Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  The nakedness of the woman on the bed painted by Hals is very different from Bathsheba’s. She is not in a natural state, prior to putting her clothes on. She has only recently taken them off, and it is her raw experience, just brought back from the world outside the room with the flax-coloured wall, that lies on the bed. She does not, like Bathsheba, glow from the light of her being. It is simply her flushed perspiring skin that glows. Hals did not believe in the principle of redemption. There was nothing to counteract the realist practice, there was only his rashness and courage in pursuing it. It is irrelevant to ask whether or not she was his mistress, loved or unloved. He painted her in the only way he could. Perhaps the famous speed with which he painted was partly the result of summoning the necessary courage for this, of wanting to be finished with such looking as quickly as possible.

  Of course there is pleasure in the painting. The pleasure is not embedded in the act of painting — as with Veronese or Monet — but the painting refers to pleasure. Not only because of the history which the sheet tells (or pretends to tell like a storyteller) but also because of the pleasure to be found in the body lying on it.

  The hair-thin cracks of the pigment, far from destroying, seem to enhance the luminosity and warmth of the woman’s skin. In places it is only this warmth which distinguishes the body from the sheet: the sheet by contrast looks almost greenish like ice. Hals’s genius was to render the full physical quality of such superficiality. It’s as if in painting he gradually approached his subjects until he and they were cheek to cheek. And this time in this skin-to-skin proximity, there was already pleasure. Add to this that nakedness can reduce us all to two common denominators and that from this simplification comes a kind of assuagement.

  I am aware of failing to describe properly the desperation of the painting. I will try again, beginning more abstractly. The era of fully fledged capitalism, which opened in seventeenth-century Holland, opened with both confidence and despair. The former — confidence in individuality, navigation, free enterprise, trade, the bourse — is part of accepted history. The despair has tended to be overlooked or, like Pascal’s, explained in other terms. Yet part of the striking evidence for this despair is portrait after portrait painted by Hals from the 1630s onwards. We see in these portraits of men (not of the women) a whole new typology of social types and, depending upon the individual case, a new kind of anxiety or despair. If we are to believe Hals — and he is nothing else if not credible — then today’s world did not arrive with great rejoicing.

  In face of the painting of the woman on the bed I understood for the first time to what degree, and how, Hals may have shared the despair he so often found in his sitters. A potential despair was intrinsic to his practice of painting. He painted appearances. Because the visible appears one can wrongly assume that all painting is about appearances. Until the seventeenth century most painting was about inventing a visible world; this invented world borrowed a great deal from the actual world but excluded contingency. It drew — in all senses of the word — conclusions. After the seventeenth century a lot of painting was concerned with disguising appearances; the task of the new academies was to teach the disguises. Hals began and ended with appearances. He was the only painter whose work was profoundly prophetic of the photograph, though none of his paintings is ‘photographic’.

  What did it mean for Hals as a painter to begin and end with appearances? His practice as a painter was not to reduce a bouquet of flowers to their appearance, nor a dead partridge, nor distant figures in the street; it was to reduce closely observed experience to appearance. The pitilessness of this exercise paralleled the pitilessness of every value being systematically reduced to the value of money.

  Today, three centuries later, and after decades of publicity and consumerism, we can note how the thrust of capital finally emptied everything of its content and left only the shard of appearances. We see this now because a political alternative exists. For Hals there was no such alternative, any more than there was redemption.

  When he was painting those portraits of men whose names we no longer know, the equivalence between his practice and their experiences of contemporary society may well have afforded him and them — if they were prescient enough — a certain satisfaction. Artists cannot change or make history. The most they can do is to strip it of pretences. And there are different ways of doing this, including that of demonstrating an existent heartlessness.

  Yet when Hals came to paint the woman on the bed it was different. Part of the power of nakedness is that it seems to be unhistorical. Much of the century and much of the decade are taken off with the clothes. Nakedness seems to return us to nature. Seems because such a notion ignores social relations, the forms of emotion and the bias of consciousness. Yet it is not entirely illusory, for the power of human sexuality — its capacity to become a passion — depends upon the promise of a new beginning. And this new is felt as not only referring to the individual destiny, but equally to the cosmic which, in some strange way, during such a moment, both fills and transcends history. The evidence for the fact that it happens like this is the repetition in love poetry everywhere, even during revolutions, of cosmic metaphors.

  In this painting there could be no equivalence between Hals’s practice as a painter and his subject, for his subject was charged, however prematurely, however nostalgically, with the potential promise of a new beginning. Hals painted the body on the bed with the consummate skill that he had acquired. He painted its experience as appearance. Yet his act of painting the woman with the crow black hair could not respond to the sight of her. He could invent nothing new and he stood there, desperate, at the very edge of appearances.

  And then? I imagine Hals putting down his brushes and palette and sitting down on a chair. By now the woman had already gone out and the bed was stripped. Seated, Hals closed his eyes. He did not close them in order to doze. With his eyes shut, he might envisage, as a blind man envisages, other pictures painted at another time.

  1979

  In a Moscow Cemetery

  The snow had thawed a week before, and the earth, just uncovered, was dishevelled like somebody woken up too early. In patches, new grass was growing, but mostly the grass was last year’s: lank, lifeless and almost white. The earth, awoken too early, was stumbling towards a window. The immense sky was white, full of light and tactful. It told no stories, made no jokes. Earth and sky are always a couple.

  Between them a wind blew. North-east veering to east. A routine unexceptional wind. It made people button their coats, the women adjust the kerchiefs on their heads, but across the plain it scarcely ruffled the surface of the million puddles. The earth had thrown a mud-coloured shawl over her shoulders.

  Flying low over the waterlogged soil, jackdaws and crows let themselves be carried sideways by the wind. Now that the snow had gone, worms would become visible. Across the mud, lorries were transporting gravel. On one of the two building sites a crane was lifting concrete joists to an open fourth storey, which was as yet no more than a skeletal platform. Nothing there, between earth and sky, would ever be entirely finished.

  Many people were arriving and leaving, a few in cars, most in lorries or old buses. There was no town to be seen. And yet you could sense the presence of a city not so far away: a question of sounds, the silence was still shallow, not yet deep like the ocean.

  Twenty people got down from one of the buses, the last four carrying a coffin. Their faces — like those of other groups — were closed but not locked. Each face had pulled the door to — and, within, each one was conversing with an old certainty.

  They carried the coffin over the pallid grass towards a wooden structure, rather like the stand on which generals take up their positions, so as to be better seen when reviewing their troops. A woman, who had been sheltering from the wind in a hut, stepped out, a camera slung round her neck. She was the temporary specialist of last pictures. The coffin, its lid now removed, was placed on one of the lower steps of the wooden st
and in such a way that it was inclined towards the photographer so that the woman inside the coffin should be visible. She must have been about seventy years old. The group of family and friends took up their position on the other steps of the stand.

  Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death, but the temporary specialist of last pictures was only concerned that nobody in the group should be excluded by the frame. The photos were in black and white. The yellow daffodils surrounding the coffin would print out as pale grey, only the sky would be almost its real colour. She beckoned to the figures on the right to close in.

  The image she saw through the viewfinder was not grief-stricken. Everyone knew that grief is private and long and has never spared anyone, and that the photograph they had ordered was a public record in which grief had no place. They looked hard at the camera, as if the old woman in the coffin was a newborn child, or a wild boar shot by hunters, or a trophy won by their team. This is how it appeared through the viewfinder.

  The cemetery was very large but almost invisible because so low on the ground. For once, the equality of the dead was a perceptible fact. There were no outstanding monuments, no hopeless mausoleums. When the new grass came, it would grow between all. Around some of the graves there were low railings, no higher than hay, and inside the railings, small wooden tables and seats, which all winter long were buried under the snow, just as in ancient Egypt mirrors and jewels were buried in the sand with the royal dead, with the difference that, here, after the thaw the tables and seats could also serve the living.

  The burial ground was divided up into plots of about an acre, each one numbered. The numbers were stencilled on wooden boards, nailed to posts, stuck into the earth. These numbers, too, were buried under the snow in the winter.

  On some of the headstones there were sepia oval photos behind glass. It is strange how we distinguish one person from another. The visible outward differences are relatively so slight — as between two sparrows — yet by these differences we distinguish a being whose uniqueness seems to us to be as large as the sky.

  The gravediggers, whose jokes are the same on every continent, had dug up many mounds of earth. The soil there was acid.

  The cemetery was begun in the 1960s, the plots with the lowest numbers being the earliest. In each plot there were those who died young, and those who lived to an old age. But in the first plots those who had died in their forties or early fifties were far more numerous. These men and women had lived through the war and the purges. They had survived to die early. All illnesses are clinical, and some are also historical.

  Silver birches grow quickly and they were already growing between the graves. Soon their leaves would be in bud and then the blood-red catkins, now hanging from their branches like swabs of lint, would fall on to the acid earth. Of all trees, birches are perhaps the most like grass. They are small, pliant, slender; and if they promise a kind of permanence, it has nothing to do with solidity or longevity — as with an oak or a linden — but only with the fact that they seed and spread quickly. They are ephemeral and recurring — like words, like a form of conversation between earth and sky.

  Between the trees you could glimpse figures, figures of the living. The family who had just been photographed were carrying wreaths of daffodils, whose yellow was strident as a keening.

  And perhaps, Jesus, holding your feet

  on my knees

  I am leaning to embrace

  The square shaft of the cross,

  Losing consciousness as I strain your

  body to me

  Preparing you for burial

  Pasternak

  The lid was placed on the coffin for the last time and nailed down.

  Nearby, a middle-aged woman on her knees was cleaning an old grave as though it were her kitchen floor. The ground was water-logged, and when she stood up, her wide knees were black with rain water.

  Far away the tractors were pulling their trailers of heaped gravel; the crane was delivering concrete slabs to the fifth storey; and the jackdaws, in that place where nothing would ever be entirely finished, were letting themselves be carried sideways by the wind.

  A couple sat at one of the wooden tables. The woman brought out her string bag, wrapped in newspaper, a bottle and three glasses. Her husband filled the three glasses. They drank with the man beneath the earth, pouring his glass of vodka into the grass.

  The specialist of last pictures had by now taken another dozen. A colleague had just phoned her, in her hut, to tell her that some raincoats had been delivered to the shop near the bridge over the canal. She would stop there on her way home tonight to see whether they had her son’s size. The coffin she could see through the viewfinder was small, the child inside no more than ten years old.

  Among the first plots a solitary man in a raincoat, leaning against a birch tree, was sobbing, his fists thrust deep into his pockets. In some puddles, cloud was reflected; into others soil had crumbled, muddying them, so that there were no reflections. The man glanced up at the sky with a look of recognition. Had they, one evening when they were both drunk, reminisced together?

  With questions and partial answers, mourners and visitors to the cemetery were trying to make sense of the deaths and their own lives, just as previously the dead had done. This work of the imagination, to which everybody and everything contributes, can never be entirely finished, either in the Khovanskoie cemetery, twenty miles south of Moscow, or anywhere else in the world.

  1983

  Ernst Fischer: A Philosopher and Death

  It was the last day of his life. Of course we did not know it then — not until almost ten o’clock in the evening. Three of us spent the day with him: Lou (his wife), Anya and myself. I can write now only of my own experience of that day. If I tried to write about theirs — much as I was conscious of it at the time and later — I would nevertheless run the risk of writing fiction.

  Ernst Fischer was in the habit of spending the summer in a small village in Styria. He and Lou stayed in the house of three sisters who were old friends and who had been Austrian Communists with Ernst and his two brothers in the 1930s. The youngest of the three sisters, who now runs the house, was imprisoned by the Nazis for hiding and aiding political refugees. The man with whom she was then in love was beheaded for a similar political offence.

  It is necessary to describe this in order not to give a false impression of the garden which surrounds their house. The garden is full of flowers, large trees, grass banks and a lawn. A stream flows through it, conducted through a wooden pipe the diameter of an immense barrel. It runs the length of the garden, then across fields to a small dynamo which belongs to a neighbour. Everywhere in the garden there is the sound of water, gentle but persistent. There are two small fountains: tiny pin-like jets of water force their way hissing through holes in the wooden barrel-line; water flows into and empties continually from a nineteenth-century swimming pool (built by the grandfather of the three sisters): in this pool, now surrounded by tall grass, and itself green, trout swim and occasionally jump splashing to the surface.

  It often rains in Styria, and if you are in this house you sometimes have the impression that it is still raining after it has stopped on account of the sound of water in the garden. Yet the garden is not damp and many colours of many flowers break up its greenness. The garden is a kind of sanctuary. But to grasp its full meaning one must, as I said, remember that in its outhouses men and women were hiding for their lives thirty years ago and were protected by the three sisters who now arrange vases of flowers and let rooms to a few old friends in the summer in order to make ends meet.

  When I arrived in the morning Ernst was walking in the garden. He was thin and upright. And he trod very lightly, as though his weight, such as it was, was never fully planted on the ground. He wore a wide-brimmed white and grey hat which Lou had recently bought for him. He wore the hat like he wore all his clothes, lightly, elegantly, but without concern. He was fastidious — not about
details of dress, but about the nature of appearances.

  The gate to the garden was difficult to open and shut, but he had mastered it and so, as usual, he fastened it behind me. The previous day Lou had felt somewhat unwell. I enquired how she was. ‘She is better,’ he said, ‘you have only to look at her!’ He said this with youthful, unrestricted pleasure. He was seventy-three years old and when he was dying the doctor, who did not know him, said he looked older, but he had none of the muted expressions of the old. He took present pleasures at their full face-value and his capacity to do this was in no way diminished by political disappointment or by the bad news which since 1968 had persistently arrived from so many places. He was a man without a trace, without a line on his face, of bitterness. Some, I suppose, might therefore call him an innocent. They would be wrong. He was a man who refused to jettison or diminish his very high quotient of belief. Instead he readjusted its objects and their relative order. Recently he believed in scepticism. He even believed in the necessity of apocalyptic visions in the hope that they would act as warnings.

  It is the surety and strength of his convictions which now make it seem that he died so suddenly. His health had been frail since childhood. He was often ill. Recently his eyesight had begun to fail and he could read only with a powerful magnifying glass — more often Lou read to him. Yet despite this it was quite impossible for anyone who knew him to suppose that he was dying slowly, that every year he belonged a little less vehemently to life. He was fully alive because he was fully convinced.

  What was he convinced of? His books, his political interventions, his speeches are there on record to answer the question. Or do they not answer it fully enough? He was convinced that capitalism would eventually destroy man — or be overthrown. He had no illusions about the ruthlessness of the ruling class everywhere. He recognized that we lacked a model for Socialism. He was impressed by and highly interested in what is happening in China, but he did not believe in a Chinese model. What is so hard, he said, is that we are forced back to offering visions.