravel the tangles of his allusions, but to explore more fully an intriguing and powerful mind and talent’
New York Times
Pig Earth
With this haunting first volume of his Into Their Labours trilogy, John Berger begins his chronicle of the eclipse of peasant cultures in the twentieth century. Set in a small village in the French Alps, Pig Earth, relates the stories of sceptical, hard working men and fiercely independent women; of calves born and pigs slaughtered; of a message of forgiveness from a dead father to his prodigal son; and of the marvellous, indomitable Lucie Cabrol, exiled to a hut high in the mountains.
‘Brilliant … These stories have a remarkable sense of celebration’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Pig Earth is a relentlessly realist work … Doggedly scrupulous in its detail, its sheer unshowy knowledgeability … Berger is one of the few English writers who can interleave poems and political essays of equivalent intricacy’
New Statesman
Once in Europa
In Once in Europa, part of the acclaimed Into Their Labours trilogy, John Berger paints a vivid portrait of two worlds – a small Alpine village bound to the earth and its age-old traditions, and the restless, ephemeral, future-driven culture that is invading it – at their moment of collision. The main instrument of entrapment and conflict, in these stories, is love. Lives are lost and hearts are broken, and yet, sometimes, love is a transcending form of grace.
‘Berger’s prose homes in on an intense and grainy view of the details of local life, and somehow transposes them into the patterns of a wider world’
Financial Times
‘Berger writes in an ethereal style, each sentence full of poetic prose’
Observer
Lilac and Flag
As Dickens and Balzac did for their time, so John Berger does for ours, rendering the movement of a people and the passing of a way of life. In Lilac and Flag, the Alpine village of the two earlier volumes of the Into Their Labours trilogy has been forsaken for the mythic city of Troy. Here, amidst shanty-towns, factories, opulent hotels, fading heritages and steadfast dreams, the children and grandchildren of rural peasants pursue meagre livings as best they can. And two young lovers embark upon a passionate, desperate journey of love and survival and find transcending hope both for themselves and for us as their witnesses.
‘Remarkable … Like all great novelists John Berger guides his characters and readers tenderly and with intimate humour’
Michael Ondaatje
‘A magnificent trilogy … Moving in an almost unbearable way’
Anthony Burgess
Photocopies
In his new book John Berger traces in words moments lived in Europe at the end of the millennium. These moments are not fiction. They happened. As he wrote them Berger sometimes imagined a frieze of ‘photocopies’ arranged side by side, giving future readers a panoramic view of what this moment in history was like when lived. Each ‘photocopy’ is about somebody for whom Berger felt a kind of love, but the book also becomes an unintentional portrait of the author as well.
‘This beautiful book bring non-fiction writing close to drawing – the sort of drawing that both records and investigates … Berger makes you believe in goodness: not an impossible state out of our reach, but a capacity in all of us to do with honesty, not faking. This is a marvelous book’
New Statesman
‘Awe-inspiring … All the writing has a still, insistent beauty … Berger sometimes manages a moment of absolute and truthful emotion, which can be extraordinary’
Observer
To the Wedding
With an introduction by Nadeem Aslam
‘No one knows more about the necessity of love than John Berger: what love makes us capable of, and incapable of. This is a book of the most precise humanity. No one who reads it will forget what it makes us understand: every action has its twin, conscionable or unconscionable; every truth, its shadow in the world; everything lost, alive in love’
Anne Michaels
A mother and father, estranged for years, are travelling across Europe to their daughter’s wedding. Vibrant, beautiful Ninon has fallen in love with the young Italian Gino. She is twenty-three years old – and she is dying of AIDS. As their wedding approaches, the story of Ninon and Gino unfolds. On their wedding day, Ninon will take off her shoes and dance with Gino: they will dance as if they will never tire; as if their happiness is eternal; as if death will never touch them. To the Wedding is a novel of devastating heartache, soaring hope and above all, love that triumphs over death.
‘A great, sad, and tender lyric, a novel that is a vortex of community and compassion that somehow overcomes fate and death’
Michael Ondaatje
‘A wonderful book, one which yields immediate pleasure and promises to stay long in the mind’
Sunday Times
‘The finale, the wedding itself, is a masterpiece … This is a novel that will haunt you’
Sunday Telegraph
‘One of the greatest and most honest love stories of our time’
Colum McCann
Here is Where We Meet
No one appreciates the detail of being alive more than the dead. In Lisbon, a man encounters his mother sitting on a park bench who laughs with the impudence of a schoolgirl. She has been dead for fifteen years. In Krakow market he recognises Ken, his passeur, the most important person in his life between the ages of eleven and seventeen. They last met when Ken was sixty-five – forty years ago. The number of lives that enter any one life is incalculable. In this nomadic and playful book, which travels through fictions
across Europe, seemingly disparate stories reveal themselves to be linked, mislaid objects find their place and sensual memories penetrate the present.
‘A triumph … Magical … Peppered with unforgettable images, it makes us stop and take a breath. It makes us see the world afresh’
Guardian
‘Is there anyone today who has done more to change the way we look at art and its relationship to time, landscape and social life than Berger? … He has created a body of work unrivalled in the breadth of forms and genres it spans, its sensuous intelligence, its radical humanism and its ceaseless commitment to carrying out E. M. Forster's famous injunction: “Only connect”’
Daily Telegraph
About Looking
As a novelist, essayist and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight whose work amounts to a subtle but powerful critique of the canons of our civilization. In About Looking he explores our role as observers to reveal new layers of meaning in what we see. How do the animals we look at in zoos remind us of a relationship between man and beast all but lost in the twenty-first century? What is it about looking at war photographs that doubles their already potent violence? How do the nudes of Rodin betray the threats to his authority and the potency posed by clay and flesh? And how does solitude inform the art of Giacometti? In asking these and other questions, Berger alters the vision of everyone who reads his work.
‘I admire and love John Berger’s books. He writes about what is important, not just interesting … A wonderful artist and thinker’
Susan Sontag