Landscapes - John Berger

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for the poet in him – this was more complicated. It had nothing to do, for instance, with his attitude to language. On the contrary, he had little feeling for words and considered them absolutely functionally, absolutely unsensuously; they were simply nails to be hit on the head in order to fix an idea or establish a fact in its proper place. It was rather that his sense of history, connecting the past with the future, was similar to the epic poet’s sense of destiny. And just as the poet seeks to connect intuitively by images, Antal sought to connect rationally by research. Above all his compulsion to work was similar to a poet’s. He worked to release a vision.

      Another thing I would like to emphasise is Antal’s feeling for paintings and sculpture. He never simplified the mystery out of art – and by mystery I mean the power of a work of art to affect the heart. I have seen him profoundly moved in front of works he admired. Nor was his judgment of a work necessarily dependent upon his knowledge of all the related facts. A few weeks before he died, we went together to an exhibition of a contemporary Asian painter whom neither of us knew anything about. As we walked round he demanded now and again the date of a particular painting. Most of them were fifteen or twenty years old. After about half an hour he asked me what I thought. I was rather enthusiastic. He agreed that the paintings were good, but told me to think about what their style could lead to, what the same artist’s later pictures would be like. Then, in great detail, he described what he foresaw. When we went out we passed through another gallery. There, unbeknown to either of us, were the same artist’s later paintings. They were exactly as Antal had described them.

      Finally I want to mention his optimism. He always said that it was not age or generation which counted, but one’s outlook. And it was the optimism of Antal’s outlook that kept him young. As an exile, at odds in his fundamental beliefs with nearly all his Western colleagues, and – a lack he felt very keenly – denied in this country any outlet for his great talents as a polemicist, he had little personal reason for being optimistic. Nor was his optimism of the short-term sentimental sort. Indeed he saw very clearly the full extent of the present corruption of Western culture and realised that even when true socialism had been achieved, it would take a long time for any tradition of real art to be re-established. What I call his optimism consisted of his conviction that all who fought this corruption and worked for socialism – in however small or unrecognised a way – were doing something of certain value. In an age of frantic self-justification erected over a sense of futility and despair, he remained intellectually calm: confident in the judgment of history which – as I have tried to show – meant for him the judgment of the future.

       5.

       An Address to DanishWorker Actors on the Artof Observation, by BertoltBrecht, Translated by AnyaRostock and John Berger

      You have come here to act plays

      But now you are to be asked:

      For what purpose?

      You have come here to reveal

      Yourselves in all that you can do.

      You think this worthy of being watched.

      And you hope the people will applaud

      As you transport them

      Out of the narrowness of their world

      Into the largeness of yours,

      Sharing with you the dizzy peaks

      And the tumults of passion.

      But now you are to be asked:

      For what purpose is this?

      On their low benches

      Your spectators begin to argue.

      Some hold and maintain

      You must do more than show yourselves.

      You must show the world.

      Where is the use, they ask,

      Of being shown time and time again

      How this one can be sad

      How she is heartless

      How that one would make a wicked king?

      Where is the use in this endless

      Exhibiting of grimaces,

      These antics of a handful

      In the hands of their fate?

      You show us only people dragged along,

      Victims of foreign forces and themselves.

      An invisible master

      Throws them down

      Their joys like crumbs to dogs.

      And so too the noose is fitted round their necks –

      The tribulation that comes from above.

      And we on our low benches

      Held by your twitches and grimacing faces,

      We gape with fixed eyes

      And feel at one remove

      Joys that are given like alms,

      Fears beyond control.

      No. We who are discontented

      Have had enough on our low benches.

      We are no longer satisfied.

      Have you not heard it spread abroad

      That the net is knotted

      And is cast

      By men?

      Even now

      In the cities of a hundred floors,

      Over the seas on which the ships are manned,

      To the furthest hamlet –

      Everywhere now the report is: man’s fate is man.

      You actors of our time,

      The time of change

      And the time of the great taking over

      Of all nature to master it

      Not forgetting human nature,

      This is now our reason

      For insisting that you alter.

      Give us the world of men as it is,

      Made by men and changeable.

      Thus the gist of the talk on the low benches.

      Not all of course agree.

      Most sit, their shoulders hunched,

      With brows furrowed

      Like stony fields ploughed

      Repeatedly in vain.

      Worn away by increasing daily struggles

      They avidly await the very thing their companions

      Hate.

      A little kneading for the slack spirit.

      A little tightening for the tired nerve.

      The easy adventure of magically

      Being led by the hand

      Out from the world given them,

      Out from the one they cannot master.

      Whom then, actors, should you obey?

      I’d say: the discontented.

      Yet how to begin? How to show

      The living together of men

      That it may be understood

      And

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