John Berger - Hold Everything Dear - Dispatches on Survival and Resistance

Climb one of the jabals and look down at the Wall, way below winding its geometric divider's course towards the southern horizon. Did you see the hoopoe bird? In the longterm view the Wall looks makeshift.

There are 8,000 political prisoners in Israeli jails, 350 of them under eighteen years old. A period in prison has become a normal phase to be undergone, once or several times, in a man's life. Throwing stones can lead to a sentence of two and a half years or more.

Prison for us is a sort of education, a strange sort of university. The man speaking has glasses, is about fifty and is wearing a business-lunch suit. You learn how to learn there. He's the youngest of five brothers and imports coffeemachines. You learn how to struggle together and become inseparable. Certain conditions have improved over the last forty years — improved thanks to us and our hunger strikes. The most I did was twenty days. We won a quarter of an hour more exercise time each day. In the long-sentence prisons they used to mask the windows so there was no sunshine in the cells. We won back some sunshine. We got one body-search removed from the daily routine. Otherwise, we read and discuss what we read, teach each other different languages. And come to know certain soldiers and some of the guards. In the streets it's the language of bullets and stones between us. Inside it's different. They're in prison just as we are. The difference is we believe in what's got us there, and they mostly don't, because they're just there to earn a living. I know of some friendships that began like that.

The stance of undefeated despair works like this.

The Judean desert between Jerusalem and Jericho is of sandstone, not sand, and is precipitous, not flat. In the spring, parts of it are covered with wild grasses and the goats of Bedouins can feed off it. Later in the year there are only clumps of boxthorn.

If you contemplate this desert, you quickly discover that it's a landscape whose gaze is totally directed towards the sky. A question of geology, not biblical history. It hangs there beneath the sky like a hammock. And when it's windy it twists like a winding sheet. As a result, the sky appears to be more substantial, more urgent, than the land. A porcupine quill blown by the wind lands at your feet. It's not surprising that hundreds of prophets, including the greatest, nurtured their visions here.

The light is fading and a herd of two hundred goats, with a Bedouin shepherd on a mule with his dog, is making its evening zigzag descent down to the camp, where there's water to drink and some extra grain to eat. The thistles and rhizome roots give little nourishment at this time of year.

The difficulty with prophets and their final prophesies is that they tend to ignore what immediately follows an action, ignore consequences. Actions for them, instead of being instrumental, become symbolic. It can happen that prophesies cause people not to see what time contains.

The Bedouin family below are living in two abandoned buildings, not far from a Roman aqueduct. At this time of day the mother will be cooking flat bread, daily bread, on a heated stone. Seven of her sons, who were born here, work with the herd. The family has recently been informed by the IDF that they have to leave before next spring. Hands above the head and walk backwards! All the female goats are pregnant. Five months' gestation period. We'll face that when we get there, says one of the sons. The stance of undefeated despair works like this.

A refusal to see immediate consequences. For example — the Wall and the annexation of still more Palestinian land cannot promise security for the state of Israel; it recruits martyrs.

For example — if a kamikaze martyr could see with their own eyes, before he or she died, the immediate consequences of their explosion, they might well reconsider the appropriateness of their steadfast decision.

The goddamned future of prophesies that ignore all but the final moment!

In the stance I keep referring to, there is something special, a quality which no post-modern or political vocabulary today can find a word for. The quality of a way of sharing which disarms the leading question of: why was one born into this life?

This way of sharing disarms and answers the question not with a promise, or a consolation, or an oath of vengeance — these forms of rhetoric are for the small or large leaders who make History — and this way disarmingly answers the question despite history. Its answer is brief, brief but perpetual. One was born into this life to share the time that repeatedly exists between moments: the time of Becoming, before Being risks to confront one yet again with undefeated despair.

Friday.

Nazim, I'm in mourning and I want to share it with you, as you shared so many hopes and so many mournings with us.

The telegram came at night,

only three syllables:

‘He is dead.' 1

I'm mourning my friend Juan Muñoz, a wonderful artist, who makes sculptures and installations and who died yesterday on a beach in Spain, aged forty-eight.

I want to ask you about something which puzzles me. After a natural death, as distinct from victimization, killing or dying from hunger, there is first the shock, unless the person has been ailing for a long while, then there is the monstrous sense of loss, particularly when the person is young –

The day is breaking

but my room

is composed of a long night. 2

— and there follows the pain, which says of itself that it will never end. Yet with this pain there comes, surreptitiously, something else which approaches a joke but is not one. (Juan was a good joker.) Something which hallucinates, a little similar to the gesture of a conjuror's handkerchief after a trick, a kind of lightness, totally opposed to what one is feeling. You recognize what I mean? Is this lightness a frivolity or a new instruction?

Five minutes after my asking you this, I received a fax from my son Yves, with some lines he had just written for Juan:

You always appeared

with a laugh

and a new trick.

You always disappeared

leaving your hands

on our table.

You disappeared

leaving your cards

in our hands.

You will re-appear

with a new laugh

which will be a trick.

Saturday.

I'm not sure whether I ever saw Nazim Hikmet. I would swear to it that I did, but I can't find the circumstantial evidence. I believe it was in London in 1954. Four years after he had been released from prison, nine years before his death. He was speaking at a political meeting held in Red Lion Square. He said a few words and then he read some poems. Some in English, others in Turkish. His voice was strong, calm, highly personal and very musical. But it did not seem to come from his throat — or not from his throat at that moment. It was as though he had a radio in his breast, which he switched on and off with one of his large, slightly trembling hands. I'm describing it badly because his presence and sincerity were very obvious. In one of his long poems he describes six people in Turkey listening in the early 1940s to a symphony by Shostakovich on the radio. Three of the six people are (like him) in prison. The broadcast is live; the symphony is being played at that same moment in Moscow, several thousand kilometres away. Hearing him read his poems in Red Lion Square, I had the impression that the words he was saying were also coming from the other side of the world. Not because they were difficult to understand (they were not), nor because they were blurred or weary (they were full of the capacity of endurance), but because they were being said to somehow triumph over distances and to transcend endless separations. The here of all his poems is elsewhere.