Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  Everybody has noticed that, 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 we accept 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 is the master who gave this truth a literary form.

  Yet it is not only a cultural truth. A natural equivalent of the periodic increase of the density of lived time may be found in those days of alternating sun and rain, in the spring or early summer, when plants grow, almost visibly, several millimetres or centimetres 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, which is to say 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 that one is using. What matters and is important 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 this intractable dimension was allowed for. It is present in all cyclic views of time. According to such views, time passes, time goes on, and it does 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 is against this resistance that the wheel turns. 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.

  Today the intractable dimension lives a ghostly life within the cyclic measurements — seconds, minutes, days, years — which we still use to measure time. The term light-year is eloquent of this persistent ghost. To measure astronomic distances one takes as a unit that distance which light travels in a year. The magnitude of such distances, the degree of separation they imply, seems boundless. Yet hidden within the conceptual system for measuring such boundlessness is the indispensable, local, cyclic unit of the year, a unit which is recognized by its returning.

  The body ages. The body is preparing to die. No theory of time offers a reprieve here. Yet we condemn ourselves as no other culture has done.

  The spectre of death has always haunted man. Death and Time were always in alliance. Time took away more or less slowly, and Death more or less suddenly.

  Yet Death was also thought of as the companion of life, as the pre-condition 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.

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

  The concept of entropy is the figure of Death translated into 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’. Here is the finality of modern despair, against which no plea is possible. Our totalitarianism begins with our teleology.

  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 every sense of the word — gigantic. The size of man — his potential, his coming power — would replace the timeless.

  Today, as the culture of capitalism abandons its claim to be a culture and becomes nothing more than an instant practice, the force of time, still retaining its absolute supremacy, is felt to be inhuman and annihilating. The planet of the earth and the universe are running down. Disorder increases with every time-unit that passes. The envisaged 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 needs to be disputed.

  The process of increasing entropy ends with heat death. It began with a state of total order (perfection?), 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 takes place.

  In most earlier cosmogonies, however, time was cyclic and this meant that the ‘ideal’ original state would one day return or was retrievable. Not usually in a lifetime — this was only the occasional revolutionary hope — but in the lifetime of existence. Recognition of the Fall coexisted with hope. Accumulation and dissipation increased concurrently. With entropy and the nineteenth-century view of time, we face only the irretrievable and only dissipation.

  The facing of this may be considered an act of intellectual courage. Yet it is also an act of inhibition.

  The sexual thrust to reproduce and to fill the future is a thrust against the current of time flowing 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 opposes the impersonal passing of time and is antithetical to it.

  Every life is both created by and held in the encounter of these two opposing forces. The paired relationship of Eros and Thanatos is an expression of this holding. To speak of such a ‘holding’ is another way of defining Being. What is so baffling and mysterious about the state of Being is that it represents both stillness and movement. The stillness of an equilibrium created by the movement of two opposing forces.

  The nineteenth-century inhibition was not towards the function of sexuality in nature; it was towards the intimacy of the relation between sexuality and love. The two had t
o be kept as far apart as possible. Partly because in capitalist practice — and capitalism was now annexing the entire world — all love had to be reduced to the narrowly private; and partly because the century’s view of time left no place (except in poetry) for the energy of love. It was Blake who saw this so clearly and so early.

  Love, in the history of human development, was born, and still is, from sexuality. Without the initial force of the sexual impulse across, towards another body, the transmigration of the self which constitutes love would never have been possible. The distinction between love, in any of its sexual forms, and simple sexuality, can be seen in their different relations to time.

  Sexuality is a source of continual renewal — renewal of the species and renewal of itself. The sexual is forever unfinished, is never complete. It finishes only to rebegin, as if for the first time.

  By contrast, the utopia of love is completion to the point of stillness. The ideal act of love is to contain all. The love poetry of every continent and century testifies to this. ‘Here I understand,’ wrote Camus, ‘what they call glory: the right to love without limits.’ But this ideal act is not a passive one, for the totality which love has to continually reclaim is precisely the totality which time so convincingly appears to fragment and hide. Love is a reconstitution — in the heart as much as in the mind — of that ‘holding’, of that Being, which occurs in the momentary equilibrium created by the opposing forces of sexuality and time.

  Sublimated forms of love — political, social, religious, cultural — reclaim a totality on a historical as well as a personal scale. But in every form of love a past and a future are grasped as if present. The momentary ‘holding’, seized by the imagination through the energy of love, realizes a whole, which is outside time.

  Such realizations are intrinsic to the human experience and occur, more or less intensely, all the while. To ask whether love has or has not an objective existence is to ask a somewhat mechanical question, for it ignores that what we feel can be a response to what approaches us from our surroundings; surroundings in both time and space. Heidegger suggests the nature of this approach: ‘It might be that that which distinguishes man as man, is determined precisely by what we must think about here: man, who is concerned with, approached by presence, who, through being thus approached, is himself present in his own way for all present and absent things.’

  This ‘approaching’ has always been recognized by artists and in the modern era has been termed inspiration.

  Much has to be thought through. Particularly the question of how each art finds its own specific means for giving form to a whole, realized by love. Poetry would seem to be the simplest art to approach in this sense because it so often speaks of love, sexual or otherwise. Yet for this very reason poetry could confuse the inquiry.

  For it is not a question of saying that every painter (Goya?) has loved what he has painted, that every story-teller (Stendhal?) has loved all his characters, that all music is lyrical. Rather it is a question of seeing that the artist’s will to preserve and complete, to create an equilibrium, to hold — and in that ‘holding’ to hope for an ultimate assurance — that this derives from a lived or imagined experience of love.

  This may seem close to Freud’s theory of sublimation. Except for the important difference that Freud, given his nineteenth-century view of time, could not distinguish between sexuality and love in terms of what is intractable to time. I am arguing that sexuality is the antithesis of art, but that love is the human model for both.

  Does this mean that historical analysis is therefore irrelevant? No. The means used by each art at different periods for giving form to ‘what is held’ are often historically determined. To analyse these determinants helps us to understand better the conditions under which people were living or were trying to live, and this is to understand better the form of their hopes.

  What is ahistorical is the need to hope. And the act of hoping is inseparable from the energy of love, from that which ‘holds’, from that which is art’s constant example.

  There is a question which finally has to be answered, one way or the other. Is art consolation or revelation? Modern aesthetics have mostly avoided this question by reducing art to the personal and private; most superficially by reducing it to a question of taste; more subtly, by isolating the artistic experience by refusing to place what poetry says beside the findings of science — for example, what poetry says, often explicitly, about that which is intractable to time. ‘More permanent than anything on earth is sadness,’ wrote Akhmatova, ‘and more long-lived is the regal word.’

  Art is either a social practice to maintain illusions (a conclusion not so different from that of many Althusserians), or it is a glimpse of what lies beyond other practices, beyond them because it is not subject to the tyranny of the modern view of time.

  I began with a quotation from Mandelstam. The sentence which follows reads: ‘Dante is anti-modernist. His topicality is inexhaustible, incalculable, perennial.’

  There is no question of looking away from the modern world and its practices. There is no question of a Pre-Raphaelite flight back to the Middle Ages. It is rather that Dante advances towards us. And in the specific purgatory of the modern world, created and maintained by corporate capitalism, every injustice is grounded in that modern unilinear view of time, for which the only relation conceivable is that between cause and effect. In contrast to this, in defiance of this, the ‘single synchronic act’ is that of loving.

  1982

  A Load of Shit

  In one of his books, Milan Kundera dismisses the idea of God because, according to him, no God would have designed a life in which shitting was necessary. The way Kundera asserts this makes one believe it’s more than a joke. He is expressing a deep affront. And such an affront is typically elitist. It transforms a natural repugnance into a moral shock. Elites have a habit of doing this. Courage, for instance, is a quality that all admire. But only elites condemn cowardice as vile. The dispossessed know very well that under certain circumstances everyone is capable of being a coward.

  A week ago I cleared out and buried the year’s shit. The shit of my family and of friends who visit us. It has to be done once a year and May is the moment. Earlier it risks to be frozen and later the flies come. There are a lot of flies in the summer because of the cattle. A man, telling me about his solitude not long ago, said, ‘Last winter I got to the point of missing the flies.’

  First I dig a hole in the earth — about the size of a grave but not so deep. The edges need to be well cut so the barrow doesn’t slip when I tip it to unload. Whilst I’m standing in the hole, Mick, the neighbour’s dog, comes by. I’ve known him since he was a pup, but he has never before seen me there before him, less tall than a dwarf. His sense of scale is disturbed and he begins to bark.

  However calmly I start the operation of removing the shit from the outhouse, transporting it in the barrow, and emptying it into the hole, there always comes a moment when I feel a kind of anger rising in me. Against what or whom? This anger, I think, is atavistic. In all languages ‘Shit!’ is a swear word of exasperation. It is something one wants to be rid of. Cats cover their own by scraping earth over it with one of their paws. Men swear by theirs. Naming the stuff I’m shovelling finally provokes an irrational anger. Shit!

  * * *

  Cow dung and horse dung, as muck goes, are relatively agreeable. You can even become nostalgic about them. They smell of fermented grain, and on the far side of their smell there is hay and grass. Chicken shit is disagreeable and rasps the throat because of the quantity of ammonia. When you are cleaning out the hen house, you’re glad to go to the door and take a deep breath of fresh air. Pig and human excrement, however, smell the worst, because men and pigs are carnivorous and their appetites are indiscriminate. The smell includes the sickeningly sweet one of decay. And on the far side of it there is death.

  Whilst shovelling, images of Paradise come into my mind. Not the angels and heavenly
trumpets, but the walled garden, the fountain of pure water, the fresh colours of flowers, the spotless white cloth spread on the grass, ambrosia. The dream of purity and freshness was born from the omnipresence of muck and dust. This polarity is surely one of the deepest in the human imagination, intimately connected with the idea of home as a shelter — shelter against many things, including dirt.

  In the world of modern hygiene, purity has become a purely meta-phoric or moralistic term. It has lost all sensuous reality. By contrast, in poor homes in Turkey the first act of hospitality is the offer of lemon eaude-Cologne to apply to the visitors’ hands, arms, neck, face. Which reminds me of a Turkish proverb about elitists: ‘He thinks he is a sprig of parsley in the shit of the world.’

  The shit slides out of the barrow when it’s upturned with a slurping dead weight. And the foul sweet stench goads, nags teleologically. The smell of decay, and from this the smell of putrefaction, of corruption. The smell of mortality for sure. But it has nothing to do — as puritanism with its loathing for the body has consistently taught — with shame or sin or evil. Its colours are burnished gold, dark brown, black: the colours of Rembrandt’s painting of Alexander the Great in his helmet.

  A story from the village school that Yves my son tells me:

  It’s autumn in the orchard. A rosy apple falls to the grass near a cow pat. Friendly and polite, the cow shit says to the apple: ‘Good morning, Madame la Pomme, how are you feeling?’

  She ignores the remark, for she considers such a conversation beneath her dignity.

  ‘It’s fine weather, don’t you think, Madame la Pomme?’

  Silence.

  ‘You’ll find the grass here very sweet, Madame la Pomme.’

  Again, silence.

  At this moment a man walks through the orchard, sees the rosy apple, and stoops to pick it up. As he bites into the apple, the cow shit, still irrepressible, says: ‘See you in a little while, Madame la Pomme!’