21 December 2006

what is small with what is large, what is near with what is distant.

Having previously read one book of Berger’s, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, and that slender book having made a lasting impact on me, I was pretty keen to dig into Pig Earth. It’s effects on me were strikingly similar. I mean “lasting impact” in the expansive sense, not just for the gorgeous ideas but also for the way those ideas are transmitted: never have I read observations of life and the world that so cleanly, so concisely point to the higher truths surrounding them; nor, conversely, have I encountered philosophy so rooted in the visual. And so, in the space of one sentence, I’ve spilled my two primary trails of thought about this hard and lovely writer, for Berger’s tightly bound formula of observation and revelation makes for a kind of critical examination by itself, such that anything I might want to say about it seems hopelessly secondary and relative, and therefore just barely-but-yes interesting enough for me to say.

Coping is funny—it may be understandable, and rarely are its motivations very complex; but never, in my experience, anyway, does coping come from or lead directly to any kind of knowledge or surrender that is admirable. What I'm doing now is something else, something i am good at --- radiating context: I can be an awful and disconnected shit, can go around acting all crammed by my own inertia, and that’s truthfully where I was when I picked up this book. Another true thing is that Berger made me read all the way to page six before changing the rest of my week:

In any case experience folds upon itself, refers backwards and forwards to itself through the referents of hope and fear; and, by the use of metaphor, which is at the origin of language, it is continually comparing like with unlike, what is small with what is large, what is near with what is distant.

My fall quarter’s critical paper was about metaphor, as will be next quarter’s, and though I’d been researching and reading for weeks and had the firm start of an outline, inertia had swallowed my enjoyment of it, as it had most else in my life. And there, in the space of one goddam sentence, is Berger not only tossing off the core of my thesis but also pointing me to the balance point in my self-made pathos. The fall introduced me to a new saint, Simone Weil, and now here in the winter, in Berger, I’ve been handed some candles and sat down at the altar of another.

15 December 2006

i just want to say hi to my girlfriend, ok? yo, adrian! it's me, rocky.

I was sick the other day, and so in the middle of the afternoon found myself under a pile of blankets, drinking decaf and watching Rocky. The broadcast was intermitted by commentators – a high-pitched brunette and two dudes who talked loosely about the movie while playing poker – for reasons never explained but nonetheless obvious. Being a long-time fan of Rocky (ie, a hetero-normative male who grew up loving sports and with a youth pastor whose favorite analogous reference to the love of Jesus Christ was the bull-headed persistence of Rocky Balboa during his training) I knew some things about the film. i knew that one of the best, most fiery and true and romantically charged exchanges of all time went like this.

[Adrian is trying to get to Rocky in the ring]
Rocky: Adrian!
Adrian: Rocky!
Rocky: Adrian!
Adrian: Rocky!
Rocky: Adrian.
Adrian: Rocky.

Also I knew that Sylvester Stallone had shot the film on a super-constricted budget over a period of 28 days. But the card-playing cable hosts did impart something new to me: Stallone wrote the Rocky screenplay in three days. Inspired by having watched Ali beat the snot out of some little-known white dude, he sat down and in three days had a completed script. The idea of writing at that pace did not take my breath away. What came closer to doing so, however, was the thought of re-imagining a here-and-gone event, a transitory happening in the career of one of the world’s least definable athletes, and creating something that entirely new. And, in the pantheon of film, utterly lasting. After Rocky I had a nap, switched directions on the couch, and read Once in Europa. My mind, metaphorically prone as it is, soon drew on two things: holding John Berger’s book up against the three days that yielded Rocky, I realized it was pretty impossible to accurately imagine the pace at which Berger wrote, but it felt like he got maybe two sentences per week, by which I mean that the truths his work elucidate seem so big that they’d only come sufficiently into focus for the eye of a guy who’d honed his attentiveness and learned extraordinary patience, like a Buddhist monk; and, second, it struck me that Stallone’s shift of focus from Apollo Creed (the character parallel to Ali) to the shambled life of the underdog, with his reclusive girlfriend and her alcoholic brother, is near-exactly the kind of storyline Berger would be drawn to. This turned out to be a fun line of thought, for how different would the story of Rocky Balboa look if relayed to us by John Berger, if he’d spent a summer sleeping on the matted trundle bed of Rocky’s couch, working 12-hour shifts flaying beef at the processing plant where Balboa came to train and punch the hanging carcasses?

He was standing motionless in the garden in front of his house. Across his body he was holding a spade. He had been like that for ten minutes. He was looking at the earth just ahead of his boots. Not a grain of soil stirred. [from The Accordion Player]

This passage is evocative in the most patient of ways: a long shot setting up the scene, with a stillness that promises the movement to come. And it captures something that Berger’s work fairly demands of the reader. A willing patience.

It seems the overall themes of Berger’s writing in the first two parts of his trilogy come gradually but more comprehensively into focus of the course of Once in Europa. And there is at least one noteworthy thematic parallel to the story of Rocky Balboa, for that movie defined American movie-land’s fixation with the underdog. Berger portrays so acutely the story of the small town, the village and its decline, the gradual breaking apart of traditions – both holy and habitual – and within that picture the capacity, over just a few generations, to succumb to the pressures of a modern life, and in doing so yield the immensely more personal smallness of the old village world for the bigger fault lines of the new.