Bento's Sketchbook

John Berger

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781781688199
• eBook ISBN: 9781781688205
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Monografías de artistas

The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza-also known as Benedict or Bento de Spinoza-spent the most intense years of his short life writing. He also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes-but no drawings.

For years, without knowing what its pages might hold, John Berger has imagined finding Bento's sketchbook, wanting to see the drawings alongside his surviving words. When one day a friend gave him a beautiful virgin sketchbook, Berger said, "This is Bento's!" and he began to draw, taking his inspiration from the philosopher's vision.

In this illustrated color book John Berger uses the imaginative space he creates to explore the process of drawing, politics, storytelling and Spinoza's life and times.

Coming for a ride, Bento?

I wouldn’t make a direct comparison between a motorbike and a telescope for which you grind lenses, yet they have certain features in common: both need to be well aimed, both diminish distance, and both offer a tunnel of attention and the sensation of speed.

When you stop looking through a telescope, even if you’re looking at a coastline or a stationary star, when you stop looking through the lens, you have the impression of your vision slowing down. In the tunnel of speed there is also a kind of silence, and when you get off the bike or remove your eye from the eyepiece, all the slow repetitive sounds of daily life return, and this silence recedes.

… surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak.

(Ethics, Part III, Propositions)

To the key-ring of my motorbike ignition key I’ve attached a little token of a black tortoise. This model of bike (a Honda CBR 1100) was known, when first launched, as Blackbird. The tortoise with his determined slowness and the swiftness of the blackbird’s flying.

For many years I’ve been fascinated by a certain parallel between the act of piloting a bike and the act of drawing. The parallel fascinates me because it may reveal a secret. About what? About displacement and vision. Looking brings closer.

Put in ignition key, swing leg over, fasten helmet strap, pull on gloves, adjust choke, press starter, kick back the stand with left foot.

I remember when bikes had only kick-starters. Lunge, lunge with right leg, using as much bodyweight as one could muster. Cylinders inhaling, coughing, not firing. When they do finally spark into life, the sensation is of being astride a chorale.

Let out clutch gently with left hand, palm throttle with right, move forward. Stability.

You pilot a bike with your eyes, with your wrists and with the leaning of your body. Your eyes are the most importunate of the three. The bike follows and veers towards whatever they are fixed on. It pursues your gaze, not your ideas. No four-wheeled vehicle driver can imagine this.

If you look hard at an obstacle you want to avoid, there’s a grave risk that you’ll hit it. Look calmly at a way around it and the bike will take that path.

I say expressly that the mind has no adequate but only confused knowledge of itself, of its body, and of external bodies, when it perceives a thing in the common order of nature, that is, whenever it is determined externally, that is by fortuitous circumstances, to contemplate this or that, and not when it is determined internally, that is, by the fact that it regards many things at once, to understand their agreements, differences and oppositions one to another.

(Ethics, Part II, Proposition XXIX)

Pilot and two-wheeled machine form a single unit, and its disposition from within, its capacity for self-regulation, is linked to the inertia principle in physics. Like a top spinning, it continues and corrects itself so long as a certain momentum is maintained. But unlike a top spinning, which remains on one spot, this unit traces a continually shifting, ongoing line which feels like a contour. A contour of what? Of what is extensive. Exactly as you describe it.

Before we proceed further, let us call to mind what we have already shown: that whatever can be conceived by infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance, appertains to one substance alone: and consequently thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended through this and now through that attribute.

(Ethics, Part 2, Proposition VII)

The contours of what is extensive.

The act of drawing. Any fixed contour is in nature arbitrary and impermanent. What is on either side of it tries to shift it by pushing or pulling. What’s on one side of a contour has got its tongue in the mouth of what’s on the other side. And vice versa. The challenge of drawing is to show this, to make visible on the paper or drawing surface not only discrete, recognisable things, but also to show how the extensive is one substance. And, being one substance, it harasses the act of drawing. If the lines of a drawing don’t convey this harassment the drawing remains a mere sign.

The lines of a sign are uniform and regular: the lines of a drawing are harassed and tense. Somebody making a sign repeats an habitual gesture. Somebody making a drawing is alone in the infinitely extensive.

Think of the bike’s trajectory or track as if it were a line drawn on the ground. The pilot with his body is concentrated on maintaining that line. The bike may follow his gaze, but he has to keep them both on the ground. And to do this he has continually to negotiate with two things. (1) The contact between the ground’s surface and the tyres of the two revolving wheels. And (2) the impetus of the forces brought into play when the line and the bike change direction. Unless you are driving alone on a race track straight lines are brief. You are seldom vertical. To varying degrees you are nearly always heeling over, and, according to the degree, you negotiate with the play of forces involved.

(1) When as a draughtsman your drawing instrument makes contact with the paper, you assess how absorbent the paper is, how smooth, how resistant, how accommodating or intractable, and then you draw accordingly, modifying pressure, the longevity of touches, the amount of ink, the hardness of the charcoal, the amount of spit, etc. And as a pilot, you observe and assess the surface of the road or track in a comparable manner. Gravel, sand, moisture, fallen leaves, oil, white marking-paint, mud, ice, encourage, each in its own way, the tyres to slip. Other surfaces hold the tyres. And you decide accordingly about the instant of each of your own actions, which involve braking, accelerating, turning, slowing down. You react as though you have a bare foot which feels the tread of the tyres on the surface they are crossing.

(2) When you change direction you lean into the turn, and this maintains the turning. At the same moment, however, you coax the front wheel to point in the opposite direction, to point out of the turn. And you do this not to limit or end the turn, but to strengthen the forward thrust coming from the back wheel and to keep the line being drawn taut and tense, to keep it under a constant push-and-pull pressure from left and right, from the extensive which it is crossing. What is one side of the line you are following has got its tongue in the mouth of what is on its other side.

Axiom I. All bodies are either moving or at rest.

Axiom II. Each body moves now more slowly, now more quickly.

Lemma I. Bodies are reciprocally distinguished with respect to motion or rest, quickness or slowness, and not with respect to substance.

… Lemma III. A body in motion or at rest must be determined to motion or rest by some other body, which, likewise, was determined for motion or rest by some other body, and this by a third, and so on to infinity.

(Ethics, Part II, Proposition XIII, Note)

You are riding a drawing.

Spontaneously, I always want to draw on the right-hand page of the sketchbook, rather than the left. A recollection from childhood, a question of hope?

I want to tell you the story of how I gave away a Sho Japanese brush. Where it happened and how. The brush had been given to me by an actor friend who had gone to work for a while with some Noh performers in Japan.

I drew often with it. It was made of the hairs of horse and sheep. These hairs once grew out of a skin. Maybe this is why when gathered together into a brush with a bamboo handle they transmit sensations so vividly. When I drew with it I had the impression that it and my fingers, loosely holding it, were touching not paper but a skin. The notion that a paper being drawn on is like a skin is there in the very word: brushstroke. The one and only touch of the brush! as the great draughtsman Shitao termed it.

The setting for the story was a municipal swimming pool in a popular, though not chic, Paris suburb, where from time to time I was something of an habitué. I went there every day at one p.m. when most people were eating and so the pool was less crowded.

The building is long and squat and its walls are of glass and brick. It was built in the late 1960s and it opened in 1971. It’s situated in a small park where there are a few silver birches and weeping willows.

From the pool when swimming you can see the willows high up through the glass walls. The ceiling above the pool is panelled and now, forty years later, several of the panels are missing. How many times when swimming on my back have I noticed this, whilst being aware of the water holding up both me and whatever story I’m puzzling over?

There’s an eighteenth-century drawing by Huang Shen of a cicada singing on the branch of a weeping willow. Each leaf in it is a single brushstroke.

Seen from the outside it’s an urban, not a rural building, and if you didn’t know it was a swimming pool and you forgot about the trees, you might suppose it was some kind of railway building, a cleaning shed for coaches, a loading bay.

There’s nothing written above the entrance, just a small blazon containing the three colours of the tricolore, emblem of the Republic. The entrance doors are of glass with the instruction ‘POUSSEZ’ stencilled on them.

When you push one of these doors open and step inside you are in another realm which has little to do with the streets outside, the parked cars or the shopping street.

The air smells slightly of chlorine. Everything is lit from below rather than from above as a consequence of the light reflected off the water of the two pools. The acoustics are distinct: every sound has its slight echo. Everywhere the horizontal, as distinct from the vertical, dominates. Most people are swimming, swimming from one end of the large pool to the other, length after length. Those standing have just taken off their clothes or are getting out of them so there’s little sense of rank or hierarchy. Instead, everywhere, there’s this sense of an odd horizontal equality.

There are many printed notices, all of them employing a distinctive bureaucratic syntax and vocabulary.

The Hairdryer will be shut off 5 minutes before closing-time.

Bathing Caps Obligatory. Council Decree. As from Monday Sept. 12 1980.

Entry through this door forbidden to any person who is not a member of staff. Thank you.

The voice embodied in such announcements is inseparable from the long political struggle during the Third Republic for the recognition of citizens’ rights and duties. A measured, impersonal committee voice – with somewhere in the distance a child laughing.

Around 1950 Fernand Léger painted a series of canvasses called Plongeurs – Divers in a swimming pool. With their primary colours and their relaxed, simple outlines, these paintings celebrated the dream and the plan of workers enjoying leisure and, because they were workers, transforming leisure into something which had not yet been named.

Today the realisation of this dream is further away than ever. Yet sometimes, whilst putting my clothes in a locker in the men’s changing room and attaching the key to my wrist, and taking the obligatory hot shower before walking through the foot bath, and going to the edge of the large pool and diving in, I remember these paintings.

Most of the swimmers wear, as well as the obligatory bathing caps, dark goggles to protect their eyes from the chlorine. There’...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• This autumn the quetsch…
• The philosopher Baruch…
• I’m drawing some…
• Now, a drawing I started…
• A house stands on…
• Around her is a block…
• The centre of the city…
• I was in London…
• It belongs to Luca…
• The human capacity…
• Dostoevsky’s novel…
• There are two categories…
• The Prado in Madrid…
• I’m in a hard-discount…
• Coming for a ride, Bento?…
• Study the faces…
• Now I can make…
• Melina, my granddaughter…
• A Biographical Note
• Acknowledgements