The Shape of a Pocket

by John Berger

  The reference to Berlusconi is telling. Every day, all over the world, the media network replaces reality with lies. Not, in the first place, political or ideological lies (they come later), but visual, substantial lies about what human and natural life is actually made of. All the lies converge into one colossal falsehood: the supposition that life itself is a commodity and that those who can afford to buy it are, by definition, those who deserve it! Most of us know this is false, but very little of what we are shown confirms our resistance. Then we may come upon a painting by Barceló.

  Imagine, suddenly, the substantial material world (tomatoes, rain, birds, stones, melons, fish, eels, termites, mothers, dogs, mildew, salt water) in revolt against the endless stream of images which tell lies about them and in which they are imprisoned! Imagine them, as a reaction, claiming their freedom from all grammatical, digital and pictorial manipulation, imagine an uprising of the represented!

  This is what is happening on these canvases. They are listening to the revolt of the solid and the mortal. Before the deluge of insubstantial consumerist clichés and the claim that the genius of mankind is to be found in the pursuit of profit, they open a floodgate to the elemental flow of life and death.

  Ecological propaganda, however, is no better than any other propaganda when it comes to producing art. And so the secret of these paintings is not in their argument but in the way they listen. They listen to the protest of each thing painted against being so depicted, which means also against being recuperated and used as a lie. They listen and the protests become visual for they are nervously translated into pictorial language.

  Let me list some of the ploys the protests use and the art of painting interprets. There is the ploy against being framed: the things being painted desert the centre and go to the edges.

  There is the refusal to be reduced to a patch of colour: the thing being painted heaves itself up into a three-dimensional lump, or scoops out its hollow inside so that if the canvas was on the floor you could stand a spoon up in it.

  There is the rejection by the thing being painted of cheap labels: a blue fish cuts itself up into nine pieces and deploys itself across the whole terrain of the picture.

  There is the sabotage of the things being painted against anything which is suave and pretends to be complete: painted bodies of flesh stuff themselves with fibres and hair.

  And then there are the continual plots by what is being painted against any uniform space or perspective: things become a mirage, a sky is being stirred like soup, or surfaces of the earth under rain seem as flimsy as a smear across a window.

  Nothing he paints wants to give up its soul and become simply an image. And he goes along with this. ‘I need to have what I am painting beside me, on the painting, smelling it, handling it. And then eating it. Using melon rinds as spatulas when I am painting melons, and so mixing their juice with the paint.’

  This could all lead to incoherence, the risk is considerable, and he enjoys the risk. Yet the work remains coherent. I cannot explain why, any more than I can explain why a swarm of bees always has a kind of symmetry.

  I think about Chaim Soutine, not to make an art-historical comparison, but because, by imagining the two painters side by side, I see more clearly what has changed in the world during the last fifty years. Soutine, too, listened intently to the will of what he was painting, and, as a result, his art is full of pathos and suffering. In Barceló there is no pathos; there is simply the will of the teeming, pullulating material of the universe to resist! And in this resistance is hope. A hope that we are desperately trying to learn to recognise.

  22

  Against the Great Defeat of the World

  In the history of painting one can sometimes find strange prophecies. Prophecies that were not intended as such by the painter. It is almost as if the visible by itself can have its own nightmares. For example, in Brueghel’s Triumph of Death, painted in the 1560s and now in the Prado Museum, there is already a terrible prophecy of the Nazi extermination camps.

  Most prophecies, when specific, are bound to be bad, for, throughout history, there are always new terrors – even if a few disappear, yet there are no new happinesses – happiness is always the old one. It is the modes of struggle for this happiness which change.

  Half a century before Brueghel, Hieronymus Bosch painted his Millennium Triptych, which is also in the Prado. The left-hand panel of the triptych shows Adam and Eve in Paradise, the large central panel describes the Garden of Earthly Delights, and the right-hand panel depicts Hell. And this hell has become a strange prophecy of the mental climate imposed on the world at the end of our century by globalisation and the new economic order.

  Let me try to explain how. It has little to do with the symbolism employed in the painting. Bosch’s symbols probably came from the secret, proverbial, heretical language of certain fifteenth-century millennial sects, who heretically believed that, if evil could be overcome, it was possible to build heaven on earth! Many essays have been written about the allegories to be found in his work.* Yet if Bosch’s vision of hell is prophetic, the prophecy is not so much in the details – haunting and grotesque as they are – but in the whole. Or, to put it another way, in what constitutes the space of hell.

  There is no horizon there. There is no continuity between actions, there are no pauses, no paths, no pattern, no past and no future. There is only the clamour of the disparate, fragmentary present. Everywhere there are surprises and sensations, yet nowhere is there any outcome. Nothing flows through: everything interrupts. There is a kind of spatial delirium.

  Compare this space to what one sees in the average publicity slot, or in a typical CNN news bulletin, or any mass media news commentary. There is a comparable incoherence, a comparable wilderness of separate excitements, a similar frenzy.

  Bosch’s prophecy was of the world-picture which is communicated to us today by the media under the impact of globalisation, with its delinquent need to sell incessantly. Both are like a puzzle whose wretched pieces do not fit together.

  And this was precisely the term that the Subcomandante Marcos used in a letter about the new world order last year … He was writing from the Chiapas, south-east Mexico.* He sees the planet today as the battlefield of a Fourth World War. (The Third was the so-called Cold War.) The aim of the belligerents is the conquest of the entire world through the market. The arsenals are financial; there are nevertheless millions of people being maimed or killed every moment. The aim of those waging the war is to rule the world from new, abstract power centres – megapoles of the market, which will be subject to no control except that of the logic of investment. Meanwhile nine-tenths of the women and men living on the planet live with the jagged pieces that do not fit.

  The jaggedness in Bosch’s panel is so similar that I half expect to find there the seven pieces that Marcos named.

  The first piece he named has a dollar sign on it and is green. The piece consists of the new concentration of global wealth in fewer and fewer hands and the unprecedented extension of hopeless poverties.

  The second piece is triangular and consists of a lie. The new order claims to rationalise and modernise production and human endeavour. In reality it is a return to the barbarism of the beginnings of the industrial revolution, with the important difference this time round that the barbarism is unchecked by any opposing ethical consideration or principle. The new order is fanatical and totalitarian. (Within its own system there are no appeals. Its totalitarianism does not concern politics – which, by its reckoning, have been superseded – but global monetary control.) Consider the children. One hundred million in the world live in the street. Two hundred million are engaged in the global labour force.

  The third piece is round like a vicious circle. It consists of enforced emigration. The more enterprising of those who have nothing try to emigrate to survive. Yet the new order works night and day according to the principle that anybody who does not produce, who does not consume, and who has no money to
put into a bank, is redundant. So the emigrants, the landless, the homeless are treated as the waste matter of the system: to be eliminated.

  The fourth piece is rectangular like a mirror. It consists of an ongoing exchange between the commercial banks and the world racketeers, for crime too has been globalised.

  The fifth piece is more or less a pentagon. It consists of physical repression. The Nation States under the new order have lost their economic independence, their political initiative and their sovereignty. (The new rhetoric of most politicians is an attempt to disguise their political, as distinct from civic or repressive, powerlessness.) The new task of the Nation States is to manage what is allotted to them, to protect the interests of the market’s mega-enterprises and, above all, to control and police the redundant.

  The sixth piece is the shape of a scribble and consists of breakages. On one hand, the new order does away with frontiers and distances by the instantaneous telecommunication of exchanges and deals, by obligatory free trade zones (NAFTA), and by the imposition everywhere of the single unquestionable law of the market; and on the other hand, it provokes fragmentation and the proliferation of frontiers by its undermining of the Nation State – for example, the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, etc. ‘A world of broken mirrors,’ wrote Marcos, ‘reflecting the useless unity of the neoliberal puzzle.’

  The seventh piece of the puzzle has the shape of a pocket, and consists of all the various pockets of resistance against the new order which are developing across the globe. The Zapatistas in south-east Mexico are one such pocket. Others, in different circumstances, have not necessarily chosen armed resistance. The many pockets do not have a common political programme as such. How could they, existing as they do in the broken puzzle? Yet their heterogeneity may be a promise. What they have in common is their defence of the redundant, the next-to-be-eliminated, and their belief that the Fourth World War is a crime against humanity.

  The seven pieces will never fit together to make any sense. This lack of sense, this absurdity is endemic to the new order. As Bosch foresaw in his vision of hell, there is no horizon. The world is burning. Every figure is trying to survive by concentrating on his own immediate need and survival. Claustrophobia, at its most extreme, is not caused by overcrowding, but by the lack of any continuity existing between one action and the next that is close enough to be touching it. It is this that is hell.

  The culture in which we live is perhaps the most claustrophobic that has ever existed; in the culture of globalisation, as in Bosch’s hell, there is no glimpse of an elsewhere or an otherwise. The given is a prison. And faced with such reductionism, human intelligence is reduced to greed.

  Marcos ended his letter by saying: ‘It is necessary to build a new world, a world capable of containing many worlds, capable of containing all worlds.’

  What the painting by Bosch does is to remind us – if prophecies can be called reminders – that the first step towards building an alternative world has to be a refusal of the world-picture implanted in our minds and all the false promises used everywhere to justify and idealise the delinquent and insatiable need to sell. Another space is vitally necessary.

  First, an horizon has to be discovered. And for this we have to refind hope – against all the odds of what the new order pretends and perpetrates.

  Hope, however, is an act of faith and has to be sustained by other concrete actions. For example, the action of approach, of measuring distances and walking towards. This will lead to collaborations which deny discontinuity. The act of resistance means not only refusing to accept the absurdity of the world-picture offered us, but denouncing it. And when hell is denounced from within, it ceases to be hell.

  In pockets of resistance as they exist today, the other two panels of Bosch’s triptych, showing Adam and Eve and the Garden of Earthly Delights, can be studied by torchlight in the dark … we need them.

  I would like to quote again the Argentinian poet, Juan Gelman.*

  death itself has come with its documentation/

  we’re going to take up again

  the struggle/again we’re going to begin

  again we’re going to begin all of us

  against the great defeat of the world/

  little compañeros who never end/or

  who burn like fire in the memory

  again/and again/and again.

  * One of the most original, even if contested, is the Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch by Wilhelm Franger (Faber & Faber).

  * This letter was published in August 1997 throughout the world press, and notably in Le Monde Diplomatique, Paris.

  * Juan Gelman, Unthinkable Tenderness, translated from the Spanish by Joan Lindgren (University of California Press, 1997).

  23

  Correspondence with Subcomandante Marcos

  I. The Herons

  Spring is the awaited season. Some languages, like Spanish, make spring feminine; others, like Greek, masculine. Once arrived, the two of them stay for a weekend, hand over to a successor, and slip away.

  Yet from January onwards we gossip about them as though they were there in hiding. And under the earth’s skin they are there: the branches of elders already suffer burgeoning wounds, snowdrops already push with their heads, teeth clenched. When at last spring comes out into the open we have the impression of ‘no sooner come than gone’.

  Not a season at all but a longing. At my age it is natural to ask: how many more times shall I witness this waiting? The waiting is for a new beginning. It is not a question of the year being young but of the offer of choices again. In the winter of discontent, there are no choices.

  The first season comes desperately and hopefully which is another reason for its necessary clandestinity. And here I think of your letter, Marcos, where you write:

  We would like to offer you a flower, I say a flower because we don’t have enough for all of you, but one is enough if you share it and if each one of you keeps a tiny fragment so that when you are old you can tell the children of your country: At the end of the twentieth century I fought for Mexico and from here I gave support to those over there: of whom I knew only that they wanted what all human beings want if they haven’t forgotten that they’re human beings, that’s to say democracy, liberty and justice. I never saw their faces but their hearts were like ours.

  This year spring came out into the open on April 12th and I’ll tell you how. Your mountains are higher than ours but when you take one of the tracks down to the plain, you must come upon a somewhat similar place. At a certain altitude a rocky stream runs into a small lake and the vegetation turns a little greener. The lake seeps into the earth which is waterlogged and is difficult to cross. It’s easier to skirt round the place.

  In a month’s time, thousands of frogs will come to mate in the pool. At the moment it still freezes at night and in the morning some of the boulders glisten with frost. Over the years I’ve often seen a heron here. Sometimes he is perched near the top of one of the spruce firs. Sometimes he is standing in the marsh, his fishing beak at the ready. When a heron strikes, he does so with a rapidity which is faster than an eye blinking, and after a heron has prepared a nest and is calling for a female companion, he holds his head so that his beak points vertically into the sky like a steeple or like a Brancusi sculpture. Every winter the herons migrate from our rivers to North Africa.

  Yet every year it is the same heron who returns here. Herons can live for twenty years or more. I guess this one is no longer young and maybe that is why he is a loner who avoids the settlements where the others nest. I’ve never seen him with his companion but I’ve seen him flying regularly to a hidden nest to regurgitate the frog or fish he has just eaten as food for his fledglings.

  Apart from the heron, there’s nothing special about the place: a pool of water, a small bog, a steepish slope. It’s on the north side of the mountain and so gets little sunlight. One of nature’s backyards, not recommended for its flowers. And here, on Wednesday April 12th this year, sprin
g came out into the open.

  I didn’t notice anything special at first. Then gradually I became aware, before I looked up, that something unusual was happening in the sky. Nothing alarming. Rather something measured and solemn. So I glanced up.

  There were two herons circling with slow wing-beats. They were low enough for me to see the black feathers like ribbons which trail from their ears. Grey wings, white throats. Whilst they flew around me one of them crossed the circle to be nearer to the other, and the other flew to meet the first, and like this both found themselves again on opposite sides of the same circle.

  It was their first morning. They had come back. Ornithologists say that the male heron searches for a partner only after he has established a nest. In which case this pair was an exception. They were cautiously surveying the terrain together.

  Yet what caught my breath, Marcos, was the leisure, the ease with which they were doing this. In that leisure there was a momentary yet supreme confidence and sense of belonging. Slowly they circled the place as if they were surveying their own lives to which they had come home.

  And this made me think of you in Chiapas and of your struggle to restore what has been stolen from the people by those who in this life know two things: how to transfer money and how to drop bombs. In their world there are no homecomings and there never will be. Four things came together in my head: the spring, the resistance of the Zapatistas, your vision of a different world and the slow beat of the herons’ wings.

  II. The Herons and Eagles