The Freedom Artist

by Ben Okri

  Mirababa paused and took a deep breath. He turned to the girl. He noticed how beautiful she had become.

  ‘Can I begin again?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Can’t we pretend?’

  ‘All right,’ the girl said, brightening. ‘Let’s pretend to begin again. First shut your eyes. Imagine everything is at the beginning. You have to alter time. Can you do that? You have to imagine everything as it was. If you can do that then we can begin again.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ Mirababa said meekly.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  The boy shut his eyes. Fervently, he tried to imagine everything as it was at the beginning.

  36

  Karnak sat in an upholstered armchair the colour of money. The grey-haired gentleman and the woman sat next to him, on a pure white sofa. A butler in a white uniform placed drinks on a diamond-shaped table.

  The artist had begun speaking as soon as they sat down. He spoke from his throne of gold, as if continuing what he was saying a moment before. He spoke as if to an unchanging audience. He spoke in a manner that made Karnak feel that he was not there. Karnak felt himself as an absence, a sort of a ghost, there and not there.

  ‘I don’t care much for people’s opinions,’ the artist was saying. ‘I make opinions. No one can create my world. I see the artist as the true king. People pay us to make up the world. If the artist is a true artist, the best thing he does is create the most important thing in society. In the olden days that was beauty, or religion, or myth. But we are modern and we are bored with beauty, we are sick of religion, and we’ve sorted out the old myths. God left us a long time ago. The most significant force in society is not what it used to be. Not that long ago, fame was the new religion. To be famous was to be a kind of god. The greatest artist then was the most famous artist. But we’ve done fame. We’ve come to the end of fame. It’s too easy to be famous. Every idiot artist is famous now. Fame has got devalued because there’s just too much of it. Fame used to be magic. You could conjure with it. You could be a mountain in people’s minds. You could be a demon or a monster. Now fame makes you tame, makes you common. Nothing more commonplace than fame.’

  He paused, not to look at them, but to scratch his cheek. He had paused because he felt like pausing. There was no reason for it. In just the same way, he began again, arbitrarily, as if speaking were his sublime prerogative and hearing was that of his listeners.

  ‘We’ve gone beyond fame. We’ve done the Everest of fame. Fame belongs to the past. Deliberately not being famous is the new fame. I declare it so. No artist conquers again what has already been conquered. They do something new. They find a new territory. If the artist is true they will create what is most important in their times. It is not the work that the artist creates that counts. It is the value that the artist creates that counts. All else is bilge. Being a great artist is easy. It’s been done several times. Being great is boring. Too many people have done it. But have you noticed that the really great artists create the notion of their greatness separate from the notion of their works? They create a new value. Anyone can create a great work. But how many have created a new value? The really great artist creates a new value. This new value is their true work of art. The works they are known for are merely justifications, objective correlatives, coins to make an idea concrete. In a way you don’t need the work of art any more. You can just create a new value. That would be greater than any work.’

  At the movement of a finger someone appeared from behind an arras and poured him liquid from a golden goblet into an emerald cup. He gulped it all down in one.

  ‘The question is this: what is the most important value of our times? What is the most important symbol? I’ll tell you. It’s simple. It’s all around. Cities are made of it, civilisations are sustained by it, religions need it, pyramids are erected with it. Long have we looked right through it while it shapes our lives. Artists have created all manner of things, but never has an artist created this value, with this symbol. For the first time in human history an artist has sculpted at last with this magic value, painted with it, drawn with it, and used it as the primal force in his art, the chief idiom of his work. Great bankers have created vast edifices of power with it. Merchants have funded whole eras of art with its power. Kings and Popes have used it. But I am the first and the only one so far to have created this value entirely in itself. I am the first artist of money.’

  He paused and looked upward.

  ‘The rest merely seek it, lust after it, charge high prices for their work to get it, but not one of them has created money as the chief and only value of their art. Money is the most important force of our times. The person who masters money masters society. The artist who masters money masters the future. No longer is there religion. There is only the art of money, its temples, its altars, its apotheoses, its mountain peaks, its dreams. These I celebrate. These I create. The rest is folly.’

  The artist paused again, and looked around the vast hall. With a melancholy sweep of the hand, he said:

  ‘Money is the new imagination. The genie of our age, from the magic lamp of our times, is money. It is the only reliable open sesame. To mint money is primitive; to incarnate money is genius. Why has no one thought of it before? Money sends our thoughts round the world. Money is the new Mona Lisa, its smile more mysterious and seductive. People are interested in my works not because they see art, but because they see money. I have compelled money and art to get into bed with each other. It is the new alchemy. Turning lead into gold – that is too laborious and quaint. But turning anything I look at into money, now that is the new alchemy. Midas had to touch things to turn them into gold. I merely have to think of them and they are changed.’

  As if he were alone in the vast hall, the artist pulled a face, then continued:

  ‘I am yet to discover what the limits of money are. I see none. With money I have compelled destiny, altered fate, and coerced providence. With money I have erected a value more lasting than bronze and my immortality is more certain than the mountains. Beyond money where can you go? There is nothing beyond. Money is the last frontier of the imagination. It is the last object in art. Artists of the future have nowhere to go. There will be no new beginnings. I am the end of art.’

  The artist spoke into the vast hall, his voice drifting round the columns, and disappearing towards the embossed ceiling. The lights dimmed and brightened mysteriously through the stained-glass windows.

  Karnak, almost comatose now, turned to the grey-haired gentleman and the lady, who were both fast asleep on the sofa. The artist, addressing the hall with dull eyes, had not noticed.

  Certain that he would get no clues here, the young lover crept out of the room. As he left he heard the artist begin speaking again.

  He didn’t wait to listen.

  37

  Mirababa was attempting to reverse time. He shut his eyes and tried to recreate the beginning. He tried to imagine the moment again when the girl, dripping moonlight, emerged from the lake. He imagined the moment so hard, he got lost in his imagining.

  When he woke, it was a dark night. The lake shone in the middle of the forest and the moon shone in the middle of the lake. It was as though no time had passed at all.

  He waited and watched. Nothing happened. The lake did not change, the moon did not move, and the darkness did not alter. It was as if time stood still. He could not even feel the wind.

  It occurred to him that maybe he was dead. This was the world as the dead experienced it: the same scene before them eternally. If he was dead the thought didn’t bother him. He found it rather pleasant. He played at being dead. Things would remain like this, unchanging, forever.

  He decided that if the lake, with the moon, was always going to be there then he may as well get used to it. He stared at the moon in the lake. There was something odd about it. He had always assumed that the moon was a reflection. But the more he looked the more it became clear that it was real. This surprised him. He
looked up at the sky, and saw that there was no moon up there at all.

  The sky was very dark, though he could make out the stars. It was odd that the moon was in the lake and not in the sky. Was he in an inverted universe?

  He remembered the words of his grandfather. Go in. What did he mean? Mirababa had gone into the lake and had only got cold and wet. A girl had come to him from the lake and he had asked the wrong question. What was the right question? Why hadn’t the girl come back?

  Then in a flash a clear thought occurred to him.

  ‘I have not been asking the right question.’

  This was a little revelation. He sensed it was leading him somewhere. He said to himself:

  ‘What is the right question?’

  He thought about it. He stopped thinking. He became aware of the strangeness of his situation.

  ‘What am I doing here?’ he asked himself.

  ‘And who am I anyway?’

  The question intrigued him. He had never asked it before. This struck him as very odd.

  ‘Why have I never asked this question before?’

  He liked the question. He asked it again.

  ‘Who am I?’

  He felt himself expanding inward, as though an unsuspected world were opening within him. He shut his eyes, the better to experience this blossoming world. With a child’s insistence he went on asking the same question.

  ‘Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?’

  Soon he lost himself in the question, and drifted deeper into the flowering darkness within him. He grew fainter and felt a wonderful warmth envelop him. As he went deeper into the swirling darkness he noticed the most amazing changes taking place within him. A world was opening. He found himself emerging into an unknown world.

  38

  Karnak was grateful to be back in the street, relieved to have escaped the company of the money artist. He knew now for certain that artists could tell him nothing of what he sought.

  As he wandered the streets, observing the faces, listening to the noises, he thought about Amalantis and wondered what he could do to find her. He still felt the question-askers might know.

  He had gone past a shop when a few steps later he realised that it was a bookshop. For many decades now bookshops had been vanishing from contemporary life. This must be one of the last left. People had stopped reading books. With the changing myths, reading had begun to be perceived as a suspicious activity. Those who wanted to know more than others were thought of as pariahs. The modern idea was to be more ignorant than your neighbour. To be less well read than your neighbour was thought the greatest politeness. To say, in conversation, ‘Does such a book exist?’ was the height of good manners. To read books was considered dangerous. This was largely aided by the myth of the garden.

  The myth, as interpreted by the state philosophers, declared that everyone was already educated. Everyone already had in them from birth all they needed to know. Education was a bringing out, not a putting in. Ignorance was therefore the higher state. The true self was supposed to emerge with education. People were not meant to fill their heads with facts, but only to re-learn what they already knew. And what they already knew was that the state was good and everything they did was leading them back to the garden of origins.

  Gradually people stopped reading. Even the machines invented to make reading easier and portable fell into disuse. These machines were smaller than a coin and could hold vast libraries of books. People simply stopped reading the ancient classics. Then they couldn’t read anything that required a little thought. Then they couldn’t read anything but the simplest books. Then all they read were newspapers of the popular variety. Literacy vanished from the world, along with bookshops.

  It was therefore with amazement that Karnak came upon the only bookshop left in the world just when he was wondering how to find the question-askers.

  He took this for a sign, and went in.

  39

  To his surprise there were no books in the bookshop. There were only holograms of books. When he looked at one of the holograms he noticed that it was of the pages of a book being turned. Every hologram was of a different book, whose pages were being turned. Then he heard a distant voice reading out words from a book, a soothing female voice. The book was about a girl who had fallen down a rabbit-hole. He didn’t know what a rabbit-hole was. Such things had disappeared ages ago.

  Karnak had heard about bookshops and had been shown books when he was growing up, but he had been shown them in great secrecy. He had been given to understand that this was something people used to have, when ideas were important, but which it was now quite dangerous to have. No one was taught with books. Children were taught through information piped into their brains, through thought-pods.

  He had heard about those who read. The strange ones. They read in secret. They met, like a secret society, and if they were caught terrible things happened to them. Someone in his family had disappeared that way. An uncle. Now that he thought about it Amalantis, before she disappeared, had been saying something he didn’t want to hear. Something about the old books.

  Karnak soon realised that the shop wasn’t really a book- shop. It was a holographic museum of the lost art of books. He marvelled at the beauty of what he saw. He gazed with admiration at the pages and the printed word.

  But someone was watching him from a dark corner of the room.

  40

  Seated at a table in a corner of the shop was a girl. She was staring at him coolly. Her presence made him jump.

  She stared at him candidly. There was no evasion or shiftiness in her eyes. The directness of her gaze was something he hadn’t encountered for a long time.

  The way she looked at him made him feel his reality more intensely. He felt his heart beating. He felt a pulse in his neck. He felt his bones and his skin. Normally when people looked at him they made him feel that he wasn’t quite there. They made him feel blurred. This young woman made him feel clear and real.

  There was something else unusual about her. Something he hadn’t seen for years. It eluded him. She continued to gaze at him in silence, with such steadiness that he found himself speaking even when he knew he didn’t have to.

  ‘What happened to books?’

  ‘What do you mean by “what happened to books?”’ was the girl’s careful reply.

  ‘I mean—’ and here Karnak stammered, ‘I mean these images make me nostalgic for books, though they disappeared long ago. What happened? Why did they disappear? I have always wanted to ask that question.’

  The girl did something unexpected. She laughed. Admittedly, it was brief but it astounded him. He looked around, expecting something to happen. He wasn’t sure what. Nothing did.

  ‘The only thing that happened to books,’ the girl said, ‘is that people stopped reading.’

  ‘How did we stop reading?’

  ‘There are many views on this,’ she said, with the air of one bursting with abundant research into the forbidden. ‘Some historians of culture say the art of reading was outstripped by technology. We perfected machines that did our reading for us. We could have books in smaller and smaller machines anywhere. Then we simply had books piped into our brains. Then we had our books condensed into a pill. The pill could be named “The Odyssey”, for example. You swallowed it and you had the book in you. We sought easier and easier ways of reading. We wanted reading to be entirely devoid of effort. As we succeeded in eliminating effort in most parts of life, books followed this trend.’

  ‘You mean we lost the art of reading because we wanted no effort in our lives?’

  ‘Something like that. It began with a cultural revolution in the last century. Everyone wanted an easy life. Then there were protests against elitism in art and difficulty in writing. This was really popular. The people were used to simple newspapers and publishers found that simple books sold better. Then writers simplified their language. It became the fashion to write with words no longer than two or three syllables. It was the era of
short words.’

  She looked at him, smiling faintly.

  ‘Then technology made it worse. It became a kind of a revolution. Soon books became so simple that the greatest novels of the time could be read by a child of four. This was the new ideal in literature. This was the golden age of simplicity.’

  She paused and flipped a switch and the holograms changed their images. A rapid succession of books flickered in the air.

  ‘Afterwards people stopped reading because they didn’t need to. Libraries had already gone anyway in the previous century. Then publishers stopped publishing. Some of them manufactured paper bags used in the great shopping arcades. Some published postcards and merchandise.’

  She paused again and Karnak still tried to place the element in her that eluded him.

  ‘But what really killed books was the great campaign against originality. The age of equality. Then we arrived at the point where, as you know, it’s an insult to be better informed than your neighbour.’

  She gave a short laugh.

  ‘In our age, ignorance is genius. Sorry for such a long answer. It is not often that someone asks that question.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked at him. There was a smile in her voice when she said:

  ‘You’re our first visitor in three months.’

  ‘Why do you have this shop then? Why an exhibition about the death of books?’

  ‘Because of my father.’

  ‘Who was your father? He sounds interesting.’

  ‘He was fascinated by reading. It’s a quaint notion. Someone sitting down and reading words along a line. Turning pages of a book. Isn’t it odd to think of leaves of a book with words printed on both sides? Words printed with a sense of order. Words that are silent on the page and give no indication of what they sound like or what they represent. It’s magic. We’ve tried to recreate this strange art, with the help of the few writers left…’