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| John Berger |
John Berger remembered
by Simon McBurney
Friday 6 January 2017
No one I have ever met listened like John. He leaned forward. His very blue eyes scanning yours. Then glancing away for away for a moment as his ear turned towards you. To be the object of this fierce attention was… to feel heard. And being heard, at once you had a place in the world. You belonged. You were situated. Sited.
John’s writing desk in his house in the mountains in France faced the wall. Above it drawings by his son Yves and his granddaughter Melina. A CD of Glenn Gould lay beside one of Tom Waits. His pen (he only wrote in ink) was fat and comfortable. The window to his left looked out onto the garden. A vegetable patch gave way to apple trees which in turn bordered a field where cows, except in winter, would graze.
We would watch them as each evening they were called to milk. Bells sounding, arses covered in shit. He listened to them in the same way. With the same attention. He was never not listening.
In 1992, never having met, I watched him watching The Street of Crocodiles ( a play created from the writings of Bruno Shultz) from a point of vantage above the audience. His body so concentrated as if he himself were creating the piece before him. Afterwards he suggested we eat. Days later he was in my kitchen discussing the show and the magnetic knife rack beside my ancient gas stove.
His short story The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol is the final entry in a collection entitled Pig Earth, the first of the epic trilogy Into Their Labours, which chronicles peasant life, and migration into the cities, in the 20th century. I asked him if he would allow me to make Lucie Cabrol into a piece of theatre.
He invited me to visit him in the Haut Savoie and picked us up at the airport. “Lucie was not her real name,” shouted John as he drove Tim Hatley, my designer, and I into the mountains. “I will show you where she lived and the site of her death.”
We drank his coffee, saw the memorials to the Maquis, walked the precipitous slopes. Laughed. There was always laughter with John. We heard how he had first heard the story of this woman, a mythic figure in the all the local villages. “To live here was always an act of resistance. She was tiny, the unlikeliest of survivors. But never accepted defeat. Even in the face of her own murder.”
For him resisting was part of existing. “... defiant resistance in the face of likely defeat. The poor, the ill, animals, the prisoner, especially the political prisoner, the migrant, the peasant, the Palestinian: he saw none of them as failures,” as Anthony Barnett writes.
John Berger was my friend. Seeing people’s responses to his death over the last few days, many many people would claim him as theirs too. John had that quality of engagement. “The opposite of love is not hate, but separation,” he wrote.
His words joined things together. With certainty, clarity and, always, tenderness. The personal and the political, the poetic and the prosaic, the natural with the man made. And also the writer and the reader. They too were joined, bound together. Thus people felt, correctly, he was attached to them. And they to him. He was theirs. He listened to them. Even now, in the most deafening roar of these dark and absurd times, he makes me feel that it is possible to be heard. That we must be heard.
One consolation in the face of his absence, is that his writing will remain for me a place of refuge. A site where “language has acknowledged the experience which demanded which cried out...” Where words promise “that which has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been.”
“Can you hear me in the dark?”
In 1999, in the abandoned Aldwych Underground station we created, together, for Artangel, A Vertical Line. A meditation on the origins of art. The last movement was in a deep tunnel imagining the discovery of the Chauvet cave, the site of the worlds oldest prehistoric paintings.
“Can you hear me in the dark?” John shouts. And the piece begins...
Yes, John, we can still hear you in the dark.
The last time he fetched me from the airport, aged 84, he was holding two crash helmets. Laughing. We’re on the bike. Minutes later John and I were weaving through the Geneva traffic and hitting the motorway towards the mountains. Over his shoulder I glanced at the speedometer as it climbed towards 160kph. If we die, I thought, at least it will be quick. Then I closed my eyes and pushed myself into his back.
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