G.

by John Berger

  Her cunt begins at her toes; her breasts are inside it, and her eyes too; it has enfolded her.

  It enfolds him.

  The ease.

  Previously it was unimaginable, like a birth for that which is born.

  It is eight o’clock on a December morning. People are already at work or going to work. It is still not fully light and the darkness is foggy. I have just left a laundry, where the violet fluorescent lighting bleaches most stains out until you unwrap the washing and look at it in your own room. Under the fluorescent lighting the girl behind the counter had the white face of a clown with green eye shadow and violet almost white lips. The people I pass in the rue d’Odessa move briskly but rigidly, or hold themselves stiff against the cold. It is hard to imagine that most of them were in bed two hours ago, languid, unrestrained. Their clothes—even those chosen with the greatest personal care or romantic passion—all look as though they are the uniforms of a public service into which everybody has been drafted. Every personal desire, preference or hope has become an inconvenience. I wait at the bus stop. The waving red indicator of the Paris bus, as it turns the corner, is like a brand taken from a fire. At this moment I begin to doubt the value of poems about sex.

  Sexuality is by its nature precise: or rather, its aim is precise. Any imprecision registered by any of the five senses tends to check sexual desire. The focus of sexual desire is concentrated and sharp. The breast may be seen as a model of such focus, gathering from an indefinable, soft variable form to the demarcation of the aureola and, within that, to the precise tip of the nipple.

  In an indeterminate world in flux sexual desire is reinforced by a longing for precision and certainty: beside her my life is arranged.

  In a static hierarchic world sexual desire is reinforced by a longing for an alternative certainty: with her I am free.

  All generalizations are opposed to sexuality.

  Every feature that makes her desirable asserts its contingency—here, here, here, here, here, here.

  That is the only poem to be written about sex—here, here, here, here—now.

  Why does writing about sexual experience reveal so strikingly what may be a general limitation of literature in relation to aspects of all experience?

  In sex, a quality of ‘firstness’ is felt as continually re-creatable. There is an element in every occasion of sexual excitement which seizes the imagination as though for the first time.

  What is this quality of ‘firstness’? How, usually, do first experiences differ from later ones?

  Take the example of a seasonal fruit: blackberries. The advantage of this example is that one’s first experience each year of eating blackberries has in it an element of artificial firstness which may prompt one’s memory of the original, first occasion. The first time, a handful of blackberries represented all blackberries. Later, a handful of blackberries is a handful of ripe/unripe/over-ripe/sweet/acid, etc., etc., blackberries. Discrimination develops with experience. But the development is not only quantitative. The qualitative change is to be found in the relation between the particular and the general. You lose the symbolically complete nature of whatever is in hand. First experience is protected by a sense of enormous power; it wields magic.

  The distinction between first and repeated experience is that one represents all: but two, three, four, five, six, seven ad infinitum cannot. First experiences are discoveries of original meaning which the language of later experience lacks the power to express.

  The strength of human sexual desire can be explained in terms of natural sexual impulse. But the strength of a desire can be measured by the single-mindedness it produces. Extreme single-mindedness accompanies sexual desire. The single-mindedness takes the form of the conviction that what is desired is the most desirable possible. An erection is the beginning of a process of total idealization.

  At a given moment sexual desire becomes inextinguishable. The threat of death itself will be ignored. What is desired is now exclusively desired; it is not possible to desire anything else.

  At its briefest, the moment of total desire lasts as long as the moment of orgasm. It lasts longer when passion increases and extends desire. Yet, even at its briefest, the experience should not be treated as only a physical/nervous reflex. The stuff of imagination (memory, language, dreams) is being deployed. Because the other who is palpable and unique between one’s arms is—at least for a few instants—exclusively desired, she or he represents, without qualification or discrimination, life itself. The experience = I + life.

  But how to write about this? This equation is inexpressible in the third person and in narrative form. The third person and the narrative form are clauses in a contract agreed between writer and reader, on the basis that the two of them can understand the third person more fully than he can understand himself; and this destroys the very terms of the equation.

  Applied to the central moment of sex, all written nouns denote their objects in such a way that they reject the meaning of the experience to which they are meant to apply. Words like cunt, quim, motte, trou, bilderbuch, vagina, prick, cock, rod, pego, spatz, penis, bique—and so on, for all the other parts and places of sexual pleasure—remain intractably foreign in all languages, when applied directly to sexual action. It is as though the words around them, and the gathering meaning of the passage in which they occur, put such nouns into italics. They are foreign, not because they are unfamiliar to reader or writer, but precisely because they are their third-person nouns.

  The same words written in reported speech—either swearing or describing—acquire a different character and lose their italics, because they then refer to the speaker speaking and not directly to acts of sex. Significantly, sexual verbs (fuck, frig, suck, kiss, etc., etc.) remain less foreign than the nouns. The quality of firstness relates not to the acts performed, but to the relation between subject and object. At the centre of sexual experience, the object—because it is exclusively desired—is transformed and becomes universal. Nothing is left exterior to it, and thus it becomes nameless.

  I make two rough drawings:

  They perhaps distort less than the nouns. Through these drawings, what I have called the quality of firstness in sexual experience is perhaps a little easier to recall. Why? Being visual, they are closer to physical perception. But I doubt whether this is the explanation. A skilful Roman or Renaissance pornographic painting would be still closer to visual perception and yet, for our purpose, it would be more opaque.

  Is it because these rough drawings are schematized and diagrammatic? Again, I doubt it. Medical diagrams are sometimes more schematic—and again more opaque. What makes these drawings a little more transparent than words and sophisticated images is that they carry a minimal cultural load. Let us prove it obversely.

  Take the first one. Put the word big above it. Already it is changed, and the load increased. It becomes more specifically a message addressed by writer to reader. Put the word his in front of big and it is further changed.

  Take the second one and put the following words above it: Choose a woman’s name and write it here. Although the number of words has increased, the drawing remains unchanged. The words do not qualify the drawing or use it syntactically. And so the drawing is still relatively open for the spectator’s exclusive appropriation. Now carry out the instructions. Write the name of, say, Beatrice. Once again the increase of its cultural load renders the drawing opaque. The name Beatrice refers the drawing to an exterior system of categories. What the drawing now represents has become part of Beatrice, Beatrice is part of an historical European culture. In the end we are left looking at a rough drawing of a sexual part. Whereas sexual experience itself affirms a totality.

  Take both drawings and put the word I above each one.

  I am writing about the lovers on the bed.

  Her eyes refocus upon him. Their look is for him something as specific and permanent as a house or a particular door. He will find his way back to it.

  It is a
look for which the Roman girl’s prepared him four years ago. Behind such a look is a total confidence that at that moment to express something—without thought, without words, but simply through one’s own uncontrollable eyes—is to be instantaneously understood. To be, at that moment, is to be known. Hence all distinctions between the personal and the impersonal disappear.

  Do not let us even by a hair’s breadth misinterpret the meaning of this look. The look is simultaneously and in absolutely equal terms appealing and grateful. This does not mean that Beatrice is grateful for what has passed and is appealing for what is to come.

  Don’t stop, my sweet, don’t stop, is what she may have said or will do: but not with this look.

  Such an interpretation implies that eventually, if all is well, her look will be transformed into one which is purely grateful. An interpretation particularly dear to the male as provider and master. But false.

  The look in Beatrice’s eyes being in equal measure appealing and grateful is not the result of these two feelings co-existing. There is only one feeling. She has only one thing to say with her uncontrollable eyes. Nothing exists for her beyond this single feeling. She is grateful for what she appeals for; she appeals for what she is already grateful for.

  To follow her look, we enter her state of being. There, desire is its satisfaction, or, perhaps, neither desire nor satisfaction can be said to exist since there is no antinomy between them: every experience becomes the experience of freedom there: freedom there precludes all that is not itself.

  The look in her eyes is an expression of freedom which he receives as such, but which we, in order to locate it in our world of third persons, must call a look of simultaneous appeal and gratitude.

  A little later she strokes his back and whispers: You see. You see.

  The world is not as we have subsided into it. Within us there is the keenness, the sharpness to perform surgery. Within, if we have the courage to wield it, is the cutting edge to sever the whole world as it is, the world that pretends to be part of us, the world to which by compromised and flabby usage we are said to belong. Say now to me. Now to me say to me.

  She places her hand so that his testicles may rest upon the palm.

  From the long tight bud the longer petals loosen: their tips begin to separate so that at the far end of the flower there is an open mouth. Then, freed, the petals slowly revolve like propellers: in eight hours one may turn between forty-five and ninety degrees. As they revolve they retreat till they are pointing backwards from their small round calyx which is now thrust forward.

  Thus a cyclamen opening. And thus too, greatly accelerated, the sensation of his penis becoming erect again and the foreskin again withdrawing from the coronal ridge.

  The clocks keep another time.

  I was walking through a forest with a woman, smaller than I and blonde. We were happy but not specially preoccupied with one another.

  We came to a dead animal’s head, half detached from its body. The animal might have been a fox, a donkey, a deer. The head was hollow like a mask or a glove. The sight should have been disturbing, but it was not. On the contrary it encouraged us. The mouth of the animal seemed to be grinning, its eye peaceful. The tattered skin of its neck was like a wide tattered sleeve. This sideways-lurching grinning severed head of an average-sized animal did not signify the death of that animal; it was purely a sign, put there to encourage us to continue.

  We came out of the forest on to a large plain. The sky there was dark and purple but the plain was pale gold. The beauty of this plain, shimmering, many degrees lighter than the sky, made me (and I think her too) entirely happy. Quite near us were two rows of wooden buildings, like stables except that each was separate from the rest like very small wooden Russian houses. Around these buildings were men and women dressed in long whitish clothes. They were buying and selling cattle. (The people were not rich buyers and sellers: they were nomadic herdsmen.) We saw a herd of white cows (bison?) charging over the plains and vaguely in our direction. They were kicking up clouds of golden dust against the blackish sky. Suddenly she was frightened. I was not—perhaps because of the sign in the forest. I put my arms around her and pressed her against me. The intense pleasure of doing this became indistinguishable from that which I derived from what was happening around us. Be still, I said to her, if we are absolutely still, they will avoid us. The cattle thundered past, covering us, pressed tightly against one another, with gold dust. Not a single tail touched us.

  They lie abandoned, side by side. The air from the open window cools their bodies and makes them aware of how damp they are, on the front of their stomachs how wet.

  It should go on for ever, she says. It is not a complaint. She grips two fingers of his hand. She knows that the pace of time is reverting to normal. She crossed a threshold beyond which space, distance, time were meaningless. The threshold was warm, damp and quivering: animate to a degree for which the inanimate has no qualitative equivalent—unless it be jurassic mountains: animate to a degree at which it seemed that substance became sound alone.

  It should go on for ever.

  They lie on their backs. He has a sensation of being extended horizontally. He is conscious of the flatness of the bed, the floor, the earth under the house. Everything that is standing looks incongruous and incomplete to him. He is on the point of laughing. Suddenly he notices the portrait of her father on the wall opposite the bed. It is a provincial clumsy painting so that the image of the man oscillates between being a likeness and a childish stereotype of a ruddy-faced country gentleman at an inn. The face looks as though it has been tinted pink. The eyes are blankly fixed. Looking at this portrait of her father, he waves a hand.

  POEM FOR HIM

  éblouir to dazzle

  like silk

  her body is borderless

  its centre a mouth of earth

  liquid throat

  (o nightingales of 19th century verse)

  passage of unprotected being

  cul de sac

  to have reached there

  to dazzle the earth

  éblouir

  3

  5.

  THE BEGINNING AS DREAM

  The strange thing about dreams is not so much what happens in them, but what one feels in them. In dreams there are new categories of emotion. In all dreams, even bad ones, there is a sense of imminent resolution such as one scarcely ever experiences when awake. By resolution I mean the answering of all questions. In my dream we were crossing a city. The city might have been London; it was a city, anyway, which was familiar; a city in which everything was interesting, in which everything was both striking and intimate. I was crossing this city in a bus and at the beginning I was on top of the bus (it was a double-decker bus without a roof). At the beginning of the journey in the bus it was dusk or night. I remember the coldness of the air outside, the coldness of the wind which swept over the seats on top of the bus without a roof, and at the same time the affirmative warmth of myself in my clothes. The bus passed through many streets with crowds of people, lights, cinemas, underground railway stations. It was a long journey and we had an appointment at the other end of the city, an appointment which at that moment it seemed important to keep. But after we had been travelling for about an hour, it became clear that although this bus was going in the right direction, it was taking a much longer time than we could possibly have imagined. And so I decided that we would get off the bus at the next stop, in a crowded place where we might be able to find a taxi. We would go the rest of the way by taxi. Deciding this in no way made me regret what we had done; it had nevertheless been a good idea to take the bus. No sooner had I made this decision than the bus left the main thoroughfares and drove, without stopping now, along narrow back streets beneath warehouses, bridges and high brick walls that we couldn’t see over. These were the outskirts of the city, still familiar, still intimate, still a pleasure to see. And I had the sense that we were getting near an estuary or perhaps even the sea. By now i
t was clear that the route the bus was taking was the wrong one; it was more than that even, it was a route that had been abandoned, yes, that is how it felt to me, although I did not formulate it in my dream quite like that. And yet in riding in this bus which was following an abandoned route there was still the same strong sense of rightness. And this was confirmed when the high wall beside the bus suddenly disappeared and there was a view of water below, with ships along the quayside and, nearer than the ships, a pool of vivid green light on the water, across which a white bird, a huge white bird flew. It didn’t fly like a swan; it flew, not with its legs tucked up but with its legs hanging down, its neck curved not stretched straight out, its big, heavy wings, rather clumsy, white, tinged with green reflexions from the water beneath it. It was a vision of a bird such as I had never known before. And it was enough to justify, to explain everything else that had happened and was happening or would happen. The bus didn’t stop. We sat back in our seats, the cold night air blowing against our faces.

  And then the bus, never going very fast, changed into a train, a train which we were responsible for driving. There was nothing very complicated mechanically about this. We were now in the front of the vehicle and it was running along lines, still following or continuing the same route as the bus had taken. I keep on saying ‘we’ because I wasn’t by myself, but I wasn’t with any other specific people either, I was in the first person plural. We were now in front of the train which was running a little faster along a single track. Although we were in a deep cutting with high stone walls (or were they brick? they were black brick), although we were in this cutting, I had a sense of being at a very high altitude.