Selected Essays of John Berger

by John Berger

  If the apes are partly victims of their own bodies — the price they pay, like man, for not being confined to their immediate needs — they have found a consolation, which Europe has forgotten. My mother used to say the chimps were looking for fleas, and that when they found one, they put it between their teeth and bit it. But it goes further than Mother thought — as I guessed even then. The chimpanzees touch and caress and scratch each other for hours on end (and according to the etiquette rules of a strict group hierarchy) not only hygienically, to catch parasites, but to give pleasure. ‘Grooming’, as it is called, is one of their principal ways of appeasing the troublesome body.

  This one is scratching inside her ear with her little finger. Now she has stopped scratching to examine minutely her small nail. Her gestures are intimately familiar and strikingly remote. (The same is true for most actions on any theatre stage.) An orang-utan is preparing a bed for herself. Suddenly, she hesitates before placing her armful of straw on the floor, as if she has heard a siren. Not only are the apes’ functional gestures familiar, but also their expressive ones. Gestures which denote surprise, amusement, tenderness, irritation, pleasure, indifference, desire, fear.

  But they move differently. A male gorilla is sitting at ease with his arm held straight and high above his head; and for him this position is as relaxed as sitting with legs crossed is for women and men. Everything which derives from the apes’ skill in swinging from branches — brachiation, as the zoologists call it — sets them apart. Tarzan only swung from vines — he never used his hanging arms like legs, walking sideways.

  In evolutionary history, however, this difference is in fact a link. Monkeys walk on all fours along the tops of branches and use their tails for hanging. The common ancestors of man and apes began, instead, to use their arms — began to become brachiators. This, the theory goes, gave them the advantage of being able to reach fruit at the ends of branches!

  I must have been two years old when I had my first cuddly toy. It was a monkey. A chimpanzee, in fact. I think I called him Jackie. To be certain, I’d have to ask my mother. She would remember. But my mother is dead. There is just a chance — one in a hundred million (about the same as a chance mutation being favoured by natural selection) — that a reader may be able to tell me, for we had visitors to our home in Higham’s Park, in East London, sixty years ago, and I presented my chimp to everyone who came through the front door. I think his name was Jackie.

  Slowly, the hanging position, favoured by natural selection, changed the anatomy of the brachiators’ torsos so that finally they became half-upright animals — although not yet as upright as humans. It is thanks to hanging from trees that we have long collarbones which keep our arms away from our chests, wrists which allow our hands to bend backwards and sideways, and shoulder sockets that let our arms rotate.

  It is thanks to hanging from trees that one of the actors can throw himself into the arms of a mother and cry. Brachiation gave us breasts to beat and to be held against. No other animal can do these things.

  When Darwin thought about the eyes of mammals, he admitted that he broke out in a cold sweat. The complexity of the eye was hard to explain within the logic of his theory, for it implied the co-ordination of so many evolutionary ‘accidents’. If the eye is to work at all, all the elements have to be there: tear glands, eyelid, cornea, pupil, retina, millions of light-sensitive rods and cones which transmit to the brain millions of electrical impulses per second. Before they constituted an eye, these intricate parts would have been useless, so why should they have been favoured by natural selection? The existence of the eye perfidiously suggests an evolutionary aim, an intention.

  Darwin finally got over the problem by going back to the existence of light-sensitive spots on one-celled organisms. These, he claimed, could have been ‘the first eye’ from which the evolution of our complex eyes first began.

  I have the impression that the oldest gorilla may be blind. Like Beckett’s Pozzo. I ask his keeper, a young woman with fair hair. Yes, she says, he’s almost blind. How old is he? I ask. She looks at me hard. About your age, she replies, in his early sixties.

  Recently, molecular biologists have shown that we share with apes 99 per cent of their DNA. Only 1 per cent of his genetic code separates man from the chimpanzee or the gorilla. The orang-utan, which means in the language of the people of Borneo ‘man of the forest’, is fractionally further removed. If we take another animal family, in order to emphasize how small the 1 per cent is, a dog differs from a raccoon by 12 per cent. The genetic closeness between man and ape — apart from making our theatre possible — strongly suggests that their common ancestor existed not 20 million years ago as the Neo-Darwinist palaeontologists believed, but maybe only 4 million years ago. This molecular evidence has been contested because there are no fossil proofs to support it. But in evolutionary theory fossils, it seems to me, have usually been notable by their absence!

  In the Anglo-Saxon world today the Creationists, who take the Genesis story of the Creation as the literal truth, are increasingly vocal and insist that their version be taught in schools alongside the Neo-Darwinist one. The orang-utan is like he is, say the Creationists, because that’s the way God made him, once and for all, five thousand years ago! He is like he is, reply the Neo-Darwinists, because he has been efficient in the ceaseless struggle for survival!

  Her orang-utan eyes operate exactly like mine — each retina with its 130 million rods and cones. But her expression is the oldest I’ve ever seen. Approach it at your peril, for you can fall into a kind of maelstrom of ageing. The plunge is still there in Jean Mohr’s photo.

  Not far up the Rhine from Basel, Angelus Silesius, the seventeenth-century German doctor of medicine, studied in Strasbourg, and he once wrote:

  Anybody who passes more than a day in eternity is as old as God could ever be.

  I look at her with her eyelids which are so pale that when she closes them they’re like eyecups, and I wonder.

  Certain Neo-Darwinist ideas are intriguing: Bolk’s theory of neoteny, for instance. According to Bolk, ‘man in his bodily development is a primate foetus that has become sexually mature’, and consequently can reproduce. His theory proposes that a genetic code can stop one kind of growth and encourage another. Man is a neonate ape to whom this happened. Unfinished, he is able to learn more.

  It has even been argued that today’s apes may be descendants of a hominid, and that in them the neoteny brake was taken off so that they stopped stopping at the foetus stage, grew body hair again and were born with tough skulls! This would make them more modern than we are.

  Yet in general, the conceptual framework in which the Neo-Darwinists and the Creationists debate is of such limited imagination that the contrast with the immensity of the process whose origin they are searching is flagrant. They are like two bands of seven-year-olds who, having discovered a packet of love letters in an attic, try to piece together the story behind the correspondence. Both bands are ingenious and argue ferociously with one another, but the passion of the letters is beyond their competence.

  Perhaps it is objectively true that only poetry can talk of birth and origin. Because true poetry invokes the whole of language (it breathes with everything it has not said), just as the origin invokes the whole of life, the whole of Being.

  The mother orang-utan has come back, this time with her baby. She is sitting right up against the glass. The children in the audience have come close to watch her. Suddenly, I think of a Madonna and Child by Cosimo Tura. I’m not indulging in a sentimental confusion. I haven’t forgotten I’m talking about apes any more than I’ve forgotten I’m watching a theatre. The more one emphasizes the millions of years, the more extraordinary the expressive gestures become. Arms, fingers, eyes, always eyes … A certain way of being protective, a certain gentleness — if one could feel the fingers on one’s neck, one would say a certain tenderness — which has endured for five million years.

  A species that did not protect i
ts young would not survive, comes the answer. Indisputably. But the answer does not explain the theatre.

  I ask myself about the theatre — about its mystery and its essence. It’s to do with time. The theatre, more tangibly than any other art, presents us with the past. Paintings may show what the past looked like, but they are like traces or footprints, they no longer move. With each theatre performance, what once happened is re-enacted. Each time we keep the same rendezvous: with Macbeth who can’t wake up from his downfall; with Antigone who must do her duty. And each night in the theatre Antigone, who died three millennia ago, says: ‘We have only a short time to please the living, all eternity to please the dead.’

  Theatre depends upon two times physically co-existing. The hour of the performance and the moment of the drama. If you read a novel, you leave the present; in the theatre you never leave the present. The past becomes the present in the only way that it is possible for this to happen. And this unique possibility is theatre.

  The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection — the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel. The Neo-Darwinists are trapped within the machine of their theory, in which there can be no place for creation as an act of love. (Their theory was born of the nineteenth century, the most orphaned of centuries.)

  The ape theatre in Basel, with its two times, suggests an alternative view. The evolutionary process unfolded, more or less as the evolutionists suppose, within time. The fabric of its duration has been stretched to breaking point by billions of years. Outside time, God is still (present tense) creating the universe.

  Silesius, after he left Strasbourg to return to Cracow, wrote: ‘God is still creating the world. Does that seem strange to you? You must suppose that in him there is no before nor after, as there is here.’

  How can the timeless enter the temporal? the gorilla now asks me.

  Can we think of time as a field magnetized by eternity? I’m no scientist. (As I say that, I can see the real ones smiling!)

  Which are they?

  The ones up there on a ladder, looking for something. Now they’re coming down to take a bow …

  As I say, I’m no scientist, but I have the impression that scientists today, when dealing with phenomena whose time or spatial scale is either immense or very small (a full set of human genes contains about 6 billion bases: bases being the units — the signs — of the genetic language), are on the point of breaking through space-time to discover another axis on which events may be strung, and that, in face of the hidden scales of nature, they resort increasingly to the model of a brain or mind to explain the universe.

  ‘Can’t God find what he is looking for?’ To this question Silesius replied, ‘From eternity he is searching for what is lost, far from him, in time.’

  The orang-utan mother presses the baby’s head against her chest.

  Birth begins the process of learning to be separate. The separation is hard to believe or accept. Yet, as we accept it, our imagination grows — imagination which is the capacity to reconnect, to bring together, that which is separate. Metaphor finds the traces which indicate that all is one. Acts of solidarity, compassion, self-sacrifice, generosity are attempts to re-establish — or at least a refusal to forget — a once-known unity. Death is the hardest test of accepting the separation which life has incurred.

  You’re playing with words!

  Who said that?

  Jackie!

  The act of creation implies a separation. Something that remains attached to the creator is only half-created. To create is to let take over something which did not exist before, and is therefore new. And the new is inseparable from pain, for it is alone.

  One of the male chimps is suddenly angry. Histrionically. Everything he can pick up he throws. He tries to pull down the stage trees. He is like Samson at the temple. But unlike Samson, he is not high up in the group hierarchy of the cage. The other actors are nonetheless impressed by his fury.

  Alone, we are forced to recognize that we have been created, like everything else. Only our souls, when encouraged, remember the origin, wordlessly.

  Silesius’s master was Eckardt, who, further down the Rhine beyond Strasbourg, in Cologne, wrote during the thirteenth century, ‘God becomes God when the animals say: God.’

  Are these the words which the play behind the soundproof plate glass is about?

  In any case I can’t find better.

  1990

  The Opposite of Naked

  Among the French Impressionists, Renoir is still the most popular. All over the world his name is associated with a particular vision of sunlight, leisure and women. This would have pleased him. It was for his paintings of women — and particularly for his nudes — that he believed he would be admired and remembered.

  I believe he will remain a widely popular painter, because his work is about pleasure. But pleasure in what exactly? Or, to put it another way, what does Renoir’s way of painting — which is so instantly recognizable — really reveal to us?

  A male dream of goddesses? An eternal summer of full-fleshed happy women? Daily domesticity treated as recurring honeymoon? Some of this. But what has been replaced? What is crying out because it is not there, has not been included?

  All the photographs of Renoir — from the first in 1861 when he was twenty to the last when, nearly eighty, he could only paint by having the brushes strapped to his arthritic hand — show a nervous, lean, vulnerable man. About halfway through his life the expression in his eyes changes: from being shy and dreamy, it becomes a little fixed and fanatical. This change, occurring around 1890, corresponds more or less with three other developments: his settling down into marriage, his achieving financial security, and the first signs of the rheumatoid arthritis which was to cripple him, yet in face of which his obstinacy and courage were very impressive.

  These photographs remind us that what is banished from Renoir’s paintings is any sign of anguish, any possibility of choice. He often said that he painted for his own pleasure and to give pleasure. Yet for him the pre-condition of pleasure was the fantasy of a world without edges, without sharpness or conflict, a world that enveloped like a mother’s open blouse and breast. Pleasure for him was not for the taking: it had to be ubiquitous and omnipresent. You have to embellish, he said; paintings should be friendly, pleasurable and pretty. And about this, as he grew older, he became fanatical: ‘The best exercise for a woman is to kneel down and scrub the floor, light fires or do the washing — their bellies need movement of that sort.’ By this he meant that such work produced the kind of belly he found friendly and pleasurable.

  His son, the film director Jean Renoir, has written a remarkable book about his childhood memories. In it there is this conversation with his father:

  ‘Whose music is that?’

  ‘Mozart’s.’

  ‘What a relief. I was afraid for a minute it was that imbecile Beethoven … Beethoven is positively indecent the way he tells about himself. He doesn’t spare us either the pain in his heart or in his stomach. I have often wished I could say to him: what’s it to me if you are deaf?’

  Nothing is simpler than to ridicule a past age, and nothing is more ridiculous. It is not by our own virtue today that we are closer to Beethoven. Feminist reasoning applied retrospectively to Renoir is too easy. I use these quotations only to indicate how threatened Renoir often felt. He was, for instance, obsessional about the safety of his children: all sharp edges had to be sawn off the furniture, no razorblades were allowed inside the house. Only if we appreciate Renoir’s fears can we better understand how he painted.

  Now I want to add one more element to the riddle of the meaning of Renoir’s oeuvre. He was born in 1841. His father was a tailor who worked at home. His mother was a dress-maker. Very soon the father’s trade began to diminish, as more and more factory-made clothes came on to the market in the second half of the nineteenth century. The immensity of any childhood begs description. Yet we can suppose that in
this childhood home there was already a certain nostalgia for the security of the past and that this nostalgia was intimately associated with cottons, silks, organdies, tulles, taffetas — clothes.

  The exact nature of Renoir’s anxiety — which became more acute as he settled down into a successful, secure life — we can never know. Some aspect of reality frightened him — as may happen to any of us. Yet Renoir was a painter working directly from the real. And so his imagination and his senses led him to develop a way of painting which transformed the real, which banished fears and consoled him. You have to embellish, he said. How?

  By muffling, by covering, by draping, by dressing. He studied the surface or the skin of everything he saw before his eyes, and he turned this skin into a veil which hid what lay behind the surface — the real that frightened him.

  This process which generated all the energy of his vision (painting as an act not of disclosing but of covering) had two obvious consequences. When he painted coverings, when he painted cloth, there was a complicity between the stuff and his vision of it which is unique for its freedom in the history of art. He painted the dreams of dressing as no other artist except Watteau has ever done. Sometimes I imagine him before his easel, having almost stopped breathing, his eyes screwed up, with pins in his mouth like his mother.

  Think of La Danse à Bougival and you’ll see a warm dress dancing with a sweating suit and two hats breathing each other’s perfumes. What about the hands? you ask. But look again, the hands are like gloves. What about her pretty face? It’s as if painted with face-powder and it’s a pretty mask.

  Think of Le Déjeuner des Canotiers, where you have, at the end of a summer lunch, a rumpled pearly table-cloth with discarded napkins which are like a concert of singing angels. And the bottles and the dog’s coat and the man’s vest and the hats and scarves, all the confection, as the French say, is singing: only the figures are mute because lacking substance.