John Berger - Keeping a Rendezvous

John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, was published in 1958, and since then his books have included the novel G., which won the Booker Prize in 1972, and the Into Their Labours trilogy, which is composed of Pig Earth (1979), Once in Europa (1987), and Lilac and Flag. His six volumes of essays include Keeping a Rendezvous (1991), The Sense of Sight (1985), Ways of Seeing (1972), and About Looking (1980).

In 1962 Berger left Britain permanently, and he now lives in a small village in the French Alps.

THE WORKS OF JOHN BERGER

PIG EARTH (first book
of the Into Their Labours trilogy)

ONCE IN EUROPA (second book of the trilogy)

LILAC AND FLAG (third book of the trilogy)

A PAINTER OF OUR TIME

PERMANENT BED

THE FOOT OF CLIVE

CORKERS FREEDOM

A FORTUNATE MAN

ART AND REVOLUTION

THE MOMENT OF CUBISM AND OTHER ESSAYS

THE LOOK OF THINGS: SELECTED ESSAYS AND ARTICLES

WAYS OF SEEING

ANOTHER WAY OF TELLING

A SEVENTH MAN

G.

ABOUT LOOKING

AND OUR FACES, MY HEART, BRIEF AS PHOTOS

THE SENSE OF SIGHT

THE SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF PICASSO

KEEPING A RENDEZVOUS

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, NOVEMBER 1992

Copyright 1991 by John Berger

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1991.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berger, John.
Keeping a rendezvous / John Berger.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Pantheon, 1991.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79429-1
1. ArtPsychology. 2. Visual perception. 3. Meaning (Psychology) 4. Observation (Psychology) I. Title.
[N71.B399 1992]
701.15dc20 92-50073

v3.1

The essays in this work were originally published as follows:

Miners, first printed in an exhibition catalogue of Paintings and Drawing by Knud and Solwei Stampe. The Cleveland Gallery, Middlesbrough, England, 1989.

Evry Time We Say Goodbye, first published in a slightly modified version in Expressen, Stockholm, November 3, 1990.

That Which Is Held, first published in the Village Voice, April 13, 1982.

A Load of Shit, first published as Muck and Its Entanglements in Harpers Magazine, May 1989.

Her Secrets, now titled Mother, first published in Threepenny Review, Summer 1986.

A Story for Aesop. Part of this text was first published in Granta, no. 21, Spring 1986, and another part in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, April 1986.

Imagine Paris, first published in Harpers Magazine, January 1987.

A Kind of Sharing, first published in the Guardian, November 23, 1989.

Christ of the Peasants, first published by the Arts Council of Great Britain for the exhibition Pilgrims: Photographs by Marketa Lustacova, 1985.

A Professional Secret, first published in New Society, December 18, 1987.

One Bear, first published in Socialist Challenge, December 14, 1978.

Ape Theatre, first published in Tages-Anzeiger, November 9/10, 1990.

Infancy, first published in the Guardian, September 21, 1990.

The Opposite of Naked, first published as Nakedness Veiled with Paint in Harpers Magazine, December 1985.

A Household, first published in New Statesman & Society, July 15, 1988.

Drawing on Paper, first published as To Take Paper, to Draw in Harpers Magazine, September 1987.

Erogenous Zone, previously published in El Pais, April 8, 1988.

Lost Off Cape Wrath, first published in Threepenny Review, Winter 1988.

A Different Answer, first published in Tages-Anzeiger, May 5/6, 1989.

Keeping a Rendez-Vous, now titled The Soul and the Operator, first published in Expressen, March 19, 1990.

F OR B EVERLY

I TRAVEL to places. I live the years. This is a book about keeping rendezvous. (The ones I failed to keep are another story.) Each account begins with an image which conjures up something of where the meeting took place. Some would not be easy to find on a map, others would be. All of them, of course, have been visited by other travellers. I hope readers too will find themselves saying: Ive been here.

MINERS

W HEN THE JUST CAUSE is defeated, when the courageous are humiliated, when men proven at pit-bottom and pit-head are treated like trash, when nobility is shat upon, and the judges in court believe lies, and slanderers are paid to slander with salaries which might keep alive the families of a dozen miners on strike, when the Goliath police with their bloody truncheons find themselves not in the dock but on the Honours List, when our past is dishonoured and its promises and sacrifices shrugged off with ignorant and evil smiles, when whole families come to suspect that those who wield power are deaf to reason and every plea, and that there is no appeal anywhere, when gradually you realize that, whatever words there may be in the dictionary, whatever the Queen says or parliamentary correspondents report, whatever the system calls itself to mask its shamelessness and egoism, when gradually you realize that They are out to break you, out to break your inheritance, your skills, your communities, your poetry, your clubs, your home and, wherever possible, your bones too, when finally people realize this, they may also hear, striking in their head, the hour of assassinations, of justified vengeance. On sleepless nights during the last few years in Scotland and South Wales, Derbyshire and Kent, Yorkshire, Northumberland and Lancashire, many, as they lay reflecting on their beds, heard, I am sure, this hour striking. And nothing could be more human, more tender than such a proposed vision of the pitiless being summarily executed by the pitiful. It is the word tender which we cherish and which They can never understand, for they do not know what it refers to. This vision is occurring all over the world. The avenging heroes are now being dreamt up and awaited. They are already feared by the pitiless and blessed by me and maybe by you.