A Mountain, by John Berger


Blue fist lightly clenched. Fist of right hand, for the thumb, where the pass picks its way across the mountain, is on its left. A back of a hand laid on a mule's neck; it’s too hot on this road for horses. On the thumb a smear of blood, a thistle scratch, no more. Several of the same thistles grow here as in North Africa and the Middle East. A mule's sense of tomorrow is probably similar to a mountain's;
tomorrow is waiting for them, never the other way round.

Turn the painting upside down and see the carcass of the mule,
sprawled on an asphalt road eventually leading to Córdoba. In the
foreground sky, now above the carcass, a vivid sunset; tomorrow will
be as hot as today.

The energy of the fist, mountain, mule, thistle, is the one and same
energy and it is the energy found by the artist when making this
painting. It didn't come from the mere act of observation, any more
than it came from any manual act of gesturing. It came from quitting
the self, and feeling, with all six senses, his wary way into the
jurisprudence of the elemental, which holds together the known (and
unknown) laws of geology, climate, anatomy and the longings of the
soul.

John Berger writes: Shortly before his death, Miles asked me to write something about the exhibition that is due to open at the Boundary Gallery, north London, on November 7.

Dear Miles,

It's good people are coming here to watch your paintings and drawings. I say watch rather than look at because they are so full of movement. Like watching a bird cross the sky, or an animal making its way to its lair.

I want to share with you a recent experience. A few weeks ago the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died. I was expecting to meet him on an already planned visit to Ramallah. As things turned out, we visited - several times - his grave.

A few days after receiving the unexpected news of his death I was seized by a desire to draw something for him. To draw ears of wheat - which feature in one of his great poems - and some flowers. As I drew the grains and the petals, they became words and phrases transported from his poems. The same pen with the same ink on the absorbent Japanese paper drew plants and wrote words at the same time.

Meanings and forms became interchangeable. They were twins born of the timeless intelligence which is inherent in every thing which is alive, and which grows and dies.

One day I'll become what I want.

One day I will become a thought

that no sword or book can dispatch to

the wasteland

A thought equal to rain on the

mountain split open by a blade of grass.

You have spent your life, Miles, looking for and recording those mountains, those rains, those blades.

Darwish's verse ends with these two lines:

where power will not triumph

and justice is not fugitive.