the little one

This photograph is on the cover of Walser's The Walk.

John Berger has a fascinating small essay on the picture (excerpts to follow). Line for line, Berger's writing remains, for me at least, an indication of what it is to write with a singular vision, paring what one hears and sees and speaks down to the fundamental, the essential, the way an old man might encapsulate the meaning of a sentence in the sweep of his hand or some other gesture.

Yesterday little r asked me: "What is the Hajj?"

Me: It is when you go to God's House.

Her: "Will He serve lemonade and cake?"

~~~

Cheever has shifted gear, toned down, old age reducing everything to a well-worn truth. There is hardly a mention of his wife, a dull acceptance that some colossal mistake has been made but cannot be repaired or rectified. There is-it appears-some coming through the alcohol-dependence. The great longing for beauty, tenderness remains; if a person's character is known by her grasp of the quality of the light then the light becomes an irresolute grey in these final pages.

For some reason you remembered Aurelius's meditations and how they could still be read two thousand years after being written. That's saying something. With JC there's always the lurking suspicion that much of what is noted is partial, of its time, easily dated and one is drawn to ask: what is universal? Love, the loss of love, the longing for it..is there any other story?

There are words, sentences, and if you're out of sorts they can seem like cages. But then, in the middle of them, between the bars, between your breaths, he says something remarkable, such as: all his homosexual feelings were in reality probably just a search for his brother's love. A single line, and then it's gone.

There is a winding down, the failing body. Gardening always seems like a way of putting off death. The silly flirtations, the surface illuminations. Does an excess of unhappiness lead to depth or superficiality? It can go either way. There is more reading now-of course, this may not be true...these journals represent 1/20th of the whole. That fact makes you wonder to yourself: assuming that this was a judicious selection, what would it mean to have read the whole man, start to finish? You imagine the tedium God must go through seeing our small lives.

There is no whole man, no whole woman, perhaps. This loose sprawl of words is what you see, what you get.

~~~

The small man, making it into the next century. Their clothes don't fit, the suits are dark, thick, class-ridden. To live out of sync with the times, then as well as now.

Confinement. The body stuck, at the wrong angle to the world: straight or queer (to tie the loose threads together).

The solid world of the peasants would disappear, the slow, assured and worked out rhythms of change that reproduce the same gestures, the same smiles, generation after generation. From now on, what resources could one draw upon, what inner strength could be found?

The voice falters, the synapses of the brain pick out the same words, a man's gait is weighed down by grief. The circle closes, there are many shades of green in anyone's life. To name every movement of green, every perfection glimpsed or deeply known.

"You can't change the past," little r told me in her hilarious American accent.

Where on earth did you learn that?

"Lion King I".

I give up!