On ‘How to Live with Stones’ by John Berger

The scene is kind of pragmatic and very dreamy. In 1998, John Berger writes a letter to Subcomandante Marcos (‘The ski mask! The pipe!’ I chant, to prompt my friend’s memory), the military leader and spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico. It is an open letter to be published in HEAT and the LA Times in the same year, an itinerary that follows a complex literary precedent I’m ill-equipped to place. In part, I realise, this is because my diet of open letters has been pretty unvaried; I guess living in Australia has me accustomed to single-issue appeals bolstered by a few dozen signatories. 

So! There are other open letters! Errant, enigmatic letters, with their different impressions laid side by side. They form a kind of domus de janas for the addressee, where ‘from the inside you can see the sun rise’. And then I think, isn’t this how it feels to read Berger? (‘He was an unorthodox Marxist! He eschewed scholarly dialect!’ I continue, as I lecture my friend.) So! There are other books! Those wild Berger books in which, laid side by side, are the subjects of migration, workers, painting, photography […]!

Down with the intellectual enclosures!Who cares if a few critics thought he was too sentimental and earnest, maybe a bit mushy and vague? Did it occur to any of them to write an open letter to Subcomandante Marcos in the mountains of Southeast Mexico, and moreover, to make the focus of that letter the presence of stones in the hinterland of Ghilarza, Sardinia, where Antonio Gramsci lived from the age of six to twelve?  (Yes, stones!) The scene is pragmatic:

Every tanca – pasture – and every cork-oak plantation has at least one, often several piles of stones and each pile is the size of a large freight truck. These stones have been gathered and stacked together recently so that the soil, dry and poor as it is, can nevertheless be worked.

The scene is also dreamy:

Stones propose another sense of time, whereby the past, the deep past of the planet, proffers a meagre yet massive support to human acts of resistance, as if the veins of metal in rock led to our veins of blood.

I picture Berger writing this at his home in Quincy in the Haute-Savoie region of France in 1998. My picture has him holding his head in his hands. Why did it occur to him, the notion of writing this letter in this way? What does he mean by this ‘deep past’ offering ‘meagre’ yet ‘massive’ support of resistance? He’s flirting freely here – even for him – with the mushy vagueness. And: what’s the secret of the stones? Does Berger stay cryptic so he can support, without seeming to, the case for armed struggle?  Armed struggle as pragmatic and very dreamy. (‘He’s a stone’s throw away from it,’ I smile to my friend.)

—

I picture Berger holding his head in his hands. He is thinking about open letters. He is thinking about the genre of the open letter in Arabic literature (risāla maftūḥa), which stems from the epistolary tradition of rasā’il in classical literature. He is thinking of Nadia’s leg (‘amputated from the top of the thigh’) in Ghassan Kanafani’s ‘Letter from Gaza’, which was published seven years after the Nakba. He is thinking of Kanafani’s stones, which suddenly take on such meaning that the narrator gives up his ticket to a new life in the US, and stays with the possibility of Gaza. A small, obscure feeling grows. (Hope.) Come back, my friend!

And Gaza was brand new, Mustafa! You and I never saw it like this. The stones piled up at the beginning of the Shajiya quarter where we lived had a meaning, and they seemed to have been put there for no other reason but to explain it. This Gaza in which we had lived and with whose good people we had spent seven years of defeat was something new. It seemed to me just a beginning. 

Twenty years after he publishes the open letter to Subcomandante Marcos, Berger reads ‘Letter from Gaza’ at the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature. At the end of the twenty-minute reading, his head falls into his waiting hands. What prevented Gramsci becoming ‘like many revolutionaries, a millennialist’, Berger writes to Marcos, was that he ‘believed in hope rather than promises and hope is a long affair’. And I feel this weight of Berger’s head – heavy with which wish or consciousness? – in the post-script to his letter to Marcos. The note lingers in its description of two stones at the Gramsci museum, carved into round weights the size of grapefruits, that the young Antonio lifted every day to strengthen his shoulders and correct his back. His special patience, Berger writes to Marcos, came from a sense of a practice which will never end. Which seems to me, then, placeable everywhere. Which seems to me, just a beginning—

RE:HEAT is a series in which recent contributors to HEAT reflect on writing from the magazine’s archive. Sign up to our newsletter to receive RE:HEAT in your inbox.