and the hours after that

“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry. And the task of this unceasing labor is to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart. Physical pain can usually be lessened or stopped only 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 labor of reassembling what has been scattered.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“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.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most direct protests against social injustice were 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 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 constant 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 word is impartial: the usage 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 center, a single voice, and this voice is simultaneously that of an announcement and a response to it.

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 can signify 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 labor 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 labor of poetry. And the task of this unceasing labor is to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart. Physical pain can usually be lessened or stopped only 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 labor of reassembling what has been scattered. Three thousand five hundred years ago, an Egyptian poet was writing:

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.

Poetry’s impulse to use metaphor, to discover resemblance, is not to make comparisons (all comparisons as such are hierarchical) or 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. Anna Akhmatova:

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.

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 labor, 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 visions
from time immemorial
And the guide of our rhymes.

writes the poet Nazik al Mal’-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 labor—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. In a lamentation, 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 judgment is distant. Yet the language, which is immediate and which is sometimes wrongly thought of as being only a means, the language offers, obstinately and mysteriously, its own judgment when it is addressed as poetry. This judgment 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!”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“At that moment I saw you at the end of the platform. You were wearing trousers. On the long platform beside the stranded train, in the vast white diffused late-afternoon light of the rift valley, you looked very small. With your appearance everything changed. Everything from the passage under the railway tracks to the sun setting, from the Arabic numerals on the board which announced the times of the trains, to the gulls perched on a roof, from the invisible stars to the taste of coffee on my palate. The world of circumstance and contingency, into which, long before, I had been born, became like a room. I was home.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“Airports are too polite; reality is always at one remove in an airport.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“Coming and going. Meeting and parting. Dreams welcomed the railway station so readily since it was already—in other forms—a familiar. The Greek word for ‘porter’ is metaphor. And this is a reminder of how deeply the act of transporting, of despatch and delivery, is intrinsic to the imagination.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“Before the railways were built, what took the place of stations in people’s dreams? Perhaps cliffs or wells or a blacksmith’s forge? Like a tram or a bus this question is a way of approaching the railway station.

Of all nineteenth-century buildings, the mainline railway station was the one in which the ancient sense of destiny was most fully re-inserted. Stock exchanges, banks, hotels, theaters, courts were built as pretenses, or, to put it another way, they were already dreams. The railway station—whatever the extravagances of its ‘decorative’ architecture—remained stark. And it remained so because it was a site of arrival and departure, where there was nothing to muffle the significance of those two events. Coming and going. Meeting and parting. Dreams welcomed the railway station so readily since it was already—in other forms—a familiar. The Greek word for ‘porter’ is metaphor. And this is a reminder of how deeply the act of transporting, of despatch and delivery, is intrinsic to the imagination.

Seaports are more moderate than mainline railway stations for, although the distances involved are usually longer, the sea has not been laid down, like the railtracks, for the sole and unique purpose of transporting. Airports are too polite; reality is always at one remove in an airport.

In a railway station the impersonal and the intimate coexist. Destinies are played out. The trains run regularly, according to printed timetables. The lines are inexorable. But for each passenger or for each person who comes to meet or see off a traveler, the train in question has its own portent. The portents can be read close-up, in faces, in details of luggage, in the welcomes and partings as people embrace on the platform.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“Home is the return to where distance did not yet count.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“The opposite of to love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together—the lover with the loved, the one who hates with the hated. Both passions are tested by separation.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“The opposite of to love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together—the lover with the loved, the one who hates with the hated. Both passions are tested by separation.

As soon as space and therefore separateness is the condition of existence, love contests this separation. Love aims to close all distance. Death achieves the same end. Yet whereas love celebrates the unique, the unrepeatable: death destroys them.

Supposing that the universe is an expanding universe, its maximum diameter, the limit of its possible extension, has been calculated as being 25,000 million light years. One light year is 5.8784 X 10¹² miles.

Such an extension is beyond our imagination because of the terms in which it is expressed. There is a double separation: that of the statement and that of the numerical isolation.

Elsewhere—in our hearts—we learn the proposition that the force by which space was created may have been an alternating force of expulsion and attraction, extension and passion. This is why, in every language, love is found quoting the stars. But it is also why every cosmology returns to sexuality.

The ‘cosmic egg’ of modern physics and the proposed single original substance of ylem—of which one cubic centimeter would weigh, 1,000,000,000,000 kg, and from which all other matter was born—are variants of a theme to be found in most creation myths. Only the nouns change.

Once earth and sky were passionately one, yet nothing had form; everything was virtual. For the world and its forms and its extension to come into existence, earth and sky had to be torn apart and separated.

Love aims to close all distance. Yet if separation and space were annihilated neither loved one nor lover would exist. Between space and love there is the first opposition—that opposition which is contained as energy within the original act of creation.

All theories about origin are either naive or despairing, from Genesis to Darwin. Yet perhaps one misunderstands their purpose. All origins are unattainable—just as, on a personal scale, it is impossible to imagine a self before conception. Theories of origin are attempts to explain our ongoing relation to the so-evident energy of the universe around us. The energy of our consciousness in all its concentration is continually trying to define itself by and against the energy of the universe in all its incomprehensible extension. Every form of interrogation of the stars has been about this, and every theory of origin is a story invented to describe the experience of being here.

In the beginning was the creator. What followed—if there was to be any story at all—was deployment, extension, space, separateness. Ma femme.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“Sexuality is the result of an original unity being destroyed, of separation. And, in this world as it is, sexuality promises, as nothing else can, momentary completion. It touches a love to oppose the original cruelty.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“Desire changes its character by 180 degrees. Often, when first aroused, it is felt as the desire to have. The desire to touch is, partly, the desire to lay hands on, to take. Later, transformed, the same desire becomes a desire to be taken, to lose oneself within the desired. From these two opposed moments come one of the dialectics of desire; both moments apply to both sexes and they oscillate. Clearly the second moment, the desire to lose oneself within, is the most abandoned, the most desperate… .”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

“[Caravaggio] was the first painter of life as experienced by the popolaccio, the people of the backstreets, les sans-culottes, the lumpenproletariat, the lower orders, those of the lower depths, the underworld. There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronize the urban poor it is naming. That is power.”

— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos