A Book I'm Looking Forward To

From Jim Johnson's (Notes On) Politics, Theory & Photography comes exciting news - a new book from John Berger, due out in June. Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance.

More from the Verso website:

From Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 and 7/7, to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the countless personal choices, encounters, illuminations, sacrifices, new desires, griefs and memories that occur in the course of political resistance to empire and colonialism.

These sensuous reflections reveal the political at the core of human existence, from the relentlessness of daily life in the West Bank, to the potential force of desire, to the unflinching gaze of Pasolini's political film. Visceral and passionate, Hold Everything Dear is a profound meditation on what political resistance means today, by one of the most compelling radical voices of our age.

I did think to write at greater length about Berger himself and why his work matters so much to me, but I had trouble distilling this into a single blog post. At which point, I got the idea of creating a separate site (organised more appropriately to the task) on which to publish my notes on Berger, Garner and Illich - and the connections and resonances between their work. Because they are generally shelved in different sections of the bookshop, these connections have seldom been made, but I have found them deeply helpful in making sense of the world we're in.

So one of the reasons for the relatively neglected state of this blog is that I have started work on that site, under the title 'Redrawing the Maps'. Given the number of unfinished grand projects gathering dust in different corners of my life, I'm keeping this simple. As soon as I've pulled together enough material to be of use or interest to anyone - hopefully within the next few weeks - I'll make it public, while continuing to add to it as and when I get the chance.

Prehistoric Totalitarianism and Tiny Elephants

I just got round to starting Steven Mithen's 'After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-50,000 BC'. As befits a book which comes recommended by Alan Garner, it is both a damned good read and an education.

Without abandoning his professional rigour, Mithen provides the layman with a tour of a prehistoric world, many of whose 'most remarkable events remain hidden from all but a few academics and specialist readers in scholarly works of impenetrable and jargon-laden prose.' This is the story of the origins of farming, towns and civilisation against the backdrop of (at times dramatic) shifts in climate.

As Mithen acknowledges, the bumpy journey from the Last Glacial Maximum to the more hospitable world of the Holocene offers food for thought for us, facing the unknowns of man-made climate change. There are stories here which put a quietness on you. Consider the Natufians, who lived comfortably in villages across the Middle East for fifty generations, before the climatic switchback of the Younger Dryas brought in a thousand years of cold and drought, scattering them to a hungry, wandering existence.

Then there is a nightmarish reconstruction of the early town of Çatalhöyük, with its fearsome iconography of bulls and women whose breasts split apart to reveal the skulls of dead animals. Mithen suspects its residents, alienated from nature, became trapped inside their own myths: 'every aspect of their lives had become ritualised, any independence of thought and behaviour crushed out of them by an oppressive ideology manifest in the bulls, breasts, skulls and vultures.'

After this, it is a relief to reach the chapter on Cyprus, which reminded me - somewhat improbably - of a post from my favourite blogging librarian, relating a visit from her inlaws. The following dialogue was originally offered as proof of their deepening strangeness:

MiL: You know they made small animals out of bigger animals?

Me: *wondering if we're about to get a Talk on the Miracle of Birth* Not exactly...?

MiL: Well, you know, like domestic cats were bred from big wild cats, and dogs from wolves, and so on.

Me: Oh! Yes, what of it?

MiL: Well, don't you think they should make tiny elephants? You could stroke them *vigorously mimes stroking 2ft high elephant* They would look so cute scampering around the house, and they wouldn't shed on the carpet.

FiL: They're terrible for shedding skin, though, elephants are. *nods wisely*

Me: *boggles*

Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I have a soft spot for hippopotami - so I was doubly delighted to discover that not only tiny elephants but herds of tiny hippo actually existed in prehistoric Cyprus! This came about, not as my friend's in-laws proposed, through domestication, but as a result of the lack of predators on the island, 'great bulks being quite unnecessary if the only worry is to procure sufficient food and sex to ensure the survival of genes':

Both elephants and hippos gradually assumed the size of large pigs, the latter far more numerous and seeming to behave like pigs themselves. They were good swimmers but seemed happier scurrying through the undergrowth, feeding on leaves and shoots. The hippos had drunk from freshwater springs on the cliff-tops. In cold weather they had sheltered in coastal caves, being adept at climbing up and down steep slopes.

Controversy rages, apparently, over whether these marvellous sounding creatures were hunted to extinction by the first humans to reach Cyprus, at around 10,000 BC, or had already given up the ghost as a result of climate change. (Mithen comes down on the latter side of the argument.)

So much to write about, and I'm not yet a quarter of the way through this utterly fascinating book! (Meanwhile, here is a pair of small hippos I met in Trafalgar Square the other weekend...)

Mud Maps and Long Breakfasts

Around this time last year I had the good luck to share the back seat of a car to and from a conference with a young academic called Anthony McCann. I had already read one of his articles which suggested both that he was alarmingly clever and that we had many interests in common, and so that weekend led to a friendship which grew over the following months. On Monday mornings we would meet at 8.15 at my favourite cafe and it was not unusual for us still to be there, several coffees down, as the lunchtime rush began.

That series of drawn out breakfasts offered the most sustained period of intellectual guidance I had known since leaving Oxford. Six years on, I was more committed to the ground we covered and (with no disrespect to my old tutors) had found a teacher better suited to my own ways of thinking. (Among other things, it had the effect of allaying my insecurity about never quite making it back to academic study, despite the good intentions and aborted Masters courses of my mid-twenties.)

Sadly for me, though not for him, Anthony moved on to Derry last summer, where he now lectures at the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster. Around the same time, my own life became busier, and our friendship has lain fallow of late. But I was brought back tonight to one of the maxims to which he would return regularly in our conversations. "The more the words matter, the less they matter."

It seems a paradoxical saying for a pair who could talk four hours flat and barely stop for breath. (On one memorable occasion, our conversation was overheard by Sam West, who introduced himself afterwards and expressed an interest in hearing more of my ideas - an interest which sadly came to nothing...) But besides reminding me that I'm too good at hiding in words, Anthony's point was that the more you insist on the letter of what you or anyone else is saying, the less likely it is that you are paying attention to or being heard by those you are with.

Ivan Illich gets at a similar truth in his essay, 'The Eloquence of Silence'. (I quoted this at greater length on Anthony's Crafting Gentleness blog last summer.) He is reflecting on the experience of providing language training to priests, teachers and social workers:

It is... not so much the other man's words as his silences which we have to learn in order to understand him...

The man who tries to buy the language like a suit, the man who tries to conquer the language through grammar so as to speak it "better than the natives around here" ...is a man who tries basically to rape the culture into which he is sent, and he must expect the corresponding reactions... He continues to "do things for people" and considers them ungrateful because they understand that he does these things to bolster his ego...

It requires much courage at this point to return to the patient silence of interest or to the delicacy of the silence within which words grow.

What brought me back to that passage tonight was an account (courtesy of Juliet E McKenna) of Alan Garner's appearance at last year's Cheltenham Literary Festival, where he told the story of The Stonebook Quartet, which is the story of his family:

Alan talked of childhood visits to his grandfather; of the way silence was as much a part of conversations as words, and how he absorbed knowledge of local family, history and legend by osmosis. How for him, family became something between linear time and a time beyond history, a universality. As he grew older, he realised that local stories attributed to a stone-cutting great-great grandfather couldn’t possibly be quite true. Later, he learned that this is a feature of folk-myth, where significant local features and stories are successively tied to real figures on the upper limit of local living memory. So to question the truth of such a story is to completely miss the point.

What leapt at me was the bit about the role of silence in conversation - and Garner is, by all accounts, as outstanding a linguist as was Illich - but on re-reading, I notice that the last line of that paragraph is also a version of Anthony's maxim, for to question the truth of the story is to make the words matter overly.

(These are strange things to say, for few handle words with so great a respect as Alan Garner - yet to do so is to recognise their strangeness, just as the Biblical literalist denies it. To idolise something is, by this line of thought, a form of disrespect.)

I am fascinated by the kind of common ground which is invisible to the categories into which writers and thinkers are conventionally sorted. So that I find resonances again and again between Garner and Illich, or between either and John Berger, Hugh Brody, Rowan Williams and so on. (You are unlikely to spot such resonances if you place importance on the labels which attach to a writer, so that Garner is a children's novelist, Berger an old Marxist art critic and Williams the Archbishop of Canterbury - another case of letting the words matter too much.)

sMary tells me that I go about constructing subterranean canons - which is fine, so long as it's clear that these alignments of names and texts are improvised to fit the moment, not presented as an alternative pantheon. (A moment may be a single conversation or a life's work.) If they are helpful, it is in the way that a map sketched in the mud may help:

A mud map is the map a farmer draws on the ground for a passing traveller. It is rough and ready, not very detailed, and lacks nuance. The scale may be inaccurate. But the map has on it the details needed for the journey.

(Thanks to Jan Thomas for the 'mud map' analogy, which I find very helpful.)