Starbook

by Ben Okri

  'There was nothing there, father, and I could not understand. The river was the same, or maybe it wasn't; the shore was the same, though I am not sure; the sky hadn't changed, and all my favourite flowers are in bloom, but it was all empty, as if the spirit of things had gone away from them. When my companions sang, they did not please me. When they danced, they were clumsy. I did not feel like anything. The wind wasn't sweet. The river was like stone. I wandered into the forest alone. It was without colour. I couldn't see the green of leaves. Everything was flat. Sometimes a butterfly lands on my shoulder. Sometimes I see a snail on the path and we have something to say to one another. Sometimes, while walking, I have a diamond dream, and some fairy has made me a queen, or a princess, and I am smiling among the trees. Sometimes, father, I see in front of me a perfect image that I can make in bronze or wood. And when it goes away it reappears in my dreams. Sometimes I hear the song a suitor sings on the edge of a dream while I am coming home. But these days, and today especially, nothing happens. The world is flat. The stars don't shine, and even my heart beats as if everything is normal. Has something changed in the world that I haven't noticed?'

  And then she was silent. Her father was silent too, and worked quietly, only now and then moving wood on the table, breathing as wooden statues do, gently, as if not wanting to trouble the air. The maiden stared at the statues in the workshop, stared without seeing, and in that abstracted semi-dreaming state she made out the shapes of spirits going about their tasks of slowly bringing new forms into being, under the precise instruction of her father, their master. She watched the dimly visible forms of the spirits out of the corner of her eye and for a moment noticed a new one amongst them, but when she looked to ascertain, it was gone, faded into the mysterious half-light of the workshop where the most important events happened in the shadows, in an insubstantial light, not possible to gaze on, in a dark mist, where things become real and unreal like shadows moving in a darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–SEVEN

  The maiden didn't notice the new servant even when she sat in her chair and dozed and dreamt that one of the statues was alive. Sometimes when she was awake and listening to her father carving shapes in the air, describing forms to his spirit-servants that he wanted them to make out of the wood that he had long prepared for their new life as art, the new servant would stir under the wall, and cough gently, as though breathing in the dust that floated from the wood were mildly choking him. Even then the maiden didn't notice. Once while the maiden dozed with eyes half open the new servant crept across her field of vision and received instructions from her father and went out and returned and whispered in his ear and passed her reclining form in the chair and he went and resumed his stillness in the dark, among the statues under the wall, and still she did not notice or see him. It was as if her father, the master, had cast a spell of invisibility over the new servant so that he would not be seen by his daughter; or as if he had cast a spell of incomprehension over his daughter so that she would not see the new servant, or notice him at all. Or it may have been that the new servant cast a spell on himself, that he would not be seen or noticed by her, following the principle of the heron but raising it to the pitch of an enchantment.

  When he sat there in the dark, under the wall, many things came to the mind of the new servant. He fell often into a dreaming state and passed through a golden gap in his sleep and found himself in a place where he was a slave. He had no idea what had brought him to this condition. He was in a faraway land, among those whose skin was the colour of the sky just before evening comes, and he was a slave working in a field from dawn to dusk, along with many others, singing poignant lamentations for a life that was gone. Sometimes he was half naked in a marketplace, being sold for the price of a dog. Sometimes he had three children that were not his colour and his wife's eyes were cold like the eyes of a dead fish. Sometimes it was hard for him to find the golden gap and return to the workshop, in the dark, awake. In silence, when he returned, he was puzzled.

  Many thoughts and fragments of lives, many notions fantastical and real descended on him as he sat there among the stones and structured wood.

  The new servant that he was, he sat there quietly, and obediently, and still. He learnt the art of statues. He learnt their stillness. He learnt their repose. He learnt how to absorb all things, all energies, all memories, all thoughts and moods around him into his unresisting being. He learnt to give off his mood, his thoughts, and energies too, in silence, such as they were. He learnt the absorbency of statues, and learnt their radiation too. He learnt to be present the way they are, without insistence, and yet unforgettable, not moving, and yet seeming to move, never changing, and yet changing with the light, or the angle of being viewed. He learnt the simplicity of statues, and how this simplicity makes them monumental in the mind. He learnt the immobility of statues, and how this immobility makes them able to travel to a vast number of minds who haven't even seen them. He learnt the humour of statues, how they keep their best secrets to themselves, smiling inwardly at the unreality of their outward form, their true mystery dwelling within. He learnt like statues to dwell in the mystery within and to live in its secret light and listen to the truths whispered in the silence inside the forms of things. He learnt the openness of statues too, and offered himself to all eyes, all souls, to be gazed upon without being understood, and not minding. He learnt the tranquillity of statues, content simply to be, to give or receive, to waste no energy in that which is not, to be unconcerned about being or not being, but in being to so clearly be. He also learnt the power of statues, he learnt how to occupy and not to occupy the space he did, he learnt how to feel every part of his being, and to be aware of all that he was, and to be aware of all that is, all that is the case, in the universe.

  He learnt from statues that all things participated in all things in the universe, and no one thing or object or being was isolated from another. He learnt the indestructibility of statues, for they can't be destroyed, and when statues are burned or broken down their form remains, even in their formlessness, and what they once were persists for ever in the memory of the invisible space, and in the eternal book that dwells among the stars.

  Many things the new servant learnt from the statues without knowing it. And one of them was the unteachable art of happiness; for statues, in all that they are, know happiness as a by-product of their inner certainties about the higher this and the lower that. And so whatever they are, this they appear to be, along with the inner art, which they reveal only in the dark, among themselves, when no one else is around or watching; when they can be most true. It took some time before they admitted the new servant to their hidden exalted ranks. And first he had to be tested and initiated into their condition, into their philosophy, into their mysteries.

  His time among the statues, as a statue, was one of the greatest adventures of his life.

  And so the prince, in order to serve, became a statue. He became a statue in the maiden's father's workshop. He seldom moved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–EIGHT

  Meanwhile, the clamour of the suitors grew worse. Their competitiveness intensified. Many of them had been in the village, putting forth their individual suits, through elaborate, influential and often unorthodox intermediaries. Herbalists had been recruited into the ranks; and they, on the payroll of one of the suitors, would insinuate their way into the maiden's parents' house and whisper hints laden with suggestions as to evil things that might befall the family if so-and-so were not chosen as bridegroom. Or if there were an illness in the family, and in secret a witch-doctor were consulted, it would often be hinted that such-and-such a suitor was responsible, or that if a favourable decision were made in the direction of such-and such then the epidemic, of which the illness was merely a forerunner, might be spared the family, if not the tribe.

  On all sides the maiden's family was pestered and hounded, bribed and threatened by the increasingly frustrated suitors. Their frustration had begun to have an unwholesome e
ffect on the village, on the artistic life of the people, even on the good will in the air. One way or another people of the village found themselves being drawn into one camp or another, into supporting one influential suitor or another, into being used by them. In the marketplace those who sold fish, or the butchers, or the sellers of trinkets, of mounds of vegetables, of bales of dyed cloth, would whisper to anyone from the maiden's household the name of a suitor that would be much favoured by the majority; this name would make its way, via circuitous routes, to the mother, and then eventually to the maiden herself, who wouldn't hear it, nor hear any other names, nor hear the word suitor, because she had developed a graceful eccentric deafness to the whole subject and in its place had acquired a lovely drifting absent-mindedness. She would be often singing, often dreaming of a moment, shrouded in golden mystery, by the river.

  The more the suitors clamoured, the stranger and more elusive the maiden became. She grew more beautiful in her awkward way, and yet more invisible. She learnt the art of passing by people without being seen, or slipping through crowds without being noticed. She also learnt to stop seeing what she didn't want to see. And as the suitors began to make themselves an unavoidable part of the village, she learnt to see less and less, and to hear less and less, till she almost wholly withdrew into a way of dreaming and a way of wandering.

  The suitors so infected the village with their obnoxious rivalry that the families of other young girls of marriageable age began to complain. Often they could be heard, with daggers in their voices, saying:

  'Why doesn't she choose one man and let us have peace in the village? Is she the only girl in the world? Why doesn't she think of others? Because of her this village is being ruined by strangers.'

  The Mamba, her chief suitor, who made this theme popular, now increased the pitch of his campaign. He slandered the other suitors, and maintained that their wealth, their presence, their alien ways were corrupting the spiritual integrity of the village; and that the maiden's inability to make a sensible choice would bring fragmentation and even death to the village, if care was not taken.

  This kind of talk grew in force. Many picked upon it, and even the secret masters were alarmed enough to feature it in their obscure meetings.

  CHAPTER TWENTY–NINE

  For the first seven days the new servant did as he was told and if he was told nothing he did nothing. He barely spoke as a servant but only listened. He never knew there was so much to listen to, so much to hear, in the world, and in the universe.

  At first listening was very alien to him, very difficult, and he experienced it as a kind of agony. Then, slowly, he noticed there was a pleasure in it, if he slowed down the workings of his mind and if he forgot himself. He began to hear things he would never have been told. He heard stories and rumours about the kingdom. He heard that the land had a king that no one had ever seen. He heard that in the king's court there were those plotting the removal of the king and the division of the kingdom. He heard that the prince had died and that a false prince had been put in his place to soothe the agitation of the people. He heard that on all sides the kingdom was being invaded by shadows and white spirits. He heard that the land was being devoured by darkness, and that an evil had come among the people and was snatching away the young men and women and stealing them away into a dark space beyond the great seas, from where there is no return. He heard the cry of the ancestors, he heard the wailing of the legion of unborn generations, and he heard the crashing down of the great pillars of the land, the collapsing houses, the crumbling palaces, the howling of the dead, and the poignant songs of angels singing of new ages to come out of such appalling destruction. He had no idea how he heard these things, but when he learnt to listen there seemed no end to the things it was essential for him to hear.

  He learnt to listen without fretting, without the need to act. He learnt to listen, and to hear, the way statues do.

  He realised that the more he listened, the more he heard.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Every evening the new servant went back to the forest and walked into the precise gap between the trees and found himself in the same forest, except it was different, and it led him home. He would rise from among the statues and bow silently to the father of the maiden, and would pick his way through the sculptures, the wooden busts, the gates of images, the statues of gods, the thronging artworks along the village main ways and paths, images in stone and wood and mixed materials of nails and feathers and blood and rope and patterned cowries, works that crowded the thoroughfare, changing shapes in the encroaching evening. And he would make his way past them all, listening to the murmur of voices like the choirs of the low rumbling river. And, without looking at any faces, or dwelling too long on any one sight, he would glide past the busy village, not drawing attention to himself, and would find his way to the dark thick forest. Often it was that the rich startling fragrance of the evening-breathing leaves would engulf him in deep memories and a feeling of a great freedom; and his heart would sing with a ruby-dark joy. Often he would feel so fortunate to have the kingdom of the forest all to himself, and he would linger or run among the trees and sing to the birds and recite lines of ancient verse to the forest flowers. Sometimes he would lie with his back against a tree and for a moment would allow himself to drift in a realm of elementals. And on one such occasion he had an extraordinary dream about a baby who, on the very same day it was born, became a man, married a wife, had three children, fought valiantly in a great war, travelled to all the continents, was initiated into the mighty secret brotherhood of universal masters, healed the sick, redirected the course of world history, cleansed half the earth of its great corruptions by diverting through it the wonderful river of Venus, yoked the oxen of the sun to the dry unfruitful earth, fought the seven-headed monster of the deep, and restored the neglected garden of the race to its pristine beauty, and then died at the midnight of its first and only day on earth. The dream of this wonderful child haunted the new servant for a long time, and he had no idea what it meant, but he drew great strength thinking about this baby avatar that accomplished so much on the first and only day of its life.

  Every evening the new servant would do something new in the forest on his way back home. Sometimes he would learn the taste of fear as he walked in the dense shadows of the trees and listened to the weird birds call his secret names in distorted voices. Sometimes he would try to listen to the language of trees, to hear what they had to say about being immemorial, and about time. He sometimes heard whispers that death lived in the forest and that its house was all the trees and all the shade and all the darkness and all the earth and that in its womb was life too, if you could find it. These whispers made no sense to him.

  Whatever he did, however much he lingered, he always made sure that whenever he was returning home to the palace he found the exact gap between the trees and that he passed through it quickly and in a firm spirit. And when he did he found that he had vanished in one place only to reappear in the same place that was somehow different. He couldn't understand it and didn't try.

  But it was some time before he realised that this gap might be the reason why his emissaries had been unable to find the tribe of artists. And it occurred to him that the mysterious tribe was not on any map or in any territory, but in a separate realm. For the first time the prince was not even sure if they were of the land, or in the land, or in the kingdom.

  And when he passed through that gap, which changed shape from day to day, never the same, sometimes like a moon, sometimes like a fire, sometimes like a clear mirror of water dazzling in the air, sometimes in the shape of a woman, but whenever he passed through the gap, he became the other side of what he was, different, but also the same. And on the journey home he became the prince, frail, tender, his head shimmering with a new clarity, as if with eyes shut he could see half the universe in a flash, and glimpse the immortal mirror of destiny.

  CHAPTER THIRTY–ONE

  For seven days he served thus
. For days he lived thus. Then he asked his father, the king, for permission to stay longer on his mysterious mission. His father, with the hint of sublime mischief in his eyes, said:

  'I consider it part of your duties as a prince to be first and foremost a human being, richly grounded and properly rounded. A season of humility would do you good. Another season of suffering would be quite excellent for you. A season of humiliation would put power in your veins and some ripening rage in your heart. To be all things is to be human. The ancestry of dust, the lash of destiny, exile in a hostile land, servitude, slavery, warfare, madness, folly, despair, grandeur – these are the food of human history. All will be tasted at the feast before you become king. But the greatest fruit of all, my son, is love; and if love is that with which you can learn, in the art of a human being, you will be a great prince and a joy to the mystery of the stars.'