The final little essay in John Berger‘s About Looking is the exquisite, the personal, Field (1971). It’s a meditation really, on Berger’s understanding of the “field that I have always known”.
Berger’s understanding of the noumenal nature of that field which is the template for all fields is clear in this memory from his childhood:
Into the silence, which was also at times a roar, of my thoughts and questions forever returning to myself to search there for an explanation for my life and its purpose, into this concentrated tiny hub of dense silent noise, came the cackle of a hen from a nearby garden, and at the moment of that cackle, its distinct sharp-edged existence beneath a blue sky with white clouds, induced in me an intense awareness of freedom. The noise of the hen, which I could not even see, was an event … in a field which then had been awaiting a first event in order to become itself realisable. I knew that in that field I could listen to all sounds, all music.
Here is Berger attempting to describe in language experiences that “exist at a level of perception and feeling that is probably pre-verbal” (as he later says). And he goes on to show how certain correlates of this experience can be found in nature – there are actual fields that (given they have the right physical characteristics, which he is generous enough to list for us) can invoke this remembrance of the “field that I have always known”. We are even supplied in this essay with a picture of such a field:
This accords with my own experience. And I add that for me personally, along with the shock of such re-discovery there is often the heaviness of grief for those extended periods of my life during which I’ve been without this awareness.
In the shock of re-recognition of the field there’s a merger of the temporal and the spatial. Berger speaks of this: “time and space conjoin”. He finishes the essay with this beautiful sentence:
The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life.
This is to say that there’s a deep recognition that we are in fact the extent of the field we observe, we are moment by moment arising from this extent, are, at an essential level, no different from this extent.
Perhaps it is Berger’s deep connection to the field that enabled him at age 80 to make the following statement (on ABC radio’s The Book Show, last year):
I live the present moment as though it perhaps is the last. Okay, at my age now that is not a surprising thing to say, but I felt like that and acted like that when I was 16 and when I was 30 and when I was 42. You name the year and I was living like that.
