Starbook

by Ben Okri

  'I'm in love, but I don't know who I am in love with. Why?'

  Her mother was bewildered.

  The maiden joined her mother in the creation of images on cloth; and in silence she made a beautiful collection of dye work of all the suitors, their forms, their traits, their gifts, and the works of art each had created. It was a loving group portrait of all the suitors who had honoured her with their intentions, their efforts, their patience and their ardour. She worked in silence with her mother. This was the way they talked about things too difficult to talk about. It was long laborious work and as the faces emerged, each one represented so beautifully, the maiden's mother wept at the wonderful gift her daughter had and didn't value at all.

  'Mother, why are you weeping?' the maiden asked absent-mindedly, and with a simple smile.

  'I just pray that you marry the right person. You are the strangest daughter that God could have given a mother. I just don't know what to do with you.'

  And the maiden laughed and wept on her mother's shoulder, like a little girl.

  Later on, when the dye was set, and the cloth was ready, the suitors delighted in the lovely gift the maiden had given them, the gift of fame. For their faces adorned the women's bodies in the season's festivities and were seen beyond the tribe, carried to distant lands by cloth merchants. And instead of pacifying the suitors, this act inflamed them more.

  But in making the images on cloth, the maiden found herself perplexed: she made an astonishing discovery. She was not remotely in love with any of the suitors. And yet she knew, from all she had heard, from all the tales of the heart she had been told, and from the quickened happy and alive quality of her being, the delightful half-blinding half-clear-seeing malady, that she was in love. There could be no other explanation. Either she was in love, or she was possessed by a god, or she was being worked on by a master or a wizard, or she was going mad in her youth. Was she just simply more than normally excited by the miraculous joy of being alive? How could she love without an object for that love? These questions troubled her. And yet she could not sleep, she brooded around the outskirts of the village and hung around the shrine and lingered in her father's workshop staring at the statues that were slowly coming to life. She consulted, secretly, the priestesses of the shrine, and they told her riddles, prophecies and obscure words that confused her even more.

  'When that which is not seen is seen,

  When that which is dead comes to life again,

  When stone turns to flesh,

  When the yellow river bears

  The prince and princess into distant lands,

  When darkness has come and gone

  Over the world,

  And we understand the meaning of the sun,

  And we realise what a human being

  Is among the stars,

  Then all your questions will be answered.

  The whole world is a seed

  And inside the seed we dream.

  One day the seed will grow,

  And what we will see will be

  As great as heaven.

  What you love is right in front

  Of your eyes.

  But you can only see it with

  Your heart, your soul.'

  This they told the maiden in songs, woven with choruses.

  CHAPTER THIRTY–SEVEN

  Meanwhile the new servant was being woven in cobwebs and in enigmas by the spirits of the master-maker's workshop. In order to serve, he became a statue, and was inducted into the mysteries without knowing it. For only the statues, in their purity, know the secrets of the land. They absorb them simply, and store them in their forms. The new servant absorbed the lessons he had to learn from the master without being told anything. He absorbed by being still. He almost never moved. And when he did move he did it silently, like a shadow or a ghost, not troubling the air, or shifting the mood. He moved with the grace and simplicity of the dead. And he returned to his place under the wall, in the dark, among the statues, as though he were occupying a space he had never left. He began to suspect that a part of him moved, but another part of him remained behind, unmoving, in the semi-darkness, among the spirits and the fragrance of wood. He thus acquired a delicate patina from the air of the master's dreams.

  For a long time the father of the maiden did not require much of him, and asked him to do nothing. At first there were simple errands, but even these were forgotten, and abandoned. The master worked in silence at his new revelation, which demanded the utmost stillness and the most profound concentration which, for him, was really a form of great humility, an acute receptivity. The master too had to cease to be in order to see what needed to be. It was a new mode every time. Sometimes, in order to make a work happen, he had to turn into a wild lion and roam the forests hunting for a dream that dwelt among the spirits there, a dream that can be seen by beasts, but not men. Sometimes, in order to drag back form that would endure for more than two thousand years, he had to change into an eagle and fly to remote villages in faraway lands and spy on the rituals of the daughters of an ancient mother whose children, scattered about the world, didn't know one another any more. And sometimes, very rarely, when he felt an acute mood in the world that needed a cry of bafflement to help heal a giant wound which an entire race will suffer, he had to turn into a shape abhorrent to men, and journey to the realm of the dead and drag back the corpses of evil images, and change them into beautiful forms in the darkness before the light of the sun reaches them. And then he would have to learn, for many months, how to be human again. All this expended his life, shortened his life, converted his vitality. And it was only by regenerating himself in an invisible stream of light that flowed from the centre of the sun to the centre of the earth that he managed, in dreams and in meditation, in prayer and in rigorous ritual exercise, not to die, as many do who work such tough wonders, long before their time.

  And now the father of the maiden was preparing himself again. Slowly, he was letting go of the world. Slowly, he was letting go of desire. Slowly, he was releasing himself of all need to create, or to command, or to will, or to dream, or to summon. The world must do without him. In prayer, within a magic circle, in his workshop, surrounded by an invisible light, protected by the seven spirits who ward off all intruders, the father of the maiden set himself adrift into a world where all forms, all notions, all unexplored dreams, all ideas dwell in a constellation bright as the light and fire of jewels and diamonds that sparkle in the sun. He released himself into this world, and surrendered himself to its currents, and then found the gates to unsuspected worlds, where he made new friends, and attended the convention of master artists from all the worlds. While in the workshop, he might as well have been dead.

  Often the father of the maiden went off like this, without informing anyone. And so he forgot all things, and left the new servant without instructions. So the new servant sat under the wall and stared and dreamt and discovered new gaps and was silent. And then he found that he was learning and being taught in the silence. Things and beings and artworks were whispering to him. The masters of the tribe, who saw him in their meditations, whispered secrets into his being. Spirits of the workshop came and explained the workings of things to him, the secrets of bronze-casting, the golden art of harmony in wood-sculpting, the art of kinetic magic in mask-making, the history of the tribe, its public history and its secret sacred history too.

  It was whispered to him, by beings he had no idea about, from realms inaccessible except to travellers in dreams, that the artworks of the tribe were prophecies of one kind or another. They were prophecies that the tribe itself didn't know about. Sometimes, in the silence, the new servant found himself elsewhere. Sometimes he found that he was in the square, or in the circle, where the shrine stood, and he was being shown statues and sculptures, masks and carvings and paintings of wars between tribes, invasions of continents by aliens, of wars being fought across the seas, of murders committed in distant lands which have never been solved, and secret inte
ntions of governments far away given clear artistic form. And market traders on caravan routes who have visited the tribe to trade have been shocked to recognise, among the artworks that were visible, the face of one who had been crowned king of their land just as they were setting out on their journeys, or the face of a famous sage who never travelled, a thing the tribe of artists simply could not have known about.

  The new servant gathered, in the hints and whispering in the air, that the tribe of artists were listeners at the universal world of facts and events. It was as though they had access to a place where all things that happened in the universe were registered. And so they seemed to know, in the works they created, without knowing that they knew, the invasions planned on sleeping lands, assassinations, the faces of generals who would lead monstrous battles, world wars that would not happen in their time but hundreds of years in the future. And the new servant learnt to see in the artworks prophecies of great events to come in the far distant future as well as those that happened in the remotest past. It was as though time was an indifferent stream in which past, present and future were all one. And the artists of that tribe bathed in that stream, and drew from it their inspiration without end.

  Happenings and possibilities were coded there in the odd art of the tribe, in one form or another. The futures of the world and of many worlds were encoded there in one form or another. The tribe knew great and intimate secrets that they didn't know they knew.

  But the new servant was astonished to learn, in a flash of intuition, that the artworks of the tribe were intended to be works of sublime indifference and beauty. They were not interested in prophecy. They had no idea of prophecy. It meant nothing to them. They were not interested in facts. Only in creating different kinds of beauty: beauty out of disharmony, beauty that lurks in chaos, beauty that hides in disorder, beauty that sings in destruction, beauty out of the least expected events or things or materials or elements, beauty in ugliness, beauty that becomes beauty in a horrible-looking work only when you have stopped looking at it; beauty that the work creates in the mind, a mental and spiritual beauty stimulated by the work but not residing in the work, or its design. Even beauty itself the tribe of artists were indifferent about. They were interested only in what exalted states the work could induce in you, for you to use as your intelligence or need best suggests to you. And so they had no word for beauty in their language. They had banished it centuries ago, because the word got in the way of infinite suggestibility and an inducement to higher states of consciousness.

  The prophetic element was merely a covert accessory, a hidden incidental, accompanying the strange beauty that the art of the tribe embodied.

  CHAPTER THIRTY–EIGHT

  All this, and much more, the new servant learnt in silence. The silence was invaluable. The semi-darkness was invaluable. So also was the stillness in which he could learn to be free. He learnt more in the silence than in years of being told things.

  Then, at a certain moment, he realised that he was learning things about the kingdom, about the palace, about the traditions, about the mysterious nature of the gaps, and about the white spirits and their silent invasion of the land through mirrors and with hidden fire.

  He was even learning about learning.

  Everything in the workshop was eager to tell him things, to teach him. The stones yielded the secrets of the structure of matter. The spiders yielded the secrets of the art of making, and of cohesion. The implements yielded the secrets of joining, of angles. The walls yielded up the art of the vertical. The air taught the art of invisibility. Feathers taught the nature of flight. And the light that came in through the chinks in the wall bore to him the underlying secret of all things, in fragments, hints, and undeciphered illumination.

  Time was different in the realm of the artists: sometimes it was long, sometimes it was short, and often it simply did not exist at all. Mostly time for them was timelessness.

  Everything in that village, in that tribe, was eager to teach him. He was eager to listen, and to learn.

  CHAPTER THIRTY–NINE

  Meanwhile, brooding darkness was gathering about the kingdom. First came the white wind that made things disappear; then came the brooding darkness. It was not there before. The old sages say that it came with a name, a word uttered, words used as an incantation to distort the land and make it more manageable to those who wanted to conquer and use it. They say the words created the darkness, and then the darkness came and hung over the land, and the people did not know it. The darkness thickened amongst them, and the elders did not see it. And when the darkness had made them more visible to those outside, the white spirits came and emptied the kingdom of its young ones, its virile men, its gifted children. And at first no one noticed. They didn't notice because of the darkness.

  About this time the new servant made infrequent visits home through the forest. He noticed that there were more gaps than before. This filled him with mild alarm. In the palace he noticed changes in the air. The women were more silent. He peered into the faces of his people and he saw a new doubt he had never seen before, a new puzzlement. He asked them questions and they spoke of their dreams. Many dreamt that their bodies were taken from them in the brightness of day, when they were in the middle of their tasks and without knowing when they had become spirits who were performing empty duties in a place where nothing happened. Their bodies had been taken from them and worked the white fields of blood as if in a deep sleep of horror. They tried to get their bodies back, but they were stuck in that place, working the farms of the strangers. Many people reported having the same dream, of how their bodies had been snatched, and how they found themselves as spirits in the kingdom. Some said that eventually they managed to get their spirits to join their bodies in that far-off place, and then the agony of their nightmares began.

  The prince was troubled by these dreams of his people. No one seemed able, or willing, to interpret them.

  About this time the prince, in asking so many questions, began to rouse, unknowingly, the fears and unease of the elders. They feared once again that he was going to undermine them. They feared he was going to destroy their power and their institutions when he became king. They feared he would be a dangerous king, with too many new ideas, too many changes, making women equal to men, reducing the hierarchies of things, and, worse, changing the nature of their rough religion, and altering the laws which made them the secret masters of the land. And so they pressed forward with their schemes, plotting ways of getting rid of the prince. And then one of them – Chief Okadu, the Crocodile – had the brilliant idea of somehow offering the prince to the white spirits, so that they might carry him off to the seas and leave the elders free again to rule in secret, in the name of the laughing king.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  There were times when the prince would stand near the centre of the village where the palace could be seen in the distance, and where all around he breathed in the immemorial air of his people, their harvests, their traditions, their births, deaths, their wars, their festivities. There were times when he would watch the women on their way to the farms, or the marketplace, or the river, or on visits to their relations; and, unaccountably, he would weep. There were times when the ochre of the huts, and the winding bronze paths that led to evergreen forests, and the rolling choruses of children's voices, and the clear sharp tinkling of bells rang out gently behind the passionate songs of the women or the deep-throated songs of the men in their gatherings at dusk, and the silvery blue quiver of the sky, and the brightness of the moon white as the most perfect gap that leads to other worlds, and the smell of the goats, and the lonely song of the hunter in the hills, and the sudden red and yellow cry of the women of the golden shrines, and the flight of the blue-headed sharp-eyed long-flying birds that precipitate auguries when they circle the palace three times before shooting upwards into the palm-wine sky – there were times when overcome by all this, standing in the square, dreaming of his ancestors who had come from the land that w
as now forgotten under the sea, there were times when the prince found that time itself had turned upside-down, had become scrambled, that the huts had turned to dust, that the children had all fled or been sold or only their spirits remained, that the forests had shrunk, that the stream had thinned into a ribbon, that only the very old remained, that the elders had lost their memories, that the aged mothers wandered the forests without voices, unrecognised by their children, and that the white wind had wiped away the traditions, and that only the dreams and the histories and a bitterness, tinged with songs, lingered in the dry hot air where his tears of an exile turned into stones as they fell from his face and piled up, white and sparkling as diamonds, at his feet.