by John Berger
Six months ago I happened to be in London and I found myself two minutes’ walk away from the modest house where we rented the two rooms. The house had been done up and repainted but it hadn’t been rebuilt. So I knocked on the door. A man opened it and I explained that fifty years ago I had lived there and would it be possible for me to see the two rooms on the ground floor?
He invited me in. He and his wife occupied the whole house. There were carpets and lamps and paintings and china plates on the walls and a hi-fi and silver trays. Useless to look for the gas meter which we fed with coins when we were cold and needed to light the gas-fire or heat some water. Useless to look for the bathtub, which, when we weren’t taking a bath together, served as a support for a tabletop on which we chopped onions and beat eggs for an omelette. Everything had been replaced and nothing was the same except for the plaster mouldings on the ceiling and the proportions of the large window by whose light she made her clothes and I painted.
I asked if I could draw back the curtains. And I stood there staring at the window panes – it was raining and already evening so I could see nothing outside.
And standing there, I found her likeness, as she sat in the chair in her green dress, asleep.
Likenesses hide in rooms, you find them sometimes when the rooms are being emptied.
There are certain people who are so secluded – they live in a kind of Switzerland of perception – that they can’t see a likeness when it’s staring them in the face.
A journalist is visiting a modern prison of which the local authorities are proud. They call it a model prison. He is chatting with a long-term prisoner. Finally, still taking notes, the journalist asks: And what did you do before? Before what? Before you were here? The prisoner stares at him. Crime, he says, crime …
Talking of model prisons, a new women’s prison has just been built in Britain. Each cell measures 3 steps by 3 steps. A zoo director commented on the smallness of the space. ‘No zoo would confine an ape in an area measuring this. It would damage both the psychological and the physical well-being of the animal. It would not be allowed in any professional zoo.’ A third of the women prisoners in Britain are there for not paying fines or TV licences.
Arno Schmidt in one of his books quotes from a poem in English:
I go towards my likeness, and my likeness goes towards me.
She embraces me and holds me close, as if I had come out of prison.
It is a new day, and Goya is taking the dog for a walk. They are both in exile. In the town of Bordeaux which, when there is a west wind, smells of the Atlantic.
As the Nikkei Stock Average breaks through the 2,000-point mark, European money managers brim with confidence that the market to watch next year will be Japan.
An eye with a perfect retina, going, going, gone!
‘In these parts it is a miracle the people are still alive,’ said Moisés, a young man who joined the Zapatista insurrection in south-east Mexico. ‘Families of seven to twelve people have been surviving on a hectare or half a hectare of infertile soil … We have nothing, absolutely nothing, no decent roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health, no food, no education …’ The year was 1994.
Now I’m going to send you by radio a strange likeness – that of a man whose face we do not know. Whenever he’s in company, he wears a black ski mask. ‘Here we are,’ he says, ‘the forever dead, dying once again, but now in order to live.’ His assumed name is Marcos.
A terrorist! It was agreed that this was a radio talk about economics, and you contrive to introduce a terrorist. An expert in violence!
I’m transmitting his likeness. A likeness created by his own words:
I have the urge to write to you and tell you something about being ‘the professionals of violence’, as we have so often been called. Yes, we are professionals. But our profession is hope … out of our spent and broken bodies must rise up a new world … Will we see it? Does it matter? I believe that it doesn’t matter as much as knowing with undeniable certainty that it will be born, and that we have put our all – our lives, bodies and souls – into this long and painful but historic birth. Amor y dolor – love and pain: two words that not only rhyme, but join up and march together.
Empty leftist rhetoric!
Here is the rest of the likeness:
There is something else about this passionate moving of words, something that does not appear in any postscript or any communiqué. It is the anxiety, the uncertainty, the galloping questions that assault us every time one of the couriers leaves with one, or several, communiqués. Questions and more questions fill up our nights, accompany us on our rounds to check the guards, sit beside us on some broken tree trunk looking at the food on the plate … ‘Were these words the best ones to say what we wanted to say?’ ‘Were they the right words at this time?’ ‘Were they understandable?’
A likeness is a gift and remains unmistakable – even when hidden behind a mask.
A likeness can be effaced. Today Che Guevara sells T-shirts, that’s all that is left of his likeness.
Are you sure?
[Silence]
Silence, you know, is something that can’t be censored. And there are circumstances in which silence becomes subversive. That’s why they fill it with noise all the while.
* * *
Goya is walking with his dog by the ocean.
The other day I was listening to Glenn Gould playing Mozart’s Fantasy in C Major. I want to remind you of how Gould plays. He plays like one of the already dead come back to the world to play its music. And that’s how he played when he was alive!
Three nimble hands.
Why three?
One of the two women had an accident at work.
Bought.
I’ll tell the story of the best likeness ever made. John is the only one who tells the story. The other Evangelists don’t refer to it – though they refer to Martha and Mary. The two sisters had a brother, Lazarus, who fell sick and died in the village of Bethany. When Jesus, who was a friend of the family, arrived in the village, Lazarus had been dead and buried for four days.
‘Where have you laid him?’ he asked.
‘Come and see, Lord,’ they replied.
Jesus wept.
Then the Jews said: ‘See how he loved him!’
But some of them said: ‘Could not he, who opened the eyes of the blind man, have kept this man from dying?’
Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. ‘Take away the stone,’ he said.
So they took away the stone.
Jesus called in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen and a cloth round his face.
Jesus said to them: ‘Take off the grave clothes and let him go.’
This was the perfect likeness. And it provoked Caiaphas, the high priest, to lay the plot for the taking of Jesus’s own life.
Goya is going back to work in his studio.
Now he is painting. Can you hear him? Faces appear on the canvas. Then they disappear. All have gone.
Try turning the volume of the silence up – higher – higher. Higher still …
[Total silence]
Is this the silence of a likeness, of the mountains at night in south-east Mexico, or of us listening together?
Acknowledgements
The essays in this book were first printed – sometimes with different tides and in a slightly different form – in the following publications:
Opening a Gate The Russian Way (Opus 31) by Pentti Sammallahti Photographic Portfolio, Finland, 1996
Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible Das Abenteuer der Malerei (The Adventure of Painting), Editions Tertium, Ostfildern, Germany, 1995
Studio Talk Miquel Barceló, Recent Paintings, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, 1998
The Chauvet Cave Guardian, London, 16 November 1996
Penelope Tages Anzeiger, Zurich, 18 April 1997<
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The Fayum Portraits El Pais, Madrid, 20 December 1998
Degas Die Weltwoche, Zurich, 29 July 1993
Drawing: Correspondence with Leon Kossoff Guardian, London, 1 June 1996
Vincent Aftonbladet, Stockholm, 20 August 2000
Michelangelo Guardian, London, 21 November 1995
Rembrandt and the Body Frankfurter Rundschau, Frankfurt, 2 May 1992
A Cloth Over the Mirror Independent, London, 3 June 2000
Brancusi Die Weltwoche, Zurich, 6 June 1995
The River Po ‘du’ Die Zeitschrift der Kultur, Zurich, November 1995
Giorgio Morandi El Pais, Madrid, 7 February 1997
Pull the Other Leg, It’s Got Bells On It Guardian, London, 3 June 1995
Frida Kahlo Guardian, London, 12 May 1998
A Bed Wet Roks Seen From Above. Paintings: Christoph Hänsli Memory/Cage Editions, Zurich, 1996
A Man with Tousled Hair Le Monde Diplomatique, Paris, December 1991
An Apple Orchard Le Monde Diplomatique, Paris, September 2000
Brushes Standing Up in Jars Aftonbladet, Stockholm, 5 April 1996
Against the Great Defeat of the World Race & Class, London, October 1998-March 1999
Correspondence with Subcomandante Marcos:
The Herons El Pais, Madrid, 27 April 1995
The Herons and Eagles La Jornada, Mexico City, 3 June 1995
How to Live with Stones Le Monde Diplomatique, Paris, November 1997
Will It Be a Likeness? First performed by John Berger at Das Tat Theater im Bockenheimer Depot, Frankfurt, 1996. Directed by Juan Munoz. Simultaneous radio broadcast: Heissischer Rundfunk, Frankfurt. BBC Radio 3, 1996. First printed La Jornada, Mexico City, 4 August 1996.
Copyright © 2001 by John Berger
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Illustrations from a photograph by Peter Marlow © Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Berger, John.
The shape of a pocket / John Berger.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49084-1
1. Art—Themes, motives. I. Title.
N7560.B47 2002 701’.18’09—dc21 2001036513
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