And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (review)

Robert Buckeye

Minnesota Review, Number 28, Spring 1987 (New Series), pp. 102-104
(Article)
Published by Duke University Press

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In writing about some of Berger's most recent essays, Dyer makes the following claims
about Berger's conception of the aesthetic:
Far from being an idealist category, the aesthetic for Berger is that part of reality in
which the labour of existence, "the production of the world," is most intensely revealed. Berger sees this most clearly in the work of Van Gogh: "Take a chair, a bed, a
pair of boots. His act of painting them was far nearer than that of any other painter
to the carpenter's or the shoemaker's act of making them." . . .That is what the aesthetic
means to Berger. Art is part of the labour of producing the world. In the aesthetic
we see at the highest level of intensity the process by which reality is being produced,
(pp. 140-41).

This is a false move, which, far from avoiding idealism, reproduces one of its classical avatars:
the elevation of poiesis to the plane of metaphysical principle. The closeness to a certain
Heidegger hereBerger's choice of Van Gogh as exemplar cannot have been fortuitousis
both obvious and telling. As Wittgenstein once said of philosophy, the conception of art
to which Dyer appeals leaves everything just as it is. Historical materialism imposes more
stringent demands upon the aesthetic understood as a social practice.
If Dyer's account of Berger bends the stick too far in the direction of a metaphysics
of art, this is no doubt due largely to the impasse which any socialist artist must encounter
when reflecting lucidly upon the position of art within class-divided societies. Among Berger's
earliest attempts to grapple with this problem, A Painter of Our Time still seems to me to
have posed its necessary conditions. For Janos Lavin, painting and politics are utlimately
irreconcilable inside the social forms of the present. Authentic art, by which is meant an
art that expresses the reality of human achievement (as opposed to its Utopian aspirations),

is deeply incompatible with the structures of life in capitalist societies. Luka'cs once remarked

that only in the classless society of the future will the true nature of the aesthetic be realized.
Chastened by just this understanding of art's relationship to politics and history, Lavin abandons his budding career in London to return to his native Hungary and participate in the
1956 revolution. We may perhaps recognize in Berger's light from Britain and his removal
to a peasant community in the Haute-Savoie a similar commitment. While there are unmistakable gestures in Berger's writings toward a possible art and society of the future, it
would not be inconsistent with the entirety of his output to see it equally as a militant repudiation of art. If such a conclusion leaves us vaguely dissatisfied, this is but the mark of the
failure of capitalism to realize the conditions under which a successful artistic career might
be attained. The horizon of John Berger's project remains that which he so brilliantly mapped apropos of Picasso and cubism some twenty years ago.
MICHAEL SPRINKER

And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos by John Berger. New York: Pantheon Books,
1984. 101 pp. $5.95 (paper); $12.45 (cloth).
One painting that John Berger discusses in this book is Rembrandt's The Woman in
Bed, whose model was the great love of Rembrandt's life, Hendricke Stoffels. "In the pain-

ting," Berger writes, "there is a complicity between the woman and the painting ___ In

her face, the two of them are reunited, ... his image of her in bed, as he remembers her;

her image of him, as she sees him approaching their bed." We are at once privileged to

witness an intimate moment in the lives of two lovers at the same time we are shut off from

their lives, which remain opaque to us. It is, Berger implies, what art can do: it tells us all,

while, in a certain sense of the world, it tells us nothing. It is very much the image we must
keep in mind for this remarkable book, which is also about Berger's love for the woman
in his life, the relationship of that love or love to the world around it, and how that love

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determined in many ways how And Our Faces is written. Like the Rembrandt painting, this
book is the most personal and intimate of gestures, and the most secret. At the same time
its consideration of love is as much its limitation as its strength.
And Our Faces is divided into two parts, the first about time and the second about space.
It includes discussions, throughout brief and telescoped, of the metaphysics of post offices
and railroad stations; of writing letters and meeting loved ones; of a photograph of Turkish
workers who would be executed if the authorities were to see the photograph; of the death
of a friend; of the historical functions of prose and poetry; and of lilacs, hares, kittens,
glow worms, the night sky, fields. In the first part (time), each section begins with the ageold storyteller's opening, "once," and untitled poems of Berger's are scattered throughout.
In the second part (space), the sections are not titled but the poems are. In this most personal of books (his publisher's comment), there is no mention of his other books or writing,
his politics, experience or circumstances. The clear reason why is that these brief addresses
are, in effect, love letters written to the absent Other, and there is no need to tell loved ones

these things. Berger begins the book with a poem about a photograph he has of the woman
he loves and concludes it with a statement of his love. To note how Berger has ordered the
materials of his book into time or space categories, in other words, may prevent us from
remembering that this is indeed a book about love (as its title suggests), how we connect,
and what drives us apart, and that it addresses the reader as a lover writes his beloved.
The argument runs this way: in a world in which capitalist economy and imperialist practices uproot us all, we either are or will be homeless, exiles of one kind or another, with
distance a measure not so much of miles but of alienation and loneliness. In these cir-

cumstances, what we consider home is less an actual place than it is an ontological center,
our essentially real; and, at the very least, "Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold
story of a life being lived." (Here, and elsewhere. Berger is an important witness to dispossession and dislocation; his writing locates for us the landscape of such loss and removal.) Community in this context cannot be what it once was; relationships become transformed; and
History, which replaced God as the judgment of the world and was once, "the guardian
of the past . . . has become the midwife of the future. It no longer speaks of the changeless,
but rather, of the laws of change which spare nothing." Where in this world, Berger asks
again and again, do we find home, a shelter?
Love is one place ("what happens between women and men in love is beyond history").
It brings together, Berger notes, two displaced persons. It aims to close all distance. It
remembers beginnings and origins. In short, love promises to return us home, at one with
our world and our selves. World-wide solidarity is another: "then the substitute for the shelter
of a home will not just be our personal names, but our collective conscious presence m history,
and we will live again at the heart of the real." Poetry is yet one more place to live, find
shelter, for though it "can repair no loss, ... it defies the space which separates."
Berger's narrative circles around these concerns of home, exile and distance; of love and
loss, death; of real and imagined worlds; of why work clothes smell the way they do; of
how the ways we use language describe how we live; and of why gravestones record names,
and birth and death dates. His discussion of Caravaggio is characteristic of his method in
the book. "One night in bed," he begins, "you asked me who was my favorite painter."
Berger answers by mentioning how he understood Caravaggio for the first time in Livorno
after World War II, where he was himself painting and where he "discovered that I wanted
as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power"; then, he briefly places
Caravaggio in art history, discusses his use of darkness in his painting and darkness in general,
particularly its function among the poor, criminals, the outcast, considers death and how
the poor mourn, returns to a consideration of the underworld, its theatricality, quotes a
poem of Cavafy's, and concludes with an analysis of sexuality in Caravaggio's paintings
and sexuality in general. Here, as elsewhere, he uses the personal to abstract a more general,
broader understanding and the general to derive the personal once again in its particularity.
And though he engages the personal, we learn nothing further in this discussion of Caravaggio
of the woman who asked the question, the room they are in, the circumstances of their conversation; only Berger's answer, in how and what he considers and discusses, is a measure,

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oblique as it is, of what he thinks of her.

Albert Memmi writes how he conceived of love as the only answer to solitude, the one

escape from the world, the sure possibility for happiness as well as how he was to discover
that "the whole world is within the couple." We've all been there: love takes us out of the
world. But we also always return to a world ever more there (here); the distance love erases
also brings that distance to life. Berger's embrace of love underlines what we have lost, and
how radical we must become. Love may be the way, but it has to be more than meets the
eye and less idealistic than Berger presents it. Whatever its many perceptions, and despite

its daring in analyzing romantic love as a crucial, even revolutionary, action, And Our Faces
takes us only as far as our experience of love will permit.
ROBERT BUCKEYE

Richard Blessing. Poems and Stories. Seattle: Dragon Gate, 1986. 75 pp. $6.00 (paper).
A few years ago some of the poems reprinted here appeared in Poetry Northwest. I read
and was deeply moved by them, and have not forgotten the experience. They concern the
brain tumor which afflicted the author and which, before this book was published, caused

his death. That's how I introduced the poems when I read them in my classes, the poems
of a man dying, a man just dead. How strange to read them aloud to students, to one class
in particular, crowded with young writers straining to know themselves. How good they
are as writers, if they "can" write, to read words from someone who knew these poems

to be probably the last few things he would pen. I felt, I think, privileged to serve as the
emissary for them, proud that I had been as if chosen to offer them up in those rooms full
of light and life, to be carrying forth Richard Blessing's struggle in a world that otherwise
might not know what it was. But as I read I also partially understood how unfair it was
to present such powerful work in an academic context. Some listeners might ascertain how
fine the poems are, but most of us are as remote from such crises as we are from World
War II. As I recall this, a passage from Donald Justice comes to mindI felt as if I were
someone "come down from Mars or the moon."

Reading the poems I also felt vindicated. I was using them. If in my own poetry I cannot

offer persuasive evidence that language is muscle and blood, if my own passions cannot
invest in others or in things the fierce self-consciousness in which these poems sing in me,
then these poems, written in extremis, and by someone already a sensitive writer before his
illness, would attest, would body forth the banner of poetry before all present distraction
and indifference. They would stir us to new heights, new honesties.
Such passion does inevitably abate. The weather changes, someone sneezes, a page turns.
The skin grows cautious of its vulnerable display, and we retreat invariably into our own
cares and mutterings. The reading comes to an end, people who have been silent bestir
themselves, there is a rustle of papers, chairs are pushed back, doors open, a rush of voices
in the hall. Class is over, other classes beckon, parking meters have run down and need
to be fed, the living go again about their business. A typical academic setting, full of promise, dissolves into fragments of attention, into forgetfulness. Richard Blessing, who spent
his last years teaching, or trying to teach despite his cancer, might approve my effort and
understand my frustration.

This is one kind of use to which these poems may be put. (That they have uses, that
one imagines better or worse contexts for them, signifies their uniqueness among our present poetry.) Young writers here discover how poetry persists unto death, that poems are
life even in the face of annihilation or oblivion. Or that one writes poetry not for "credit"
or glory or merely out of habit, but as one lives and breathes.
Surely another thing to do with these poems is to ask how good they are. Regarding
them as I have here as sacred texts, utterances against one man's overwhelming doom, may
be a way of avoiding talking about them as pieces of writing. My question is basically whether