Selected Essays of John Berger (88 page)

In Basel we are watching a strange theatre in which, on both sides of the glass, the performers may believe they are an audience. On both sides the drama begins with resemblance and the uneasy relationship that exists between resemblance and closeness.

The idea of evolution is very old. Hunters believed that animals — and especially the ones they hunted — were in some mysterious way their brothers. Aristotle argued that all the forms of nature constituted a series, a chain of being, which began with the simple and became more and more complex, striving towards the perfect. In Latin
evolution
means unfolding.

A group of handicapped patients from a local institution come into the theatre. Some have to be helped up the tiers, others manage by themselves, one or two are in wheelchairs. They form a different kind of audience — or rather, an audience with different reactions. They are less puzzled, less astounded, but more amused. Like children? Not at all. They are less puzzled because they are more familiar with what is out of the ordinary. Or, to put it another way, their sense of the norm is far wider.

What was new and outrageous in
The Origin of Species
when it was first published in 1859 was Darwin’s argument that all animal species had evolved from the same prototype, and that this immensely slow evolution had taken place through certain accidental mutations being favoured by natural selection, which had worked according to the principle of the survival of the fittest. A series of accidents. Without design or purpose and without experience counting. (Darwin rejected Lamarck’s thesis that acquired characteristics could be inherited.) The pre-condition for Darwin’s theory being plausible was something even more shocking: the wastes of empty time required: about 500 million years!

Until the nineteenth century it was generally, if not universally, believed that the world was a few thousand years old — something that could be measured by the time scale of human generations. (As in Genesis, chapter 5.) But in 1830 Charles Lyell published
The Principles of Geology
and proposed that the earth, with ‘no vestige of a beginning — no prospect of an end’, was millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of years old.

Darwin’s thinking was a creative response to the terrifying immensity of what had just been opened up. And the sadness of Darwinism — for no other scientific revolution, when it was made, broadcast so little hope — derived, I think, from the desolation of the distances involved.

The sadness, the desolation, is there in the last sentence of
The Descent of Man
, published in 1871: ‘We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems
to me, that man with all his noble qualities, still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’

‘The indelible stamp’ speaks volumes. ‘Indelible’ in the sense that (unfortunately) it cannot be washed out. ‘Stamp’ meaning ‘brand, mark, stain’. And in the word ‘lowly’ during the nineteenth century, as in Thatcher’s Britain, there is shame.

The liberty of the newly opened-up space-time of the universe brought with it a feeling of insignificance and
pudeur
, from which the best that could be redeemed was the virtue of intellectual courage, the virtue of being unflinching. And courageous the thinkers of that time were!

Whenever an actor who is not a baby wants to piss or shit, he or she gets up and goes to the edge of a balcony or deck, and there defecates or urinates below, so as to remain clean. An habitual act which we seldom see enacted on the stage. And the effect is surprising. The public watch with a kind of pride. An altogether legitimate one. Don’t shit yourself. Soon we’ll be entering another century.

Mostly, the thinkers of the nineteenth century thought mechanically, for theirs was the century of machines. They thought in terms of chains, branches, lines, comparative anatomies, clockworks, grids. They knew about power, resistance, speed, competition. Consequently, they discovered a great deal about the material world, about tools and production. What they knew less about is what we still don’t know much about: the way brains work. I can’t get this out of my mind: it’s somewhere at the centre of the theatre we’re watching.

Apes don’t live entirely within the needs and impulses of their own bodies — like the cats do. (It may be different in the wild, but this is true on the stage.) They have a gratuitous curiosity. All animals play, but the others play at being themselves, whereas the apes experiment. They suffer from a surplus of curiosity. They can momentarily forget their needs, or any single unchanging role. A young female will pretend to be a mother cuddling a baby lent by its real mother. ‘Baby-sitting,’ the zoologists call it.

Their surplus of curiosity, their research (every animal searches, only apes research) make them suffer in two evident ways — and probably also in others, invisibly. Their bodies, forgotten, suddenly nag, twinge, and irritate. They become impatient with their own skin — like Marat suffering from eczema.

And then too, starved of events, they suffer boredom. Baudelaire’s
l’ennui
. Not at the same level of self-doubt, but nevertheless with pain, apathy. The signs of boredom may resemble those of simple drowsiness. But
l’ennui
has its unmistakable lassitude. The body, instead of relaxing, huddles, the eyes stare painfully without focus, the hands, finding
nothing new to touch or do, become like gloves worn by a creature drowning.

’If it could be demonstrated,’ Darwin wrote, ‘that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.’

If the apes are partly victims of their own bodies — the price they pay, like man, for not being confined to their immediate needs — they have found a consolation, which Europe has forgotten. My mother used to say the chimps were looking for fleas, and that when they found one, they put it between their teeth and bit it. But it goes further than Mother thought — as I guessed even then. The chimpanzees touch and caress and scratch each other for hours on end (and according to the etiquette rules of a strict group hierarchy) not only hygienically, to catch parasites, but to give pleasure. ‘Grooming’, as it is called, is one of their principal ways of appeasing the troublesome body.

This one is scratching inside her ear with her little finger. Now she has stopped scratching to examine minutely her small nail. Her gestures are intimately familiar and strikingly remote. (The same is true for most actions on any theatre stage.) An orang-utan is preparing a bed for herself. Suddenly, she hesitates before placing her armful of straw on the floor, as if she has heard a siren. Not only are the apes’ functional gestures familiar, but also their expressive ones. Gestures which denote surprise, amusement, tenderness, irritation, pleasure, indifference, desire, fear.

But they move differently. A male gorilla is sitting at ease with his arm held straight and high above his head; and for him this position is as relaxed as sitting with legs crossed is for women and men. Everything which derives from the apes’ skill in swinging from branches —
brachiation
, as the zoologists call it — sets them apart. Tarzan only swung from vines — he never used his hanging arms like legs, walking sideways.

In evolutionary history, however, this difference is in fact a link. Monkeys walk on all fours along the tops of branches and use their tails for hanging. The common ancestors of man and apes began, instead, to use their arms — began to become
brachiators
. This, the theory goes, gave them the advantage of being able to reach fruit at the ends of branches!

I must have been two years old when I had my first cuddly toy. It was a monkey. A chimpanzee, in fact. I think I called him Jackie. To be certain, I’d have to ask my mother. She would remember. But my mother is dead. There is just a chance — one in a hundred million (about the same as a chance mutation being favoured by natural selection) — that a reader may be able to tell me, for we had visitors to our home in Higham’s Park, in East London, sixty years ago, and I presented my chimp to everyone who came through the front door. I think his name was Jackie.

Slowly, the hanging position, favoured by natural selection, changed the anatomy of the brachiators’ torsos so that finally they became half-upright animals — although not yet as upright as humans. It is thanks to hanging from trees that we have long collarbones which keep our arms away from our chests, wrists which allow our hands to bend backwards and sideways, and shoulder sockets that let our arms rotate.

It is thanks to hanging from trees that one of the actors can throw himself into the arms of a mother and cry. Brachiation gave us breasts to beat and to be held against. No other animal can do these things.

When Darwin thought about the eyes of mammals, he admitted that he broke out in a cold sweat. The complexity of the eye was hard to explain within the logic of his theory, for it implied the co-ordination of so many evolutionary ‘accidents’. If the eye is to work at all, all the elements have to be there: tear glands, eyelid, cornea, pupil, retina, millions of light-sensitive rods and cones which transmit to the brain millions of electrical impulses per second. Before they constituted an eye, these intricate parts would have been useless, so why should they have been favoured by natural selection? The existence of the eye perfidiously suggests an evolutionary aim, an intention.

Darwin finally got over the problem by going back to the existence of light-sensitive spots on one-celled organisms. These, he claimed, could have been ‘the first eye’ from which the evolution of our complex eyes first began.

I have the impression that the oldest gorilla may be blind. Like Beckett’s Pozzo. I ask his keeper, a young woman with fair hair. Yes, she says, he’s almost blind. How old is he? I ask. She looks at me hard. About your age, she replies, in his early sixties.

Recently, molecular biologists have shown that we share with apes 99 per cent of their DNA. Only 1 per cent of his genetic code separates man from the chimpanzee or the gorilla. The orang-utan, which means in the language of the people of Borneo ‘man of the forest’, is fractionally further removed. If we take another animal family, in order to emphasize how small the 1 per cent is, a dog differs from a raccoon by 12 per cent. The genetic closeness between man and ape — apart from making our theatre possible — strongly suggests that their common ancestor existed not 20 million years ago as the Neo-Darwinist palaeontologists believed, but maybe only 4 million years ago. This molecular evidence has been contested because there are no fossil proofs to support it. But in evolutionary theory fossils, it seems to me, have usually been notable by their absence!

In the Anglo-Saxon world today the Creationists, who take the Genesis story of the Creation as the literal truth, are increasingly vocal and insist that their version be taught in schools alongside the Neo-Darwinist one.
The orang-utan is like he is, say the Creationists, because that’s the way God made him, once and for all, five thousand years ago! He is like he is, reply the Neo-Darwinists, because he has been efficient in the ceaseless struggle for survival!

Her orang-utan eyes operate exactly like mine — each retina with its 130 million rods and cones. But her expression is the oldest I’ve ever seen. Approach it at your peril, for you can fall into a kind of maelstrom of ageing. The plunge is still there in Jean Mohr’s photo.

Not far up the Rhine from Basel, Angelus Silesius, the seventeenth-century German doctor of medicine, studied in Strasbourg, and he once wrote:

I look at her with her eyelids which are so pale that when she closes them they’re like eyecups, and I wonder.

Certain Neo-Darwinist ideas are intriguing: Bolk’s theory of neoteny, for instance. According to Bolk, ‘man in his bodily development is a primate foetus that has become sexually mature’, and consequently can reproduce. His theory proposes that a genetic code can stop one kind of growth and encourage another. Man is a neonate ape to whom this happened. Unfinished, he is able to learn more.

It has even been argued that today’s apes may be descendants of a hominid, and that in them the neoteny brake was taken off so that they stopped stopping at the foetus stage, grew body hair again and were born with tough skulls! This would make them more modern than we are.

Yet in general, the conceptual framework in which the Neo-Darwinists and the Creationists debate is of such limited imagination that the contrast with the immensity of the process whose origin they are searching is flagrant. They are like two bands of seven-year-olds who, having discovered a packet of love letters in an attic, try to piece together the story behind the correspondence. Both bands are ingenious and argue ferociously with one another, but the passion of the letters is beyond their competence.

Perhaps it is objectively true that only poetry can talk of birth and origin. Because true poetry invokes the whole of language (it breathes with everything it has not said), just as the origin invokes the whole of life, the whole of Being.

The mother orang-utan has come back, this time with her baby. She is sitting right up against the glass. The children in the audience have come close to watch her. Suddenly, I think of a Madonna and Child by Cosimo Tura. I’m not indulging in a sentimental confusion. I haven’t forgotten
I’m talking about apes any more than I’ve forgotten I’m watching a theatre. The more one emphasizes the millions of years, the more extraordinary the expressive gestures become. Arms, fingers, eyes, always eyes … A certain way of being protective, a certain gentleness — if one could feel the fingers on one’s neck, one would say a certain
tenderness
— which has endured for five million years.

A species that did not protect its young would not survive, comes the answer. Indisputably. But the answer does not explain the theatre.

I ask myself about the theatre — about its mystery and its essence. It’s to do with time. The theatre, more tangibly than any other art, presents us with the past. Paintings may show what the past looked like, but they are like traces or footprints, they no longer move. With each theatre performance, what once happened is re-enacted. Each time we keep the same rendezvous: with Macbeth who can’t wake up from his downfall; with Antigone who must do her duty. And each night in the theatre Antigone, who died three millennia ago, says: ‘We have only a short time to please the living, all eternity to please the dead.’