Ghost whisperer

John Berger visits with the spirits of his past in Here Is Where We Meet

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In “Lisboa,” the first of the eight (and a half) pieces that comprise John Berger’s Here Is Where We Meet, we alight upon a square somewhere in the Portuguese capital to encounter a woman seen projecting “demonstrable stillness”—a stillness that, for Berger, functions as a way of getting attention rather than diverting it. Berger describes Lisbon as a city of streetcars running smoothly while practically pressed against houses, of unique light and visual trickery, of elaborately adorned cemeteries, of ancient aqueducts that have survived major earthquakes; it is a city of endurance. As he comes closer to the still woman, he discovers that it’s his mother, who, we’re told, has been dead for several years. Nonetheless, they walk through the city and converse, part and meet again, until she vanishes into a serene afternoon that matches her stillness.

In his previous work, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos, Berger concentrated on the nature of space and time, gleaning poetic truths from the slippery, raw musculature of physics. With Here Is Where We Meet, there is the sense that space ultimately becomes a tool for transcending time’s directional singularity, and that Berger’s encounters with the dead are entirely dependent on location and certain spatial conditions. Characteristically nomadic and resistant to definition, the book never announces its larger purposes or final destinations, but it keeps moving, sometimes hurtling, across maps and memories; the movement gives way to a loosening of historical order. Berger is getting close to 80 now, and perhaps, in his relative proximity to death, he can catch a few glimpses of the dead, with clear eyes and without sentimentality. And he can do it with the alignment to the sensual world that has been dazzling his readers for 50 years.

In Geneva, he visits Borges’s grave and leaves a glove in lieu of flowers. In Krakow, he meets Ken, “who was born in New Zealand and died there.” They met when Berger was 11 and Ken was 40, and Ken taught him about wandering, bluffing and books, which the young Berger absorbed idiosyncratically, distrusting literary explanations and never once asking about what he failed to understand. There’s also the feeling that Ken helped to found Berger’s romanticism, since they shared an understanding that “we learn how to live partly from books.” As with other encounters, there’s no whiff of the fantastical, just two guys drinking cans of Polish beer and talking; though by the end, Berger, who never knew how Ken died, will finally be able to suffer his death.

In one stream, he examines the art left behind by the dead wife of an old friend in Islington and explores art left behind in darkened caves by Cro-Magnons in France 30,000 years ago (in his brilliant piece of speculative anthropology “Le Pont d’Arc”), and through it, Berger weaves together the processes of creativity, labour, cooking, the removal of boots and travelling along highways into a single fabric of experience. “The Szum and the Ching,” the penultimate and longest piece in the book, most clearly resembles a stream, not only in its mental connecting of two rivers but also in its propulsive flow of associative images and events, linking together several ideas from earlier in the book and developing them further. While Berger prepares a soup and waits for the arrival of some guests, he ponders persistent mysteries (a well-kept grave in the woods) and ideas that take a lifetime to understand (his father’s building of a drawbridge that leads nowhere over the stream behind Berger’s childhood home).

Berger gives us back the world like few writers do, sculpted, mulled over, but with the raw materials gleaming on the surface. The travelogue-memoir-fiction-essay hybrid of Here Is Where We Meet is come by naturally, without much sense of a classical literary schema at work. But there is, throughout, an awareness of collected parts that are building up to something never reached, because to reach it would be to deny the transitory nature of the work and impose a fixed view. And it mirrors a “hunch” that Berger declares late in the text: “Counting is a way of secretly approaching something other than what is being counted.” V

Here Is Where We Meet
By John Berger • Bloomsbury U.K. • 237 pp. • $35.95

Ghost whisperer

John Berger visits with the spirits of his past in Here Is Where We Meet

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