The Shape of a Pocket

I. The Herons

Spring is the awaited season. Some languages, like Spanish, make spring feminine; others, like Greek, masculine. Once arrived, the two of them stay for a weekend, hand over to a successor, and slip away.

Yet from January onwards we gossip about them as though they were there in hiding. And under the earth’s skin they are there: the branches of elders already suffer burgeoning wounds, snowdrops already push with their heads, teeth clenched. When at last spring comes out into the open we have the impression of ‘no sooner come than gone’.

Not a season at all but a longing. At my age it is natural to ask: how many more times shall I witness this waiting? The waiting is for a new beginning. It is not a question of the year being young but of the offer of choices again. In the winter of discontent, there are no choices.

The first season comes desperately and hopefully which is another reason for its necessary clandestinity. And here I think of your letter, Marcos, where you write:

We would like to offer you a flower, I say a flower because we don’t have enough for all of you, but one is enough if you share it and if each one of you keeps a tiny fragment so that when you are old you can tell the children of your country: At the end of the twentieth century I fought for Mexico and from here I gave support to those over there: of whom I knew only that they wanted what all human beings want if they haven’t forgotten that they’re human beings, that’s to say democracy, liberty and justice. I never saw their faces but their hearts were like ours.

This year spring came out into the open on April 12th and I’ll tell you how. Your mountains are higher than ours but when you take one of the tracks down to the plain, you must come upon a somewhat similar place. At a certain altitude a rocky stream runs into a small lake and the vegetation turns a little greener. The lake seeps into the earth which is waterlogged and is difficult to cross. It’s easier to skirt round the place.

In a month’s time, thousands of frogs will come to mate in the pool. At the moment it still freezes at night and in the morning some of the boulders glisten with frost. Over the years I’ve often seen a heron here. Sometimes he is perched near the top of one of the spruce firs. Sometimes he is standing in the marsh, his fishing beak at the ready. When a heron strikes, he does so with a rapidity which is faster than an eye blinking, and after a heron has prepared a nest and is calling for a female companion, he holds his head so that his beak points vertically into the sky like a steeple or like a Brancusi sculpture. Every winter the herons migrate from our rivers to North Africa.

Yet every year it is the same heron who returns here. Herons can live for twenty years or more. I guess this one is no longer young and maybe that is why he is a loner who avoids the settlements where the others nest. I’ve never seen him with his companion but I’ve seen him flying regularly to a hidden nest to regurgitate the frog or fish he has just eaten as food for his fledglings.

Apart from the heron, there’s nothing special about the place: a pool of water, a small bog, a steepish slope. It’s on the north side of the mountain and so gets little sunlight. One of nature’s backyards, not recommended for its flowers. And here, on Wednesday April 12th this year, spring came out into the open.

I didn’t notice anything special at first. Then gradually I became aware, before I looked up, that something unusual was happening in the sky. Nothing alarming. Rather something measured and solemn. So I glanced up.

There were two herons circling with slow wing-beats. They were low enough for me to see the black feathers like ribbons which trail from their ears. Grey wings, white throats. Whilst they flew around me one of them crossed the circle to be nearer to the other, and the other flew to meet the first, and like this both found themselves again on opposite sides of the same circle.

It was their first morning. They had come back. Ornithologists say that the male heron searches for a partner only after he has established a nest. In which case this pair was an exception. They were cautiously surveying the terrain together.

Yet what caught my breath, Marcos, was the leisure, the ease with which they were doing this. In that leisure there was a momentary yet supreme confidence and sense of belonging. Slowly they circled the place as if they were surveying their own lives to which they had come home.

And this made me think of you in Chiapas and of your struggle to restore what has been stolen from the people by those who in this life know two things: how to transfer money and how to drop bombs. In their world there are no homecomings and there never will be. Four things came together in my head: the spring, the resistance of the Zapatistas, your vision of a different world and the slow beat of the herons’ wings.

II. The Herons and Eagles

A reader may ask: What is the writer’s relationship with the place and the people he writes about?

John Berger, Pig Earth

Agreed, but he could also ask himself: What is the relationship between a letter written in the jungle of Chiapas, Mexico and the response that it receives from the French countryside? Or, even better, what is the relationship between the slow beating of the wings of the heron with the hovering of the eagle over a serpent?

For example, in Guadalupe Tepeyac (now a village empty of civilians and filled with soldiers), the herons took over the night sky of December.

There were hundreds. ‘Thousands,’ says Lieutenant Ricardo, a Tzeltal insurgent who sometimes has a propensity to exaggerate. ‘Millions,’ said Gladys who, despite being twelve years old (or precisely because of it), does not want to be left out. ‘They come every year,’ says the grandfather while the small flashes of white hover above the village, and maybe disappear towards the east?

Are they coming or going? Are they your herons, Mr Berger? A winged reminder? Or a greeting filled with premonition? A fluttering of wings of something that resists death?

Because as a result, months later, I read your letter (in a dog-eared clipping from a newspaper, with the date hidden under a mud stain), and in it (your letter) the wings of dawn are hovering once again in the sky and the people of Guadalupe Tepeyac now live in the mountain and not in the little valley whose lights, I imagine, are of some significance on the navigation maps of the herons.

Yes, I know now that the herons, about which you wrote to me, fly during the winter from North Africa, and that it is improbable that they have anything to do with those that arrived in December 1994 in the Lacandon jungle. In addition the grandfather says that every year the disconcerting tour above Guadalupe Tepeyac is repeated.

Perhaps south-eastern Mexico is an obligatory stopover, a necessity, a commitment. Perhaps they were not herons, but fragments of an exploded moon, pulverised in the December of the jungle.

December 1994

Months later, the indigenous of south-eastern Mexico again reiterated their rebellion, their resistance to genocide, to death … The reason?

The supreme government decided to carry out organised crime, the essence of neoliberalism, that money, the god of modernity, had planned. Dozens of thousands of soldiers, hundreds of tons of war materials, millions of lies. The objective? The destruction of libraries and hospitals, of homes and seeded fields of corn and beans, the annihilation of every sign of rebellion. The indigenous Zapatistas resisted, they retreated to the mountains and they began an exodus that today, even as I write these lines, has not ended. Neoliberalism disguises itself as the defence of a sovereignty which has been sold in dollars on the international market.

Neoliberalism, this doctrine that makes it possible for stupidity and cynicism to govern in diverse parts of the earth, does not allow for inclusion other than that of subjection to genocide. ‘Die as a social group, as a culture, and above all as a resistance. Then you can be part of modernity,’ say the great capitalists, from the seats of government, to the indigenous campesinos. These indigenous people irritate the modernising logic of neomercantilism. Their rebellion, their defiance, their resistance, irritates them. The anachronism of their existence within a project of globalisation, an economic and political project that, soon, will decide that poor people, all the people in opposition, which is to say, the majority of the population, are obstacles. The armed character of ‘We are here!’ of the Zapatista indigenous people does not matter much to them nor does it keep them awake (a little fire and lead will be enough to end such ‘imprudent’ defiance). What matters to them, and bothers them, is that their very existence, in the moment that they (the indigenous Zapatistas) speak out and are heard, is converted into a reminder of an embarrassing omission of ‘neoliberal modernity’: ‘These Indians should not exist today, we should have put an end to them BEFORE. Now annihilating them will be more difficult, which is to say, more expensive.’ This is the burden that weighs upon neoliberalism made government in Mexico.

‘Let’s resolve the causes of the uprising,’ say the negotiators of the government (leftists of yesterday, the shamed of today) as if they were saying: ‘All of you should not exist, all this is an unfortunate error of modern history.’ ‘Let’s resolve the causes’ is the elegant synonym of ‘We will eliminate them’. For this system which concentrates wealth and power and distributes death and poverty, the campesinos, the indigenous, do not fit in the plans and projects. They have to be got rid of, just like the herons … and the eagles … have to be got rid of.

What remains mysterious is not so much what has been deliberately hidden but, as I have said, the surprising range of the possible. And thus, too, there is little performing: peasants do not play roles as urban characters do. This is not because they are ‘simple’ or more honest or without guile, it is simply because the space between what is unknown about a person and what is generally known — and this is the space for all performance — is too small.

John Berger, ibid.

December 1994

A cold dawn that drags itself between the fog and the thatched roofs of the village. It is morning. The dawn goes away, the cold remains. The little paths of mud begin to fill with people and animals. The cold and a little footpath accompany me in the reading of Pig Earth. Heriberto and Eva (five and six years old respectively) come and grab (‘they snatched’ I should say, but I don’t know if the distinction is understood in English) the book. They look at the drawing on the front cover (it is a Madrid edition from 1989). It is a copy of a painting by John Constable, an image of an English countryside. The cover of your book, Mr Berger, summons a rapid connection between image and reality. For Heriberto, for example, there is no doubt that the horse in the painting is La Muñeca (The Doll) (a mare that accompanied us in the long year during which the indigenous rebellion governed south-eastern Mexico), whom no one could mount except Manuel, a playmate who was twice the age, size and weight of Heriberto, who was Chelita’s brother, and consequently, also his future brother-in-law. And what Constable called ‘a river’ was really a riverbed, a riverbed that crossed through La Realidad (La Realidad is the name of a village), a reality which is the limit of Heriberto’s horizons. The furthest place that his trips and running around have taken him is la realidad.

Constable’s painting did not remind Heriberto and Eva of the English countryside. It did not take them outside of the Lacandon jungle. It left them there, or it brought them back. It brought them back to their land, their place, to their being children, to their being campesinos, to their being indigenous, to their being Mexicans and rebels. For Heriberto and Eva, Constable’s painting is a coloured drawing of La Muñeca and the tide, Scene on a Navigable River, is not a valid argument: the river is the riverbed of La Realidad, the horse is the mare La Muñeca, Manuel is riding, and his sombrero fell off, and that’s it, on to another book. And we do that, this time it is about Van Gogh and for Eva and Heriberto, the paintings of Holland are scenes from their land, of their being indigenous and campesinos. After this Heriberto tells his mother that he spent the morning with the Subcomandante.

‘Reading big books,’ says Heriberto, and I believed that this earned him a free hand with a box of chocolate cookies. Eva was more far-sighted, and asked me if I didn’t have a book about her doll with the little red bandanna.

The act of writing is nothing except the act of approaching the experience written about; just as, hopefully, the act of reading the written text is a comparable act of approach.

John Berger, ibid.

Or of distancing, Mr Berger. The writing, and above all, the reading of the written text could be an act of distancing. ‘The written word and the image,’ says my other, which to add problems paints himself, alone.

I think that yes, that the ‘reading’ of the written word and the image could approximate the experience or distance it. And so, the photographic image of Alvaro, one of the dead combatants in Ocosingo in January 1994, returns. Alvaro returns in the photo. Alvaro with his death speaks in the photo. He says, he writes, he shows: ‘I am Alvaro, I am an indigenous, I am a soldier, I took up arms against being forgotten. Look. Listen. Something is happening in the closing of the twentieth century that is forcing us to die in order to have a voice, to be seen, to live.’ And from the photo of Alvaro dead, a far-off reader from the distance could approximate the indigenous situation in modern Mexico, NAFTA, the international forums, the economic bonanza, the first world.

‘Pay attention! Something is evil in the macroeconomic plans, something is not functioning in the complicated mathematical calculations that sing the successes of neoliberalism,’ says Alvaro with his death. His photo says more, his death speaks, his body on the soil of Chiapas takes voice, his head resting in a pool of blood: ‘Look! This is what the numbers and the speeches hide. Blood, cadavers, bones, lives and hopes, crushed, squeezed dry, eliminated in order to be incorporated into the indices of profit and economic growth.’

‘Come!’ says Alvaro. ‘Come close! Listen!’

But Alvaro’s photo also can ‘be read’ from a distance, as a vehicle that serves to create distance in order to stay on the other side of the photo, like ‘reading’ it in a newspaper in another part of the world. ‘This did not happen here,’ says the reader of the photo, ‘this is Chiapas, Mexico, a historical accident, remedial, forgettable, and … far away.’ There are, in addition, other readers who confirm it: public announcements, economic figures, stability, peace. This is the use of the indigenous war at the end of the century, to revalue ‘peace’.

Like a stain stands out on the object that is stained. ‘I am here and this photo happened over there, far away, small,’ says the ‘reader’ who distances himself.

And I imagine, Mr Berger, that the final result of the relationship between the writer and the reader, through the text (‘or from the image’, insists my other self again), escapes both. Something is imposed on them, gives significance to the text, provokes one to come closer or go further away. And this ‘something’ is related to the new division of the world, with the démocratisation of death and misery, with the dictatorship of power and money, with the regionalisation of pain and despair, with the internationalisation of arrogance and the market. But it also has to do with the decision of Alvaro (and of thousands of indigenous along with him) to take up arms, to fight, to resist, to seize a voice that they were denied before, not to devalue the cost of the blood that this implies. And it also has to do with the ear and eye that are opened by Alvaro’s message, whether they see and hear it, whether they understand it, whether they draw near to him, his death, his blood that flooded the streets of a city that has always ignored him, always … until this past January the first. It also has to do with the eagle and heron, the European campesino who is resisting being absorbed and the Latin American indigenous who is rebelling against genocide. It has to do with the panic of the powerful, as the trembling, that is growing in its guts, no matter how strong and powerful it appears, when, without knowing, it prepares to fall …

And it has to do with, I reiterate and salute it in this way, the letters that come from you to us, and those that, with these lines, bring you these words: the eagle received the message, he understood the approach of the hesitant flight of the heron. And there below, the serpent trembles and fears the morning …

Vale, Mr Berger. Health and follow closely the heron up above until it appears as a small and passing flash of light, a flower that lifts itself up …

From the mountains of southern Mexico

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

Mexico, May 1995

III. How to Live with Stones

Marcos, I want to say something about a pocket of resistance. One particular one. My observations may seem remote, but, as you say, ‘A world can contain many worlds, can contain all worlds.’

The least dogmatic of our century’s thinkers about revolution was Antonio Gramsci, no? His lack of dogmatism came from a kind of patience. This patience had absolutely nothing to do with indolence or complacency. (The fact that his major work was written in the prison in which the Italian fascists kept him for eight years, until he was dying at the age of forty-six, testifies to its urgency.)

His special patience came from a sense of a practice which will never end. He saw close-up, and sometimes directed the political struggles of his time, but he never forgot the background of an unfolding drama whose span covers incalculable ages. It was perhaps this which prevented Gramsci becoming, like many other revolutionaries, a millennialist. He believed in hope rather than promises and hope is a long affair. We can hear it in his words:

If we think about it, we see that in asking the question: What is Man? we want to ask: What can man become? Which means: Can he master his own destiny, can he make himself, can he give form to his own life? Let us say then that man is a process, and precisely, the process of his own acts.

Gramsci went to school, from the age of six until twelve, in the small town of Ghilarza in central Sardinia. He was born in Ales, a village nearby. When he was four he fell to the floor as he was being carried, and this accident led to a spinal malformation which permanently undermined his health. He did not leave Sardinia until he was twenty. I believe the island gave him or inspired in him his special sense of time.

In the hinterland around Ghilarza, as in many parts of the island, the thing you feel most strongly is the presence of the stones. First and foremost it is a place of stones, and — in the sky above — of grey hooded crows. 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 stones are large, the smallest would weigh half a ton. There are granites (red and black), schist, limestone, sandstone and several darkish volcanic rocks like basalt. In certain tancas the gathered boulders are long rather than round, so they have been piled together like poles and the pile has a triangular shape like that of an immense stone wigwam.

Endless and ageless dry-stone walls separate the tancas, border the gravel roads, enclose pens for the sheep, or, having fallen apart after centuries of use, suggest ruined labyrinths. There are also little pyramid piles of smaller stones no larger than fists. Towards the west rise very ancient limestone mountains.

Everywhere a stone is touching a stone. And here, over this pitiless ground, one approaches something delicate: there is a way of placing one stone on another which irrefutably announces a human act, as distinct from a natural hazard.

And this may make one remember that to mark a place with a cairn constituted a kind of naming and was probably among the first signs used by man.

Knowledge is power [wrote Gramsci], but the question is complicated by something else: namely that it is not enough to know a set of relations existing at a given moment as if they were a given system, one also needs to know them genetically — that’s to say the story of their formation, because every individual is not only a synthesis of existing relations, but also the history of those relations, which means the resume of all the past.

On account of its strategic position in the western Mediterranean and on account of its mineral deposits — lead, zinc, tin, silver — Sardinia has been invaded and its coastline occupied during four millennia. The first invaders were the Phoenicians, followed by the Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Pisans, the Spanish, the House of Savoy and finally modern mainland Italy.

As a result Sardinians mistrust and dislike the sea. ‘Whoever comes across the sea,’ they say, ‘is a thief.’ They are not a nation of sailors or fishermen, but of shepherds. They have always sought shelter in the stony inaccessible interior of their land to become what the invaders called (and call) ‘brigands’. The island is not large (250 km. × 100 km.) yet the iridescent mountains, the southern light, the lizard-dryness, the ravines, the corrugated stony terrain, lend it, when surveyed from a vantage point, the aspect of a continent! And on this continent today, with their 3.5 million sheep and their goats, live 35,000 shepherds: 100,000 if one includes the families who work with them.

It is a megalithic country — not in the sense of being prehistoric — like every poor land in the world it has its own history ignored or dismissed as ‘savage’ by the metropols — but in the sense that its soul is rock and its mother stone. Sebastiano Satta (1867–1914), the national poet, wrote:

When the rising sun, Sardinia, warms your granite

You must give birth to new sons.

This has gone on, with many changes but a certain continuity, for six millennia. The shepherd’s pipe of classical mythology is still being played. Scattered over the island there remain 7,000 nuraghi- dry-stone towers, dating from the late neolithic period before the Phoenician invasion. Many are more or less ruins; others are intact and may be 12m. in height, 8m. in diameter, with walls 3m. thick.

It takes time for your eyes to get used to the dark inside one. The single entrance, with a hewn architrave, is narrow and low; you have to crouch to get in. When you can see in the cool dark inside, you observe how, to achieve a vaulted interior without mortar, the layers of massive stones had to be laid one on top of the other with an overlap inwards, so that the space is conical like that of a straw beehive. The cone, however, cannot be too pointed, for the walls need to bear the weight of the enormous flat stones which close the roof. Some nuraghi consist of two floors with a staircase. Unlike the pyramids, a thousand years earlier, these buildings were for the living. There are various theories about their exact function. What is clear is that they offered shelter, probably many layers of shelter, for men are many-layered.

The nuraghi are invariably placed at a nodal point in the rocky landscape, at a point where the land itself might, as it were, have an eye: a point from which everything can be silently observed in every direction — until, faraway, the surveillance is handed on to the next nuraghi. This suggests that they had, amongst other things, a military, defensive function. They have also been called ‘sun temples’, ‘towers of silence’ and, by the Greeks, ‘daidaleia’ after Daedalus, the builder of the labyrinth.

Inside, you slowly become aware of the silence. Outside there are blackberries, very small and sweet ones, cacti whose fruit with stony pips the shepherds take the thorns out of and eat, hedges of bramble, barbed-wire, asphodels like swords whose hilts have been planted in the thin soil … perhaps a flock of chattering linnets. Inside the hive of stones (constructed before the Trojan Wars) silence. A concentrated silence — like tomato puree concentrated in a tin.

By contrast, all extensive diffused silence has to be continually monitored in case there is a sound that warns of danger. In this concentrated silence the senses have the impression that the silence is a protection. Thus you become aware of the companionship of stone.

The epithets ‘inorganic’, ‘inert’, ‘lifeless’, ‘blind’ — as applied to stone — may be short-term. Above the town of Galtelli towers the pale limestone mountain which is called Monte Tuttavista — the mountain which sees all.

Perhaps the proverbial nature of stone changed when pre-history became history. Building became rectangular. Mortar permitted the construction of pure arches. A seemingly permanent order was established, and with this order came talk of happiness. The art of architecture quotes this talk in many different ways, yet for most people the promised happiness did not arrive, and the proverbial reproaches began: stone was contrasted with bread because it was not edible, stone was called heartless because it was deaf.

Before, when any order was always shifting and the only promise was that contained in a place of shelter, in the time of the nuraghis, stones were considered as companions.

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.

To place a stone upright so that it stands vertical is an act of symbolic recognition: the stone becomes a presence; a dialogue begins. Near the town of Macomer there are six such standing stones summarily carved into ogival forms; three of them, at shoulder-level, have carved breasts. The sculpting is minimal. Not necessarily through lack of means; perhaps through choice. An upright stone then did not depict a companion: it was one. The six bethels are of trachytic rock which is porous. As a result, even under a strong sun, they reach body heat and no more.

When the rising sun, Sardinia, warms your granite You must give birth to new sons.

Earlier than the nuraghi are the domus de janas, which are rooms hollowed out of rock-pediments, and made, it is said, to house the dead.

This one is made of granite. You have to crawl in, and inside you can sit but not stand. The chamber measures 3 m. by 2. Stuck to its stone are two deserted wasp nests. The silence is less concentrated than in the nuraghi and there is more light, for you are less deeply inside; the pocket is nearer to the outside of the coat.

Here the age of the man-made place is palpable. Not because you calculate … mid-neolithic … calcolithic, but because of the relation between the rock you are in and human touch.

The granite surface has been made deliberately smooth. Nothing rough or jagged has been left. The tools used were probably of obsidian. The space is corporeal — in that it seems to pulse like an organ in a body. (A little like a kangaroo’s pocket!) And this effect is increased by the remaining soft smears of yellow and reddish ochre where originally the surfaces were painted. The irregularities of the chamber’s shape must have been determined by variations in the rock formation. But more interesting than where they came from is where they are heading.

You lie in this hiding place, Marcos — there is a faint sweetish almost vanilla smell coming from some herb outside — and you can see in the irregularities the first probings towards the form of a column, the outline of a pilaster or the curves of a cupola — towards the idea of happiness.

By the foot of the chamber — and there’s no question which way the bodies, either alive or dead, were intended to lie — the rock is curved and concave and on this surface a human hand has chipped distinct radiating ribs as on a scallop shell.

By the entrance, which is no higher than a small dog, there was a protrusion like a fold in the rock’s natural curtain, and here a human hand tapered and rounded it so that it approached — but did not yet reach — the column.

All domus de janas face east. Through the entrances from the inside you can see the sun rise.

In a letter from prison in 1931 Gramsci told a story for his two children, the younger of whom, because of his imprisonment, he had never seen. A small boy is asleep with a glass of milk beside his bed on the floor. A mouse drinks the milk, the boy wakes up and finding the glass empty cries. So the mouse goes to the goat to ask for some milk. The goat has no milk, he needs grass. The mouse goes to the field, and the field has no grass because it’s too parched. The mouse goes to the well and the well has no water because it needs repairing. So the mouse goes to the mason who hasn’t exactly the right stones. Then the mouse goes to the mountain and the mountain wants to hear nothing and looks like a skeleton because it has lost its trees. (During the last century Sardinia was drastically deforested to supply railway sleepers for the Italian mainland.) In exchange for your stones, the mouse says to the mountain, the boy, when he grows up, will plant chestnuts and pines on your slopes. Whereupon the mountain agrees to give the stones. Later the boy has so much milk, he washes in it!

Later still, when he becomes a man, he plants the trees, the erosion stops and the land becomes fertile.

P.S. In the town of Ghilarza there is a small Gramsci Museum, near the school he attended. Photos. Copies of books. A few letters. And, in a glass case, two stones carved into round weights about the size of grapefruits. Every day Antonio as a boy did lifting exercises with these stones to strengthen his shoulders and correct the malformation of his back.