{"id":284057,"date":"2025-01-06T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2025-01-06T12:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=284057"},"modified":"2025-01-01T11:13:46","modified_gmt":"2025-01-01T11:13:46","slug":"the-avenging-heroes-among-us-john-berger-on-the-courage-to-create","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/01\/the-avenging-heroes-among-us-john-berger-on-the-courage-to-create\/","title":{"rendered":"The Avenging Heroes among Us: John Berger on the Courage to Create"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cWhat makes Heroic?\u201d asked Nietzsche as he was emerging from depression<\/a>, then answered: \u201cTo face simultaneously one\u2019s greatest suffering and one\u2019s highest hope.\u201d<\/em> That is the heroism of the inner world, yes, but what makes a person heroic in the world we share is to face the greatest suffering \u2014 their own and the world\u2019s \u2014 then make of it a found of hope and fulcrum of strength for others. Heroes are transmutation agents \u2014 people who alchemize suffering and restlessness and rage into love, who compost disappointment into fertilizer for growth, who break down cynicism to its building blocks of helplessness and hubris, then metabolize the toxin out of the system we call society.<\/p>\n

There are myriad kinds of heroes capable of myriad heroisms \u2014 the epochal heroisms of speaking truth to power<\/a> that mobilize the consciousness of a civilization and the small daily heroisms of the invisible labor<\/a> that makes the world cohere, the heroism of planting a tree and the heroism of abolishing a plantation, the heroism of keeping faith in a friend through a hard time and the heroism of leaving a false love.<\/p>\n

It helps to remember this diversity of heroisms, because it saves us from imprisoning our heroes in the expectation that everyone contribute to the shared cause \u2014 the great project of human flourishing \u2014 in the same way. The protest marcher and the poet are very different kinds of heroes, and it is an act of oppression against the gift of each to measure them on the register of the other. Only when we cease doing that can we begin to recognize the heroes who across the history of every civilization have kept the lighthouse blazing through the dark times<\/a> \u2014 the heroes we call artists.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The Star-Lighter<\/em> by Rockwell Kent<\/a>, 1919. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These are the heroes John Berger<\/a> (November 5, 1926\u2013January 2, 2017) celebrates in one of the essays in his 1991 collection Keeping a Rendezvous<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the heroes we need in times \u201cwhen the just cause is defeated\u2026 when our past is dishonoured and its promises and sacrifices shrugged off with ignorant and evil smiles, when whole families come to suspect that those who wield power are deaf to reason and every plea, and that there is no appeal anywhere, when gradually you realize\u2026 that They are out to break you, out to break your inheritance, your skills, your communities, your poetry, your clubs, your home and, wherever possible, your bones too.\u201d Of such times, Berger writes:<\/p>\n

The avenging heroes are now being dreamt up and awaited. They are already feared by the pitiless and blessed by me and maybe by you.<\/p>\n

I would shield any such hero to my fullest capacity. Yet if, during the time I was sheltering him, he told me he liked drawing, or\u2026 she told me she\u2019d always wanted to paint, and had never had the chance or the time to do so, if this happened, then I think I\u2019d say: Look, if you want to, it\u2019s possible you may achieve what you are setting out to do in another way, a way less likely to fall out on your comrades and less open to confusion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Echoing Iris Murdoch\u2019s abiding observation that \u201ctyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify\u201d<\/a> and Auden\u2019s insistence that \u201cthe mere making of a work of art is itself a political act,\u201d<\/a> Berger adds:<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life\u2019s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honour.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Leonard Cohen on what makes a modern saint<\/a>, James Baldwin on the artist\u2019s role in society<\/a>, Toni Morrison on the artist\u2019s task in troubled times<\/a>, and Ernst Becker on heroism and our search for meaning<\/a>, then revisit Berger on the power of music<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> My name is <\/em>Maria Popova<\/em><\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which <\/em>bore the unbearable name <\/em>Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What is all this? (<\/em>More<\/em><\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It helps to remember this diversity of heroisms, because it saves us from imprisoning our heroes in the expectation that everyone contribute to the shared cause \u2014 the great project of human flourishing \u2014 in the same way. The protest marcher and the poet are very different kinds of heroes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":106597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[1630,642],"class_list":["post-284057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-creativity","tag-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284059,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284057\/revisions\/284059"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}