by Ben Okri
Do not think for one moment that you are small, that you are powerless, that you have nothing to give, or that you are alone. I have not met a powerless person. You are only small and powerless if you think only of yourself, if you are selfish. The moment you think of humanity, of service to humanity, then you become powerful.
The heart is bigger than the earth. There are few things more noble in this life than serving humanity. If ever you suffer from crises of confidence, from doubt, from fear, from suicidal impulses, from loneliness, from existential despair, that is often because you are living only for yourself, your career, your dreams, your ego, your race, your family, clan or class. But the moment you think of humanity, all humanity, then your own problems become smaller, and then disappear.
We are here on earth to serve humanity, to take the human possibility forward, to create a better world. We are here to grow, to learn, to share our light, our gifts, our love.
There are people who are prepared to die for their limited racial and religious causes. They are a negative inspiration. You should be prepared to be the most wonderful person you are capable of being, and for the best causes, which are the enrichment of humanity, the promotion of equal rights for all, the provision of education, food, and a good life for the poor and wretched of the earth. This is a greater way to live than even laying down your life for your brother, sister, or your country.
Use all the intelligence, passion, fun, joy, and the blessings of your life to help make the life of all humanity sweeter, and you will not have to worry unduly about the state of your soul or about the meaning of life. If you do this alone, especially in this part of your life when you are young and free, if you give what’s good in you to raising higher the human story as best you can, then your life will be justified, and you will have transcended failure and success.
Open your hearts and minds to the beauties and possibilities of being human. Do not see people’s colour first. Do not see people in their material conditions first. We don’t know who or what any human being really is. Believe me, we are each one a great mystery. The person who dwells in great misery, in the gutter, alone, may well be an angel. The way you judge others – a person or a continent – judges you. And this judgement will bring you either the good or the evil you deserve.
So, go out into the world. Transcend all the bullshit that your education, your history, your culture, your class has passed on to you. Learn for yourselves. Find out for yourselves. Question everything. Question the certainties fed you by your mothers and fathers and the great authority figures of your land and your age. Be always a question mark. Seek to know for yourself, so that you may grasp the deeper truths of life with a strong mind. Give of your soul. Feel the life and the suffering and the joys of the world. Feel! Don’t be afraid to feel, or to love, or to fail. So long as you are doing the little best you can to make this ruined world better, you are making good use of the miraculous reality that is your life.
For the rest, have fun. Laugh. Lighten up. Don’t be too serious. Play. Be inspired. Be your true best self without being mean to others. And, by God, learn the wonderful art of happiness. We not only deserve to be happy. It is our divine right. How can we enjoy the happiness and growth of others, if we are not happy ourselves? It was Novalis who said: ‘I am you’ – in another form.
Let life inspire you, and teach you always how to be free, and to encourage freedom in others, if they so desire.
All of humanity is really one person. What happens to others, affects us. There’s no way out, but up.
Let’s all rise to the beautiful challenges of our age, and to our luminosity.
London, Our Future City
An Orientation
For Chris Smith
A city is only as great as the dreams that can be realised there. The more beautiful the dreams, the greater the city.
After all, cities are made by men and women; but the city that allows the highest aspirations and possibilities of its people, its artists, its visionaries, its architects, its administrators to flourish and shine becomes the magic city of the world. Such a city everyone wants to make a pilgrimage to, and hopes to dwell in for a time, as one of the great adventures in living. James Baldwin said that what is valued by a people is what is found amongst them. London’s future can be no better therefore than what we value, the true quality of our dream.
Dostoevsky said famously that St Petersburg is the most intentional city in the world. He meant, I imagine, that it was shaped deliberately, made consciously. There are two sides to this. An intentional city, shaped by genius, becomes a dream of genius. But geniuses rarely get to shape cities. Too many factors prevent this, not least the factor of pragmatism. On the other hand, cities ought to have in them something organic, something intrinsic. They ought to grow from their own dream, their character, their ever-unfolding identity. They ought to be like a work of art made by many master artists, animated by the same magical vision.
I have used the word ‘dream’ a lot in this meditation. And that is because a great city is a dream, a great dream. We do practical things there like work, play, and live; but the most important thing we do in a city is different from what we do in nature. And that is we create future possibilities from an ever-revealing, ever-concealing present. This can only be done where there is space, the space in which a higher life can flourish. This space is not just the space of parks, cathedrals, or between buildings. I speak of another kind of space. First let me play a little on this theme.
On the whole cities tend to be too built-up. City planners seldom see a space that they are not tempted to fill. We treat space as an element of functionality. We always think that space should be doing something, or that we should always do something in a space. For that reason we tend, either in thought or in reality, to bulk up all our spaces.
If a space is not being used, isn’t being filled up, we think of it as useless, or as dead space. We also have this attitude to time, which is another form of space. And so we create a world of diminishing space.
But if there is one great potential of humanity it is precisely in the freedom, the potentiality, of spaces. The most important space of all is the space to dream, the space to be free, the space to conceive and unfold the magical project of humanity.
Such a space cannot be a real space, like a park, a green belt, or a skyline, though I believe passionately that these spaces should be cultivated. The one I hint at has its home primarily in the dreams of a city, in the minds and hearts of its people. It is a mental space, or rather a space rich in potential for ideas and deeds of genius that can reside in and come from the mind.
What am I really saying? As within, so without; as without, so within, goes the ancient adage. What we see in our city is what we have planted there from our hearts or from our heartlessness, from our vision or lack of it. Everything outside has come from inside. And many things inside us have come from outside us. We either create a city that dehumanises us, or one that transforms us by its aspirations, its symbols, its visible wisdom.
I dream of a new kind of city. Not just a city that reflects the diversity of the people that live in it, reflects its traditions and its history in all its institutions. I dream of a city that we should be inventing all the time, one that acts as a perpetual guide and initiator of the human spirit.
Indeed, a city is a place where the human destiny, the great project of humanity unfolds. It is more than a home, a playground, a place of work. It is the new garden, the modern Eden, the open labyrinth. It is the instructor, the astonisher, the terrain of trial and reconciliation. It is the place where we plan, consciously or unconsciously, the redemption of humanity.
Here is the arena of the transformed journey from violence and selfishness and sundry evils, from hopelessness and loss of innocence to the future man and woman, people more at ease in the world, with a better history.
This is where we should dream a world where every individual can begin to realise their secret genius, t
heir hidden happiness.
And how do we do this? By remembering that a city is a dream. It is a place of signs and hints and mysterious inscriptions. It is a living theatre of alchemical spaces that always whisper to the soul wherever it turns. And sometimes it whispers that here, in this world, in this life, there are fragments of paradise.
Musings on Beauty
Beauty is embraced truly by the soul. It has its roots deep in the subconscious. Its appeal is from deep down, in the hidden archetypes and the fundamental forms and the myths within that are but echoes of the stars.
Beauty is our sense of the mysteries of the universe. Beauty is always mysterious, because its true source is beyond reason. It belongs to higher causes rather than effects. But it is the effect of the higher origins of beauty’s mystery that we experience as its reality.
We speak of the beauty of the moon when we mean not only its pure round whiteness in the night sky, but also the mysterious influence it exerts. We also imply its magnetism, its mesmeric hold on our imagination, and the inexplicable way it affects our bodies, our sleep, our moods, and all nature. When we gaze up at night the moon unifies our world-view. It is a mirror, reflecting the light of the sun, but in its own unique consistency.
The moon is more than what we see. Its appeal is cosmic and beyond the mind’s full conscious comprehension. It is as deep in us as it is far above us. To see it is to resonate with a thousand invisible forces and feelings.
Such is beauty. To the religious it hints at the spiritual realm and draws the mind to a contemplation of the infinite. To the non-religious, it inspires fascination, pleasure, and desire. In both there is desire. In the spiritual, beauty inclines to desire for the highest, for the absolute. In literature it inclines towards an unquenchable hunger for the finest artistic impulses, for creativity, love. In the scientist, beauty inclines towards the great desire to understand, to explain, to make clear the laws of the universe, the mystery of all things – time, space, matter, light, creation.
Beauty leads us all, finally, to the greatest questions of all, to the most significant quest of our lives.
It is indeed a humbling thing that such a young poet, touched by the sublime, could have given us, from notions already familiar to philosophers and mystics of the distant ages, the perfect formula, worthy of an Einstein or a Newton: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’
Francis Bacon, who straddles the worlds of science and literature, put it wonderfully well when he wrote: ‘The noblest use of the mind is the contemplation of the works of the creator.’ If you probe the greatest achievements in literature or science or indeed any significant human endeavour you will find this to be more or less true.
*
The beauty of surfaces and the beauty of depths. Beauty in ugliness. Beauty in how time resolves evil. Beauty in birth and beauty in death. Beauty in the ordinary. Beauty in memory, in fading things, in forms perceived and not perceived.
Beauty in awkward, unfinished, ruined, broken things. Beauty in creation and in destruction. Beauty in time and in timelessness. Beauty in the infinite that encompasses all, before the beginning and beyond the end.
On Childhood (4)
1
Our childhoods pass obscure judgements on us. Looking at a picture of oneself as a child, who does not hear a faint whisper say: ‘This is what you were; and look at who you have become’? We always let down the unstated promise inherent in our childhood. But we are not sure in what way. The failure eludes us somehow.
Childhood seems to promise so much, much that is unspecified. An eternal twinge of failure awaits the person who can meet, in spirit, the child that they were. For childhood seems to say that anything is possible, and that the golden ages can be incarnate in our time, within those lustrous eyes. And then the child becomes the person you are, here, now. Whoever you may be.
How fallen are the promises, how lowly are the glories!
Childhood is the enchanted judgement on the world, on society, and what we have let it become.
2
Childhood is the father and mother of humanity. In its mysterious estate lie our greatest secrets, our hopes, our redemption, the cures to our malaise.
3
Childhood is humanity’s secret. If you want to understand a nation study the way it treats its children, the way it educates them, the way it moulds them. Study the children themselves. Are they suspicious of the other? Then, for all their guises and civility, so are their parents. Then so is society. Are the children open to the other, to differences? Then more so are their parents, their society.
Children are the true thoughts of their nation, their class, their religion – the true thoughts untrammelled by diplomacy, politeness, politics, and hypocrisy.
Children betray the true nature of families. They reveal them. Or they redeem them. Children show what is good, what is true, what is pure, what is striven for, and what is natural in nations, and in families.
4
Childhood, paradoxically, is the future of all, not just its past. All great things incline us towards a higher childhood. Atlantis lives on in our imagination, and much can be learned from it. Eden has been transmuted into a future destination, made by our collective will and secret hopes, shaped by our hearts that yearn for a world where the unsuspected genius within us can live and unfold.
Childhood is the great puzzle, the marvellous symbol, the emblem of the quintessence, the magic mirror, the little grail, the missing key to our future.
5
This is why the childhood of literature is so important. Those early tales and fables can, at best, reveal to us our true, hidden, forgotten selves. It tells us who we are, and why. It dispels the shadows of the past. It shines a light on society. It brings back into our increasingly arid and closed minds the magic that dreams sometimes have. It makes some forgotten joy tremble in us. It makes us want to dream again, be free again, and to reach for childhood’s elusive promise of a beautiful self. It makes us want to transform the world, and to be happy.
6
With the best writing about childhood something else happens. The world is made new. Fables become real. Reality becomes fabulous. Time and space are revealed as illusions. A vaster power flows through one’s being. One senses that one can fly. For a magic moment all things are possible. Why not? The mind conceiving them makes them real. Childhood is about discovery. We rediscover the world, and are tempted to begin the grander journey of self-discovery. Then the closed circle becomes open again…
7
Novalis puts it beautifully. ‘Where children are, there is a golden age.’ Childhood is the golden age of humanity, invented in retrospect, with wonder woven in.
Through certain artists flows the childhood of the world, the forgotten angles, the golden ages of the spirit. In their best works we catch glimpses of the wondrous kingdom that childhood hints at. And we know that what we have glimpsed is not magic, or art, or enchantment. We know, in some obscure way, that the kingdom is real. This is what haunts us for ever.
O childhood, O initiation and birthplace of the world. You are the acorn, the seed, the ocean, the crossroads of past and future, the meeting place of lives; where what was is almost forgotten, and where what will be is seen ‘as through a glass, darkly’.
O childhood, elixir of time
And of flowers;
O childhood, where are those
Lost, serene hours?
When Colours Return Home to Light
1
The light came from the South, rose in the East, and flowered in the West. In the North it slumbers, and will awaken.
2
The god raped the girl, fertilised her consciousness with the bliss of origins, and named a continent.
3
These fragments are related.
4
Before the globe was split by the seas, all was one.
5
Then each fragment of the broken whole developed according to its special place in the univ
ersal scheme of secret destinies.
6
The myth of Europe is one, though many.
7
To understand. To dissect. To explain. To analyse. To prove. To make evident. To make practical.
8
Science is its religion, even in its religion.
9
Listen. A celebrated professor claims that Hamlet and his doubt, and his intellectual prosecution of reality, foreshadowed modern man and the plasma of the European self.
10
Frankenstein wanted to create, in the laboratory of science, the mystery of life – a living human being, from dead bodies and an electric spark. Culture would follow, it was presumed, from education and the environment. Frankenstein is a European, but so also is the monster.
11
Faust had exhausted all knowledge, secular and arcane, and explored the nebulous extremes of magic. The desire to know, the desire to master, seduces him into an immortal pact with Mephistopheles, a pact with his own soul, written in blood. Faust is European, but so also is Mephistopheles.
