by Ben Okri
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To know the impossible knowledge. To conquer unconquerable realms. To pierce the veil of the forbidden, the obscure. To use the mind and intellect as a laser. To prosecute the divine. This is the ideological DNA of the myth of Europe. These are the fragments. These are the original building blocks of the ruins.
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Out of the myth of Europe has come as much good as evil. Fascism, the slave trade, and genocide have grown out of the need to master the forces of nature just as much as some of the world’s greatest productions of art, the finest discoveries in science and governance. Civilisation, Western style, is the fruit of it, from the magnificent cathedrals, the Homeric epics, and the idealism of Plato to the ideas of democracy and all the attempts to achieve, by reason and power, a better life for its people. And the domination of the world.
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The myth of Europe is the story of the light fertilising the intellect. The heart cries out in the myth.
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Euripides heard that cry and elaborated, from the ancient rituals, the birth of Dionysus for the awakening of the European heart to the beautiful chaos of wine, to spiritual possession, to faith, to unknowing. The terror of the sublime must be encountered again.
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This, it seems, was the warning that Euripides shaped: Do not deny the immeasurable mysteries. Surrender to the god that you cannot comprehend. Or great diseases of body and mind will invade your lives; and your conquests will be changed into the emptiness of the absurd; and you will dwell in the existential wastes of the spirit and the heart. You will dwell without wonder.
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The origins of the Dionysian rituals are in the East and South, but they ought to penetrate the European myth. They ought to fertilise the myth, and lead the people towards an instinct for a new covenant.
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The completion of a fragmented dream. The reunification of all humanity.
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The myth of Europe is incomplete. It is the partial glimpse of what the mind sees and understands as it peers into the mirror of immortality. It catches glimpses of which its self is but a fragment, glimpses that can produce multiplication of knowledge, but ignorance of the infinite, of the one.
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Europe is the only myth born from the divine that has ended in the murky text of unbelief. The brain’s productions.
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Its myth cries for feeling. Wagner knew this well. And music, at its most unmoored, sweeps the myth into realms where the head dare not go. For the whole edifice would crumble in the presence of such an examination.
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The myth of Europe ought to return to its origin. To re-fertilise the bliss of the god into the heart and spirit. To re-create the original impact. To experience that joy for the first time.
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So that the intellect may be illumined by the sublime hints of the shining jewel that dwells in us as the philosopher’s stone, the ululations of Dionysus, the tranquillity of Apollo, the incarnation of Christ, and the whisperings of enigmatic wonderful dreams.
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All our myths: they are needs refracted from our angle to the origin.
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All our myths: they should be reunited in the knowledge that unless we return to the unfragmented truth of the family of humanity, unless we return love back to the centre of our ways, unless the colours return home to light, we will be trapped in our myths, which will then become our prisons. Then eventually will follow our doom, and the twilight of all our stories.
Form and Content
Aphorisms
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People think it is content which endures; but it is form which enables content to endure.
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Form endures longer than content.
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It is form that keeps content perpetually new and alive.
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Form preserves the content like Greek vases or the Pyramids.
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Everything has its own form. Every living thing has its living form.
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The form unique to itself is what enables a thing to express its thingness. This is true of a fly, a particular short story, a painting or an individual.
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Conforming to its generic type it is nonetheless unique to itself.
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Nothing can live in art or in life that does not find the form unique to itself by which its individual soul can be expressed.
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In that sense true form is both evanescent and eternal, a paradox, a mystery.
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If something does not find its true form, it does not live.
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Every true work of art is a meditation in form, and every meditation in form is a meditation on the mystery of life.
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For the outer condition of life must correspond to the inner, and the outer condition of form must correspond to the inner condition of the work, its content, its dream, its spirit.
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Form is the visible manifestation of spirit.
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The spirit, infinitely greater than the form, shines through the form, as the soul shines through the body, or as the aura surrounds the body, pervades it, unseen to the eye, but sensed by the unacknowledged higher senses. It is this quality, this shining through, that makes a work of art greater than it seems.
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As long as the form is capable of being a commensurate vehicle of spirit.
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The medium is higher the more levels it has within it that correspond to the levels within us.
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To find an invisible form.
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Too much form means not enough spirit.
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Too much spirit means not enough form.
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To find the form that is also formless.
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Or to find the formlessness which has form.
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Whatever multiplies suggestiveness is best.
Healing the Africa Within
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Heart-shaped Africa is the feeling centre of the world.
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Continents are metaphors.
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A people are spiritual states of humanity as distinguishable in what they represent as roses, lions, and stars.
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Have we forgotten what Africa is?
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Africa is our dreamland, our spiritual homeland.
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There is a realm in everyone that is Africa. We all have an Africa within.
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When the Africa outside is sick with troubles, the Africa inside us makes us sick with neuroses.
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The sheer quantity of inexplicable psychic illness in the world is possibly, indirectly, connected to the troubles in Africa.
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We have to heal the Africa in us if we are going to be whole again.
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We have to heal the Africa outside us if the human race is going to be at peace again in a new dynamic way.
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There is a relationship between the troubles in a people and the troubles in the atmosphere of the world.
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The troubles of Africa contribute immensely to the sheer weight and size of world suffering.
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And this world suffering affects everyone on the planet, affects children and their health, affects our sleep, our anxiety, and our unknown suffering.
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For it is possible to suffer without knowing it.
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We have to heal the Africa within. We have to rediscover the true Africa. The Africa of laughter, joy, improvisation, and originality. The Africa of myths and legends, storytelling and playfulness. The Africa of generosity, hospitality, and compassion. The Africa of wisdom, mysticism, and divination. The Africa of paradox, proverbs, and surprise. The Africa of magic, faith, patience, and endurance. The Af
rica of a fourthdimensional attitude to time. The Africa of a profound knowledge of nature’s ways and the secret cycles of destiny.
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We have to rediscover Africa. The first encounter with Africa by Europe was the wrong one. It was not an encounter. It was an appropriation. What they saw, and bequeathed to future ages, was in fact a misperception. They did not see Africa. This wrong seeing of Africa is part of the problems of today. Africa was seen through greed and what could be got from her. This justified all kinds of injustice.
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What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
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It is now time for a new seeing. It is now time to clear the darkness from the eyes of the world.
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The world should begin to see the light in Africa, its possibilities, its beauty, its genius.
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If we see it, it will be revealed. We only see what we are prepared to see. Only what we see anew is revealed to us.
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Africa has been waiting, for centuries, to be discovered with eyes of love, the eyes of a lover.
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There is no true seeing without love.
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We have to learn to love the Africa in us if humanity is going to begin to know true happiness on this earth.
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We love the America in us. We love the Europe in us. The Asia in us we are beginning to respect. Only the Africa in us is unloved, unseen, unappreciated.
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The first step towards the regeneration of humanity is making whole again all these great continents within us.
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We are the sum total of humanity.
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Every individual is all of humanity.
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It is Africa’s turn to smile.
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That would be the loveliest gift of the twenty-first century: to make Africa smile again.
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Then humanity can begin to think of the universe, even the remote stars, as its true home.
A Time For New Dreams
The crisis affecting the economy is a crisis of civilisation. The values that we hold dear are the very same that got us to this point. The meltdown in the economy is a harsh symbol for the meltdown of some of our values. A house is on fire; we see flames coming through the windows on the second floor and we think that is where the fire is raging. In fact it is raging elsewhere.
For decades poets and artists have been crying in the wilderness about the wasteland, the debacle, the apocalypse. But apparent economic triumph has deafened us to these warnings. Now it is necessary to look at this crisis as a symptom of things gone wrong in our culture.
Individualism has been raised to a religion, appearance made more important than substance. Success justifies greed, and greed justifies indifference to fellow human beings. We thought that our actions affected only our own sphere, but the way that appalling financial decisions made in America have set off a domino effect makes it necessary to bring new ideas to the forefront of our civilisation. The most important is that we are more connected than we suspected. A visible and invisible mesh links economies and cultures around the globe to the great military and economic centres.
The only hope lies in a fundamental re-examination of the values that we have lived by in the past thirty years. It won’t do just to improve the banking system – we need to redesign the whole edifice.
There ought to be great cries in the land, great anger. But there is a strange silence. Why? Because we are all implicated. We have drifted to this dark, unacceptable place together. We took the success of our economy as proof of the rightness of its underlying philosophy. We are now at a crossroads. Our future depends not on whether we get through this, but on how deeply and truthfully we examine its causes.
I strayed into the oldest church in Cheltenham not long ago and, with no intention in mind, opened the Bible. The passage that met my eyes was from Genesis, about Joseph and the seven lean years of famine. Something struck me in that passage. It was the tranquillity of its writing, the absence of hysteria.
They got through because someone had a vision before the event. What we need now more than ever is a vision through and beyond the event, a vision of renewal.
As one looks over the landscape of contemporary history, one thing becomes very striking. The people to whom we have delegated decision-making in economic matters cannot be unaware of the consequences. Those whose decisions have led to the economic collapse reveal to us how profoundly lacking in vision they were. This is not surprising. They never were people of vision. They never had to be. They are capable of making decisions in the economic sphere, but how these decisions relate to the wider world was never part of their mental and ethical make-up. This is a great flaw of our world.
To whom do we turn for guidance? Teachers have had their scope limited by the prevailing fashions of education. Artists have become appreciated more for scandal than for important revelations about our lives. Writers are entertainers, provocateurs or – if truly serious – ignored. The Church speaks with a broken voice. Politicians are guided by polls more than by vision. We have disembowelled our oracles. Anybody who claims to have a new vision is immediately suspect.
So now that we have taken a blowtorch to the ideas of sages, guides, bards, holy fools, seers, what is left in our cultural landscape? Scientific rationality has proven inadequate to the unpredictabilities of the times. It is enlightening that the Pharaoh would not have saved Egypt from its seven lean years with the best economic advisers to hand.
This is where we step out into a new space. What is missing most in the landscape of our times is the sustaining power of myths that we can live by.
If we need a new vision for our times, what might it be? A vision that arises from necessity or one that orientates us towards a new future? I favour the latter. It is too late to react only from necessity. One of our much-neglected qualities is the creative ability to reshape our world. Our planet is under threat. We need a new one-planet thinking.
We must bring back into society a deeper sense of the purpose of living. The unhappiness in so many lives ought to tell us that success alone is not enough. Material success has brought us to a strange spiritual and moral bankruptcy.
If we look at the prevalence of alcoholism, the rise in suicides and our sensation addiction, we must conclude that the banishment of higher things from the garden has not been beneficial. The more society has succeeded, the more its heart has failed.
Everywhere parents are puzzled as to what to do with their children. Everywhere the children are puzzled as to what to do with themselves. The question everywhere is: you attain success, and then what?
We need a new social consciousness. The poor and the hungry need to be the focus of our economic and social responsibility.
Every society has a legend about a treasure that is lost. The message of the Fisher King is as true now as ever. Find the Grail that was lost. Find the values that were so crucial to the birth of our civilisation, but were lost in the intoxication of its triumphs.
We can enter a new future only by reconnecting what is best in us, and adapting it to our times. Education ought to be more global; we need to restore the pre-eminence of character over show, and wisdom over cleverness. We need to be more a people of the world.
All great cultures renew themselves by accepting the challenges of their times, and, like the biblical David, forge their vision and courage in the secret laboratory of the wild, wrestling with their demons and perfecting their character. We must transform ourselves, or perish.
A Time for New Dreams
