◎ The cloud also retreats
Man must choose a place to live; man cannot be omnipresent, "self-possessed" like the God of the Bible—a natural constraint that will upset a very small number of people whose minds are racing, whose souls are not bound by anything metaphysical, who are acutely aware and must move around to constantly reserve new materials of sensation.
John Berger is a man who sits on an infinite library of material. All works of art, for him, are the source of feelings, thoughts and imaginations. His style is unique, and it is called "flowing" when he sounds good, and if he is harsh, he can also say that he likes to say things that do not know what to do. The accumulation of works of art over the past thousand years is the basis for him, a person who lived in the 20th century, to form various opinions and opinions and criticisms. Although these works of art are often written by famous people, Berg's articles can be written as if those works cannot exist independently of his criticism.
Over-interpreted
I still remember how Berger evaluated Picasso's and the Musician in His book The Success or Failure of Picasso. In what appears to be a twisted figure, Berg says in an immersive way that the two women are surrounded in a room with "no windows or doors," and that in their relationship with their home, "there is a complete claustrophobia of curfew time and a city without freedom." It was like making love in a dark secret room. It seems that the sex of the woman in bed and the music of the mandolin have lost their roar..." Picasso-like geometric drawings, seen by Berg as a true portrayal of man broken and completely lost, said of The Weeping Woman: "It is a face in which the joy of sexual desire disappears, and all that remains is a fragment of pain." It is not the work of a moralist but a lover. He implied that the moralists were all moralists, talking only about how to restrain people, especially women, and teach them to keep the way of being human, so that they could not see the pain of man's self-destruction, which only Picasso, the lover of all women, could see, so he painted the woman's face "as if a kind of castration had occurred."
He is extremely good at sensory associations. The search for pleasure is the only way for man to live as a whole man, and various forces—from Taoists, from war, age, and so on—have ruined this prospect. Berg constantly reveals these facts. Modernist painters like Picasso, Van Gogh, Courbet, Klee, Rothko, etc., are not without wayward paintings, and he analyzes and plays so "more truthfully" that people may think that he is mysterious at first glance: Isn't this just a sad woman? Why is there an over-interpretation of "this woman's face seems to have undergone a castration"? But his words are already there, and instead of discerning the right and wrong of this argument, it is better to let it rest in his heart, and perhaps one day he will be touched to remember his words.
"Small things make big"
Another characteristic of Berger is that he is good at "making small things big". This is also suspicious, because it is inevitable to make a fuss. This is most evident in his photographic criticism. The title of his book "Look at a Photo" implies the solemn and serious attitude that people should adopt in front of a photo, because the momentary scene taken by the camera can affect everyone in all times. In "Keep All Dear," Berg writes about what he saw in a Palestinian home: an old woman with three young grandchildren, two boys the older "has a sense of vigilance and stalking, the older is only four years old, is having chickenpox, and the woman is doing the most mundane housework." The Palestinian context itself has a fixed political connotation, but Berg has refrained from emphasizing the focus on the present in the woman's eyes. At the end of this scene, he writes:
"If two people lay the tablecloth together, they will use the afterglow to confirm each other to determine the location of the shop. Imagining the world is such a table, and the tablecloth is the life we must save. That's the look. ”
This is quite a clever statement, he does not directly interpret resistance and patience in the details already in the picture, but interprets the action of the tablecloth that is not in the picture as an act of saving lives, and does not hesitate to switch the subject of salvation from "they" to "we". Language can reduce the uncountable distance between time and space to the size of the word spacing on a page, and of course, it can also stretch the relationship between the two sides into the end of the world.
Berg has a relationship with Palestine. In "Keep All Dear", he puts in a photograph of his father when he was young and tells the reader that this photo was taken in Haifa, and the next words are intriguing:
"Once a colleague told me that he looked like Pasternak, the Russian poet, what do you think? (It's very similar.) He had a heart attack, and 'Disaster Day' killed him. He died in this room, when I was twelve. ”
Since he compares his father to the "Pastenak of Palestine," Berg's ambition and sense of mission are unquestionable. And the six ordinary, emotionless words of "I was twelve years old" contain a hint that may be broadened: a man should be associated with every day, month, and year of his life with other events that occurred that day, month, and year—as large as the loss of land of a nation, as small as the robbery of a family. Because he shared dates with those things.
Communication intermediaries
When talking about an old photograph taken, it is Berger's routine to turn the pen sharpened into "you" and "me/us." He took the attitude that what happened in the picture, the situation of the people, the meaning of the scene, had to do with himself, an intellectual and writer with a high aesthetic taste, and after he had a real touch, he managed to generate words to impress the reader. Photography, painting, music, film, literary creation, as part of culture, are not passive reflections of the interests and tastes of a certain class, but intermediaries for communication between the educated and the uneducated, and thus the opportunity for the authorities and those who are not present to communicate their hearts and feelings.
He wants to facilitate this communication. In the biography of John Berger's Triple Life, the author Joshua Sperling devotes some important space to explaining the influence of Gramsci on Berg, and it was Gramsci, the spiritual leader of the Italian Communist Party, who first proposed that intellectuals break through the barriers of their own residence and enter the living circles of ordinary people, the task of intellectuals is to convey their voices to ordinary people, and "the ultimate goal of art is to bridge the gap between national culture and the working class, which is both the subject of aesthetic experience. Also the audience.".
Beginning in the 1950s, Burger's cultural initiatives were guided by this. The biography describes several attempts by Berger over the years: writing editorials for art exhibitions, photographic exhibitions, and other art exhibitions, and appealing to people with low culture to come to the exhibition. This is, of course, embarrassing, because the audience is bound to need guidance, and the intellectual elite is needed to explain the work to them, which in itself shows a kind of inequality between class and circle. But Berg insisted on doing so. These events also put up the slogan "Every painting, every work of art, is about some human experience."
Years of crisis
Too much happened in the fifties, on the one hand, McCarthyism in the United States launched terrorist acts against the left forces, on the other hand, the hegemony of the Soviet Union that divided the Marxist parties in Europe, and in 1956, especially the year when the quarrels reached a fever pitch, intellectuals could not remain neutral and had to attack each other's positions and camps. Joshua Sperling describes the disadvantageous situation in which Berg fell after the events in Hungary: he had always advocated the correlation between art and politics, and now, with the reputation of the Soviet Union discredited, he found himself unable to say anything more, because his leftist tone had become evidence of a nostalgia, and countless opponents mocked him for selectively ignoring the atrocities of the Soviet Union, even for it.
By 1965, when Berger published The Success or Failure of Picasso, the events of ten years ago had almost been decided in history, and Berger was able to get rid of his partisan identity and talk about how to implement care through art. Echoing Susan Sontag's moving statement about the "suffering of others," Berg also emphasizes that people should always care about politics simply because they understand the inhumane things that happen elsewhere, and understanding is relevant:
"In our century, events are global, and the scope of our knowledge needs to be constantly expanded so as not to fall behind. Every day we notice a major issue that concerns the lives and deaths of millions of people, and most of us do not want to think about it except in times of crisis or war. ”
As his commentaries on works such as The and the Musician show, his art criticism can well focus on eternal themes, such as the eternal suffering of individuals, no matter which group, what society, and human poverty from which the suffering hurt comes, no matter which country has a large number of poor people. In confronting Picasso's paintings, Berg was not thinking about the world-famous painter himself or his splendid private life, but about the poor and poor people of Andalusia. As Jeff Dyer puts it, Berg's fifty-year pen career combines two often irreconcilable concerns, one of the "enduring mysteries" possessed by masterpieces of art and the other of "the living experience of the oppressed." The typical Bur format language is: "Today, infinitely with the poor." ”
Unity of knowledge and action
John Berg's Triple Life is a very good biography in which the author sorts out Berg's complex experiences to the fullest: his media writing career, his television attempts to peak the Way of Seeing, the award and controversy of his novel G.; sometimes the author finds ideal circumstantial evidence for some of Berg's excitement, for example, when speaking of Berg's fascination with photography, Sperling quotes the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature winner and Mexican poet Octavio Paz. Paz feels for the paradise of his heart, the garden of his childhood home: "All time, past or future, real or imaginary, is pure existence", as if it were the voice of Berg himself, because Berg's idea of "keeping everything" contains the confirmation of any kind of moment, the visible camera and the invisible mind, and the "present" is written down all the time.
After 1975, Berg and his second wife moved to the countryside as a residence for the rest of their lives. The place is called Quincy, and it is located in Haute-Savoie, a french province. The intellectual/artist-mass fusion he had adhered to all his life was put into practice in the years that followed, but his approach was also widely seen as an escapism that took the initiative to break away from the front line, as a submission to an era of rightward turn. Only those friends who had actually been to Berg's village admitted that he was still a unity of knowledge and action: he did the work of "ensuring that his life in Quincy was immersed in it, not as a picturesque landscape", according to the paintings of his beloved painter Miller: harvesting with a long sickle, shearing sheep, chopping firewood, digging potatoes, turning the soil, herding sheep, fertilizing, pruning branches — these were the agricultural tasks that Miller had painted, and Miller was the art practitioner who penetrated deep into the folk in Berg's interpretation, He framed the images of peasants in gilded frames, and Miller was by no means "a sentimental man, but a provocateur who had penetrated into the bourgeois organization."
It was Sperling's settlement in Quincy that made Berg "the kind of writer who is widely read around the globe," as the Chinese says of "feng shui," perfectly commensurate with his temperament, talent, and political views. In 1982, he and longtime collaborator and photographer Moore co-authored "Another Way of Telling", another "reading photography", in which most of the photographs come from scenes from his farm: for example, a farmer with his grandson, a dog and dozens of cows standing in the wind, the gentleness in the eyes of the farmer and the tenderness in the eyes of the cow appear in the same frame - Berger believes that this is the object that real "viewing" must find.
The peasants here have migrated from elsewhere, carrying the old customs and habits of each place, and together they go to the fields to farm, and they rake the hay under the hot sun to pay the rent. Berg himself was an immigrant: from England (resolutely but resolutely) to the European continent, from the cities (in a radical way) to the countryside. Sperling again wrote a moving commentary on Berg's integration on this level: poetry, painting, romantic love, religious beliefs, the constant customs of uprootes, and social movements of global solidarity, "all in an effort to recognize a new temporary refuge," he said. They look for a world, even if it may be restored immediately. ”
"Shoveler"
It is interesting to draw a contrast between Berg and the French leftist critic I Debord: Debord was the author of The Landscape Society, whose influence continues to this day, and who also lives in seclusion in the countryside, living in a villa he built, but Berger is not. He hated the walls that cut people apart as much as the city. His house was built at the entrance of the village, and as soon as others entered the village, they could see him and his wife as soon as they stepped on the winding path. In addition to farming, his family has another striking place: there is no toilet. Every May, when the winter snow has completely melted and the summer flies have not yet swarmed, Berg picks up a shovel, sometimes pushes his wheelbarrow around the wide backyard. He was going to shovel, not animal, but from himself, his wife and children, and his visiting guests.
This can accumulate for months. He has a sensational dung-sucking essay in which he names a man: Milan Kundera – Berger asks: Why can't you get a little bit of garbage in both hands, look down on human filth and the people who hoe it? "Cleanliness," he says, is a moralized word in a modern hygienic world, and that cleanliness means making everything unclean dirty, but that the so-called filth is part of "feeling reality." Berg wanted to immerse himself in the feeling that the decent people could not avoid: "I lifted the cart upwards, and the feces slid down in a hurry, and the foul smell of bad smell, sweet silk rose up and emitted an ideological grunt." ”
The smell of human dung is no different from that of pigsty, because man is an omnivore like a pig, but, Berg says, there is nothing sinful or humiliating about the Puritans, and that rotten and fermented stool is not a curse on the flesh at all. "The color of the poop is brilliant gold, dark brown or black: that's the color of Alexander the Great's helmet painted by Rembrandt."
These shoveling jobs, these farm jobs, Berg worked until his eighties until his death, and outside of labor, he liked to ride his motorcycles wildly over the mountains, and I believe he tried more than once to touch the moment between life and death. In "We Meet Here", Berg wrote many stories about death and the dead, and through the recognition of death, he transformed daily life into epic and Greek tragedy.
"I seem like an ancient Greek," he said, "and I spend most of my time writing about the dead and the dead." If so, I can only add that it can only be written with a sense of urgency, and this sense of urgency can only be given by life. At the time of his death, the world showed no signs of getting better: on the ruins of the New Left and the embers of the Cold War, the cold market mechanisms still dominated the rules of the game. What Berg insists on is a utopian experiment of one man.
Sperling commented in Berger's sentence that he, as a survivor, "resisted the inevitable things of others," and that his articles and stories in Quincy recorded a critical period of continuity, "a turning point, an upward turn."