Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things

"Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated." — so proclaimed John Berger, the seer of images and words, whose writings revealed to us the mysteries of art as a language older than speech itself. In this utterance, he speaks to us of a profound truth: that to draw is not merely to trace the outward appearance of the world, but to seek the hidden threads that bind form to form, essence to essence. As the poet uses metaphor to unite distant things, so too does the artist, in lines and shadows, restore the unity of what the world has torn apart.

In the beginning of human time, before ink upon parchment, before books bound in leather, men and women etched their visions upon cave walls. The hunter carved the bison, not only to depict it but to grasp the secret connection between his own survival and the life of the beast. The line was prayer, the drawing a bridge between man and animal, spirit and earth. Thus has it always been: drawing is communion, a rediscovery of the unity of things. Berger, looking upon this ancient practice, knew that art was more than representation—it was reconciliation.

So too in poetry, the power of metaphor takes two things estranged and fuses them, revealing the kinship of all creation. When Homer calls the sea "wine-dark," he does not simply adorn his verse, but awakens in the listener the realization that the rolling ocean and the cup of wine share a common mystery of depth, intoxication, and movement. The poet heals the fracture between realms of experience. Likewise, when the artist draws the curve of a tree’s branch and finds in it the likeness of an arm or a river’s bend, he is reminding us that nothing in this world is truly separate; all is woven into one fabric.

Think, O listener, of Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched tirelessly the bones of men, the flight of birds, the spirals of water. To him, drawing was not idle craft but discovery. In every stroke of charcoal he sought the invisible threads: the kinship of the wing and the arm, the flow of hair and the current of a river. In his notebooks, metaphor lived in lines. By connecting what seemed divided, he anticipated truths of anatomy, physics, and motion long before science had words for them. His art was vision, his vision a map of unity.

The teaching of Berger, then, is that art—whether line upon paper or word in verse—is the great healer of separations. In a world where modern life scatters things into fragments, where knowledge is divided into compartments, and where men forget the wholeness of existence, drawing and poetry restore the lost unity. They show us that the tree is like the human, the storm like the passion, the city like the hive. They remind us that we are not strangers in the cosmos, but kin to all things.

What, then, is the lesson for us? It is this: train your vision not merely to look, but to see connections. When you look at a stone, do not see only a dead weight—see also the mountain from which it fell, the centuries that shaped it, the builder who may yet lift it. When you speak, let your words be bridges, not walls. Seek metaphors, for in metaphor you will learn to feel the unity of the world. And if you can, take up pen or brush, and let your hand reveal connections your tongue cannot.

The practical path is simple yet profound: draw, even if crudely. Write, even if haltingly. Do not aim at perfection, but at perception. In the act of sketching a flower, you will come to see its kinship with the sun and the soil. In the act of writing a metaphor, you will feel the hidden harmony between your soul and the stars. By practicing these acts, you restore within yourself what the world has divided, and you grow closer to truth.

Thus, let us carry Berger’s wisdom as a lamp: that drawing and metaphor are sacred acts of reunion. They are not mere crafts but revelations, not ornaments but pathways. They show us that beneath the apparent separations of this world runs a secret river of unity, flowing from all things to all things. And if we learn to see as the artist sees, to speak as the poet speaks, then we, too, shall live not as exiles in fragments, but as children of wholeness, reconciled with all that is.