If Two People
“If two people are laying a tablecloth on a table,” says John Berger in Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, “they glance at one another to check the placing of the cloth. Imagine the table is the world and the cloth the lives of those we have to save.”
I would like to move from anger to understanding and kindness. I would like to move from despair toward philosophy and ethics and goodness. I would like to think about pain less, and joy, more. And the thing is that it’s possible to think about all these things simultaneously but that there is going to be more weight given to some rather than others right now. I happen to live in a province that currently has the highest number of Covid-19 cases in North America. And as Calgary Mayor Nenshi said, “all that matters is we stay safe, and keep each other safe.” I can’t help wondering, even, if being angry right now is a form of kindness in that it enacts an emotional and possibly physical protectiveness. To quote the Chicks, albeit from another context, I’m not really ready to make nice with anti-maskers and illegal gatherers.
So yes, the desire is to survive, to hold everything dear, and so it’s no wonder that Berger’s book, the title, literally leapt off the shelf at me the other day. The book is about another time (but not really), terrorism, poverty, war, refugees, politics, consumerism, and again, I know that our present circumstances can’t be compared to the devastation of war. But Berger is a thinker, a philosopher, whose words travel through time and illuminate dark places.
He says in an essay on the tyranny of war, “One could argue that philosophy began with the question, why pain?” He says that “much of the present suffering could be alleviated or avoided if certain realistic and relatively simple decisions were taken. There is a very direct relation today between the minutes of meetings and minutes of agony.”
In another essay, he says, “The world has changed. Information is being communicated differently. Misinformation is developing its techniques.” And didn’t that just come true?
How did we get here? This is a good question but a hard one to answer when you’re in the thick of time. Where do we go from here?
What if the table was the world and when we spread out the tablecloth with such care and lovingness that we would all be covered? Yet. Why does it feel as though there is a third set of hands trying to grab the cloth away from the other two, constantly right now?
One of the great things about blogging — an aside (also another great thing about blogging, the asides one can make) — is that one reads things that one wouldn’t otherwise. So while searching Berger’s book, I came upon this essay upon it by Ron Slate in which he remarks:
“Typically, we say there are three vocal categories in contemporary literature: the searching and questioning voices, the warning and accusing voices, and the healing and celebrating voices. Berger’s voice, lyrically composed, honors its own exceptionalism through accessibility and transparency, presented as an achievable model of speaking/seeing for everyone. It is a desperate way of perceiving, wrenched from lurking forces. Someone is being saved, saving himself for others to watch the salvaging. Thus without didacticism, Berger has denounced and penetrated, offering balm and alarm – transcending all three vocal categories.”
The thing about reading Berger is you don’t have to agree with everything he says but the point is to go on thinking about things, perceiving things, however desperately, to go on looking deeper at the world and how it works, and to be aware of who is taking the minutes at the meeting and how they’re shared. We read him for both balm and alarm. We read him because of all those we hold dear.
I’ve noticed a quotation making the rounds again by May Sarton from Journal of a Solitude — a book which in part inspired my own Calm Things back in the day). She says, “Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”
Keep busy with survival, says Sarton, and we try, even though survival really is just imitating trees. How did she know?
And while you are doing this, surviving that is, it’s good to also be seeking out and making beautiful things. On beauty, Peter Schjeldahl said, “Beauty is, or ought to be, no big deal, though the lack of it is. Without regular events of beauty, we live estranged from existence, including our own.”
Beauty, in my opinion, right now, is actually a really big deal. And that’s because we are a little estranged from existence, at least I feel as though I am.
Still, everything else goes on, and if you don’t follow my posts on Instagram, you might not know all that has been going on for me and my famjam this week. And it’s all great, wonderful, kind of amazing stuff really. Which at this time seems a bit exhausting? Ha. We’re loving it all, but it seems weird to be celebrating in the middle of a pandemic and all that. As we all are doing, and have done, amid everything else. The lows and the highs are intermingling in all new and surprising ways, aren't they?
And so with all that, I still have my book on the horizon to look forward to, which is actually truly heart-bursting — to think that this can happen amid everything else. I have my incredible publisher Palimpsest Press to thank for just persisting and being so enthusiastic and kind and also really professional and efficient, which is something I really appreciate. Because it’s easy to forget how hard it is just to operate in normal ways in these intense times and that everyone has a life outside of their work that has become tricky in immeasurable ways. And so if you can keep stuff fun and light in all this, well that is a balm and a boon.
Lastly, in the works is, get this, a new edition of Calm Things, my book of essays from 2008, because it has all but gone out of print. (There might be a few copies out in the wild here and there available). Because I’m posting more irregularly here, and if you want to make sure you get the book news etc., just wanted to let you know that you can subscribe to my posts here as a newsletter (scroll down for the form if you’re not already reading it in an email ;) ).
May 6, 2021
