John Berger by Andy Swapp (iPad) Aug 2012
“Songs refer to aftermaths and returns, welcomes and farewells…songs are sung to an absence…in the sharing of the song the absence is also shared and so becomes less acute, less solitary, less silent. And this ‘reduction’ of the original absence during the sharing of the singing, or even during the memory of such singing, is collectively experienced as something triumphant. Sometimes a mild triumph, often a covert one. ‘I could wrap myself,’ said Johnny Cash. 'in the warm cocoon of a song and go anywhere; I was invincible.”
— John Berger, from ‘Some Notes About Song (for Yasmin Hamdan)’, Confabulations
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