John Berger. Seeing comes before words

Our people say talking to yourself is OK. It only becomes a problem when you start answering yourself! That’s probably why we created priests, oracles, gurus, philosophers to help us make sense of the many questions we ask ourselves.

Poetry opened my mind to the creative dimensions of reality. The more I wrote, the more questions I asked myself.  Jimmy Cliff and Johnny Nash became the renowned philosophers of our generation.

“There are more questions than answers
Pictures in my mind that will not show
There are more questions than answers
And the more I find out the less I know” – Johnny Nash

Why Berger?

Johnny Nash sang beautifully. John Berger went further to explain in simple terms the dynamics of art and creative processes.

Berger: ” There is a sense in which seeing comes before words”.

Me: Really?  The difference between seeing and words must be fragments of nanoseconds.

Berger: “It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.’

<John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.  An influential book on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented- ‘This is an eye-opener in more ways than one- by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures.’ By now he has.>

Me: More than just how we see paintings.

Berger: With the invention of the camera, everything changed.

Me: The way we see things and experience our surroundings.

Gems of thought opening many doors to magic realism and visual poetry. ❤️