by John Berger
Mayakovsky was dead before the devaluation of the Russian language had extended very far, but already in the last years of his life, in works like Good, The Bedbug, The Bath-house — all of which were badly received — his vision became increasingly satirical. Words were loaded with a meaning that was no longer just or true. Listen to the Producer in the third act of The Bath-house:
All right now, all the men on stage. Kneel down on one knee and hunch your shoulders, you’ve got to look enslaved, right? Hack away there with your imaginary picks at the imaginary coal. Gloomier there, gloomier, you’re being oppressed by dark forces.
You there, you’re Capital. Stand over here, Comrade Capital. You’re going to do us a little dance impersonating Class Rule …
The women on stage now. You’ll be Liberty, you’ve got the right manners for it. You can be Equality, doesn’t matter who acts that does it? And you’re Fraternity, dear, you’re not likely to arouse any other feeling anyway. Ready? Go! Infect the imaginary masses with your imaginary enthusiasm! That’s it! That’s it!
Meanwhile, what was happening to Mayakovsky himself? A woman he was in love with had abandoned him. His work was being subjected to more and more severe criticism, on the grounds that its spirit was far from the working class. The doctors had told him that he had damaged his vocal cords irrevocably by straining his voice when reading. He had dissolved his own avant-garde group (LEF, renamed REF) and had joined the most official, ‘majority’ association of writers, which had always been highly critical of him (RAPP): as a result, he was snubbed by them and treated as a renegade by his former friends. A retrospective exhibition of his life’s work — poems, plays, posters, films — failed to make the impact he had hoped. He was thirty-six, next year he would be the same age as Pushkin when he met his death. Pushkin had incontestably been the founder of the language of modern Russian poetry. Yet what was happening to the language of revolutionary poetry which Mayakovsky had once believed in?
If a writer sees his life as raw material waiting to enter language, if he is continually involved in processing his own experience, if he sees poetry primarily as a form of exchange, there is a danger that, when he is deprived of an immediate audience, he will conclude that his life has been used up. He will see only its fragments strewn across the years — as if, after all, he had been torn to pieces by the jackals. ‘Don’t be afraid, we have good dogs, they won’t let them come near.’ The promise was broken. They came.
1975
The Hour of Poetry
We all know the number of steps,
compañero, from the cell
to that room.
If it’s twenty
they’re not taking you to the bathroom.
If it’s forty-five
they can’t be taking you out
for exercise.
If you get past eighty
and begin
to stumble blindly
up a staircase
oh if you get past eighty
there’s only one place
they can take you
there’s only one place
there’s only one place
now there’s only one place left
they can take you.
There is a hotel by a lake, near where I live. During the last war it was the local headquarters of the Gestapo. Many people were interrogated and tortured there. Today it is a hotel again. From the bar you look out across the water to the mountains on the far side; you look out on a scene that would have appealed to hundreds of romantic painters in the nineteenth century as sublime. And it was on to this scene that, before and after their interrogations, the tortured looked out. It was before this scene that loved ones and friends of the tortured stopped, powerless, to stare at the building, in which their own was being subjected to unspeakable pain or a lingering and agonizing death. Between the sublime and their present reality, what did they see in those mountains and that lake?
Of all experiences, systematic human torture is probably the most indescribable. Not simply because of the intensity of the suffering involved, but also because the initiative of such torture is opposed to the assumption on which all languages are based: the assumption of mutual understanding across what differentiates. Torture smashes language: its purpose is to tear language from the voice and words from the truth. The one being tortured knows: they are breaking me. His or her resistance consists in trying to limit the me being broken. Torture tears apart.
Don’t believe them when they show you
the photo of my body,
don’t believe them.
Don’t believe them when they tell you
the moon is the moon,
if they tell you the moon is the moon,
that this is my voice on tape,
that this is my signature on a confession,
if they say a tree is a tree
don’t believe them,
don’t believe
anything they tell you
anything they swear to
anything they show you,
don’t believe them.
Torture has a very long and widespread history. If people today are surprised by the scale of its reappearance (did it ever disappear?), it is perhaps because they have ceased believing in evil. Torture is not shocking because it is rare or because it belongs to the past: it is shocking because of what it does. The opposite of torture is not progress but charity. (The subject is so close to the New Testament that its terms are usable.)
The majority of torturers are neither sadists — in the clinical sense of the word — nor incarnations of pure evil. They are men and women who have been conditioned to accept and then use a certain practice. There are formal and informal schools for torturers, mostly state-financed. But the first conditioning begins, before the school, with ideological propositions that a certain category of people are fundamentally different and that their difference constitutes a supreme threat. The tearing apart of the third person, them, from us and you. The next lesson, now in the schools for torture, is that their bodies are lies because, as bodies, they claim not to be so different: torture is a punishment for this lie. When and if the torturers begin to question what they have learnt, they still continue, out of fear of what they have already done; they torture now to save their own untortured skins.
The fascist regimes of Latin America — Pinochet’s Chile, for example — have recently and systematically extended the logic of torture. Not only do they tear apart the bodies of their victims, but they also try to tear up — so that they cannot be read — their very names. It would be wrong to suppose that these regimes do this out of shame or embarrassment: they do it in the hope of eliminating martyrs and heroes, and in order to produce the maximum intimidation among the population.
A woman or man is openly arrested, taken away in a car from his home at night, or from his workplace during the day. The arresters, the abductors, wear plain clothes. After this it is impossible to have any news of the one who has disappeared. Police, ministers, courts, deny all knowledge of the missing person. Yet the missing persons are in the hands of the military intelligence services. Months, years, pass. To believe that the missing are dead is to betray those who have thus been torn away; yet to believe that they are alive is to dream of them being tortured and then, often later, to be forced to admit their death. No letter, no sign, no whereabouts, no one responsible, no one to appeal to, no imaginable end to the sentence, because no sentence. Normally silence means a lack of sound. Here silence is active and has been turned, once again systematically, into an instrument, this time for torturing the heart. Occasionally carcasses are washed up on the beaches and identified as belonging to the list of the missing. Occasionally one or two return with some news of the others who are still missing: released intentionally perhaps, so as to sow again hopes which will torture thousands of hearts.
My son has been
missing
since May 8
of last year.
&n
bsp; They took him
just for a few hours
they said
just for some routine
questioning.
After the car left,
the car with no licence plate,
we couldn’t
find out
anything else
about him.
But now things have changed.
We heard from a compañero
who just got out
that five months later
they were torturing him
in Villa Grimaldi,
at the end of September
they were questioning him
in the red house
that belonged to the Grimaldis.
They say they recognized
his voice his screams
they say.
Somebody tell me frankly
what times are these
what kind of world
what country?
What I’m asking is
how can it be
that a father’s
joy
a mother’s
joy
is knowing
that they
that they are still
torturing
their son?
Which means
that he was alive
five months later
and our greatest
hope
will be to find out
next year
that they’re still torturing him
eight months later
and he may might could
still be alive.
Physical torture often concentrates upon the genitalia because of their sensitivity, because of the humiliation involved, and because thus the victim is threatened with sterility. In the emotional torture of the women and men who love those who have been made to disappear, their hopes are chosen as the point of application for pain, so as to produce — at another level — a comparable threat of sterility.
If he were dead
I’d know it.
Don’t ask me how.
I’d know.
I have no proof,
no clues, no answer,
nothing that proves
or disproves.
There’s the sky,
the same blue
it always was.
But that’s no proof.
Atrocities go on
and the sky never changes.
There are the children.
They’ve finished playing.
Now they’ll start to drink
like a herd of wild
horses.
Tonight they’ll be asleep
as soon as their heads
touch the pillow.
But who would accept that
as proof
that their father
is not dead?
In the face of such practices and their increasing frequency and the involvement of US agencies in their preparation, if not their daily routine, every sort of active protest and resistance needs to be mounted. (Amnesty International is coordinating some of them.) In addition, poets — such as the Chilean Ariel Dorfman — will write poems (all the above quotations are from Dorfman’s Missing, published by Amnesty International). In face of the monstrous machinery of modern totalitarian power, so often now compared to that of the Inferno, poems will increasingly be written.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many protests against social injustice were written in prose. They were reasoned arguments written in the belief that, given time, people would come to see reason; and that, finally, history was on the side of reason. Today this is by no means so clear. The outcome is by no means guaranteed. The suffering of the present and the past is unlikely to be redeemed by a future era of universal happiness. And evil is a constantly ineradicable reality. All this means that the resolution — the coming to terms with the sense to be given to life — cannot be deferred. The future cannot be trusted. The moment of truth is now. And more and more it will be poetry, rather than prose, that receives this truth. Prose is far more trusting than poetry: poetry speaks to the immediate wound.
The boon of language is not tenderness. All that it holds, it holds with exactitude and without pity. Even a term of endearment: the term is impartial; the context is all. The boon of language is that potentially it is complete, it has the potentiality of holding with words the totality of human experience. Everything that has occurred and everything that may occur. It even allows space for the unspeakable. In this sense one can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man. For prose this home is a vast territory, a country which it crosses through a network of tracks, paths, highways; for poetry this home is concentrated on a single centre, a single voice.
One can say anything to language. This is why it is a listener, closer to us than any silence or any god. Yet its very openness often signifies indifference. (The indifference of language is continually solicited and employed in bulletins, legal records, communiqués, files.) Poetry addresses language in such a way as to close this indifference and to incite a caring. How does poetry incite this caring? What is the labour of poetry?
By this I do not mean the work involved in writing a poem, but the work of the written poem itself. Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry. And the task of this unceasing labour is to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart. Physical pain can usually be lessened or stopped by action. All other human pain, however, is caused by one form or another of separation. And here the act of assuagement is less direct. Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labour of reassembling what has been scattered.
O my beloved
how sweet it is
to go down
and bathe in the pool
before your eyes
letting you see how
my drenched linen dress
marries
the beauty of my body.
Come, look at me
Poem inscribed on an Egyptian statue, 1500 BC
Poetry’s impulse to use metaphor, to discover resemblance, is not for the sake of making comparisons (all comparisons as such are hierarchical), nor is it to diminish the particularity of any event; it is to discover those correspondences of which the sum total would be proof of the indivisible totality of existence. To this totality poetry appeals, and its appeal is the opposite of a sentimental one; sentimentality always pleads for an exemption, for something which is divisible.
Apart from reassembling by metaphor, poetry reunites by its reach. It equates the reach of a feeling with the reach of the universe; after a certain point the type of extremity involved becomes unimportant and all that matters is its degree; by their degree alone extremities are joined.
I bear equally with you
the black permanent separation.
Why are you crying? Rather give me
your hand,
promise to come again in a dream.
You and I are a mountain of grief.
You and I will never meet on this earth.
If only you could send me at midnight
a greeting through the stars
Anna Akhmatova
To argue here that the subjective and objective are confused is to return to an empirical view which the extent of present suffering challenges; strangely enough it is to claim an unjustified privilege.
Poetry makes language care because it renders everything intimate. This intimacy is the result of the poem’s labour, the result of the bringing-together-into-intimacy of every act and noun and event and perspective to which the poem refers. There is often nothing more substantial to place against the cruelty and indifference of the world than this caring.
From where does Pain come to us?
From where does he come?
He has been the brother of our visio
ns
from time immemorial
And the guide of our rhymes
writes the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mil’-ika.
To break the silence of events, to speak of experience however bitter or lacerating, to put into words, is to discover the hope that these words may be heard, and that when heard, the events will be judged. This hope is, of course, at the origin of prayer, and prayer — as well as labour — was probably at the origin of speech itself. Of all uses of language, it is poetry that preserves most purely the memory of this origin.
Every poem that works as a poem is original. And original has two meanings: it means a return to the origin, the first which engendered everything that followed; and it means that which has never occurred before. In poetry, and in poetry alone, the two senses are united in such a way that they are no longer contradictory.
Nevertheless poems are not simple prayers. Even a religious poem is not exclusively and uniquely addressed to God. Poetry is addressed to language itself. If that sounds obscure, think of a lamentation — there words lament loss to their language. Poetry is addressed to language in a comparable but wider way.
To put into words is to find the hope that the words will be heard and the events they describe judged. Judged by God or judged by history. Either way the judgement is distant. Yet the language — which is immediate, and which is sometimes wrongly thought of as being only a means — offers, obstinately and mysteriously, its own judgment when it is addressed by poetry. This judgement is distinct from that of any moral code, yet it promises, within its acknowledgment of what it has heard, a distinction between good and evil — as though language itself had been created to preserve just that distinction!
This is why poetry opposes more absolutely than any other force in the world the monstrous cruelties by which the rich today defend their illgotten riches. This is why the hour of the furnaces is also the hour of poetry.