90th birthday tribute<\/a>\u00a0published in Culture Matters.<\/p>\nLet us start with Berger\u2019s cunningly chosen title, which points, or seems to point, to the poem\u2019s content, or maybe to the way by which we might approach reading it. \u201cHistory\u201d, he announces. Why History, we wonder, and what aspect of History? So we read on, to find out what references there are to the Past, because History is about the Past, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
Oddly, only Berger\u2019s \u201cthe dead\u201d, in both verses, seems to belong to the Past, until we consider that \u201cthe silence\u201d is similarly devoid of life, and that \u201cthe earth\u201d is a place where graves are dug. And, again oddly, all the verbs in the poem are in the Present tense, not the expected Past, namely \u201cpockets\u201d (twice) and \u201cwalk\u201d (once). The poem seems to imply that the dead are alive, making their presence felt in the here-and-now. They are described as having a \u201cpulse\u201d that is \u201cinterminably constant\u201d, and as having eyes that are \u201cinscribed on our palms \/ as we walk on this earth\u201d. (How like a painting by Dali this surreal image is!)<\/p>\n
What of the living in this poem? Where are they? Who are they? As well as us, who walk about, looking and seeing and listening and thinking, Berger cites the thrush. He is thinking, perhaps, of the songthrush, that sings its song twice over, as is well known; or, if he is not, we, his readers, are free to conjure up that response if we wish, sharing as we do the wealth of the English language with the poet. Layers and webs and wisps of inter-textualities are all about, ready to pop into our minds as we read, bestowing an aura of extra meaning to a given text, while not contradicting it.<\/p>\n
What presence does our thrush, full of song, have in the poem? The second half of each of the two verses tells us: first the thrush is \u201cpocketed\u201d by \u201csilence\u201d, and then it is pocketed by \u201cthis earth\u201d, that is to say it is seized by death, or snaffled, or taken into possession, just like that. So the poem demonstrates both life-in-death and death-in-life. That is Berger\u2019s History; or maybe it is Natural History, more like, to use an old-fashioned term. That is the constant dual reality in which we all have our being. That is the \u201cmystery\u201d of Berger\u2019s little gem of a poem.<\/p>\n
There is an alternative way of appreciating the poem, it occurs to me, looking at it again, starting not with the title and with times Past and Present, but starting with the poem\u2019s references to Life and Death. Let us see how these twins relate, using italics and bold to distinguish them.<\/p>\n
The pulse<\/em> of the dead<\/strong>
as interminably
constant as the silence<\/strong>
which pockets<\/strong> the thrush.<\/em><\/p>\nThe eyes<\/em> of the dead<\/strong>
inscribed on our palms
as we walk<\/em> on this earth<\/strong><\/em>
which pockets<\/strong> the thrush.<\/em><\/p>\nThe poem makes these images of life and death work together \u2013 indeed walk together \u2013 very well. Line by line, we are made to see how Life and Death co-exist and interpenetrate, and do so \u201cinterminably\u201d, being \u201cconstant\u201d in their togethering. Significantly, the term \u201cearth\u201d belongs equally in both categories, as my bold italics is intended to show, earth being both the habitat of the living, and, jointly with silence, their \u201cpocketer\u201d.<\/p>\n
So, as before in our first reading, we come to the same realisation of the poem\u2019s \u201cboth-and\u201d wisdom. Let us now explore the context \u2013 other times and places \u2013 in which Berger considered the poem\u2019s themes. Here we can draw on the inspired scholarship of Tom Overton, Berger\u2019s archivist; and what a voluminous archive it is that Tom has worked on, a whole vanload of boxes of decades of work driven from Berger\u2019s house in the Haute-Savoie by Jamie Andrews of the British Library to its place of safe keeping and public access, in London.<\/p>\n
Dear David<\/em><\/p>\nThanks for writing… It looks like the section you quote comes from p16 of And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos. But as so often with JB, he\u2019s revisiting and rephrasing an older thought in a newer context: in this case a section of a longer poem collected in Andy Croft\u2019s edition of JB\u2019s Collected Poems on p 43, and annotated \u201cJura, 1973\u201d. JB was often hazy on remembering the dates of his writings in general, but here I think the voice and thought sounds very much of that place and period…<\/em><\/p>\nHappy writing \u2014 please do send me what you make of it!<\/em><\/p>\nV best<\/em>
Tom<\/em><\/p>\nStraightaway, following Tom\u2019s advice, I went to Berger\u2019s marvellously mixed reflection on Time and Space, and Death and Life, and, cross-cutting all, the power of Poetry, namely And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos, published by Writers and Readers in 1984. I say \u201cmixed\u201d, because, like many of Berger\u2019s books, it is a many-genred work, shifting rapidly and repeatedly between prose and poem, essay and memoir, fact and fiction, narrative and description.<\/p>\n
Here is what I found on p 16: a passage in prose, prefacing the poem that we have been gnawing like a bone. In it, Berger notes the death of one of his friends, and then comments on it, and on all deaths. Key to that passage is the following thought:<\/p>\n
Tony is no longer within the nexus of time as lived by those who, until recently, were his contemporaries. He is on the circumference of that nexus…. Yet he is also within that nexus as are all the dead…<\/p>\n
I have to confess that I find the passage hard to understand. It appears to be self-contradictory; but then comes the poem, and in its eight lovely lines the contradiction is resolved, clearly and elegantly. A remark of David Constantine\u2019s is proved correct, that:<\/p>\n
Berger\u2019s whole oeuvre \u2013 poetry, fiction, political and literary essays \u2013 is of a piece. Some poems… appear there not as lyrical interludes but as further condensations of accounts, events, characters, in the prose…<\/em>
– Preface to The Long White Thread of Words: Poems for John Berger, Smokestack Books, 2016)<\/p>\nChasing up Tom\u2019s second reference, I turned to p 43 of Berger\u2019s Collected Poems (Smokestack Books, 2014), and had a look at the poem printed there, also called \u201cHistory\u201d. Here, through the poet\u2019s eyes, we gaze on a blue sky (not, as before, on the earth), and on buzzards (not on a thrush); but we have the same collapsing of Past and Present into a sort of Present Habitual, \u201cregular as the sun \/ millennia powdered into blue \/sky of all moments lived…\u201d and we have the same sense of the presence of Death, co-habiting with Life: \u201cthe intent head \/ the yellow beak \/ the gut demanding food \/ talons that grip…\u201d<\/p>\n
These two poems by Berger both called \u201cHistory\u201d show him in a characteristic role, that of Death\u2019s Secretary, to borrow one of his self-descriptions. \u201cYou see,\u201d he said to an interviewer not long before his own death:<\/p>\n
I think that the dead are with us\u2026they are a presence. What you think you\u2019re looking at on that long road <\/em>
to the past is actually beside you where you stand…<\/em>
– The New Statesman, June, 2015<\/p>\nReading around, as we have been doing, looking for leads in and out of other texts, and seeking confirmations from other contexts, is akin, is it not, to Berger\u2019s own practice as a writer, and his own practice as an artist and art-critic, too? Consider this observation from his Ways of Seeing (Penguin Books, 1972):<\/p>\n
We are never just looking at one thing, we are always <\/em>looking at the relationship between things and ourselves. <\/em>Our vision is continually active, continually moving, <\/em>continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are.<\/em><\/p>\nHaving done all this looking \u2013 looking at, and behind, and beyond, and between the eight lines of Berger\u2019s \u201cHistory\u201d \u2013 how do we regard the poem when we return to it, as we are bound to be drawn to do, there being so much meat on its bone? There is still a \u201cmystery\u201d here, but one in which we can feel entirely at home.<\/p>\n
History<\/strong><\/p>\nby John Berger<\/p>\n
The pulse of the dead<\/em>
as interminably <\/em>
constant as the silence<\/em>
which pockets the thrush.<\/em><\/p>\nThe eyes of the dead<\/em>
inscribed on our palms<\/em>
as we walk on this earth<\/em>
which pockets the thrush.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Betteridge writes about the poem ‘History’ What interests me about the existence of archives is that you enter the past which is as it were in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":380,"featured_media":13732,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1660],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/380"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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