And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

by John Berger

  For the five in the wood-panelled room, resistance is more than a reflex, more than the muscles’ primitive refusal of what the body knows to be an injustice—because what its effort is continually creating is immediately and irredeemably taken out of its hands. Their resistance has mounted, and entered their thoughts, their hopes, their explanations of the world. The five heads, whose eyes pierce me, have declared their bodies, not only resistant, but militant.

  Since the coup d’état of September 1980, DISK—the left confederation of trade unions, to which the five belonged—has been declared illegal, as indeed have all political parties.

  At least 50,000 people have been arrested. The prosecution has demanded hundreds of death penalties—particularly against militant trade unionists. The manhunts are as systematic as the torture used in the hope of extracting further names and connections. This is why the photograph has become incriminating.

  Thousands have disappeared without news. To date at least eighty have died under torture. It is probable that one of the five I’m looking at is being tortured today. His body, so unmistakable in his mother’s eyes, is being made to suffer the unthinkable.

  How much this photograph says about politics! About how politics, at their origin, are irrepressible. These five men, with their loves, their children, their songs and their Anatolian memory, are the dupes of nobody. They were often badly led, often carelessly organized, often the first victims of the charismatic self-indulgence of their leaders, but none of this has surprised them. Of this present world which they know so well, they did not expect better.

  They know that there has never been a winter in Anatolia without snow, a summer without animals dying from drought, a workers’ movement without repression. Utopias exist only in carpets. But they know too that what they have been subjected to in their lives is intolerable. And the naming of the intolerable is itself the hope.

  When something is termed intolerable, actions must follow. These actions are subject to all the vicissitudes of life. But the pure hope resides first and mysteriously in the capacity to name the intolerable as such: and this capacity comes from afar—from the past and from the future. This is why politics and courage are inevitable. The time of the torturers is agonizingly but exclusively the present.

  If I screen out the heads in the photo of the five men in the wood-panelled room, it is no longer incriminating. One sees only the skimpy clothes, the hands, the open collars. But headless like this, their bodies are trapped in the present of their torturers. ......Ahmed, Salib, Mehmet, Deniz, Kerime ... it will end.

  An angel in white stone, whose wing tips merge, in the winter light, with the high hawk-colored cliff behind the village—this stone angel holds the wrist of a soldier, whose legs have already given way, and who is slumping into death. The angel does not save him, but appears somehow to lighten the soldier’s fall. Yet the hand which holds the wrist takes no weight, and is no firmer than a nurse’s hand taking a pulse. If his fall appears to be lightened, it is only because both figures have been carved out of the same piece of stone.

  On the plinth below are inscribed the forty-five names of the men who fell in the war between 1914 and 1918. Then, on another face of the plinth, twenty-one further names were added after the Second World War. Seven of these last were deported and died in German concentration camps, others were machine-gunned within earshot of the war memorial. All were in the Maquis. Some, before they died, were tortured in the Pax hotel at Annemasse, the local headquarters of the Gestapo. Did the guardian angel with the nurse’s hand appear in that renowned hotel or in the camps of Mauthausen, Dachau, and Auschwitz?

  Amongst these men, many, at different moments, had a vision of a morning in the future when they would walk again, indelibly scarred but carefree, through the village of their country which had been freed. The stone angel, if she represents anything, represents that morning.

  July 16th, 1981, 11 A.M. I did not see the cities of the future or their new technology. Nor did I see the collapse of these cities. What I saw had nothing to do with prophecy.

  I saw only the village street, which is so familiar to me that I could walk down it blindfolded if I had a stick. A blind man died a few years back. Blind from birth, he could walk down to the village from the hamlet where he lived four kilometers away. The bees he kept gave more honey than any others in the village. And he axed his own wood on a chopping block, without ever cutting his hand.

  At 11 A.M. it was sunny with a blue sky. The few white clouds were moving fast above the mountains. A north wind.

  I saw the village street at that moment, as seen from the future. What I was seeing had become the distant past. This transformation was calm, so calm that it resembled a stillness.

  The men and women in front of the Mairie, where the Tricolor was flying, were now an image in the minds of their descendants. They had acquired the mystery and the stability of the past. They had attained a kind of a complete incompleteness. They were waiting to be completed by the knowledge and actions of their descendants. And, at the same time, they were complete for they had completed themselves: they could do no more.

  I saw the future as the blind man saw his way down to the village.

  Sometimes, I’d like to write a book

  A book all about time

  About how it doesn’t exist,

  How the past and the future

  Are one continuous present.

  I think that all people—those living,

  those who have lived

  And those who are still to live—are alive now.

  I should like to take that subject to pieces,

  Like a soldier dismantling his rifle.

  wrote Yevgeny Vinokurov.

  ONCE IN A POEM

  Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.

  Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.

  Poems are nearer to prayers than to stories, but in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to. It is the language itself which has to hear and acknowledge. For the religious poet, the Word is the first attribute of God. In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication.

  Yet poetry uses the same words, and more or less the same syntax as, say, the Annual General Report of a multinational corporation. (Corporations that prepare for their profit some of the most terrible battlefields of the modern world.) How then can poetry so transform language that, instead of simply communicating information, it listens and promises and fulfills the role of a god?

  That a poem may use the same words as a Company Report means no more than the fact that a lighthouse and a prison cell may be built with stones from the same quarry, joined by the same mortar. Everything depends upon the relation between the words. And the sum total of all these possible relations depends upon how the writer relates to language, not as vocabulary, not as syntax, not even as structure, but as a principle and a presence.

  The poet places language beyond the reach of time: or, more accurately, the poet approaches language as if it were a place, an assembly point, where time has no finality, where time itself is encompassed and contained.

  If poetry sometimes speaks of its own immortality, the claim is more far-reaching than that of the genius of a particular poet in a particular cultural history. Immortality here should be distinguished from posthumous fame. Poetry can speak of immortality because it abandons itself to language, in the belief t
hat language embraces all experience, past, present, and future.

  To speak of the promise of poetry would be misleading, for a promise projects into the future, and it is precisely the coexistence of future, present, and past that poetry proposes. A promise that applies to the present and past as well as to the future can better be called an assurance.

  ONCE IN AMSTERDAM

  It is strange how art historians sometimes pay so much attention, when trying to date certain paintings, to “style,” inventories, bills, auction lists, and so little to the painted evidence concerning the model’s age. It is as if they do not trust the painter on this point. For example, when they try to date and arrange in chronological order Rembrandt’s paintings of Hendrickje Stoffels. No painter was a greater expert about the process of aging, and no painter has left us a more intimate record of the great love of his life. Whatever the documentary conjectures may allow, the paintings make it clear that the love between Hendrickje and the painter lasted for about twenty years, until her death, six years before his.

  She was ten or twelve years younger than he. When she died she was, on the evidence of the paintings, at the very least forty-five, and when he first painted her she could certainly not have been older than twenty-seven. Their daughter, Cornelia, was baptized in 1654. This means that Hendrickje gave birth to their child when she was in her mid-thirties.

  The Woman in Bed (from Edinburgh) was painted, by my reckoning, a little before or a little after the birth of Cornelia. The historians suggest that it may be a fragment taken from a larger work representing the wedding night of Sarah and Tobias. A biblical subject for Rembrandt was always contemporary. If it is a fragment, it is certain that Rembrandt finished it, and bequeathed it finally to the spectator, as his most intimate painting of the woman he loved.

  There are other paintings of Hendrickje. Before the Bathsheba in the Louvre, or the Woman Bathing in the National Gallery (London), I am wordless. Not because their genius inhibits me, but because the experience from which they derive and which they express—desire experiencing itself as something as old as the known world, tenderness experiencing itself as the end of the world, the eyes’ endless rediscovery, as if for the first time, of their love of a familiar body—all this comes before and goes beyond words. No other paintings lead so deftly and powerfully to silence. Yet, in both, Hendrickje is absorbed in her own actions. In the painter’s vision of her there is the greatest intimacy, but there is no mutual intimacy between them. They are paintings which speak of his love, not of hers.

  In the painting of the Woman in Bed there is a complicity between the woman and the painter. This complicity includes both reticence and abandon, day and night. The curtain of the bed, which Hendrickje lifts up with her hand, marks the threshold between daytime and nighttime.

  In two years, by daylight, Van Rijn will be declared bankrupt. Ten years before, by daylight, Hendrickje came to work in Van Rijn’s house as a nurse for his baby son. In the light of Dutch seventeenth-century accountability and Calvinism, the housekeeper and the painter have distinct and separate responsibilities. Hence their reticence.

  At night, they leave their century.

  A necklace hangs loose across her breasts,

  And between them lingers—

  yet is it a lingering

  and not an incessant arrival?—

  the perfume of forever.

  A perfume as old as sleep,

  as familiar to the living as to the dead.

  Leaning forward from her pillows, she lifts up the curtain with the back of her hand, for its palm, its face, is already welcoming, already making a gesture which is preparatory to the act of touching his head.

  She has not yet slept. Her gaze follows him as he approaches. In her face the two of them are reunited. Impossible now to separate the two images: his image of her in bed, as he remembers her: her image of him as she sees him approaching their bed. It is nighttime.

  ONCE IN A PAINTING

  Paintings are static. The uniqueness of the experience of looking at a painting repeatedly—over a period of days or years—is that, in the midst of flux, the image remains changeless. Of course the significance of the image may change, as a result of either historical or personal events, but what is depicted is unchanging: the same milk flowing from the same jug, the waves on the sea with exactly the same formations unbroken, the smile and the face which have not altered.

  One might be tempted to say that paintings preserve a moment. Yet on reflection this is obviously untrue. For the moment of a painting, unlike a moment photographed, never existed as such. And so a painting cannot be said to preserve it.

  In early Renaissance art, in paintings from non-European cultures, in certain modern works, the image implies a passage of time. Looking at it, the spectator sees Before, During, and After. The Chinese sage takes a walk from one tree to another, the carriage runs over the child, the nude descends the staircase. Yet the ensuing images are still static whilst referring to the dynamic world beyond their edges, and this poses the problem of what is the meaning of that strange contrast between static and dynamic. Strange because it is both so flagrant and so taken for granted.

  When is a painting finished? Not when it finally corresponds to something already existing—like the second shoe of a pair—but when the foreseen ideal moment of its being looked at is filled, as the painter feels or calculates it ought to be. The long or short process of painting a picture is the process of constructing such a moment. Of course, the painting’s moment-of-being-looked-at cannot be entirely foreseen and thus completely filled by the painting. Nevertheless every painting is, by its very nature, addressed to such a moment.

  Whether the painter is a simple practitioner or a master makes no difference to this address of the painting. The difference is in what the painting delivers: in how closely the moment of its being looked at, as foreseen by the painter, corresponds to the interests of the actual moments of its being looked at by other people, when the circumstances surrounding its production (patronage, fashion, ideology) have changed.

  Some painters when working have a habit of studying their painting, when it has reached a certain stage, in a mirror. What they then see is the image reversed. If questioned about why this helps, they say that it allows them to see the painting anew, with a fresher eye. What they glimpse in the mirror is perhaps a little like the look of their painting at that future moment to which it is being addressed.

  All finished paintings, whether a year or five hundred years old, are now prophecies, received from the past, about what the spectator is seeing in front of the canvas at the present moment. Sometimes the prophecy is quickly exhausted—the painting loses its address; sometimes it remains persistently true.

  Yet why is the still imagery of painting so compelling? What prevents painting being patently inadequate—just because it is static?

  To say that paintings prophesy the experience of their being looked at does not really answer the question. Such prophecies assume a continuing interest in the static image. Why, at least until recently, was such an assumption justified? The conventional answer is that, because painting is static, it has the power to establish a visually “palpable” harmony. Only something which is still can be so simultaneously composed, and therefore so complete.

  A musical composition, since it uses time, is obliged to have a beginning and an end. A painting only has a beginning and an end insofar as it is a physical object: within its imagery there is neither beginning nor end. This is what makes possible pictorial composition, harmony, form.

  The terms of the explanation seem to me to be both too restrictive and too aesthetic. There has to be a virtue in that flagrant contrast: the contrast between the unchanging painted form and the dynamic living model.

  Could it not be that the stillness of the painted image speaks of timelessness? The fact that paintings are prophecies of themselves being looked at has nothing to do with the perspective of modern avant-gardism, whereby the futu
re is always vindicating the misunderstood prophet. What the past, the present, and the future share is a substratum, a ground of timelessness.

  The language of pictorial art, because it is static, is the language of such timelessness. Yet what it speaks about—unlike geometry—is the sensuous, the particular, and the ephemeral.

  A sailor receives a letter

  from a thousand versts away.

  His wife has written

  that in their house

  beyond the cliffs

  she is happy.

  And this is of her letter

  during evenings with girls

  in untranslatable ports,

  through the sea of the months

  persuades the cursing sailor

  that his never-ending voyage

  will end.

  ONCE IN A LIFETIME

  It started with a small hillock, a little above and to the north of a field where I was raking hay. On this hillock were three neglected pear trees, two in full leaf and one with its grey wood, leafless and dead. Behind them, the blue sky with large white clouds.

  This small corner of the landscape—which I had never particularly noticed before—caught my eye and pleased me. Pleased me like a particular face one may see passing in the street, unknown, even unremarkable, but for some reason pleasing because of what it suggests of a life being lived.

  Soon afterwards I had the impression of being watched. For an instant I believed there was somebody standing on the hillock, or that a boy had climbed into one of the pear trees. The dead one was flanked by the two living ones. Yet there was nobody there.