And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

by John Berger

  When a man surprises an animal, or vice versa, the track of their gaze momentarily excludes everything else. It was like that, except that between animal and man there is usually an equality of presence, and there I was aware of an inequality. I was less present than the corner of the landscape which was watching me.

  The three pear trees looked different. The articulation of every branch had become apparent, I could see how each leaf moved. (All afternoon the north and south winds were contesting one another in gentle, brief breezes, scarcely longer than a breath.) The ground under the pear trees had changed.

  Until I met you, I would have been unable to name the transformation that was taking place. Today, at my late age, I name it—the fusion of love.

  Everything was shifting. The three pear trees, their hillock, the other side of the valley, the harvested fields, the forests. The mountains were higher, every tree and field nearer. Everything visible approached me. Rather, everything approached the place where I had been, for I was no longer in that place. I was everywhere, as much in the forest across the valley as in the dead pear tree, as much on the face of the mountain as in the field where I was raking hay.

  ONCE THROUGH A LENS

  Suppose a character, in one of the stories you and I write, tried to conceive of his origin, and tried to foresee beyond what he knows of his destiny at any given point of the story. His enquiries, his speculations, would lead him to hypotheses (infinity, chance, indeterminacy, free will, curved space and time …) very similar to those at which thinkers arrive when speculating about the universe.

  This is why the traffic between storytelling and metaphysics is continuous.

  The notion that life, as lived, is a story being told is a recurring one. Rationalism rejected this notion by proposing that the laws of nature were ineluctably mechanical. Most recent scientific research tends to suggest that the natural working of the processes of the universe resemble those of a brain rather than a machine. To think of such a “brain” as a narrator—although many scientists would protest that the thought was too anthropomorphic—has again become feasible. The metaphysics of storytelling has ceased to be a merely literary concern.

  What separates us from the characters about whom we write is not knowledge, either objective or subjective, but their experience of time in the story we are telling. This separation allows us, the storytellers, the power of knowing the whole. Yet, equally, this separation renders us powerless: we cannot control our characters, after the narration has begun. We are obliged to follow them, and this following is through and across the time, which they are living and which we oversee.

  The time, and therefore the story, belongs to them. Yet the meaning of the story, what makes it worthy of being told, is what we can see and what inspires us because we are beyond its time.

  Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless.

  If we storytellers are Death’s Secretaries, we are so because, in our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses.

  ONCE IN CHILDHOOD

  Thumb in mouth as sleep comes. The taste of one’s own body enveloping one, like sleep. No harm comes from one’s own body.

  Rage. Filling with cries a cavern of fear or anger. The cries, like red leaves, floating in the air, independent of oneself, and yet settling on one, covering one’s face, provoking further cries.

  Being comforted after crying. The bellows in one’s stomach stop blowing. A still sweetness, like liquid honey, accumulates in the chest. Only the roof of the mouth is still sore. The inexplicable cause has inexplicably vanished.

  The inability to remember is itself perhaps a memory. One lived with the experience of namelessness: there were certain elemental forces—heat, cold, pain, sweetness—which were recognizable. As also a few persons. But there were no verbs and no nouns. Even the first pronoun was a growing conviction rather than a fact, and because of this lack, memories (as distinct from a certain functioning of memory) did not exist.

  Once one lived in a seamless experience of wordlessness. Wordlessness means that everything is continuous. The later dream of an ideal language, a language which says all simultaneously, perhaps begins with the memory of this state without memories.

  My heart born naked

  was swaddled in lullabies.

  Later alone it wore

  poems for clothes.

  Like a shirt

  I carried on my back

  the poetry I had read.

  So I lived for half a century

  until wordlessly we met.

  From my shirt on the back of the chair

  I learn tonight

  how many years

  of learning by heart

  I waited for you.

  ONCE IN AUXONNE

  The post office at Auxonne is small and the postmistress has blue eyes. I have been there only twice.

  The first time was to send you a parcel; as the postmistress weighed it on the scale, I imagined your hands opening it.

  “Four kilos, three hundred grams.”

  In a parcel, wrapped by hand, there is a message weighing nothing: the receiver’s fingers may unknot the string which the sender’s tied.

  In the post office I saw in my mind’s eye your fingers untying the knot I tied at Auxonne.

  Ten days later I again stopped in the town, and went to the post office, this time to post you a letter. I remembered the day when I sent off the parcel and I felt a twinge of loss. Yet what had I lost? The parcel had arrived safely. You had made soup with the beetroots. And the bottle of distilled water from the flowers of orange trees you had placed on its shelf, above your dresses in the cupboard. All that had been lost was the little future of the parcel.

  What we mourn for the dead is the loss of their hopes. The man-with-the-parcel was as if dead; he could hope no more. The man-with-the-letter had taken his place.

  ONCE IN THE PAST

  One’s death is already one’s own. It belongs to nobody else: not even to a killer. This means that it is already part of one’s life. Not just in the sense that it may be anticipated and prepared for, but in the sense that its content is already, at least partly, determined. This, in the past, was the key of clairvoyance. Later new claims of freedom discredited all determinism. The notion of absolute freedom accompanied the birth of linear historical time. Such freedom was the sole consolation. Yet only when time is unilinear does the foreseeing of a future event or the pre-existence of a destiny imply determinism, and thus a crucial loss of freedom. If there is a plurality of times, or if time is cyclic, then prophecy and destiny can coexist with a freedom of choice.

  Perhaps at the beginning

  time and the visible,

  twin makers of distance,

  arrived together,

  drunk

  battering on the door

  just before dawn.

  The first light sobered them,

  and examining the day,

  they spoke

  of the far, the past, the invisible.

  They spoke of the horizons

  surrounding everything

  which had not yet disappeared.

  “For Dante time is the content of history felt as a single synchronic act. And inversely the purpose of history is to keep time together so that all are brothers and companions in the same quest and conquest of time.” (Osip Mandel’shtam)

  Of all that has been inherited from the nineteenth century only certain axioms about time have passed largely unquestioned. The Left and Right, evolutionists, physicists, and most revolutionaries, all accept—at least on an historical scale—the nineteenth-century view of a unilinear and uniform “flow” of time.

  Yet the notion of a uniform time, within which all events can be temporally related, depends upon the synthesizing capacity of a mind. Galaxies and particles in themselves propose nothing. There is a phenomenologica
l problem at the start. One is obliged to begin with conscious experience.

  Despite clocks and the regular turning of the earth, time is experienced as passing at different rates. This impression is generally dismissed as subjective, because time, according to the nineteenth-century view, is objective, incontestable, and indifferent; to its indifference there are no limits.

  Yet perhaps our experience should not be dismissed so quickly. Supposing one accepts the clocks; time does not slow down or accelerate. But time appears to pass at different rates because our experience of its passing involves not a single but two dynamic processes which are opposed to each other: as accumulation and dissipation.

  The deeper the experience of a moment, the greater the accumulation of experience. This is why the moment is lived as longer. The dissipation of the time-flow is checked. The lived durée is not a question of length but of depth or density. Proust understood this.

  Yet it is not only a cultural truth. A natural equivalent to the periodic increase of the density of lived time can be found in those days of alternating sun and rain, in the spring or early summer, when plants grow, almost visibly, several millimeters or centimeters a day. These hours of spectacular growth and accumulation are incommensurate with the winter hours when the seed lies inert in the earth.

  The content of time, that which time carries, seems to entail another dimension. Whether one calls this dimension the fourth, the fifth, or even (in relation to time) the third, is unimportant, and only depends upon the space/time model one is using. What matters is that this dimension is intractable to the regular, uniform flow of time. There may be a sense in which time does not sweep all before it. To assert that it did was a specifically nineteenth-century article of faith.

  Earlier, the intractable dimension was allowed for. It is present in all cyclic views of time. In those days time passed, time went on, and it did so by turning on itself like a wheel. Yet for a wheel to turn there needs to be a surface like the ground which resists, which offers friction. It was against this resistance that the wheel turned. Cyclic views of time are based on a model whereby two forces are in play: a force (time) moving in one direction, and a force resisting that movement.

  The body ages. The body is preparing to die. No theory of time offers a reprieve here. Death and time were always in alliance. Time took away more or less slowly: death more or less suddenly.

  Earlier, however, death was also thought of as the companion of life, as the precondition for that which came into Being from Non-being; one was not possible without the other. As a result, death was qualified by that which it could not destroy or by that which would return.

  That life is brief was continually lamented. Time was death’s agent and one of life’s constituents. But the timeless—that which death could not destroy—was another. All cyclic views of time held these two constituents together: the wheel turning and the ground on which it turned.

  The mainstream of modern thought has removed time from this unity and transformed it into a single, all-powerful and active force. In so doing it has transferred the spectral character of death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.

  To measure modern astronomic distances, one uses as a unit that distance which light will travel in one year. The magnitude of these distances, the degree of separation which they imply, seem almost boundless; the magnitude and the degree escape everything except pure calculation and even this calculation has the quality of an explosion. Yet, hidden within the conceptual system that allows man to measure and conceive of such boundlessness is the cyclic and local unit of the year, a unit which can be recognized because of its permanency, its repetition, and its local consistency. The calculation returns from the astronomic to the local, like a prodigal son.

  This weakness of the mind, this homesickness which cannot or will not altogether abandon the here-and-now, can be interpreted in two ways. It can be seen as the revealing weakness which proves how lost and impotent man is in the universe; or it can be seen as the vestige, preserved by the structure of the human mind, of the original truth.

  Pascal in the seventeenth century recognized the extent of the unprecedented rupture caused by the new calculations. With the advance of remorseless time and space, the past becomes lost and falls into nothingness. (The word néant is used in this absolute sense for the first time in the seventeenth century.) God abandons life, to inhabit the eternal domain of death. No longer present within the cycles of time, no longer the hub of these cycles, he becomes an absent, waiting presence. All the calculations underline how long he has already waited or will wait. The proofs of his existence cease to be the morning, the returning season, the newborn; instead they become the “eternity” of heaven and hell and the finality of the last judgment. Man now becomes condemned to time, which is no longer a condition of life and therefore something sacred, but the inhuman principle which spares nothing. Time becomes both a sentence and a punishment.

  Henceforth only somebody reprieved from a death sentence can imagine time as a gift. And Pascal’s famous wager—God may not exist, we may be lost, but supposing he does exist...—is a stratagem for imposing this death sentence and then hoping for a reprieve.

  The modern era of quantification begins with algebra and infinite series. It follows that one no longer counts what one has, but what one has not. Everything becomes loss.

  The concept of entropy is the figure of Death translated into a scientific principle. Yet whereas death used to be thought of as being the condition of life, entropy, it is maintained, will eventually exhaust and extinguish, not only lives, but life itself. And entropy, as Eddington termed it, “is time’s arrow.”

  The modern transformation of time from a condition into a force began with Hegel. For Hegel, however, the force of history was positive; there has rarely been a more optimistic philosopher. Later Marx set out to prove that this force—the force of history—was subject to man’s actions and choices. The always present drama in Marx’s thinking, the original opposition of his dialectics, stems from the fact that he both accepted the modern transformation of time into the supreme force, and wished to return this supremacy into the hands of man. This is why his thought was—in all senses of the word—gigantic. The size of man—his potential, his coming power—would, Marx believed, replace the timeless.

  Today, in the West, as the culture of capitalism abandons its claim to be a culture and becomes nothing more than an Instant-Practice, the force of time is pictured as the supreme and unopposed annihilator. The planet Earth and the universe are running down. Disorder increases with every time unit that passes. The final state of maximum entropy, where there will be no activity at all, is termed heat-death.

  To question the finality of the principle of entropy is not to dispute the second law of thermodynamics. Within a given system, this and the other laws of thermodynamics can apply to what unfolds within time. They are laws of time’s processes. It is their finality which can be disputed.

  The process of increasing entropy ends with heat-death. It began with a state of maximum energy, which in astrophysical terms is thought of as an explosion. The theory necessitates a beginning and an end; both these face on to what is beyond time. The theory of entropy ultimately treats time as a parenthesis, and yet has nothing to say, and has eliminated everything that might be said, about what precedes or follows the parenthesis. Therein lies its innocence.

  Many previous cosmological explanations of the world proposed, as does the theory of entropy, an ideal original state and afterwards, for man, a continually deteriorating situation. The Golden Age, the Garden of Eden, the Time of the Gods ... all were far away from the misery of the present.

  That life may be seen as a Fall is intrinsic to the human faculty of imagination. To imagine is to conceive of that height from which the Fall becomes possible.

  The Adams and Eves

  continually expelled

  and with what tenacity

  returning at
night!

  Before,

  when the two of them

  did not count

  and there were no months

  no births and no music

  their fingers were unnumbered.

  Before,

  when the two of them did not count

  did they feel

  a prickling behind the eyes

  a thirst in the throat

  for something other than

  the perfume of infinite flowers

  and the breath of immortal animals?

  In their untrembling sleep

  did the tips of their tongues

  seek the bud of another taste

  which was mortal and sweating?

  Did they envy the longing

  of those to come after the Fall?

  Women and men still return

  to live through the night

  all that uncounted time.

  And with the punctuality

  of the first firing squad

  the expulsion is at dawn.

  If there were no process of aging, if time and its passing were not built into the very code of life, reproduction would be unnecessary and sexuality would not exist. That sexuality is a species leap over death has always been clear; it is one of the truths which precede philosophy.

  Love insists upon making a comparable leap over death but, by definition, it cannot be a species leap, because the beloved constitutes the most particular and differentiated image of which the human imagination is capable. Every hair of your head.

  The sexual thrust to reproduce and to fill the future is a thrust against the current of time which is flowing ceaselessly towards the past. The genetic information which assures reproduction works against dissipation. The sexual animal—like a grain of corn—is a conduit of the past into the future. The scale of that span over millennia, and the distance covered by that temporal short circuit which is fertilization, are such that sexuality—even for women and men—is impersonal. The message dwarfs the messenger. The impersonal force of sexuality opposes the impersonal passing of time and is antithetical to it.