The writer
and art critic John Berger passed away on Monday the second of January. His
trilogy Into their Labours, Pig Earth (1980), Once in Europe (1987) and Lilac
and Flag (1990) moved me. A trilogy of novels that traces the journey of the
European peasant from the mountains to the metropolis. The Dutch translations
by Sjaak Commandeur were published by De Bezige Bij between 1988-1990.
“The way I
observe comes naturally to me as a curious person – I’m like la vigie – the
lookout guy on a boat who does small jobs, maybe such as shovelling stuff into
a boiler, but I’m no navigator – absolutely the opposite. I wander around the
boat, find odd places – the masts, the gunwale – and then simply look out at
the ocean. Being aware of travelling has nothing to do with being a navigator.”
In his 1975
book A Seventh Man, about migration, the rescuing impulse is clear. Berger
writes in the preface: “To outline the experience of the migrant worker and to
relate this to what surrounds him – both physically and historically – is to
grasp more surely the political reality of the world at this moment. The subject
is European, its meaning is global. Its theme is unfreedom.” When he considers
today’s refugee crisis – no longer confined to Europe – does he see the first
world as suffering from a failure of imagination? There is another extended
pause, like a ravine into which one might fall. Eventually he replies: “What
two different people have in common will always, in all cases, be larger than
what differentiates them. And yet for dozens of different reasons,
circumstances blind people to that.”
But
Berger’s greatest strength in old age is his ability to live in the present. “I
cultivated this early on – and this is the paradox – because it was an escape
from prescriptions, prophecies, consequences and causes.” The present moment is
key to his thinking too. In Ways of Seeing, he suggests that paintings embody
the present in which they were painted. Defining the secret of reading aloud
well, he says it is “refusing to look ahead, to be in the moment”. And he says
that a story puts its listener “in an eternal present”. He has also written
about the circularity of time. Does he think that applies to an individual
life? Is there, in old age, a way in which one starts to hold hands with one’s
younger self?
Some interesting video's here,
in particular his talk with Susan Sontag from 1983: To tell a story.
“A woman is
always accompanied, except when quite alone, and perhaps even then, by her own
image of herself. While she is walking across a room or weeping at the death of
her father, she cannot avoid envisioning herself walking or weeping. From
earliest childhood she is taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.
She has to survey everything she is and everything she does, because how she
appears to others – and particularly how she appears to men – is of crucial
importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.”
Berger’s analysis of the female figure in art and
advertising.
No comments:
Post a Comment