Pig Earth: Writing Inside the Wall

Quillian 85 Bill Quillian Pig Earth: Writing Inside the Wall Societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. Clifford Geertz I think of myself as an articulator of experience, and obviously my experience helps me to articulate the experience of others. John Berger The mountain peaks stood out against the deep blue sky like pop-out pictures in a child's book. The stars shown steadily, "as hard as nails," for at that altitude, on that cold, dry January night, there was nothing in the air to bend the light. We had been invited to dinner on top of the mountain, in a restaurant run by a young Savoyard who reputedly made the best pastries in the commune. Our host, the English novelist John Berger, drove us up the steep alpine road from the village. He drove with the assurance of familiarity, talking animatedly and freely gesturing as the car groaned up the narrow track that must have begun its life as a goat path a thousand years ago. Since our arrival two days before, I had been trying to get used to the defining verticality of this isolated area of France's Haute-Savoie. I have spent most of my life in flat lands or among rolling hills, and I suppose I have never taken seriously the moral and mystical associations writers are so fond of reading into the scarps of high mountains. But on that night, I drew a bit closer to that range of experience about which Romantic poets—Wordsworth in Book VI of the Prelude, Shelley in "Mont Blanc"—give us such accurate accounts, and I began to understand why a man like Berger, who had spent so much of his life around cities, might choose to live in such a remote and awful territory. There were six of us at dinner: myself; Lynne, my wife; Berger; his fifteen-year-old son Jacob; Beverly, the woman Berger Uves with; and their two-year-old son Yves. The restaurant occupied all of a single story Aframe building, one long room with a small bar and kitchen at the far end. Large tables were arranged in files, each seating ten or twelve. We were the first to arrive, but by the time we left, the room was beginning to fill. It reminded me of working-men's restaurants in Barcelona where the diners are all regular customers, the general conversation continually expanding to accommodate new arrivals. There were no menus; it was a restaurant where your presence implied 86 the minnesota review a trust in whatever would be offered. While we waited for the first course—a fondue of gruyere-like cheese and sherry—Berger asked me if I could recite a poem for my supper. His eyes were playful, but he was also serious. It was as if he were measuring this English professor who had written him six months earlier requesting an interview. Staring across the room, through the window to the blue night and stars outside, I thought of the following lines from Yeats' "Song of the Wandering Aengus," which fitted my mood and, somehow, fitted the situation: I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream, And caught a little silver trout. This lyric—which begins in a state of aimless wandering, moves through the transformation of a trout into a "glimmering girl," and ends with the transfigured vision of "The silver apples of the moon,/The golden applies of the sun"—has always seemed to me to exemplify Yeats' deep romantic inheritance. Escapist in impulse, it moves from an extremely close reading of the natural world into a unified image of the imagination, the white moths of a summer night becoming a simile for all the heavens. Berger's work, particularly his most recent fiction about peasants, has a similar movement. In the restaurant we talked about poetry, and about the relationship between art and experience, a relationship with which Berger, as a...