Hi, Alison - yes, it's great, isn't it? Moments of the interview are
like a blessing (the music by Stravinsky helps...). If anyone visits us
here & is interested in the Grotte Chauvet (most are), we show them the
video film in which JB enters the cave, taking you with him, and lets
you share his reactions & perceptions to what he discovers. He mentions
the reindeers' dance ("30 thousand years ago") in the interview, in
connection with his conjectures about time. In a way he's one of the
Left's lost leaders, yet his clear-eyed sense of palpable earthrooted
mystery (Musil's "tageshelle Mystik") in life & literature (Jakob
Boehme, Lawrence, Platonov) seems like a signpost on the way forward,
free of the theoretical ballast of politologists, towards possible
survival. Isn't he funny? - "I would like to be with Brecht" while
ruefully accepting his leaning more to the Lukacsian inclination for
"the good old things". Then again, he stresses that striking ingenuity
found everywhere & in everyone that can make use of those good old
things. To be, not a keeper, but a protector of the flame, ah...
Best
Martin
Alison Croggon wrote:
>What a beautiful interview, Martin - thanks for the pointer. I so admire
>John Berger. I liked this so much that I wrote it down - more or less
>accurately I think - it's Berger in response to the perennial question of
>"where do the stories come from?"
>
>"If I have a certain talent it's a talent for - not exactly allowing, not
>exactly encouraging - but silently persuading people to talk to me - ... and
>immediately, as if they were a flame, of putting hands around them, as if to
>protect that story, as if to protect that flame...and that's one of the
>things that happens on the page."
>
>Best
>
>A
>
>
>Alison Croggon
>
>Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>
>
>
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