Starbook

by Ben Okri

  The tribe sensed that the sculpture found in front of the shrine one morning was her work; centuries of artistic tradition had made them sensitive to the links between the work and its creator. And the tribe, collectively, could generally tell who had created what work, could read correlations between the work and its creator as those who could, intuitively, read the personality from the handwriting. To the deep mind of the tribe, the face of the creator was in the work they had created. And so when the sculpture of a dying prince was found in front of the shrine, first there was puzzlement, then a sense of mystery, then fascination, much discussion and many rumours, and then intuitive links were made. The hidden signature of a personality was deciphered in aspects of the work. Then a visible creator was slowly deduced. Then there was consternation.

  It amounted almost to an outrage, an insult. It seemed such a wilful diversion, a distraction, an irrelevance, a conceit, a private, unnecessary indulgence in imagery and aesthetics. The work seemed without direction, without prophecy, without vision. It did not speak. It did not address the need of the times. It did not reflect the mood of the tribe. It did not relate to anything that anyone could care about. It seemed beautiful and sad and well-wrought just for the sake of it. The sculpture seemed an exercise in displaying personal artistic accomplishment, a display of genius unfolding, a dream of beauty and piety in wood. It did nothing for the people. It did not soothe. It did not guide. It was not deemed the voice of a new generation speaking with the authority of youth that can see with clear eyes that which the elders can no longer see or cannot see for all the cataracts of experience and knowledge, too much time accumulated in the eyes and in the heart.

  The tribe felt that the work was not a new vision. It was not startling. It brought no new techniques that hinted even at the necessity of an altered way of seeing. It provoked deep outrage because it so disappointed the great hopes the tribe had placed in an image or work from the daughter of a new generation, an image or work that would begin their liberation from a destiny they could all feel but could not name.

  Or maybe it was an outrage caused by the unknown fact that it had indeed shown an image of liberation but they knew it without knowing they did, and they wished to know what they felt more directly in their feelings, which the work bypassed, working as it did on their souls, the very foundation and bedrock of who and what they were, as a tribe and as individuals. But the outrage of the tribe was very real, and almost became violent.

  At first they were enraged; then they took to mocking the work, and many other smaller and hastily executed sculptures were displayed which ridiculed the sculpture of a dying prince. Songs surfaced in drinking places, at the farms, in workshops, marketplaces and communal kitchens – songs mocking the irrelevant and inadequate sculpture. The ridicule was unprecedented and inexplicable. The numbers of those who sent in works mocking the sculpture was astonishing. Wise heads wondered if the tribe, encompassed by invisible tragic fears and paranoia, did not feel it necessary to find something to laugh at, to relieve itself of that weight of foreboding which it could not understand. Ridicule was therefore its way of dealing with incomprehension and bewilderment about a fate which seemed to oppress them, and from which they could see no escape. Like the hysterical laughter of one who knows they are doomed.

  The ridicule passed, but the consternation remained. Till a work of art has been absorbed or understood in some way, consternation and some hostility towards it abides. The truth is that the tribe had expected from the maiden a clear healing image, one that would earth the tremors sounding in the land, or an image that would free them from the underlying paralysis creeping upon them from the universe. On to the maiden they had placed great hopes. On to her mystery they had projected great expectations. And because of the legend that was her birth they had awaited a great sign, a new direction, and nourished the belief that where the people are blind one of its blessed children will see, and be its eyes, till sight returns to all. Instead she had given them an ambiguous image of a dying prince. There were no princes in the tribe. What had this to do with them? they asked, infuriated.

  The maiden was startled by the fury, the incomprehension, the ridicule, the destructive obsession, and the sudden need to tear down the reputation of her family that the work inspired and called forth from the tribe. She was terrified by their outrage, their threats of violence, their abuse. She was amazed at how quickly she became an outcast, shunned, denounced, her talent pronounced as worthless, her father's reputation seen as fraudulent. She was perplexed at the sudden desire to demonise her and her family, and at the same time she was aware of how much more fascinated and curious the tribe were about the mystery of her family. And all this had been touched off by the simple image of a dying prince, an image that she too had fallen prey to, and been seduced by; so she now was in a state of double distraction, caught between two absurdities, one public, the other private.

  Through all this her father was silent, and carried on his mysterious journeys and his enigmatic artistic ventures with his usual remote tranquillity. It was as though nothing were happening. He not only seemed unconcerned, he didn't even register that anything was going on, or that there were furious reactions directed at him and his family. He went about his business as normal, as though he lived in a separate realm where the laws of the significance of events were radically different from that of the tribe, or the so-called real world. And this quality of his gave him an invincible air. And he was invincible. And this air aided his mystery, and tightened the powers of protection around him. And when his daughter came to him troubled about it all, he smiled at her gently and said, with mildly distracted eyes:

  'The minute people are unjust to you they have already lost the fight. The moment they attack you they have lost the war. The moment they try to hurt you, to humiliate you, to bully you, to disgrace you, to destroy you, to invalidate you, that moment they have lost the truth. They have lost all protection. That moment they surrender all their power and authority to you, and they do not know it. Their end is certain. Their defeat becomes inevitable. The rest is time's doing. So carry on your business, be serene, follow your conscience, and have no fear. The laws that operate in the world are invisible laws, and they are greater than the force and powers of men and women. On these laws you can depend. Some people kill a little thing, and invite a mighty storm on their heads that wipes them out. Take pity on those who try to destroy you, and try to forgive them because what they call upon themselves is too terrible to withstand. It is better to endure their stupidity sometimes than to be part of that greater force which will wipe out a whole people, yourself, maybe, included. And sometimes it is better to fight, for their own good, to stop a greater and more implacable army of the invisible from doing your fighting for you. And so, for now, go about your business, and let's see what time brings, my daughter.'

  And so, much comforted, the maiden went about her business, and took on an air of innocent invincibility, like certain flowers have, or certain babies, as if they know that they can be destroyed, and yet cannot be destroyed. As if they know some simple secret of eternity. And this makes them smile so guilelessly, without any enigma.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY–TWO

  The masters of the tribe, however, brooded, on the night of interpretations, on the meaning of that image of a dying prince.

  It was the great night of interpretations, when they gathered, as a whole, to contemplate any enigmas that had come upon them. They tried to unravel any prophecies or utterances that had entered the tribe from the oracle or from any of the innumerable and unsuspected agencies of the oracle, be it the words of a madman, the strange accidental language of a child, a word overheard from the river, the last incoherent words of a dying man or woman, or a complete phrase made out in the noise of thunder, or the roar of a wild inspired animal in the forest.

  They came together to tease out or intuit the hidden meanings of new parables, paradoxes, mysterious sayings, stories, legends, songs, or any works of
art that perplexed or seemed to be without an easy revelation, demanding profound meditation and listening. Works of art that can only be appreciated by inspiration, by intuition. Appreciated, but not understood. For the masters knew that works of art could not be understood. And that the desire to understand was not only a fatal presumption, and an arrogance, but that it also got in the way of seeing or hearing or being inspired by the work of art at all. For (so they believed) once a work is thought to be understood, its magic is dimmed, not in the work, but in the person seeking to understand. And so such people become closed to its light, its power for continual inspiration and regeneration. The world is thus diminished; for a light, a source of light, has then been hidden by false understanding. The masters sought therefore only to be open to the work's secrets, its language, its inspiration, its guidance.

  The night of interpretations was one of the great nights of the congregation of the masters. None of them missed that night, not even if ill. Those dying have been known to attend. It was considered greatly healing to be there on that night. It was considered a high honour to die among masters on a night of interpretations. For then one's death takes place in a most exalted state.

  On this night the masters gathered to contemplate the image of a dying prince. They, who were wiser, had kept above the ridicule heaped on the maiden. And they had, in representative numbers and in significant ways, sent her words and signs of warmth, support and love to help her through. The masters knew that there could be no hasty response to a work that had come from one who was newly born in initiation, especially one so gifted by the legend of their birth and the uniqueness of their temperament, and by the way they seemed to attract both the negative and the positive in unusual combinations. The masters knew they had to look deeper into the work, and to wait, till the work spoke, or till the world gave it one of its unexpected, unsuspected meanings, one of an endless chain of illuminations.

  On this night they waited for the work to speak, and it didn't. They pondered its meaning – and could find none. Or they found too many meanings that cancelled themselves out. Was the land a dying prince? Was their way in danger? Had they lost their way under the sun? Was their freedom or their conscience dying and they couldn't see it? Was the spirit of the tribe dying? Was their art perishing?

  The masters were baffled and concerned. The more they probed, the more baffled and concerned they became.

  But the work itself did not speak. The work itself said nothing.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY–THREE

  Meanwhile the suitors for the maiden's hand persisted in their obscure competitions for her attention and her favour. Meanwhile the Mamba continued his double campaign of rumours and seduction. Meanwhile the maiden grew more odd, more innocent, more distant, and more obsessed with the mystery of a dying prince. Soon she fell ill. It was thought that the subject of her sculpture was exercising undue magical influence on her, and that she was dying with the dying prince. She was falling under the spell of her own creation. Nothing could be done about this. And so it was felt that she had to go through that condition if she was going to emerge as a purer, greater artist of the tribe, an artist who is never affected by what they are creating, because they have developed, by much exposure and strengthening, a psychic protection against the forces of their own mind, a spiritual antibody to the laws of art as it affects the creator.

  For the second time in her life, the maiden surrendered to death. She became so ill with her own mystery that she 'died' for seven days.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY–FOUR

  She did not die as such, but she did not live. She was profoundly ill and yet rich in health. She would not eat. She became lean, languid, and full of an ineluctable yearning. She longed so much for an impossible, indefinable condition, like those who yearn for some previous life of incommensurate beauty among the distant stars. She was lost to time and place, distracted from parents and suitors, and she spoke, in broken sentences, only of a love beyond reason, a love sweeter than madness, or was it a madness sweeter than love? And she slept most of the time, wherever sleep took hold of her. She slept like a calf. If sleep came upon her near the river, she would curl up on the floor and sleep. If sleep crept upon her at the marketplace, she would arrange herself on bales of cloth, or on heaps of oranges, or under the stalls of the fishmonger, and she would sleep a sleep of innocence, faintly enchanting, as if she had been put under a spell.

  Sometimes, in her father's workshop, listening to the tale his hammer told as it beat upon the chisel that wrought a dream from the wisely resistant wood, sometimes she would curl up among the fabled masks and the images of beings unseen on earth and faces that were alive and real on distant galaxies, and she would drift off to sleep listening to tales told across the vast spaces. Tales that travel in no time through dreams, in the air, carried by waves of light that are everywhere.

  She would sleep thus in her father's workshop and wake up at the marketplace; or she would fall asleep at the feet of the goddess or in the alcove of the shrine and would wake up in her mother's kitchen, her head on her mother's lap, listening to the rich mood of stories freighted over from ancient times, stories of sages that brought the lost secrets from a fabled land of their true ancestors that was now beneath the sea. Or she would fall asleep in her mother's lap, her hair being plaited, and she would wake up to find a bucket of water balanced on her head as she returned with her new companions from the river with water to wash and purify the goddess on the day of her celebrations.

  And whenever she slept she dreamt of the dying prince, among other dreams; and he gazed at her, and never spoke.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY–FIVE

  And then one day, in her dream, the dying prince that was her sculpture sat up, and stared at her as usual, as if she were the first flower he had ever seen, as if he was trying to see the flower properly and understand what about it so moved him, to understand how it came to be, its purpose, the point of its beauty or mystery.

  He stared at her as at a work of art that had no enigma and yet seemed beyond understanding. And she bore his gaze for a long time, waiting.

  And then it occurred to her that it was she who must speak. After all, he was her creation. If she the creator did not speak how could she expect her creation to speak? Her speech would free her creation into speech. She had to invest her dream with life. For too long she had been mute, waiting for her dream, her art, to speak to her. What a failure in a creator! she suddenly thought. If the creation is to have something of the creator then its soul must be awoken, with love, with a touch, with an invocation, with the magic of the word.

  She realised then that the prince, seated and staring at her so simply, regarded her as the grandest and most impenetrable mystery, a being beyond comprehension, so long as she was silent. She realised that not revealing herself, not establishing a kinship, not having a dialogue, meant that the prince would forever dwell in his own unfathomed condition. He would always be a creation without connection with anything else. He would always be unconnected with that which was the sole focus of his being, and his love. He would have nothing to say to her. And she would therefore always have this same dream. And so she would never know herself through the eyes of another. She would never know herself, or see any reflection of herself. She too would remain an unfathomed mystery to herself.

  The maiden knew instantly that she needed the prince to speak, much more than the prince needed her. She realised that if the prince did not speak she would gradually cease to be. For her being depended on being known, and loved, by another, by herself in another.

  Then the maiden understood the stare of the prince. He was looking at her with complete love, complete adoration, a love without beginning or end, a love greater than humanity, a pure love; but it was a love that was without knowledge, without understanding. It was a love without mystery. A love too pure for a creator. For it was a love without life, without suffering, without tears, without blood, without pain, without history. It was a love without time,
a love that had been found in perfection, a love without a story, without a journey, without complications. It was not a love arrived at, born into, a perplexing love. And so it was a love without self-knowledge. In fact, it was a love that did not know itself, a love that did not know what love is. It was a love that had not grown, had not evolved, had not lost its way, had not stumbled and dwelt in the dark.

  It was a love that did not know what it was like to live without love, how hellish, barren, deadly, dry, forlorn, how miserable, cold, lonely, empty, useless, bitter, agonising, tormenting, twisted, and how ugly it was to be and live without love.

  It was a love that did not know the ecstasy of one who finally comes to know, after all the darkness, what it really means to love, to have love in the heart.