by John Berger
8 POEMS OF EMIGRATION
1. Village
I tell you
all houses
are holes in an arse of stone
we eat off coffin lids
between evening star
and milk in a bucket
is nothing
the churn is emptied
twice a day
cast us
steaming
on the fields.
2. Earth
the purple scalp of the earth
combed in autumn
and times of famine
the metal bones of the earth
extracted by hand
the church above the earth
arms of our clock crucified
all is taken
3. Leaving
pain
cannot
endure long enough
tracks vanish
under snow
the white embrace
of leaving
I have tried to write the truth on trains
without an ear
the tongue takes fright
clings to a single word
the train is crossing a bridge
black ice collects
on each letter
S A V A
my river
4. Metropolis
the edge of moonlight
sharp
like the level
of water in a canal
and the locks of reason
at dawn
when the level of the dark
is brought down
to that of the light
accept the dark
massed black
zone of blindness
accept it eyes
but here the dark
has been stolen in a sack
weighted down with a pebble
and drowned
there is no longer any dark
5. Factory
here
it is dawn eternally
hour of awakening
hour of revolutionary prophecy
hour of the embers dead
time of the days work
without end
there we built the night
as we lit the fire
lay down in it
pulled up the dark as blanket
near fields were
the breath of animals asleep
quiet as the earth
warm as the fire
cold is the pain of believing
warmth will never return
here
night is time forgotten
eternal dawn
and in the cold I dream
of how the pine
burnt
like a dog’s tongue
behind its teeth
6. Waterfront
all night Hudson
coughs in bed
I try to sleep
my country
is a hide nailed to wood
the wind of my soul rushes
out of horizons
I make a hammock
in sleep
I suck birth village
touch my river’s curve
two black mackerel
pilot in
daybreak
gaff them sky gaff them
7. Absence
when the sun was no higher than the grass
jewels hung in the trees
and the terraces turned rose
between fluorescent lights along the ringroad
apartments hang their pietàs
they are frying potatoes
a factory discharges its hands in woollen gloves
there is a hole in my thumb
the vines are not green
the vines are not here
the jewels
crushed in high voltage wires
will be worn by the dead
DANGER DE MORT
8. A Forest I Knew
let me die like this
the branches have muscles
hills get up
the cloud pours
into a cup
in the forest wild boar
have eaten
are warm
and sleepy
each clearing is recorded
on a screen I carry
rolled like a cloth
in my head
a sheet
pulled over
the eyes of the dead
keeps out the look of the world
on the cloth
unrolled
I follow their spoor
in the forest I knew.
Baudelaire was among the first to name and describe the homelessness of the new city crowds.
“.... like errant homeless ghosts
doggedly bemoaning.”
Yet the judgment—not the poetry—is too sweeping. The very sense of loss keeps alive an expectation. How easy it is to lose sight of what is historically invisible—as if people lived only history and nothing else!
Popular ingenuity is often invisible. Occasionally, when gathered into political action, it becomes visible. The rest of the time it is used daily for clandestine personal survival. At the practical level of dodging, picking up, hustling: and at the psychic level of turning in circles in order to preserve one’s identity. The masses, the required anonymous labor force, persist in remaining a population of individuals, despite their living and working conditions, despite their displacement. And the ground of each one of these preserved individualities is like a home.
The “substitute” home has little to do with a building. The roof over the head, the four walls, have become, as it were, secular: independent from whatever is kept in the heart and is sacred. Such secularization is the direct consequence of economic and social conditions: tenancy, poverty, overcrowding, city planning, property speculation. But ultimately it is the consequence of a lack of choice. Without a history of choice no dwelling can be a home.
With the traditional dwelling which was a home, the choice may have been ancestral, even beyond living memory, but every act of maintenance or improvement acknowledged and repeated the first choice, which was not one of taste but of insight, in having chosen a place where the two life lines crossed. The choices open to women and men today—even amongst the underprivileged—may be more numerous than in the past, but what has been lost irretrievably is the choice of saying: this is the center of the world.
Nevertheless, by turning in circles the displaced preserve their identity and improvise a shelter. Built of what? Of habits, I think, of the raw material of repetition, turned into a shelter. The habits imply words, jokes, opinions, gestures, actions, even the way one wears a hat. Physical objects and places—a piece of furniture, a bed, the comer of a room, a particular bar, a street comer—supply the scene, the site of the habit, yet it is not they but the habit which protects. The mortar which holds the improvised “home” together—even for a child—is memory. Within it, visible, tangible mementoes are arranged—photos, trophies, souvenirs—but the roof and four walls which safeguard the lives within, these are invisible, intangible, and biographical.
To the underprivileged, home is represented, not by a house, but by a practice or set of practices. Everyone has his own. These practices, chosen and not imposed, offer in their repetition, transient as they may be in themselves, more permanence, more shelter than any lodging. Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived. At its most brutal, home is no more than one’s name—whilst to most people one is nameless.
The sky is blue black
starlings unfold their wings
quit their pediments
to write a letter
returned.
The setting sun
fills teeth with gold.
Like a shred of meat
I’m lodged in this town.
The experience of newly arrived immigrants is different from that of a long established,
“indigenous” proletariat or sub-proletariat. Yet the displacement, the homelessness, the abandonment lived by a migrant is the extreme form of a more general and widespread experience. The term “alienation” confesses all. (It would even be possible to talk of the “homelessness” of the bourgeois with his town house, his country house, his three cars, his several televisions, his tennis court, his wine cellar—it would be just possible, yet nothing about his class now interests me, for there is nothing left to discover there for the future.)
After the migrant leaves home, he never finds another place where the two life lines cross. The vertical line exists no more; there is no longer any local continuity between him and the dead, the dead now simply disappear; and the gods have become inaccessible. The vertical line has been twisted into the individual biographical circle which leads nowhere but only encloses. As for the horizontal lines, because there are no longer any fixed points as bearings, they are elided into a plain of pure distance, across which everything is swept.
What can grow on this site of loss? Perhaps it can only be that which, earlier, when every village was the center of the world, remained inconceivable. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, at least two new expectations—offering the hope of a new shelter—have become more and more widely shared.
The first is that of passionate romantic love. (Of which there is more in the backstreets than in the libraries.) In one sense what happens between women and men in love is beyond history. In the fields, on the roads, in the workshops, at school, there are continual transformations: in an embrace very little changes. Yet the construction put on passion alters. Not necessarily because emotions are different but because what surrounds the emotions—social attitudes, legal systems, moralities, eschatologies—these change.
Romantic love, in the modern sense, is a love uniting or hoping to unite two displaced persons. Friendship, solidarity, mutual interests can also unite people, but they do so according to experience and circumstances. They usually have an empirical basis. Whereas romantic love remembers beginnings and origins. Its primacy pre-dates experience. And it is this primacy which allows it to have a special meaning (from Novalis to Frank Sinatra) in the modern epoch.
In the beginning, which such love remembers, the division into two sexes polarized life. The creation of male and female constituted a separation, a new form of incompleteness. The sexual instinct was the energy of attraction between the two poles. As soon as human imagination and memory existed, the desire to hold and maintain that attraction began to declare itself as love. Such love held out a hope of completion, and proposed that its own energy belonged to the heart of the real. The hope of completion developed simultaneously with the founding of the home, but it was not the same thing. In the modern period when we are deprived of the second, we feel more intensely than ever before the resonance of the first.
The other expectation is historical. Every migrant knows in his heart of hearts that it is impossible to return. Even if he is physically able to return, he does not truly return, because he himself has been so deeply changed by his emigration. It is equally impossible to return to that historical state in which every village was the center of the world. The one hope of recreating a center now is to make it the entire earth. Only worldwide solidarity can transcend modern homelessness. Fraternity is too easy a term; forgetting Cain and Abel, it somehow promises that all problems can be soluble. In reality many are insoluble—hence the never-ending need for solidarity.
Today, as soon as very early childhood is over, the house can never again be home, as it was in other epochs. This century, for all its wealth and with all its communication systems, is the century of banishment. Eventually perhaps the promise, of which Marx was the great prophet, will be fulfilled, and then the substitute for the shelter of a home will not just be our personal names, but our collective conscious presence in history, and we will live again at the heart of the real. Despite everything, I can imagine it.
Meanwhile, we live not just our own lives but the longings of our century.
TWENTIETH CENTURY STORM
Lightning the scythe
is cutting down the rain.
Swathes of water
fall like the clothes
—o the great coats for parting
the great great coats
that never returned!
fall like the clothes
of the far away
on the sky’s empty field.
And in the grass of this rain
flowers
which grew with the strength of rivers
—o the pockets of the ferryman
packed with the letters
silences and promised numbers
of those who left!
which grew with the strength of rivers
into estuaries.
Each flower began
in the palm of a hand,
each petal
in origin
a gesture an action
a touching.
Put your garden to my cheek
your five fingered garden
in another city
to my cheek.
The haycart
loaded with thunder
is trundling across the sky
The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. Pleasure and pain need to be considered together, they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different.
Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature’s workings. Otherwise there would be no impulse to satisfy the needs which ensure the body’s and the species’ survival. And survival—for reasons we do not know—is in-written, inscribed as nature’s only goal. Gratification, or its anticipation, acts as a goad. Pain or the fear of pain acts as a warning. Both are essential. The difference between them, considered as opposites, is that pleasure has a constant tendency to exceed its functional purpose, to not know its place.
Cats display more pleasure when licking one another than when eating. (There is, it is true, in all animals, except ruminants, an urgency in eating which displaces pleasure: the pleasure comes as plenitude after the act of eating.) Horses running wild in a field appear to experience more pleasure than when quenching their thirst. The gratification, necessary in order to provoke impulses towards the satisfaction of certain essential needs, produces, even in animals, a capacity for a generalized experience of pleasure. Gratuitous pleasure.
Perhaps this capacity is linked to the fact that all young animals need to play in order to learn. Between play and gratuitous pleasure there is a face in common. Playing implies a distinction between the real and the playful. The world is doubled by play. There is the involuntary world of necessity and the voluntary world of play. In the second world pleasure no longer serves a purpose but becomes gratuitous.
For us too, the world is doubled by play, but the degree of invention mounts so that play becomes imagination. Imagination doubles and intensifies both pain and pleasure: anxiety and fantasy are born. Nevertheless the same elementary distinction remains. Pain, however much it overflows its source, always has a cause, a center, a locus; whereas pleasure does not necessarily have one.
Human happiness is rare. There are no happy periods, only happy moments. But happiness is precisely a generalized pleasure. And the state of happiness can be defined by an equation whereby, at that moment, the gift of one’s well-being equals the gift of the existent. Without a surplus of pleasure over and above functional gratification, such well-being could not exist. Aesthetic experience is the purest expression of this equation.
Traditionally this equation was read as the sign of the existence of a benevolent God or, at least, of a God sometimes capable of benevolence. The arbitrariness of happiness was interpreted as a divine intention. And from this arose the problem of suffering and pain. If pleasure was a gift, if happiness was intended, why should there be pain? The answers are hard.
With one enormous exception—the emotional pain of loss, the pain that has broken a heart. Such pain fills the space of an entire life. It may have begun with a single event but the event has produced a surplus of pain. The sufferer becomes inconsolable. Yet, what is this pain, if it is not the recognition that what was once given as pleasure or happiness has been irrevocably taken away?
The gift of pleasure is the first mystery.
A LOVE SONG
The mountains are pitiless
the rain is melting the snow
it will freeze again.
In the café two strangers
play the accordion
and a roomful of men are singing.
Tunes are filling
the sacks of the heart
the troughs of eyes.
Words are filling
the stalls
which bellow between the ears.
Music shaves the jowls
loosens the joints,
the only cure for rheumatism.
Music cleans the nails
softens the hands
scours the calluses.
A roomful of men,
come from drenched cattle
diesel oil, the eternal shovel,
are caressing
the air of a love song
with sweetened hands.
Mine have left my wrists
and are crossing the mountains
to find your breasts.
In the café two strangers
play the accordion
the rain is melting the snow.
For an animal its natural environment and habitat are a given; for man—despite the faith of the empiricists—reality is not a given: it has to be continually sought out, held—I am tempted to say salvaged. One is taught to oppose the real to the imaginary, as though the first were always at hand and the second distant, far away. This opposition is false. Events are always to hand. But the coherence of these events—which is what one means by reality—is an imaginative construction. Reality always lies beyond—and this is as true for materialists as for idealists. For Plato, for Marx. Reality, however one interprets it, lies beyond a screen of clichés. Every culture produces such a screen, partly to facilitate its own practices (to establish habits) and partly to consolidate its own power. Reality is inimical to those with power.