Merry Christmas Ernst!, These things are still here, held on an indrawn breath: the garden, a tree. … Your place in this luminous gray, looking for skull. The confectionary – your beloved Alps – are where you left them, the last time I looked. Cold solitude is another way of telling deception, telling the brush, about that which will just not stir … calm, bold. This is the way that Alexander, John, Mark told it … And the one about the snowman who says to another one, “is it me, or can you smell carrots?” … Absence, forgetting – the name of the thing one sees – and doubtless soon, the unnameable. These are not the heralded players – Blason du beau Tétin, Blason du Sourcil … Contre Blason du Tétin … nonetheless, there are shades of a dawn … a table top vermillion … bread dust, mackerel skin, cheese rind. … From the kitchen window Ernst, I can see a blue pine tree.

We sense and experience that we are eternal. For the mind no less senses those things which it conceives in understanding than those which it has in memory. For the eyes of the mind by which it sees things and observes them are proofs. So although we do not remember that we existed before the body, we sense nevertheless that our mind in so far as it involves the essence of the body under a species of eternity is eternal and its existence cannot be defined by time or explained by duration. (Spinoza, Ethics, Part V, Proposition XXIII)

We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination. (Berger)

I am floating on my back in the swimming pool with the painting I’m working on above me, thinking also of Mr. Berger’s practice of floating with whatever story he is thinking about, “above him” as he, we, float, looking at the ceiling. The painting is small, in oils, and is of a view of a hay bale in a field, one of the oblong-shaped ones familiar at this time of year. This one had been left where it had broken apart in the field, sagging into its own weight as gravity tries to suck its bulk back into the ground – as gravity tries to pull me to the floor of the pool. Berger’s stories have the quality of this particular kind of silence. For me they are touchstones for distinguishing between – in Spinoza’s terms – the inadequate and adequate; the false and the genuine. Berger’s writing continues to be, above else, an ethical, as well as intellectual example, as he explores the practice of drawing – the human body, flowers, bicycles – and how art guides our seeing and understanding of the world: how it may protest, may establish forms of resistance to ‘the pitilessness of the new world order’. One protests, he writes, by demonstrating, by striking, by hunger strike, by taking up arms, by occupying, by shouting, by writing, by drawing. One protests because to not to would be humiliating, and would result in an enforced and degrading silence. To draw – rose hip, a cherry leaf, a pebble beach – is to indelibly save the present moment from predatory global capitalism – a fusion of democracy and the free market – and its weak, constricted imagination which is focused almost entirely on maximizing profit. History may be indifferent, but Berger cares, he still has hope, and believes and writes of that sense of belonging to the what-has-been and the yet-to-come. Nowhere perhaps is this more explicit than in the story of his visit to a public library to get a copy of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. It’s not on the shelf, and after a discussion with the librarian, he is led to understand that they have two copies, but “they’re both out”. So he starts to think: ‘I wonder who’s reading The Brothers Karamazov here today. Do the two of them know each other? Unlikely. Are they reading the book for the first time? Or has one of them read it and, like myself, wants to reread it? Then I find myself asking an odd question: if either of those readers and myself passed one another – in the suburban market on Sunday, coming out of the metro, on a pedestrian crossing, buying bread – might we perhaps exchange glances that we’d both find slightly puzzling? Might we, without recognising it, recognise one another? … What I’m trying to define is more idiosyncratic and personal than a mere cultural inheritance; it is as if the bloodstream of the read story joins the bloodstream of one’s life story. It contributes to our becoming what we will become and will continue to become … Somebody in this Paris suburb, perhaps sitting tonight in a chair and reading The Brothers Karamazov, may already, in this sense, be a distant, distant cousin”. And on the next page, the right-hand page of the book – ‘A recollection from childhood, a question of hope?’ – is a sketch of an empty chair done in pencil and watercolour.

‘… of ghosts among fern and dogwood before they turn their backs / and drift down the garden path, as if the dead / really had somewhere to get to, as if the life-long burden / of things unsaid might be dumped in such a place’ (Harsent, Night)

I start on an ink drawing of sweet William in a vase. I prefer ink that is of the non-waterproof kind; it is softer, more responsive to water, and less blood-like than “permanent” ink. I make marks, I make corrections and the drawing gets darker, moves closer and closer to the edge (of what?) where I hope it will teeter (from the Old Norse, titra, ‘shake, shiver‘) in perpetuity.

John Berger, Bento’s Sketchbook (Verso, 2011) The philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) – generally known as Benedict or Bento – earned his living as a lens-grinder and spent his short life writing On the Improvement of the Understanding and the Ethics, both of which were only published posthumously. He was also a sporadic draughtsmen and according to friends carried a sketchbook around with him. De Hooch, Vermeer, Jan Steen were his contemporaries and biographers have suggested that it is likely he met Rembrandt. Following his sudden death his friends found his letters, manuscripts and notes but no sketchbook and for years, Berger has imagined a sketchbook with his drawings in it being found. “I wasn’t expecting great drawings in the sketchbook, were it to be found. I simply wanted to reread some of his words, some of his startling propositions as a philosopher, whilst at the same time being able to look at things he had observed with his own eyes”. Then a friend gave Berger a virgin sketchbook, covered with suede leather the colour of skin and he heard himself saying: “This is Bento’s!” The result is this book – containing Berger’s stories and drawings and extracts of Spinoza’s propositions and notes – an exploration of drawing inspired by the philosopher’s vision.

David Harsent, Night (Faber and Faber, 2011) Harsent’s latest book of poetry begins with a remarkable sequence of poems about a garden in which he explores how, when the lights go out, we variously rage against, weep, regret and rejoice our day-lit selves: our hopes, weaknesses, those that we set out to love and our darker instincts; the night-dreams, the insomnia and shape-shifting desire that accompanies our journey in the shadow-lands as we move inexorably towards the spectre of death. Hallucinatory.

My dream is I am standing in a dusting of snow on the farm road which passes the garden gate. The gate is open, held open by an old brick as usual (the route that Hedgehog favours on her afternoon walk in the neighbourhood) and as there is no wind, the wild rose bushes and trees are motionless. It’s quiet. It’s cold, but I’m kept warm by a heavy greatcoat. The ground is luminous. The sky a very dark grey. The snow comes on again, big heavy flakes now, as an Angel, looking across the fields towards the river, appears near the steadings at the end of the road, followed soon after by the tinkling sound of little bells. Hedgehog approaches me, and goes past, leaving little grey daubs behind on the ground, and I see that she has hung around her neck a pale blue ribbon with tiny pink bells. She looks and sounds very pretty (and she knows that I think this as well) as she goes on her way towards the serene Angel who has turned to face her.

Grey clouds in the sky over the stubble field where last Saturday I walked with my step-daughter through waist high sheaf’s of green-golden wheat … There is little more I can say about this short walk which continued a morning of playing in the little wood near to where we live; climbing trees, searching the soft floor of the wood for “bits of things”, telling each other about how the deer sleep in the small cleared patches of dirt near to fallen tree trunks and rhododendron, wondering what they might dream about – except to speak of my love for her … the warm breeze in the trees and through the tall grasses, and then, more love … In reverie, I recalled this – and more besides – as I washed breakfast dishes, surfaces, looking at the landscape outside, at my big brown Japanese wave, Wyatt in the other room. The “hiding” is twofold. Both forms necessary, if equality is up for discussion. Sweeping, dusting, doing the laundry, washing the dishes … “takes my mind off things”, but they also help “place my mind on things”, washing the dishes especially … seemingly mundane, repetitive tasks or chores may be a portal to understanding, self-knowledge, feeling (as many modern and contemporary art practices have shown). But washing dishes, more than the others, is – for me – dependent on light, on their being light, on my being able to see what I see from the kitchen window; the rising wave of landscape that I have looked at near daily for years … As winter approaches and it gets darker and darker, my enjoyment of this is curtailed, restricted to a few daylight hours – in the evening, at night, the glass of the window turns in fading light into a mirror and all I see is a man, looking back at me, puzzled.

A hare, quietly, but not overly cautious, came to where I was standing, stopped momentarily in front of me (I could have reached down and stroked it) and without turning its head to look at me, went silently, over the grass and into the small wood that is on one side of the garden. (How did I know it was a hare and not a big rabbit? In the spring, I helped my young friend C. make a drawing using rocks and pebbles on the heath where we were camped by Culra bothy. To do this we collected shapes and colours from the stream, and set them down in place. It was not as we played that C. told me how she tells the difference between the two – by the colour at the tips of their ears – it was on another occasion, some time later, if for now these two moments for me sit side by side … while sometimes, though sadly to frequently, I am amazed by “the little things” I do not know).

During the conversation with my mother she happened to mention that my brother and his wife had been at ‘T in the Park’ … And I remember … And I now saw them, imagined them, in the field … on the other side of the wall as I drove past them … without looking …

Photography credits: the second, third and fifth photographs by C.