From Left Curve: No. 31. Berger’s most recent work of fiction, From A to X, is out this month from Verso. His “Portrait of a Masked Man” appeared in the April issue of Harper’s Magazine.
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The dead surround the living. The living are the core of the dead. In this core are the dimensions of time and space. What surrounds the core is timelessness.
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Between the core and its surroundings there are exchanges, which are not usually clear. All religions have been concerned with making them clearer. The credibility of religion depends upon the clarity of certain unusual exchanges. The mystifications of religion are the result of trying to produce such exchanges systematically.
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The rarity of clear exchange is due to the rarity of what can cross intact the frontier between timelessness and time.
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To see the dead as the individuals they once were tends to obscure their nature. Try to consider the living as we might assume the dead to do: collectively. The collective would accrue not only across space but also throughout time. It would include all those who had ever lived. And so we would also be thinking of the dead. The living reduce the dead to those who have lived, yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective.
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The dead inhabit a timeless moment of construction continually rebegun. The construction is the state of the universe at any instant.
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According to their memory of life, the dead know the moment of construction as, also, a moment of collapse. Having lived, the dead can never be inert.
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If the dead live in a timeless moment, how can they have a memory? They remember no more than being thrown into time, as does everything which existed or exists.
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The difference between the dead and the unborn is that the dead have this memory. As the number of dead increases, the memory enlarges.
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The memory of the dead existing in timelessness may be thought of as a form of imagination concerning the possible. This imagination is close to (resides in) God, but I do not know how.
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In the world of the living there is an equivalent but contrary phenomenon. The living sometimes experience timelessness, as revealed in sleep, ecstasy, instants of extreme danger, orgasm, and perhaps in the experience of dying itself. During these instants the living imagination covers the entire field of experience and overruns the contours of the individual life or death. It touches the waiting imagination of the dead.
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What is the relation of the dead to what has not yet happened, to the future? All the future is the construction in which their “imagination” is engaged.
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How do the living lie with the dead? Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egotism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as eliminated.
