by Ben Okri
It was a love like a pure thing that had not lived.
That was the gaze that the maiden saw in the eyes of the prince. And she knew that the purity of that love had to be broken if the prince was ever going to be able to speak, to be free, and to love her, not as a creation, but as a free living being, out of his own choice, his own affinity, his own inspiration, his own necessity. The prince must be free to love her as himself. And so he must be awoken from his enchantment, from the eternal spell of his natural adoration for the maiden, his creator.
And so the maiden spoke to the silent dying prince that was her sculpture, her dream; and she was shocked and profoundly moved, to a state beyond tears, when the prince replied, naturally, speaking back to her in complete freedom and complete confidence in himself, in a voice which she already knew, a voice which she recognised, and loved, and revered, a deep strange magical voice which had come to her from a place older than dreams.
'Who are you?' she asked.
'I am that which was and now am.'
'What is your name?'
'My name is written in your tears.'
'Why are you dying?'
'Because I am not living.'
'Why are you not living?'
'Because I don't know what love is.'
'Do you know what love is now?'
'Yes.'
'What is love?'
'Love is life, to live.'
'You talk back and forth.'
'It is back and forth.'
'Why are you a prince?'
'Because I am the son of a king.'
'Who is the king?'
'The king is the king.'
'What is the king a king of?'
'The king is the king of a kingdom.'
The maiden paused and stared thoughtfully at the prince. The prince gazed back at her with pure, open, smiling eyes.
'Is it a kingdom of heaven or of earth?'
'I don't know the difference.'
'Am I of this kingdom?'
'Yes.'
'How can I be? I made you.'
'Did you make me, or did you discover me?'
'What's the difference?'
'Sometimes we make what we discover. Sometimes we discover what we make.'
For the first time the maiden was perplexed.
Then she had an odd notion.
'Am I dying too?'
'You can only make what you are.'
'So I am dying?'
'Maybe.'
'Why am I dying?'
'For the same reason I have not been living.'
The maiden was silent. In truth she was astonished.
It was like catching a glimpse of herself in the clear mirror of a lake and finding that she did not look at all like what she thought she looked like. It was a disquieting feeling. She was seeing a self quite different from what she thought. This displaced and shocked her. She did not know what to say. This was going to take her a long time to get used to. That was when it occurred to her that she must delay her life. To delay it till she knew who she was. To delay it till she gained some wisdom, and self-knowledge. So that she could learn how to really live.
She was not going to make any hasty decisions. She was going to take life a little slowly. Take time to learn.
The dying prince was mute again, staring at her with candour and simplicity.
And she found stillness in the depth of her dream.
CHAPTER SEVENTY–SIX
Afterwards she began her slow self-recovery. She slept less, and went about more. She became more silent, more calm, more humble, less sure. Less unpredictable.
She appeared to be listening all the time. She appeared to be listening to everything, as if whatever life had to tell her would be told her silently, between the sound of things, in the least expected ways.
She became attentive, too attentive, as attentive and as aware as she had previously been distracted and unaware. But too much attentiveness is akin to too much distraction, just as too much looking leads to too little seeing. She missed as much now as previously. There was much she didn't see because she was trying to see, or thought she saw. She wore herself out with her new intensity. As she was unable to sustain it long, it became a kind of coiled passivity, with a waiting spirit inside her. Aware and waiting for life to teach her.
Her father regarded all these changes with a smile in his mind. Her mother fretted because she knew what was happening to her daughter. Knowledge did not make her tranquil about it.
'We are built this way,' she said to her husband. 'To worry even when we know.'
The suitors were driven to frenzies by the maiden's unstated programme of delay. One by one they fell away. Till there were only six suitors left, even.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
Time passed slowly, as in dreams. The river imperceptibly changed its course. The tribe imperceptibly changed its ways, lost its centre. People died and were born. Forebodings quietly took form, and no one noticed. The gods died silently, and no one saw it happen. The world encroached on the dreams of the land, and no one saw the shadows in the distance, approaching like the evening. Lost in its dream, the land was lost in its dream. In its rituals, ways, cruelties, abominations. In its superstitions. Lost in its ancient ways, the land was lost in its ancient slumber. Its dreams, its power, its wickedness. Deep in itself, the land was lost, and did not hear the music of the world outside, or its speech. Lost in its magic, its enchantments, its ways. And so time passed slowly, as in a dream where things are changing, and the dreamer is unaware, and yet aware, awake and yet asleep, seeing what is coming in prophecies and yet blind to what it sees, deaf to its own prophecies as if cursed not to know that it is cursed, or blessed not to know that it is blessed.
And so time drifted slowly down the dreaming way. And many things were forgotten, even while they lived. The image of a dying prince was forgotten. The scandals were forgotten. The unease was forgotten, because it got worse, and therefore even more imperceptible. The tremors of art were forgotten. Rumours were forgotten. Suitors were forgotten. Purpose was forgotten. The way was forgotten. The masters were being slowly forgotten, till they became a rumour of conspiracies, or of a sinister secret society. The shrine was being forgotten. And all this in the space of a dream, in no time at all, or all the time it takes for a people to be lost, to change, and then, one day, inexplicably, to vanish off the face of the earth, as if they never existed, or as if they had been taken away, as a whole, and repositioned in another place, another realm, another constellation in the universe.
But while all this happened in their lives, while they were forgetting, and not knowing it, something unusual came to pass.
CHAPTER SEVENTY–EIGHT
One day, on a clear day in which nothing unusual happened, this happened. Mysterious laughter was heard in the land. It was a great, incommensurable laughter, inexplicable, booming, deep, happy, sad, sublime, light, cheerful, mocking, ironic, clear, lucid, sane, wise laughter. And all of the tribe heard it in their dreams. They heard it fleetingly in their work when they were most absorbed in what they were doing. They heard it in their passionate moments. They heard it in their silences. The masters heard it in their communion. The river and the birds and the trees heard it. The children and babies and the dying heard this laughter with especial clarity. And the deaf and dumb and blind and crippled and the sick heard it more clearly than most. The dying heard it with mysterious poignancy which aided their peaceful deaths. The criminals heard it and shuddered deliciously. The evil ones heard it and trembled. The Mamba heard it and felt a chill come over him that presaged the dissolution of his powers. The suitors heard it and wondered. The shrine heard it and the unknown priestess within echoed the laughter in vibrancies that shook the foundations of the tribe. The maiden heard it and fell into a dream. Her father heard it and had the inspiration to create one final work of sculpture, after which he would sculpt no more. Her mother heard it and was visited with a prophecy concerning the future of the race.
They all, in their different ways, heard this almost celestial laughter; and they never stopped hearing it, for it pervaded the land and became a permanent part of the air and the renewal of things. And long after their world came to an end, the laughter remained, as it does till this day, and all the days to come.
Book Three
THE WHITE
WIND
CHAPTER ONE
Many are the wonders to be lived, in a flash, without knowing it, in the book of life among the stars. Many are the horrors deprived of their horror, the evils deprived of their sting, the deaths deprived of their tragedies. Many are the lies stripped of their power, the sufferings stripped of their excesses, the agonies drained of their mortal pain beyond endurance. Many are the loves that haunt still, and the betrayals that shock still, and the stupidities of men and women in the blind proud empty vanities of their days and nights, all stripped of that which made them so absurd or so banal. Many are the great events drained of all wonder, the wars that seemed so significant now seen as moments on an unreal stage where people died and crawled in blood as in a vast panoramic dream. Many are the moments unnoticed, the child gazing at invisible forms and holding converse with angels, the dead drifting past the love-making forms of the living, the stars seen in spangles through gaps in the leaves of a tree, young girls brimming with the ambiguous happiness of life, drummers lost in the wild joys of syncopation, passionate lovers who destroy their love through their fear of loving, moments in dust, when dust dreamt itself in mortal forms and lived adventures in the dim mirror of illusions, with an immortal light shining within, unseen ...
Many are the lives that connect and cross and speak to one another across the stars and the vast spaces of the universe, connecting and not knowing it. Many are those who think that they are alone when in fact they live in constant speech with many others in remote realms, in their dreams and their waking moments in the depth of their spirits where time and space and matter do not cage the soul. Many are those who do not see the wonder of things in the blind realm of mortality. All this, and more, to be lived, in ways sublime and beyond the brain's knowing, in the open book of life in the magic spaces among the stars ...
CHAPTER TWO
During that time, in the kingdom so large that it did not know its own parts, and many of its parts did not know they belonged to a kingdom, during that time a mysterious plague was abroad in the land.
The kingdom was sprawling and vast and within it were many sub-kingdoms. In fact the kingdom was so extensive that it did not know itself. And the king knew it only through the cartography of dreams, of his dreams. He dreamt all the corners and obscure places of the kingdom and saw the great variety of the people, the vast forests, the mighty rivers, the innumerable creeks, the uncountable hills and valleys, the multiplicity of traditions and the incredible number of languages spoken. He saw them all in dreams, and ruled this vast unruly undivided yet much divided kingdom through the agency of dreams. There was no other way. Terrestrially he had chiefs, emissaries, deputies, spies, messengers, sub-rulers who travelled the vast lands, carrying laws, decrees, legislations, edicts, proclamations, instructions, dictates. He had an extensive hierarchy of chiefs and sub-kings who ruled the lesser kingdom in his name and spirit. But to rule them all by land, messages, edicts sent by messengers, courtiers and chiefs was insufficient. Often weeks passed before messages sent were received and the messages were often out of date by the time they arrived. Laws were no longer valid by the time they were made and received. Time devoured the possibilities of ruling the immense kingdom; and space mocked the reforms, changes, edicts sent forth; space distorted them on arrival. The only thing that time and space could not affect or distort, but would aid and enhance, was the way of ruling through dreams, through thought. The king sent forth his laws at night, on the wings of sleep; and all over the kingdom officials, chiefs and sub-kings woke up at dawn knowing what to do, and they enacted the laws as if they were their own ideas.
And so dreams were laden with instructions, urgent laws; the night trafficked in edicts, notions, improvements, reforms, reproaches, promotions, reprimands, praise, suggestions, corrections, elaborations and signs. The kingdom was busiest at night, when the people slept. Then the king, sending off his round of laws, would visit the sleeping forms of his subjects, listen to their dreams, and question them about their needs and fears. So extensively did he speak to and listen to his subjects thus, that he was as thoroughly involved in their lives as though he were one of them; and they felt this to be so, that he was one of them, and that he knew their hearts and they knew his heart, though they didn't know they did, but felt it intimately. So profoundly did the king listen to his courtiers, the elders, the criminals, the butchers, the market women, the traitors, the soldiers, the orphans, the slaves, the servants, the abandoned, the hungry, the rich, the heart-broken that he knew the hopes, the anger, the desires of the people more sensitively than if they had come to him in person and he had granted them an audience ... But he did it through dreams, he listened to them and queried them and he paid attention to them in their dreams, and he tended to them in dreams too, sending them solace and guidance, advice and suggestions, protection and blessings, and often dispensing powerful spells and incantations into their inner worlds, to strengthen them in their daily lives and to make sure they didn't feel abandoned; and so that they would know that their king, though far from them, was also closest to them, and that he never slept, but kept their needs always in mind, and always worked for their good in a thousand ways that they never suspected, be they good or bad, equally, as though they were all his children, which they all were, as they belonged to his vast kingdom without a name ...
The king therefore seemed to rule without ruling. And there were many who had no idea that they had a king, had no idea what a king was, or who. There were many to whom the king existed as a dim rumour, a murmur, a figure made up from so many stories, a figure who dwelt on a mountaintop, or deep at the bottom of the sea, or in an extensive mysterious cave; or as a persona who sometimes came to the village in disguise, an old man with a strange beard or an old woman with youthful limbs, or a child with a golden cane, or a beautiful young girl no one had ever seen before, or an animal that is white and covered in light, or as the wind, or as a cloud, or as the night itself, and sometimes as the sun.
Many were those who never thought about their king, but worked very hard at the forge or in the farms, in their labours, from dawn to dusk. Many were those who lived lives that didn't seem like lives, but one long toil and drudgery, like beasts, for no purpose, save to feed their families and drink under the moon and sleep without resting and wake without pausing. But the king knew them all intimately, from their dreams, knew their deepest truths.
Many were those who did not think the king existed, but acknowledged their local chiefs, the elders of their clans and the figures of authority of their villages, their lands.
The king therefore seemed absent in the kingdom when he was most present. But his absence meant he could know them better. His absence meant he left them in freedom, to be how they best can be. He left them free to be able to choose how they wanted to be.
The only way the king was known by those who could know these things in the kingdom was by his mysterious laughter, which was heard everywhere that solace was needed. By this laughter all things were connected, and corrected, answered, acknowledged, balanced, embraced, and touched with an enchantment beyond understanding.
The only other way the king was known was by the silent figure in their dreams, the one who is always there in their dreams, taking part and not taking part, observing and never observed, and who sometimes intervenes to make a most interesting suggestion which is nearly always forgotten because listening has not always been learned ... But then the next night, in the next dream, that silent figure would be there again, humble, unknown, and it would be the king, at his ways again, paying attention in the deepest places, to the most important or trivial things in
the spirit of his people, without sleeping ...
CHAPTER THREE
