Still thinking about weddings, I went back to re-read the final section of John Berger's 'Here is where we meet'. The book consists of a series of encounters with the dead, but it ends with a birth and a marriage - though not in the respectable order. The scene is a town in Galicia (not the region of Spain, but the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands), which like everything else in Berger's writing seems to have been listened to with an unusual attention:

Nobody starves in Nowy Targ as they do in Milano or Paris, but there's a pall of silence over the town for there are no projects to discuss. The town lives, like dust, from day to day. And its six or seven taxis wait discreetly, just off the main square, for the occasional fare, usually a foreigner.

So here are some samples from the wedding at Nowy Targ which sidle up to what I was trying to say directly and too fast. First, the young priest:

He knew each marriage at which he officiated had been agreed upon within an intricate web of calculation, desire, fear, bribes and love, for such is the nature of the marriage contract. Each time, however, the task he set himself was to try to locate what was pure in this web. Like a hunter going into the forest, he set out to stalk a purity, to entice it out of its cover and to let all those present, and particularly the couple involved, acknowledge it.

Not an easy task, and it wasn't necessarily simple on the rare occasion when the woman and man were wildly in love, with scarcely andy other interest, for then he risked to glimpse how desire, when mutual and passionate, is more often than not, a conspiracy of two against the cruelty of the world, apparently abandoned by God. Shreds of the purity he sought were of course always present, what made his task difficult is that a purity, when disclosed, invariably goes back into hiding...

The young priest last Saturday in Nowy Targ, accomplished his task; at a certain moment he was radiant. Perhaps the purity he located, the purity which did not run for cover, resided in ten-month-old Olek. Olek, dressed in white like his mother and father, lay awake and totally calm throughout the long ceremony in the arms of Danka's elder sister, who was sitting, smiling towards the altar, at the back of the church.

Incommensurability is a recurring theme in the book. Berger writes of an understanding from childhood with his father, who had lived through four years in the trenches, 'we shared the secrets of [an] incommensurable war'. Mirek, the Polish bridegroom, has spent years as a sans papier in Paris, surviving with 'the talents of both poacher and innkeeper (the lean and the well-fed man)', and for him 'No two jobs are the same.' This is contrasted with the response of Danka's employers to her decision to return to Poland with Mirek: 'She's irreplaceable! said the man. Everyone is replaceable, said the woman.'

There is a relationship between this ethic of incommensurability and Berger's thinking regarding gender, which is perhaps to be detected in this passage.

Choosing a wedding dress is unlike choosing any other garment. The bride, when dressed, has to appear to come from a place where nobody present has ever been, because it is the place of her own name. The woman to be married becomes Bride the moment she is transformed into a stranger. A stranger so that the man she is marrying can recognise her as if for the first time; a stranger so she can be surprised, at the moment when they make their vows, by the man she is marrying. Why are brides ritually hidden before the ceremony? It is to facilitate the transformation whereby the bride appears to have come from the other side of a horizon. The veil is the veil of that distance. A woman who has lived her whole life in the same village walks down the aisle of her village church as a bride, and to all those watching she becomes, for an instant, unrecognisable, not because she is wearing a disguise, but because she has become a newcomer being greeted on arrival.

The last word loops back to a passage seventy pages earlier, in which Berger writes about another theme, the different relationships to time in which different societies live:

The Cro-Magnons lived with fear and amazement in a culture of Arrival, facing many mysteries. Their culture lasted for some 20,000 years. We live in a culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress which has so far lasted two or three centuries. Today's culture, instead of facing mysteries, persistently tries to outflank them.

Finally, some moments from the wedding party:

The dishes came like good news, one after another. After each one there was an interval for drinking and dancing and measuring the improbability of so much good news. Everyone gathered there knew that news of a catastrophe comes all at once...

The music, like the young priest a few hours earlier, was searching for a purity. Not, of course, the same one. The music was searching for the purity of desire, of what passes between a longing and a promise: the promise of consolation that can outlast - or anyway outflank - the punishments of living...

[The singer's] voice touched outer space, and the music attained the purity that staunches wounds.

Everyone in the barn was reminded how a life without wounds isn't worth living.

Desire is brief - a few hours or a lifetime, both are brief. Desire is brief because it occurs in defiance of the permanent. It challenges time in a fight to the death. And dancing is about that challenge.

There was only one bride there and one groom, but there were several hundred weddings; remembered, real, regretted and imaginary.