by Ben Okri
I’m being destroyed by too much thought, too many notions, too many oracles, too many dictates, too many laws, too many dos and don’ts. I’m being destroyed by too many empires and wars, and tyrannies of the mind, too many idols.
I’m not yet born and the burden of too much false knowledge, from Mount Olympus to Mount Everest, is on my back. I’m full of too many myths and all the myths of Greece and Rome and Europe and home are killing and choking me with their too-muchness. And I long to destroy them all or resolve or dissolve them all into a pure tincture or dew.
I’m being destroyed by too many books, too many ideas, too many prophecies, too many philosophies, too many discoveries, too many geniuses, too many broken titans and towering charlatans.
I’m being destroyed by too much knowledge that is too much ignorance. All the discoveries have been made, they say, and there is nothing new under the sun, but I must find something new in the darkness of the sun. For too much light hides and creates its own darkness, its own blindness. And there is much we are not seeing with our eyes wide open because we are using our eyes and seeing not that which we see but that which we have seen before. And so I have to destroy the old eyes. I have to destroy the old light that prevents us truly seeing. I have to invent or find a new darkness in which we can truly see.
I have got to do something amazing, for everything that gave birth to me in the mind and body and heart is killing me in my birth. I’ve got to find a new fire to burn away my birth, and burn up all the idols of the past, all the gods of art, all the idols of culture, burn them all up as I was burned into life, as they burned the masks of the Africans in the great bonfire of Empire. So too I must burn all that imprisons me as a child of the earth. And then I must do what that god of fire did, give a new light, a new fire to myself in my new birth of power, or I’ll die in this darkness that is the anarchy of our times.
I sense mighty changes coming, and grim horrors, and nightmares from which we will not awaken for a hundred years. I sense monsters in time that will be seen as saviours. I sense evils clothed in light. I sense terrors in the obscure seeds of time, storms without mercy, and worse evils in man undreamt of before, sleeping in the mass of the overcrowding ruins of our past which we mistake for ancient glories.
The new century sleeps and who knows what vile dreams it will unleash when it is goaded awake by guns and the sleep of reason? I sense them all and they are killing me before I am born, and I must find the power to give them form, to seize their power, and exorcise them before they get us. For I must be free and must do something to protect this dream which is me.
I am ready to die to be born. I am ready to receive a new form, a new sacrament, a new passion. I will serve at the rigorous altar of truth if I can be free of this tyrannical burden of orthodox beauty that conceals unsuspected evils, into which I was born.
I will be the willing pilgrim of a new way of finding if I can destroy this dying weight of tradition and rebuild it again in six days.
I must do something transcendent, for I will not die.
I will defy death with my secret eyes.
Dialogue of the Masks
In a language which human beings cannot hear, the masks spoke to one another in their angular silence.
Spirit 1: They do not see us, these living ones that do not know how to live.
Spirit 2: They do not see much.
Spirit 1: Even with their eyes wide open.
Spirit 2: Especially with their eyes wide open.
Spirit 1: They can open their eyes as wide as the sky and still they will not see much.
Spirit 2: They can have their eyes as bright as fire and still they will not see much.
Spirit 1: Our ancestors were right. The more you look, the less you see.
Spirit 2: The more you see, the less you look.
Spirit 1: If you look you will not see.
Spirit 2: If you see you will not need to look.
Spirit 1: The more you look the more you look.
Spirit 2: The more you see the more you see.
Spirit 1: But these living ones, they do not see us and they do not see themselves.
Spirit 2: Words prevent them from seeing.
Spirit 1: They talk too much.
Spirit 2: And too soon.
Spirit 1: What they see is not there.
Spirit 2: What is there they do not see.
Spirit 1: They think too much.
Spirit 2: I can hear them when they think.
Spirit 1: Their thinking is loud.
Spirit 2: They think that they think.
Spirit 1: They think that thinking is thinking in words.
Spirit 2: Their thinking is without much thought.
Spirit 1: They think themselves into not seeing.
Spirit 2: They think themselves into not feeling.
Spirit 1: They think themselves into not being.
Spirit 2: They think themselves into not living.
Spirit 1: They ought to be taught how not to think.
Spirit 2: The art of non-thinking.
Spirit 1: The art of being.
Spirit 2: Then they will begin the great thinking.
Spirit 1: But will they listen?
Spirit 2: No.
Spirit 1: Will they learn?
Spirit 2: No.
Spirit 1: What is to be done?
Spirit 2: Nothing. Only to confound them with our silence.
Spirit 1: Our stillness.
Spirit 2: Our stillness in which there is immortal motion.
Spirit 1: Our stillness in which the words of the gods work.
Spirit 2: Our stillness full of magic.
Spirit 1: Our silence full of music.
Spirit 2: Our silence full of immortal harmonies.
Spirit 1: Our stillness full of immortal mysteries.
Spirit 2: We will confound them.
Spirit 1: And live.
Sublimation
I want to be a new beginning and an end. Creation will return to its source again, in a zigzag flash of reverse lightning.
After me there will be no habits of seeing, no standards of doing set in immortal stone. I want to destroy the old artistic commandments. New worlds would be created from a new ground.
After me, nothing. And in that nothing something is born from brave new souls, something like paradise, drifting in from the horizon.
On Childhood (3)
1
Childhood: being under the care of those who are generally ill qualified to be parents. People ought to learn to be parents before they become parents. It should be more than just a biological inevitability.
2
Childhood: focus of love – real love and confused love.
3
Childhood: the meeting place of an endless chain of failures and successes, hopes and fears, marvels and disasters, disorders and joys, and the hidden narrative of ancestors. Childhood is the inheritor of concentrated fictions invisible.
Every child is an entire literature. All tragedies, comedies, and epics are already resident in its birth.
4
Childhood: a lottery, Chardin’s game of cards, the luck of the draw, an unsuspected gamble, an obscure mathematics of destiny or karma; an unspecified punishment or an unnamed blessing – for deserving the parents you have, the family you’re stuck with, or the life you were born into.
5
Childhood: a time also of innocent cruelties, tearing off the wings of butterflies, cutting up worms, ganging up on the weakest, the newcomer, or the strange one. Who hasn’t noticed the peculiar intolerance of childhood; the unqualified ego of the state; or the games, the toy guns, the locking up of the smallest in a shed and then forgetting…
6
Childhood: the place of all society’s experiments, its disastrous ideas of conscious engineering.
7
Childhood: in legend reared by wolves, the child becomes wolf-like. Reared by strangers, the child has something of the stranger within
them.
8
Childhood: the place where so many seeds and notions are planted in us, and watered with the loving hands of our parents, and become full-grown trees of appalling prejudices, deeply held secret resentments, fiercely guarded dragons of suspicions, hydra-headed monsters of superstitions. All of these lovingly or bitterly planted in us and absorbed by us with all the full reverence and unquestioning acceptance we give to our parents when our minds are young and theirs to mould.
It is a difficult thing indeed to free our minds of the errors of our parents. For it amounts to rewriting our childhood, tearing down its mysterious palaces, stripping our parents of the mythical place they have within us. It would mean conceding our parents a certain ordinariness, like any other parent of one’s age group that one might think of as a bit of a fool and yet to their child is a god…
Who can disarrange the fragile garden of childhood and not make themselves a little poorer for it?
9
In literature childhood is an invention, a creation, a state constructed. The literature of childhood is properly either historical fiction, or imaginative reconstruction.
Childhood is a fairy tale taking place in a chaos. Childhood is not aware of itself as childhood.
10
Notice how late the literature of childhood appeared in the ancient world. The literature of childhood seems to suggest that society has passed its phase of childhood, its era of unconscious consciousness, its period of myths and legends, of living fables, heroic deeds, difficulties, beginnings. This literature suggests a new phase of nostalgia, of loss. The literature of childhood signifies that for a nation or a people its golden age is over. They look back who have crossed the hill. When a society has lost its way, it looks back thus – to childhoods, to origins, to arcadias. This implies a prevalent chaos, and a longing for simplicity, away from confusion.
A literature of childhood is an implicit criticism of the present. It can often be a quiet, decisive political act. It can be a scream woven into a melody, a beautiful song thrown into the face of tyranny. It can be a transfigured form of guerrilla warfare against the psyche of repression, a howl from the wounded heart of innocence. Or it can be an act of exile from the intolerable present.
11
Nations are best when you can still see something of the openness of the child in the grown-ups: a wisdom that arcs towards mature simplicity, like ancient temples.
10½ Inclinations*
* The Royal Society of Literature asked 10 writers to suggest the 10 books that children should read before leaving school. Instead of a list of books, I wrote this.
1. There is a secret trail of books meant to inspire and enlighten you. Find that trail.
2. Read outside your nation, colour, class, gender.
3. Read the books your parents hate.
4. Read the books your parents love.
5. Have one or two authors that are important, that speak to you; and make their works your secret passion.
6. Read widely, for fun, for stimulation, for escape.
7. Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
8. Read what you’re not supposed to read.
9. Read for your own liberation and mental freedom.
10. Books are like mirrors. Don’t just read the words. Go into the mirror. That is where the real secrets are. Inside. Behind. That’s where the gods dream, where our realities are born.
10½. Read the world. It is the most mysterious book of all.
Self-Censorship
1
Much has been said about public censorship, not enough about self-censorship. We veil our thoughts from ourselves. We censor our true feelings about the outrages of our day. We accept a great deal of lies from the powers that be. We swallow whole what we are fed in the various media of information and misinformation.
We are easy to manipulate because we absorb without thinking. And when we do think, we think what we have thought before. We do not question enough. We do not apply sufficient rigour to the information we receive and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. We collude in the great follies and injustices of our age by censoring our minds.
They do things in our name, with our votes, using our silent consent. Then much later our children are horrified to learn that we were present and adult when unacceptable outrages against humanity were perpetrated under our very noses, and that we did nothing. And so we implicate a whole generation; and, in extreme cases, a whole nation.
It is only by being free in ourselves that we can extend the freedom of others. It is only by being free that we can guarantee clean hands for the next generation to fight the good fight of their era.
It is time we considered the bedrock of censorship – and this is the censorship that takes place within.
We stifle our most humane thoughts. We silence our impulses to translate our sense of injustice into action. We sense something is wrong but we choose to be silent. Sometimes we do this just to have a quiet life. Sometimes we are silent because it has always been some kind of national characteristic. Embarrassment, not wanting to be different, not wanting to be the only one voicing dissent are kinds of self-censorship. Traditional modes of behaviour are internalised forms that become part of the matrix of self-censorship.
We are victims of censorship within when we do not let ourselves think the thoughts which our flesh recoils from, or let conscience speak that which the heart feels to be unacceptable, or when we give ourselves excellent reasons for not participating in this grand drama of our interconnected lives. Then we make it possible for governments to censor all those who speak out when they find our freedoms being crushed, visibly or invisibly.
2
There are many nations across the world where great works could be created, but are not. Generations have come and gone and there have been no works of significant creativity amongst them. Didn’t the people suffer, dream, love, or endure oppression? Didn’t history, with its trap-doors, its earthquakes, its upheavals, happen to them? Was there no evil, no failure, no loss, no rage, no quests, no doubts, no yearning for something undefinable? Then why so little to show for all that perplexity of living and dying, of loving and weeping, of betrayals and forgiveness? Why nothing to show for all that fire? The reason may just be censorship within.
They dared not think that which they should think. They dared not differ. They dared not step outside the prevailing orthodoxies. There are, maybe, other reasons. That under fear of death, exile, torture, the murder of loved ones, the threat to their livelihood, their government drives into silence the conscience that could express itself through the oblique forms of the imagination. In short, the artists censor themselves. The forces that be kill creativity at the very place of conception, in the heart, before inspiration can hover over the mind like that dove of the holy spirit.
And then we say the people were without genius. They lived as if they didn’t live. They gave us no sign that they were here. They added nothing to the ongoing battle for the higher civilisation of humanity. They bequeathed us nothing, not even hope. They might as well have sunk to the bottom of the sea, or vanished without a trace.
So it will be of us, if we are not mindful. We live in an age of monstrosities. We fiddle while the last days of the earth draw closer, thanks to our mindlessness. Wars rage under our eyes. Famines and plagues devour our neighbours across the seas. Next door someone is dying for want of care. Our children, with insufficient moral guidance, are burning up the tattered bible of tolerance, patience, and understanding. Anomie and indifference take on glamorous names.
How can we care about big things afar when big things nearby are not seen, even as they consume us? The true issue of our age is not terrorism or religion. The great issue of our age is freedom.
We need to de-censor our minds. Much has been said about the damage done to all when our freedom of expression is destroyed. Now it is time to speak of the more insidious censorship upon which
rest the more sensational censorships.
O fellow members of the human race, de-censor your minds. The mind is the only true place of freedom. Let’s protect that freedom within by constantly asking questions, by thinking clearly, by transcending our traditional and habitual modes of thought. That way we will better protect one another from having our world ruined by those who rule in our name, who sometimes have no idea of the catastrophic effects of what they are doing. Let’s raise our voices when our consciences are choked. Only free people can make a free world.
One Planet, One People
An address to students
Be wiser than your fathers and mothers. Be bigger-hearted. I know your fathers and mothers, and they are good people, and I love them, but you will be bigger-hearted.
You are the real hope and possibility of the century. Do not accept any limitation on the definition of what is human, and what is possible to humanity. Do not box anyone in. Don’t let yourself be boxed in either. Tear down all barriers of race, class, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. Believe in the fundamental equality of humanity.
Link hands with your brothers and sisters across the globe. Link hands with the poor and the disadvantaged and the rich. Don’t look down at anyone and don’t look up at anyone either. You are not better than the poor, nor inferior to the rich. The heritage of the earth is for all of us. Make this world one world, its riches and possibilities available to all.
