The cicadas are rattling in the trees. I’m having coffee. I finished Bento’s Sketchbook today, but I find myself thinking about something Paul Kingsnorth said in Dark Mountain: 

“Build refuges… Ask yourself, what power do you have to preserve what is of value–creatures, skills, things, places? Can you work, with others or alone, to create places or networks that act as refuges from the unfolding storm?" 

I understand him to mean the storm of progress, of information, of monoculture. The profaning of the entire world through the absence of meaning. The rise of the profiteer. 

The profiteer, Berger says, has "small eyes which examine everything and contemplate nothing. Ears extensive as a database, but incapable of listening.” (p. 147)

That quote comes from the end of this curious book. Berger says he was given a sketchbook and it struck him immediately that it was the philosopher Spinoza’s. He fills it with sketches, with quotes from Spinoza’s Ethics, with monologues on drawing and writing. He tells the story of a Cambodian he meets at the swimming pool they both frequent. He gave her a Japanese ink brush. 

“The Chinese master Qi Baishe loved drawing frogs, and he made the tops of their heads very black, as if they were wearing bathing caps. In the Far East the frog is a symbol of freedom.” (p. 123)

I started reading John Berger last year, although I had known of his Ways of Seeing since I was at college. Vi gave me a copy of his book G., but at the time it looked and sounded puzzling to me. I’m still hoping that copy shows up in one of the crates of books my mom has been sending me from my library at her house. 

I have often been taught that something must change in a story. Characters must change. I now find this blurry with nearsightedness. It’s the reader who must change in a story. What is the point otherwise? Berger asks the same question here. “Where does the story deposit those who have followed it, and in what frame of mind are they?” (p. 71)

Is there a refuge to be built there? In the story that guides one away from the path of the profiteer, the tyrant, and the bully, and towards the frog on the pond and the peasant in the field? I hear chipmunks rustling in the ferns outside my window now. I’m going to go watch them.