Here is Where We Meet [Paperback]

We are all born of woman; and from that very first relating springs the whole of our human soul; - all of its joy and suffering, its creativity and its quest for being and belonging.

While there is nothing particularly ethereal about these maternal visitations, there is nevertheless a sense that something has 'come full circle'; - but mother and son seem to take this in their stride as they pick up the threads of unfinished discussions, and - linking arms, - walk the city's streets, ride buses or go shopping in the fish market.

Across the book's eight chapters, others from the past are re-met; - both men and women: - father, friends, mentors, - past loves: - they come and go, as waves of longing and belonging push and lap at the shapes - and reconstitute the textures - of one city after another. Here are Lisbon, Madrid, Krakow, Geneva, - London; - casting their nets far and wide; - and deep into history.

And there is the to and fro' of migrant populations, propelled by economic necessity or other kinds of searching. And now, in country backwoods, there is a hollow stillness; - a ravaged sense; - the sadness of past events still hanging in the air; - although life goes on blooming, miraculously, - poignantly.

So many palpable presences and absences cluster against this shifting backdrop; - and, in amongst these, the reader, too, is somehow made to feel more than usually 'present'. If this text - a kind of narrative - has the sense of being made up of so many tangents, these are the bearings that may (indeed) help us locate a circle and its centre. The impression of meandering is deceptive; - rather, this is an earnest, concerted search; - and the gaze that searches has a feline intensity.

As the narrative now halts, - now withdraws into extended description, - now shifts to an entirely new theatre of action, we sense a conscious manoeuvring at work; - the strategic encircling of an obscure, elusive quarry. The prize is nothing less than a glimpse of the enduring soul of all Humanity; - and among our guides are the Cro-Magnon people, - who, some thirty thousand years ago, left traces of 'ourselves' on the walls of caves.

Memory is coloured by different types and intensities of emotion, just as it can be flooded with enough sensory information to retrace whole sequences of bodily sensation. Berger's own narrative somehow helps us to recreate ours; and with a precision that turns description into near-hallucination. The 'what next' of this narrative seems to consist in each new step the reader takes along a path of self-recollection.

It must be a most 'knowing' craft that allows this. Or is this simply a built-in capacity of Language itself - Language, the spinning wheel of the imagination, and the loom that maps the web of human empathy? Perhaps it is only in fully practised hands that Language finds its fullest power (and Berger is now in his eightieth year). It may be many months of toil that account for this text that is so alive; so much alive that it seems to shudder - like some delicate membrane - in response to each new soul that flickers within its sensitive range.

Like something lovelorn, the urgent embrace of Berger's memory will stop at nothing. There is no 'chance effect' here that has not been carefully weighed; - no passing description that does not point to itself and also to something beyond itself. Successive images and phrases mesmerise; - as might some musical maestro's consummate skill at fingering.

Just as Death's reach is defied, so memory is unconfined, - and nothing else is bounded here. By registering Berger's single human handprint, - duly extinguished by the great darkness of the cave whose wall receives it, - 'HERE is where we meet' gathers up all the power and universality of that absorption into darkness (the great darkness which illuminates), and the text ranges unconstrained, - freely and un-dividedly human; - quintessentially alive.

Here (indeed) is where we meet.

Ian Caughlin 2005