by Ben Okri
‘Because I am. I can feel it. I can see you. I pinch myself and I feel it.’
‘How do you know you’re not doing all this in your dream?’
‘I’m not dreaming, am I?’
‘How do you know?’
‘If everyone is asleep and awake, how can anyone wake up then?’
‘By going in.’
‘You’ve said that before.’
‘I haven’t.’
‘Yes, you have.’
‘I have never said this to you,’ said the grandfather smiling. ‘But I will say it to you again. Maybe you heard me say it to you in the future.’
‘But how can I hear something said in the future?’
‘You just did.’
The boy paused. The grandfather enjoyed the boy’s perplexity. He seemed to want to increase it, as though perplexity were a desired state of mind.
‘If someone wakes up, the eternal night will end?’
‘Yes.’
‘So everyone has to wake up to end the terrible night?’
‘Yes, but the night is defeated by one person first. Then everyone else will follow.’
‘And who will this person be?’
‘It could be anyone. It could be a child, a mad man, a woman, a girl, a lover, a thief, a tyrant, a jailor, a storyteller, a shoemaker, a poet, or a whore.’
‘What is a whore?’
‘You will find out soon enough.’
The boy paused again.
‘How will this person wake up?’
‘By going in.’
‘You’ve said that before.’
‘Ah, this is one future you heard.’
‘How will they go in?’
It was the old man’s turn to pause. He had a troubled look on his face. Then with a new voice, the voice of fear and wonder, he said:
‘By being the first to escape from this prison that has been our home from the beginning of time.’
The boy remembered this conversation as he sat by the lake. The round moon shone in its centre. It had been a long night.
24
In search of clues Karnak decided to go into the beautiful building with the sky-piercing spire. It was a simple building with a triangular pediment and fine elegant columns.
He had often been taken there as a child. Often he’d fallen asleep during the sermon. Though it was required by tradition, he hadn’t been there for many years. He could not remember why he stopped going.
He had always admired the building, even when hurrying past it on his way to work. It occurred to him that the people there might be able to help him.
It was a particularly fine morning. The sunlight was tender on the trees. He found the church almost empty. Three people were seated at great distances from one another. The service was just about to begin. He took a seat at the front, and resolved not to fall asleep as he had done when he was a child.
Figures in white vestments made their way to the front and performed a ritual in a language he did not know and made signs in the air. There was a table covered in a white cloth with gold borders. One of the men held a golden cup. Another spoke of blood turned into wine. A woman in a white surplice talked of the original garden and the fall and the first sin and salvation. An unseen choir sang. Their voices were beautiful. The man who had spoken about wine prayed on behalf of everyone. Then he asked if anyone present wanted to drink of the wine. None of the three people moved. He said something about confessing sins. No one came forward. One of the officials made a sign. Another drank from the cup, another ate of the bread. The myth of the garden was read out from a huge book with golden letters. It was the new version of the ancient myth. The choir of boys sang again. When it was all over Karnak was asleep in the pew, along with the three others who had attended the service.
It was the best sleep he’d had in a long time.
☆
Once she said to him:
‘I think I am the most ordinary person in the world.’
He laughed.
‘You? Ordinary? There’s nothing ordinary about you.’
‘But there is. That’s all I want.’
‘To be ordinary?’
‘Yes. It’s the hardest thing in our times to be ordinary.’
‘I’m not sure I follow you. What do you mean by ordinary?’
‘Someone who loves simply, like a child.’
‘That’s not ordinary. That’s beautiful.’
‘Someone who wants this world to end.’
‘Why would you want that?’
‘Someone who likes watching things grow.’
‘That’s not ordinary. That’s just old-fashioned.’
‘Someone who can be loved by you.’
‘Does my love make you feel ordinary?’
‘Yes, and I love it.’
‘Your love makes me feel drunk. You have the strangest beauty. Sometimes just looking at you makes me feel like I’m hallucinating. Sometimes I feel I’m going to fall. Sometimes just looking at you gives me panic attacks.’
‘But why?’
‘I think I would die if I lose you. I think I would just quietly go mad.’
‘Why do you think you would lose me?’
‘When you really love, it’s your first fear.’
‘When you really love you know you can never lose that person. Even if they got taken to another world.’
‘Please don’t make any hints like that. I can’t bear it.’
‘But it’s true, though. How can you lose what you love?’
‘Because it won’t be there any more.’
‘So you agree about absences?’
‘Your absence would make the world die.’
‘If only that were true.’
‘Without your beauty this world is empty. It will be a desert.’
‘You’re back to beauty again. You know what I think about beauty.’
‘I know and I don’t agree. There’s nothing wrong with beauty. It’s the charm of life.’
‘Beauty in the eye is blindness in the soul.’
‘Did you make that up?’
‘Maybe, or maybe I read it somewhere.’
‘Let’s not talk about books.’
‘Books books books.’
‘In that case, your beauty makes the air shine. It makes the world stand still. Every time I look at you my heart jumps and everything becomes unreal. You know there are moments when I look at you and I turn around and weep. Your beauty…’
‘Every time you talk about my beauty it makes me ill.’
‘But why?’
Amalantis paused. She went into a deep thought for a while, and never gave an answer.
25
By a stroke of genius, and wholly by accident, the authorities found a way to uncover those who collaborated with the question-askers.
An individual was hauled into a police station. He had been hanging about a suspicious area at night. During questioning he revealed something strange. He did not hear the screams at night. From this it was reasoned, by the sages of the land, that those who didn’t hear the screams didn’t hear them because they were also screaming. It followed that those who heard the screams were not screaming while they slept. If they did not scream at night then they were not normal. They were not like everyone else. They must have bad consciences, or evil thoughts. They might also be awake. And if they were awake while everyone else was sleeping, what on earth were they doing?
This was how the authorities came upon the method for detecting those harbouring thoughts dangerous to the state. The Sleep Police went from house to house in the dead of night listening out for those who did not scream while they slept.
26
The church had subtly altered its doctrines. All mention of the earliest myths of the prison were quietly dropped. The old books revealing the primeval myth of the prison were hidden away. The new bibles replaced the myth of the first prison with that of the first garden. But the rest of the story was retained.
/> After the garden there was still the fall. In some versions there was a long period in the desert and then there was the wasteland. The generation raised on the myth of the prison got confused by the story of the garden. The generation raised on the myth of the garden wondered how they got to the garden and wondered if there was a way back. People were taught not to ask exactly where the garden was. Historians were encouraged not to speculate about its precise location.
Then the populace was educated to treat the stories in the bible not as stories any more, but as truths. They were events that really happened long ago. In this way the promises made in the book of a future garden in which all would be happy seemed more likely to come true.
Some philosophers maintained that the garden is everywhere. The past, present, and future are all gardens. They urged their fellow citizens to regard life with more wonder.
The churches grew emptier. Services were held to empty pews.
27
Then one morning a curious word appeared in the world. It could be seen on walls, billboards, on sides of lorries and cars, and spray-painted on the streets. Leaflets fluttering in the breeze bore this single word. People hurrying to work after a night of sleep-screaming were perplexed by the word.
The word was strange, not because it was unknown, but because it was an illogical paradoxical thought. The word implied its opposite. But if its opposite was true then how could anyone be aware of the word?
The authorities descended on the streets and destroyed all the leaflets bearing the single harmless-seeming word. Walls were thoroughly scrubbed. They need not have bothered. The word barely registered in people’s minds. When it did it was with a sense of bemusement.
It turned out to be a normal day. It was a day of light breezes and intermittent sunshine. It was like any other day in a world where the water had changed. But that night people screamed louder in their sleep. All over the cities these screams could be heard. They were like the lonely debris washed home from a day of living in the world.
But there were isolated dreamers who, in their sleep, said one word over and over again.
That word was:
Upwake!
28
Arumour went round the underworld that people who did not scream in their sleep were being arrested. Small children had been taken away to the immense land of eternal darkness. Young girls were woken in the depth of the night and quietly removed to pale white vans, their helpless parents forlorn on doorsteps. One or two state philosophers, working late into the night, found themselves abandoned in the desert of darkness, with its soundlessly sleeping corpses. One or two priests were rounded up and delivered to the grim warehouse of eternal night.
It didn’t take long for fake screamers to join the real screamers. They could be coached if they were not real screamers. In some houses machines with recorded wails did the job. The authorities couldn’t tell the difference between the real and the false.
After a while it was realised that mistakes had been made. Huge financial compensations were made in secret to families who lost innocent children. Plaques commemorated missing priests. The vanished state philosopher became, in absentia, an icon of contemporary thought, his works made compulsory study at the universities.
29
Before he was taken away, the philosopher had been working on a new idea. He had been nourishing the theme of his great tome for most of his life. After years of contributing to the altered myth of the prison, he had a strange revelation. He found a flaw in the original myth. The authorities were delighted by his discovery and encouraged him to make his findings public. The book which he had been working on, written in longhand in black notebooks, deep into the night, was called: The Universe is My Dream and Mis-representation.
Its thesis was simple: the human mechanism, fatally flawed, misperceives reality. Man may as well be in a dream. Enlightened guardians are needed to lead humanity out of the forest of illusions into a brilliant new future. The senses cannot be corrected. But the mind, through suitable myths, can exert a corrective to the parallax of the sensorium.
It was a book written in aphorisms. Some were dense, others lapidary. All were designed to strengthen the notion that society needs strong leaders, that people cannot trust their senses, and that enlightened myth is the true guide of the mind.
Here are some of his aphorisms:
– That you see a star in the night sky does not mean that the star sees you. The universe does not mirror consciousness. Consciousness mirrors the universe.
– Those who sleep, awake; those who wake up, sleep.
– Society is the journey of myth through the reality of being.
– Those who yearn for power create more sleep.
– Words serve to reduce reality. Words are not things.
– To misperceive is natural to man. Philosophy and myth correct the defective vision of nature.
– Gods are the invention of man; our gods mirror us. When the gods die we are without reflections projected into the infinite.
– The old society invented gods out of the rigorous necessity of metaphor. Metaphors, once they assume human form, take on a life of their own, like the clay figures breathed on by the Demiurge that is us.
– We made the gods in our image.
– The death of God is the beginning of man.
– A peerless light shines from the original myth, but words stain its purity.
– Man was not born in prison, but prison was born in man.
– The original prison was the original garden: we have cultivated our myth.
30
Those were some of his aphorisms, written at different times, scattered across several folios. He was, however, working on an extended aphorism when the knock sounded on the door. His last thought, unfinished, was in fact a meditation on the word that had appeared everywhere that day:
– To wake up is paradoxical. If you are awake, there is no waking up from wakefulness. If you are asleep, you cannot be awake enough to know you are asleep. Consequently the word Upwake is futile. Revolutionaries are seldom philosophers. This is just as well. If the word Upwake is meant to destabilise the state, peaceful sleep is assured for generations to come. To wake up those who are asleep you must first either wake them up or make them know they are asleep. Consequently you must speak to them in their dreams. There are only two things that can speak to a sleeping person: dreams or myth, which is a kind of dream. If I were a revolutionary I would work on the kingdom of sleep, the theatre of intimate listening. The conscious mind has limitations; the subconscious has none. This is the limitation of philosophy: we address only the conscious mind. A note for the Hierarchy: exercise power over sleep. The psychiatrist should do the work of the state. Psychonalysts should report their findings to the state. The greatest leader would first be a master of the dreams of the peop…
Then came the fatal knock.
31
Among those arrested for not screaming in their sleep was a comedian, one of the funniest people in the land, and a darling of the establishment.
On this particular night the comedian was working on a series of jokes for an upcoming show. He had chosen, as his subject for the show, the not very funny question-askers. He thought it ludicrous that words painted on walls could have any impact on anyone. He had been wanting, for some time now, to take a crack at the different words that appeared every day, words that bewildered people and upset the authorities. Somehow he had never been able to find a way to make comedy out of them.
He couldn’t make fun of the myth of the original prison. It was too serious a subject. Almost sacred. He knew this, but as the best loved and most famous comedian in the land he had been urged many times to contribute to efforts to calm the public mood. This day’s word seemed perfect for mockery. He had sketched a few lines already.
– ‘Can you imagine being asleep and someone puts a “wakeup” sign over your face? Do they expect you to read it while you are snoring?’
– ‘So there I am, having this dream about this gorgeous girl. Then this guy in a balaclava sticks a sign that says “wakeup” in my face. Do you think I’d notice?’
– ‘These people who put up all those words, what do you think their life is like? They get up in the morning and they spend all day thinking of one word. “Goose!” No, that won’t do. What about “Leg!” No, maybe not. Oh I know. “Eat!” People need to eat. We should tell people what they know already. No message is more powerful than an obvious message, right? What about “Walk!” Now people don’t know how to do that. I tell you what gets me. What gets me is why do they choose one word? Why not a whole sentence? Why not a whole manifesto? Whatever happened to the good old days of powerful slogans? Workers of the world and all that. Do you think these guys have got so small from hiding in little cubby holes underground that they can only think up one word at a time?’
The comedian was pleased with the tone. He could see himself in front of the crowd already. He could imagine their anticipation and surprise as he began to tear the word of the day apart.
The roaring belly laughs, the creased up faces and the shaking bellies, the anonymous laughter from the Hierarchy boxes never failed to fill him with pleasure. He was a master of humour. He knew how to create waves of laughter from one side of the audience which would rise to meet the waves from the other side in a volcanic eruption of hilarity. This would be his biggest success.
He had begun to laugh in anticipation, when the fatal knock sounded.
32
Refreshed by his sleep, Karnak came to the conclusion that the priests would not be able to help him in his quest.
He wandered the streets, looking for clues to the identity of the mysterious people who appeared and disappeared, leaving words and leaflets and mayhem behind.
As he wandered, it occurred to him that the solution might lie in affinities. Who were most like the question-askers? Who did they most resemble? The answer came to him almost immediately. It was obvious. He wondered why he had never thought of it before. The people who were most like the question-askers were the artists. He would seek them out. They might give him clues, throw light on his search.
