The Shape of a Pocket

by John Berger

  The nuraghi are invariably placed at a nodal point in the rocky landscape, at a point where the land itself might, as it were, have an eye: a point from which everything can be silently observed in every direction – until, faraway, the surveillance is handed on to the next nuraghi. This suggests that they had, amongst other things, a military, defensive function. They have also been called ‘sun temples’, ‘towers of silence’ and, by the Greeks, ‘daidaleia’ after Daedalus, the builder of the labyrinth.

  Inside, you slowly become aware of the silence. Outside there are blackberries, very small and sweet ones, cacti whose fruit with stony pips the shepherds take the thorns out of and eat, hedges of bramble, barbed-wire, asphodels like swords whose hilts have been planted in the thin soil … perhaps a flock of chattering linnets. Inside the hive of stones (constructed before the Trojan Wars) silence. A concentrated silence – like tomato puree concentrated in a tin.

  By contrast, all extensive diffused silence has to be continually monitored in case there is a sound that warns of danger. In this concentrated silence the senses have the impression that the silence is a protection. Thus you become aware of the companionship of stone.

  The epithets ‘inorganic’, ‘inert’, ‘lifeless’, ‘blind’ – as applied to stone – may be short-term. Above the town of Galtelli towers the pale limestone mountain which is called Monte Tuttavista – the mountain which sees all.

  Perhaps the proverbial nature of stone changed when pre-history became history. Building became rectangular. Mortar permitted the construction of pure arches. A seemingly permanent order was established, and with this order came talk of happiness. The art of architecture quotes this talk in many different ways, yet for most people the promised happiness did not arrive, and the proverbial reproaches began: stone was contrasted with bread because it was not edible, stone was called heartless because it was deaf.

  Before, when any order was always shifting and the only promise was that contained in a place of shelter, in the time of the nuraghis, stones were considered as companions.

  Stones propose another sense of time, whereby the past, the deep past of the planet, proffers a meagre yet massive support to human acts of resistance, as if the veins of metal in rock led to our veins of blood.

  To place a stone upright so that it stands vertical is an act of symbolic recognition: the stone becomes a presence; a dialogue begins. Near the town of Macomer there are six such standing stones summarily carved into ogival forms; three of them, at shoulder-level, have carved breasts. The sculpting is minimal. Not necessarily through lack of means; perhaps through choice. An upright stone then did not depict a companion: it was one. The six bethels are of trachytic rock which is porous. As a result, even under a strong sun, they reach body heat and no more.

  When the rising sun, Sardinia, warms your granite You must give birth to new sons.

  Earlier than the nuraghi are the domus de janas, which are rooms hollowed out of rock-pediments, and made, it is said, to house the dead.

  This one is made of granite. You have to crawl in, and inside you can sit but not stand. The chamber measures 3 m. by 2. Stuck to its stone are two deserted wasp nests. The silence is less concentrated than in the nuraghi and there is more light, for you are less deeply inside; the pocket is nearer to the outside of the coat.

  Here the age of the man-made place is palpable. Not because you calculate … mid-neolithic … calcolithic, but because of the relation between the rock you are in and human touch.

  The granite surface has been made deliberately smooth. Nothing rough or jagged has been left. The tools used were probably of obsidian. The space is corporeal – in that it seems to pulse like an organ in a body. (A little like a kangaroo’s pocket!) And this effect is increased by the remaining soft smears of yellow and reddish ochre where originally the surfaces were painted. The irregularities of the chamber’s shape must have been determined by variations in the rock formation. But more interesting than where they came from is where they are heading.

  You lie in this hiding place, Marcos – there is a faint sweetish almost vanilla smell coming from some herb outside – and you can see in the irregularities the first probings towards the form of a column, the outline of a pilaster or the curves of a cupola – towards the idea of happiness.

  By the foot of the chamber – and there’s no question which way the bodies, either alive or dead, were intended to lie – the rock is curved and concave and on this surface a human hand has chipped distinct radiating ribs as on a scallop shell.

  By the entrance, which is no higher than a small dog, there was a protrusion like a fold in the rock’s natural curtain, and here a human hand tapered and rounded it so that it approached – but did not yet reach – the column.

  All domus de janas face east. Through the entrances from the inside you can see the sun rise.

  In a letter from prison in 1931 Gramsci told a story for his two children, the younger of whom, because of his imprisonment, he had never seen. A small boy is asleep with a glass of milk beside his bed on the floor. A mouse drinks the milk, the boy wakes up and finding the glass empty cries. So the mouse goes to the goat to ask for some milk. The goat has no milk, he needs grass. The mouse goes to the field, and the field has no grass because it’s too parched. The mouse goes to the well and the well has no water because it needs repairing. So the mouse goes to the mason who hasn’t exactly the right stones. Then the mouse goes to the mountain and the mountain wants to hear nothing and looks like a skeleton because it has lost its trees. (During the last century Sardinia was drastically deforested to supply railway sleepers for the Italian mainland.) In exchange for your stones, the mouse says to the mountain, the boy, when he grows up, will plant chestnuts and pines on your slopes. Whereupon the mountain agrees to give the stones. Later the boy has so much milk, he washes in it!

  Later still, when he becomes a man, he plants the trees, the erosion stops and the land becomes fertile.

  P.S. In the town of Ghilarza there is a small Gramsci Museum, near the school he attended. Photos. Copies of books. A few letters. And, in a glass case, two stones carved into round weights about the size of grapefruits. Every day Antonio as a boy did lifting exercises with these stones to strengthen his shoulders and correct the malformation of his back.

  24

  Will It Be a Likeness?

  (for Juan Munoz)

  Good Evening. Last week I talked about the dog and we listened to some dogs barking. I suggested that this noise after the aeons of dogs’ association with man had something to do with spoken language. Something, but what exactly?

  A number of listeners have written me letters – for which I thank you – all of them about the way in which dogs communicate. Some of you sent photos to illustrate your experience.

  I gave you my opinion last week that the dog is the only animal with an historical sense of time, but that he can never be an historical agent. He suffers history but he can never make it. And then we looked together at the famous painting by Goya on the subject. And we decided it was better to look at paintings on the radio than on the television. On the TV screen nothing is ever still, and this movement stops painting being painting. Whereas on the radio we see nothing, but we can listen to silence. And every painting has its own silence.

  A listener from the Black Forest has written to ask whether, after the dog, we might consider the butterfly, and in particular the Anthocaris Cardamines, commonly known as the Fiancée. For this listener – although our principal subject this evening is something altogether different – we have recorded here in the studio the Fiancée in flight. And if you shut the windows and settle in your chair you will now hear the wings of the Anthocaris Cardamines beating in flight.

  Every butterfly too has its own special silence. For sometimes a sound is more easily grasped as a silence, just as a presence, a visible presence, is sometimes most eloquently conveyed by a disappearance.

  Who does not know what it is like to go with a friend to
a railway station and then to watch the train take them away? As you walk along the platform back into the city, the person who has just gone is often more there, more totally there, than when you embraced them before they climbed into the train. When we embrace to say goodbye, maybe we do it for this reason – to take into our arms what we want to keep when they’ve gone.

  Excuse me, the telephone has just rung. You can’t hear it, can you? A listener asks what century in God’s name do I think I’m living in? Sounds like the nineteenth, he told me.

  No, sir, the one I live in is the sixteenth or the ninth. How many, sir, do you think are not dark? One in seven?

  Today everything everywhere on the planet is for sale.

  I’m selling. Here’s a back, a man’s working back, not yet broken. Did I hear an offer?

  What’s a back for?

  To sell wherever they need cheap backs for work.

  Bought!

  Every evening Goya takes his dog for a walk along the Ramblas.

  A heart?

  How come?

  Sixteen and healthy from Mexico.

  OK Taken!

  Then man and dog stroll home and Goya draws the curtains and settles down to look at CNN.

  A kidney.

  Bought!

  One male member and a uterus together.

  Together how?

  They stayed together. They were chased out of their village, they had no land and they were obliged to sell everything to survive.

  I’ll take the uterus.

  And the male member?

  Throw it away, plenty more where it came from.

  Difficult – they’re inseparable.

  NAFTA! Separate them!

  I’m not sure how.

  NAFTA! I tell you!

  Nafta?

  North American Free Trade Agreement.

  No sir, I live in this century which I can’t say is ours. And now, if I may, I shall return to the mystery of what makes a presence.

  When all the members have been separated and all the parts sold, what is left?

  Something more to sell. A whole is more than the sum of its parts, so we sell the personality. A personality is a media-product and easy to sell. A presence is the same thing as personality, no?

  Presence is not for sale.

  If that’s true, it’s the only thing on this earth which isn’t.

  A presence has to be given, not bought.

  Three hundred girls from Thailand.

  I’ll take them. Ask Melbourne if he’s still interested.

  A presence is always unexpected. However familiar. You don’t see it coming, it moves in sideways. In this a presence resembles a ghost or a crab.

  He’s let the dog out and the master has gone to sleep.

  Once I was in a train travelling to Amsterdam, through Germany, going north following the Rhine. It was a Sunday and I was alone in the compartment and had been travelling for several hours. With me I had a cassette player and so I decided to listen to some music. Beethoven’s one-from-last piano sonata. A man stops in the corridor and peers into the compartment. He makes a sign with his hands to enquire if he can open the door. I slide the door open. Come in, I say. He puts a finger to his lips, sits down and slides the door shut. We listen. When the sonata ends, there’s only the noise of the train … He’s a man of about my age but better dressed and with an attaché case. From it he takes out a sheet of paper, writes some words on it and hands the paper to me. ‘Thank you,’ I read, ‘for allowing me to listen with you.’ I smile, nod and know that I should not speak. We sit there silently in the presence of the last movement of the sonata. This is how a presence makes itself felt.

  An hour later when a vendor came down the corridor selling coffee and sandwiches, my travelling companion pointed to what he wanted and I understood that he was dumb, that he could not speak.

  Excuse me, the telephone again. A listener wants to know: Who was the pianist?

  Piotr Anderszewski.

  That’s not true. Why do you lie?

  Because Piotr is a friend of mine. He plays marvellously, sometimes he plays with his sister, Dorothea, who is a violinist, he comes from Poland, he’s poor and he’s already twenty-six and soon – such is the competition on the concert circuit – soon it will be too late, for ever too late, for him to be recognised for the great pianist he is. So I lied to help him. Piotr. If I keep quiet, I can hear him playing the Diabelli Variations.

  On my way here to the radio station this evening I passed a photography shop. In their window they have a notice that says: IDENTITY PHOTOS WITH A TRUE LIKENESS – READY IN TEN MINUTES!

  To talk of a likeness is another way of talking of a presence. With photos the question of likeness is incidental. It’s merely a question of choosing the likeness you prefer. With a painted or drawn portrait likeness is fundamental; if it’s not there, there’s an absence, a gaping absence.

  The dog is now asking to be let in. The master gets up, opens the door and, instead of returning to bed, goes to his easel on which there is an unfinished painting.

  You can’t hunt for a likeness. It can escape even a Raphael… Strangely, you can tell whether a likeness is there or not when you’ve never set eyes on the model or seen any other image of the model. For example, in Raphael’s portrait of a woman known as La Mata, the dumb one, there is an astounding likeness. You can hear it.

  By contrast, in Raphael’s double portrait of himself and a friend, painted in 1517, there’s no likeness present at all. This time it’s a silence without any life in it. Enough to compare this silence with the Fiancée beating her wings, for us to feel the gaping absence.

  There’s a village. A Kurdish mountain village in Eastern Anatolia. One night a wolf comes and kills many chickens and ravishes a lamb. Next morning everyone leaves the village, the men with rifles, the women with dogs and the children with sticks. It is not the first time this has happened and they know what to do. They are going to encircle the wolf. Slowly the circle closes, getting smaller, with the wolf in the middle. Finally it’s no larger than a small room. The dogs are growling. The men are holding their ropes and rifles and the end is very near. So what do they do? Wait! They slip a cord over the wolfs neck and attached to the cord is a bell! Then they disperse and let the wolf go free …

  You can’t set out to trap a likeness. It comes on its own or it doesn’t, a likeness. It moves in sideways.

  Are you saying a likeness can’t be bought or sold?

  No, it can’t.

  Bad news. Maybe you are lying again?

  This time there’s no need to lie.

  Wolves! Bells! Things which move in sideways! Pure mystification! What you can’t, in principle, buy or sell, doesn’t exist! This is what we now know for certain. What you’re talking about is your personal phantasm – to which of course you have every right. Without phantasms there would be no consumers, and we’d be back with the apes.

  * * *

  Animals are capable of feeling a presence. When a dog recognises a garment of his master by its smell – he perceives something similar to a likeness.

  You are obsessed with dogs! I thought we were thinking about invention, creation, human wealth.

  One female thyroid gland!

  Don’t! A single thyroid is not sellable. If you’re offered one, it’s suspect.

  There’s a painting from Pompeii I’d like to send you by radio.

  Of a dog, I suppose.

  No, a woman. She’s holding a wooden tablet, like a book, in her left hand, and in her right, a pen or stylo, the end of which she holds against her lip. She’s thinking about words not yet written. The portrait was painted in the year 79 – the year in which the town was buried – and preserved – in lava. Probably the words were never written.

  Not a great painting, and if I’m sending it to you – it’s simply because it’s a likeness. She’s here in the studio in front of me, with her fringe just out of curlers, and her earrings of gold, which, as soon as she puts t
hem on, are never still.

  A likeness is a gift, something left behind and hidden and later discovered when the house is empty … Whilst hidden, it avoids time.

  What do you mean ‘avoids time’?

  Confuses time, if you prefer.

  You wouldn’t get away with this nonsense on television! TV demands speed and clarity. You can’t ramble across the screen as you’re rambling now.

  So I send you the Pompeian woman of two millennia ago, with the tip of her stylo lightly touching her lower lip and her hands which are not rough with work and never will be. At the most she’s twenty years old, and you have the impression of having just seen her. Her earrings tinkling.

  You are a nostalgic old man!

  Or a young romantic?

  Anyway they’re both finished, they belong to the past. Today we live in a world of exchanges, calculations at the speed of light, credits, debts and winnings.

  And the dead don’t exist?

  Let the dead bury the dead – that was well said and has always been true.

  Our plan is more kilos for less cost.

  The cattle feed

  is driving the cows mad

  their guts were created

  for grasses

  not for offal.

  More and more kilos for less and less cost.

  The madness may be transmittable!

  Keep quiet and do not forget: the meat of the future is profit.

  I still have a portrait I painted when I was twenty. It’s of a woman asleep in a chair and on the table in front of her, in the foreground, there is a bowl of flowers. I was in love with the woman and we lived together in two small rooms on the ground floor in a house in London. I think somebody today could tell from the painting that I loved her, but there’s no likeness there. Her primrose green dress – she made it herself on the table in the room where I painted – has a distinct presence, and her fair hair, in whose colour I always saw green, is striking. But there’s no likeness. And until six months ago, if I looked at the painting, I couldn’t refind a likeness in my memory either. If I shut my eyes, I saw her. But I couldn’t see her sitting in the chair in her green dress.