John Berger - G.

They perhaps distort less than the nouns. Through these drawings, what I have called the quality of firstness in sexual experience is perhaps a little easier to recall. Why? Being visual, they are closer to physical perception. But I doubt whether this is the explanation. A skilful Roman or Renaissance pornographic painting would be still closer to visual perception and yet, for our purpose, it would be more opaque.

Is it because these rough drawings are schematized and diagrammatic? Again, I doubt it. Medical diagrams are sometimes more schematic — and again more opaque. What makes these drawings a little more transparent than words and sophisticated images is that they carry a minimal cultural load. Let us prove it obversely.

Take the first one. Put the word big above it. Already it is changed, and the load increased. It becomes more specifically a message addressed by writer to reader. Put the word his in front of big and it is further changed.

Take the second one and put the following words above it: Choose a woman’s name and write it here . Although the number of words has increased, the drawing remains unchanged. The words do not qualify the drawing or use it syntactically. And so the drawing is still relatively open for the spectator’s exclusive appropriation. Now carry out the instructions. Write the name of, say, Beatrice. Once again the increase of its cultural load renders the drawing opaque. The name Beatrice refers the drawing to an exterior system of categories. What the drawing now represents has become part of Beatrice, Beatrice is part of an historical European culture. In the end we are left looking at a rough drawing of a sexual part. Whereas sexual experience itself affirms a totality.

Take both drawings and put the word I above each one.

I am writing about the lovers on the bed.

Her eyes refocus upon him. Their look is for him something as specific and permanent as a house or a particular door. He will find his way back to it.

It is a look for which the Roman girl’s prepared him four years ago. Behind such a look is a total confidence that at that moment to express something — without thought, without words, but simply through one’s own uncontrollable eyes — is to be instantaneously understood. To be, at that moment, is to be known. Hence all distinctions between the personal and the impersonal disappear.

Do not let us even by a hair’s breadth misinterpret the meaning of this look. The look is simultaneously and in absolutely equal terms appealing and grateful. This does not mean that Beatrice is grateful for what has passed and is appealing for what is to come.

Don’t stop, my sweet, don’t stop, is what she may have said or will do: but not with this look.

Such an interpretation implies that eventually, if all is well, her look will be transformed into one which is purely grateful. An interpretation particularly dear to the male as provider and master. But false.

The look in Beatrice’s eyes being in equal measure appealing and grateful is not the result of these two feelings co-existing. There is only one feeling. She has only one thing to say with her uncontrollable eyes. Nothing exists for her beyond this single feeling. She is grateful for what she appeals for; she appeals for what she is already grateful for.

To follow her look, we enter her state of being. There, desire is its satisfaction, or, perhaps, neither desire nor satisfaction can be said to exist since there is no antinomy between them: every experience becomes the experience of freedom there: freedom there precludes all that is not itself.

The look in her eyes is an expression of freedom which he receives as such, but which we, in order to locate it in our world of third persons, must call a look of simultaneous appeal and gratitude.

A little later she strokes his back and whispers: You see. You see.

The world is not as we have subsided into it. Within us there is the keenness, the sharpness to perform surgery. Within, if we have the courage to wield it, is the cutting edge to sever the whole world as it is, the world that pretends to be part of us, the world to which by compromised and flabby usage we are said to belong. Say now to me. Now to me say to me.

She places her hand so that his testicles may rest upon the palm.

From the long tight bud the longer petals loosen: their tips begin to separate so that at the far end of the flower there is an open mouth. Then, freed, the petals slowly revolve like propellers: in eight hours one may turn between forty-five and ninety degrees. As they revolve they retreat till they are pointing backwards from their small round calyx which is now thrust forward.

Thus a cyclamen opening. And thus too, greatly accelerated, the sensation of his penis becoming erect again and the foreskin again withdrawing from the coronal ridge.

The clocks keep another time.

I was walking through a forest with a woman, smaller than I and blonde. We were happy but not specially preoccupied with one another.

We came to a dead animal’s head, half detached from its body. The animal might have been a fox, a donkey, a deer. The head was hollow like a mask or a glove. The sight should have been disturbing, but it was not. On the contrary it encouraged us. The mouth of the animal seemed to be grinning, its eye peaceful. The tattered skin of its neck was like a wide tattered sleeve. This sideways-lurching grinning severed head of an average-sized animal did not signify the death of that animal; it was purely a sign, put there to encourage us to continue.

We came out of the forest on to a large plain. The sky there was dark and purple but the plain was pale gold. The beauty of this plain, shimmering, many degrees lighter than the sky, made me (and I think her too) entirely happy. Quite near us were two rows of wooden buildings, like stables except that each was separate from the rest like very small wooden Russian houses. Around these buildings were men and women dressed in long whitish clothes. They were buying and selling cattle. (The people were not rich buyers and sellers: they were nomadic herdsmen.) We saw a herd of white cows (bison?) charging over the plains and vaguely in our direction. They were kicking up clouds of golden dust against the blackish sky. Suddenly she was frightened. I was not — perhaps because of the sign in the forest. I put my arms around her and pressed her against me. The intense pleasure of doing this became indistinguishable from that which I derived from what was happening around us. Be still, I said to her, if we are absolutely still, they will avoid us. The cattle thundered past, covering us, pressed tightly against one another, with gold dust. Not a single tail touched us.

They lie abandoned, side by side. The air from the open window cools their bodies and makes them aware of how damp they are, on the front of their stomachs how wet.

It should go on for ever, she says. It is not a complaint. She grips two fingers of his hand. She knows that the pace of time is reverting to normal. She crossed a threshold beyond which space, distance, time were meaningless. The threshold was warm, damp and quivering: animate to a degree for which the inanimate has no qualitative equivalent — unless it be jurassic mountains: animate to a degree at which it seemed that substance became sound alone.

It should go on for ever.

They lie on their backs. He has a sensation of being extended horizontally. He is conscious of the flatness of the bed, the floor, the earth under the house. Everything that is standing looks incongruous and incomplete to him. He is on the point of laughing. Suddenly he notices the portrait of her father on the wall opposite the bed. It is a provincial clumsy painting so that the image of the man oscillates between being a likeness and a childish stereotype of a ruddy-faced country gentleman at an inn. The face looks as though it has been tinted pink. The eyes are blankly fixed. Looking at this portrait of her father, he waves a hand.