by John Berger
Yes, it’s rare but not, I think, as rare as all that. The Rubens of his wife, Hélène, with just a fur coat round her shoulders? The Caravaggio of the young man posing provocatively as Cupid? Several of Picasso’s paintings of Marie-Thérèse Walter? Each of these is about a shared sexual intimacy, and the act of love is very near.
If one interprets intimacy in the wider sense of a shared and complicit openness in both parties (but without a sexual connotation), then there are certain icons by Rublev and a number of portraits by van Gogh in which the thereness of the model is complicit with the specific thereness of the painter’s vision, both so distinctly themselves that one thinks of them as being naked.
Sensuality, you say, comes from a physical integrity, from a fidelity to the self in the body, and this is what attracts us – whether we are watching a lover, an animal, or a painting. Attraction begins with the surprise of coming upon the original, as it was before the world’s usage. And the art of attraction is the art of knowing this and of preserving what you name so beautifully as the vertical truth. Thus genius is comparable with a kind of natural grace.
Yet I want to add something disconcerting about the nature of the painter’s contract with the visual. A contract that is never drawn up in clauses and that only consists of hunches. The visible waits to be seen. The visible is the painter’s first companion!
The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the inner self, but from an encounter, the energy coming from both painter and model – even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty bottles. I cannot explain this, I just know that it’s true, which is why it’s disconcerting.
Kisses, John
ATHENS
John,
OK. You win – a meeting takes place halfway between the painter and what he’s looking at. The promise of this meeting depends on a secret contract drawn up between the two of them. The miracle comes from doors being unbolted, from lock-gates being opened, and a fertilisation taking place. I still insist, however, that to open the doors and locks, the one who is looking, just as much as the one being looked at, has to be in a state of harmony, of grace, yes?
Yesterday I started work again. The same bus, no. 222 or no. 235, the same dirt, the same stale air, the same inoffensive roughness, the same belligerent spirit of this city which is like no other, and the impression you have of people and vehicles pushing and jumping in panic on top of each other, like sheep do when loaded into a lorry.
In the office the usual chaos. I chat with the girls who are sunburnt and full of remarks. And then, I work casually on a borrowed computer for an hour or so before leaving to pick up Chloé after school.
When I leave the building, I’m enveloped by the early September heat with its white, even light and its slight breeze, and an idea comes to me like a friend who comes up behind you and puts his hands over your eyes and asks you to guess who he is: the idea that this heat and this light, which are the rule in Athens from May to mid-June and from September to mid-October, abolish the frontier between inside and outside.
Of buildings, of course, but also of bodies. It’s the same temperature out of doors as in the intimacy of a bedroom or in the tunnels of your veins. There are no more barriers or outlines. The whole world (physical and psychic) is a huge, seamless sheet – but a three-dimensional one in which you are submerged. An aquarium in which everything is at the same time the inhabitant, the water, and the glass.
I pursued this line of thought, for I realised it has something to do with my vision of this country. It helped me to formulate what I feel about the people, the climate, the land, and the Greek way of thinking. The inside and the outside are one here, communicating. The other and the self are united. No fundamental difference. Everything exists in a state of homogeneity, coherence, solidarity, consistency. This doesn’t mean that all realities and relations are harmonious and trouble-free. On the contrary. But everything is comprehensible, near, share-able, easy to imagine; everything is part of the same flux. ‘You understand me, I understand you, you live this today, I will live it tomorrow, you know what it’s like, your body sweats, mine also, I know what you’re going through …’
The earth, the sea, and the sky have shared out their empire. Old men stroll in pyjamas along the filthy street. Every evening, from the balcony opposite mine, comes semi-oriental music for the whole neighbourhood! The same dust is everywhere. Everybody talks like a mother to a child. Tummy rumblings are something universal. People recognise one another, not in accordance with any particular respect due, but in accordance with the common reality of their human bodies.
Each body is one body among others and equal with them. If someone comes forward, it is usually to represent the others – like the coryphaeus of an antique chorus. This lack of politeness and civility, which so shocks foreigners, comes directly from a notion of democracy first formulated in ancient Greece. Why bother with formal gestures and hypocritical compliments when everyone is familiar with the needs, the feelings, and the thoughts of everyone else? All are part of the same chain, and each is potentially in the skin of another. When people act selfishly, they do so allowing for the selfishness of others.
Greeks start from the principle that they know themselves (not with their brains, like the French, but because they’ve lived). Armed with Socratic sayings, they extend their knowledge towards others. They go out to meet the outside because they’ve come to terms with what’s inside.
They have no need to make themselves pretty or to wrap things up: the polite bows, the fashionable clothes, all forms of dressing up here have either been imported or artifically brought in by the Church or the powers that be. Otherwise, the Greeks’ awareness of their own collectivity encourages a unique minimalism, to be seen in their buildings, in their social relations, in their cooking (the butchers simply display dead flesh), and in their everyday philosophy. The very complexity of life is simple for them. Everything is in everything. Their vases communicate.
As I’m thinking this, the bus no. 222 crosses a large building site, where work is being done on the future metro line. I notice a huge cement mixer. It has the word Titan printed on it. Straightaway I take these letters to be a sign (or an appeal?) from the old man. He’s trying to tell me something. Urgently. At this moment. What does the sign with the ‘I’ missing mean? How to read it?
The Flaying of Marsyas, the fur portraits, the men with their dogs, the Magdalenes clothed in their own curls, naked among the rocks, the nymphs adopted by the forest, the sleeping courtesans dressed in their nudity, the hairs, the canvases of ‘peach stone’ – doesn’t all this belong to the same ‘homogeneity’?
I’m tempted to call it a Classic homogeneity, for the ‘inside-outness’ comes not only from climate and geography but also from the heritage of the Classic philosophers, from a certain view of the cosmos, a certain acceptance, lost over the centuries in other countries less attached to tradition and more open to dissidence, schisms, and Progress.
Finally, in the old man’s art one finds a frankness, a familiarity, which is the consequence of going backwards and forwards between the inside and the outside and of a kind of contempt for the frontier, seen as a heresy. It’s as if both Titian and the people of this country assume their role as sinners and at the same time avidly bite into every forbidden fruit!
They insist on continual communication between the two sides of any barrier; they refuse divisions and distinctions. In this Promethean attitude, there’s an arrogance, a defiance, even an aggression; they usurp the prerogatives of the gods, and they pummel everything with their hands, ignoring any hierarchy.
Thus the timeless old man of the south was so faithful to his own instinct and senses that he brushed the world as if it belonged to him – as if it was his own beard.
You find the same magnificent arrogance in Mayakovsky, in Fellini, in Courbet, in all those who wanted to eat the universe, who communed by interfering, and who gave by seizing.
When Titian looked,
he saw himself. When he painted, he painted himself. And vice versa! All the barriers are down. When he makes gold rain on Danaë, it floods the world. And his art begins – against all rational argument – with the equivalence between the act of receiving and the act of spilling.
Looking at his paintings and seeing this triumph, we feel a sense of relief. So much joy and such a promise of a cosmic reconciliation take nearly all the weight off our shoulders. With the barriers down, we are swept away and consoled.
Could it be that beauty – as distinct from that which stimulates intellectually and feeds on differences, alternatives, paradoxes, conventions being knocked down and rebuilt, categories continually being redefined, every kind of line drawn in order to separate – could it be that beauty is born of a soup of everything mixed together, gushing out without any order or priority, its arm round the waist of life, and with none of the primness which comes from classifying – could it be that beauty is born of coloured stuff spread out for the love of life?
Just as our brain likes to follow lines traced by rational thought, so our senses and our soul need the communion which begins with the rubbing out of those lines, and the abolition of any frontier between inside and outside, the self and the world, the sea and the earth, the Creation by God and the creation by a simple titan.
Love, Katya
PARIS
Kut,
I forward a postcard to you from the island of Telos, dated 327 BC. The poem is signed by Erinna, who died when she was nineteen.
This drawing
came
from subtle hands
(Prometheus,
there are men
with skill
equal to yours)
Yes,
he who
made this girl
had he but added voice
made Agatharchis
John
A Note on the Authors
JOHN BERGER was born in London in 1926. His many books, innovative in form and far-reaching in their historical and political insight, include the Booker Prize-winning novel G, To the Wedding and King. Amongst his outstanding studies of art and photography are Another Way of Telling, The Success and Failure of Picasso, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (with Katya Berger) and the internationally acclaimed Ways of Seeing. He lives and works in a small village in the French Alps, the setting for his trilogy Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa and Lilac and Flag). His collection of essays The Shape of a Pocket was published in 2001. His latest novel, From A to X, was published in 2007.
KATYA BERGER studied French and Russian literature at Geneva University, and is a translator, journalist and cinema critic.
Also by John Berger
Fiction
The Foot of Clive
Corker’s Freedom
A Fortunate Man
Seventh Man
The Trilogy: Into Their Labours (Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag)
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
Photocopies
To the Wedding
King
Here is Where We Meet
From A to X
Poetry
Pages of the Wound
Non-Fiction
A Painter of Our Time
Permanent Red
Art and Revolution
The Moment of Cubism and Other Essays
The Look of Things: Selected Essays and Articles
Ways of Seeing
Another Way of Telling
The Success and Failure of Picasso
About Looking
The Sense of Sight
Keeping a Rendezvous
The Shape of a Pocket
Selected Essays of John Berger (ed. Geoff Dyer)
Bento’s Sketchbook
Also Available by John Berger
G.
Winner of the Booker Prize
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize
In this luminous novel, John Berger relates the story of G., a modern Don Juan forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the last century as Europe teeters on the brink of war.
With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, top reveal the conditions of the libertine’s success: his essential loneliness, the quiet cumlation in each of his sexual experiences of all of those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through the liaisons with him. Set against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi’s attempt to unite Italy, the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1898, the Boer War and the dramatic first flight across the Alps, G. is a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in the turmoil of history.
‘The most interesting novel in English I have read for many years … It is one of the few serious attempts of our time to do for the novel what Brecht did for drama: to reshape it in the light of twentieth-century experience … A fine, humane and challenging book’
New Republic
‘A rich and pleasurable reading experience’
Guardian
‘To read G. is to find a writer one demands to know more about. Not to sit at the feet of his aphorisms or unravel the tangles of his allusions, but to explore more fully an intriguing and powerful mind and talent’
New York Times
Pig Earth
With this haunting first volume of his Into Their Labours trilogy, John Berger begins his chronicle of the eclipse of peasant cultures in the twentieth century. Set in a small village in the French Alps, Pig Earth, relates the stories of sceptical, hard working men and fiercely independent women; of calves born and pigs slaughtered; of a message of forgiveness from a dead father to his prodigal son; and of the marvellous, indomitable Lucie Cabrol, exiled to a hut high in the mountains.
‘Brilliant … These stories have a remarkable sense of celebration’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Pig Earth is a relentlessly realist work … Doggedly scrupulous in its detail, its sheer unshowy knowledgeability … Berger is one of the few English writers who can interleave poems and political essays of equivalent intricacy’
New Statesman
Once in Europa
In Once in Europa, part of the acclaimed Into Their Labours trilogy, John Berger paints a vivid portrait of two worlds – a small Alpine village bound to the earth and its age-old traditions, and the restless, ephemeral, future-driven culture that is invading it – at their moment of collision. The main instrument of entrapment and conflict, in these stories, is love. Lives are lost and hearts are broken, and yet, sometimes, love is a transcending form of grace.
‘Berger’s prose homes in on an intense and grainy view of the details of local life, and somehow transposes them into the patterns of a wider world’
Financial Times
‘Berger writes in an ethereal style, each sentence full of poetic prose’
Observer
Lilac and Flag
As Dickens and Balzac did for their time, so John Berger does for ours, rendering the movement of a people and the passing of a way of life. In Lilac and Flag, the Alpine village of the two earlier volumes of the Into Their Labours trilogy has been forsaken for the mythic city of Troy. Here, amidst shanty-towns, factories, opulent hotels, fading heritages and steadfast dreams, the children and grandchildren of rural peasants pursue meagre livings as best they can. And two young lovers embark upon a passionate, desperate journey of love and survival and find transcending hope both for themselves and for us as their witnesses.
‘Remarkable … Like all great novelists John Berger guides his characters and readers tenderly and with intimate humour’
Michael Ondaatje
‘A magnificent trilogy … Moving in an almost unbearable way’
Anthony Burgess
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos
This book – call it a book of love letter meditating on place,
mortality, art, love and absence – is as breathtaking and spare as we have come to expect of John Berger. From his lyrical description of the works of Caravaggio, or the sight of a spray of lilac on a windowsill, to profound explorations of death and immigration, this is a beautiful and intimate response to our century.
‘He handles thoughts the way an artist handles paint. His mind is spattered with colour … His writing has a physical reality’
The Times
‘John Berger is genius invisible. His life’s work is synonymous with the creation of unforgettable living portraits’
Scotsman
Photocopies
In his new book John Berger traces in words moments lived in Europe at the end of the millennium. These moments are not fiction. They happened. As he wrote them Berger sometimes imagined a frieze of ‘photocopies’ arranged side by side, giving future readers a panoramic view of what this moment in history was like when lived. Each ‘photocopy’ is about somebody for whom Berger felt a kind of love, but the book also becomes an unintentional portrait of the author as well.
‘This beautiful book bring non-fiction writing close to drawing – the sort of drawing that both records and investigates … Berger makes you believe in goodness: not an impossible state out of our reach, but a capacity in all of us to do with honesty, not faking. This is a marvelous book’
New Statesman
‘Awe-inspiring … All the writing has a still, insistent beauty … Berger sometimes manages a moment of absolute and truthful emotion, which can be extraordinary’
Observer
To the Wedding
With an introduction by Nadeem Aslam
‘No one knows more about the necessity of love than John Berger: what love makes us capable of, and incapable of. This is a book of the most precise humanity. No one who reads it will forget what it makes us understand: every action has its twin, conscionable or unconscionable; every truth, its shadow in the world; everything lost, alive in love’