by Ben Okri
He brings with him – Oh, how can one say it without a flutter in the voice and a touch of the miraculous in the lift of one’s heart – he brings with him just a hint of the vanishing world.
Yet all we see is a pale church lit by a purple sun.
Dimensions of a Storm
One could trace it from the point of yellow. The way it races in the air like a bird inscribing a spiral. It swells in the air, rising and falling like the beating of giant hurricane wings.
It’s all in there: the swelling and the heaving, the magnificent roll of the invisible, heaving and pushing out against the air as if from beyond the membrane of the world. Great hulking invisible beings blowing a sustaining storm above the trees.
The blue was dense up there above the green.
But you can follow the line of that infinite breathing. Sometimes it is like the shape of the upper ventricles of the heart. Sometimes it is like a bare bent oak. Sometimes it is like a question-mark whizzing through the air, underlining everything.
It has a music alright. Music on the wings of a soaring bird. A bird with sails like a full-rigged ship on its back. A red bird ascending in a blue world barely seen. The breathing from beyond the membrane obscuring all things.
The treetops, all green, housing the storm, are swaying as the leaves are shrieking hallelujahs. Along the narrow road bordered by a hedge, a tree is growing on a stone wall. The tree is now a stump. But it is still growing. Its roots are in the stone, and the stone is in the form.
The yellow is poised up there beside the blue. Just a crouching, descending yellow. To see it is not to see it. All one feels is the heaving and the treetops swaying and the heart ascending. It takes some kind of stillness to feel the dimensions of it all.
But you are a walking line on the landscape, whose meaning only those hidden eyes know.
Artists of the Fading World
The colours left the world. They left like figures in a painting in the long glare of the tropical sun. The sun pours light on a world without light, investing objects with form. How odd that it should also drain objects of colour, like chlorophyll from Autumn’s yellowing leaves.
The higher colours left first: the unappreciated violet, the misunderstood indigo, the neglected green, the polar blue, the ambiguous pink. Red seeped away ages ago with all that chaos. We lost orange in our solitudes.
The colours have mostly gone, but we are still here. Outlines in a fugitive world. We wander like drawings in a world of vanished chlorophyll.
Slowly all things concrete fade to insubstantiality. All that remain are lines. Where once there was architecture, now there is only the hint of their original drawings.
When the world fades, so do we. When we fade, so does the world. We are fading into a dispassionate universal gold, the sunlight behind the glory of substantial things.
How odd to fade from light to quiet light. We retreat into it as into a reverse twilight, where everything is back to front. It seems the back is where things are more real. Luminous like a symphony from an unsuspected realm.
A sutra in light.
L’Époque Magique
Without knowing it we have crossed a magic line in time. We had been in the dark age of iron. It seemed to last forever.
Then one night the stars were brighter. A blue and orange fragrance floated in the air. It had a hint of saffron. Children in the poor district saw at dawn blinding flashes of a yellow angel’s wings.
That morning we felt a tingling sensation in our feet. A mermaid with a piercing voice was singing in the far reaches of the Thames. A beggar was seen levitating at dusk on the outskirts of the city.
From the graveyard the skull of a dead poet was reciting forgotten terza rimas in reverse. An alchemist on a barge turned a dead pigeon into gold with a black powder. His incantations were impressive.
But in the street, one afternoon, the simple miracle took place. A woman laced in blues and reds sprouted dark beautiful wings, under the astonished gaze of a gypsy child.
The age of iron is over. The age of magic has begun.
Unveil your eyes.
City of Enigmas
It grew its face over three thousand years. During that time, short in the mind of the moon, we had not noticed it growing.
The sea had its source in the rising sun, and the sun rose from the hills where the town began.
There is a legend that a child once rode his horse to the top of the last hill, and saw the river rising from the mouth of the rising sun. He was struck dumb by the sight, and didn’t speak for eighty years. Then on his deathbed he made the cry that has now become a legend about the river and the sun. He was buried on the brow of the hill where the building grew for three thousand years and no one noticed.
The air here is translucent. Sometimes the light has the colour of jewels too long in the sun. The light from the river makes everything brighter. The houses are yellow. The roofs are blue. The windows are green. The lawns are golden and the porches are red. The gables are black. These are the colours we call them, but not the colours that they are.
The light from the river makes all things glow. There is a sparkle in simple things. Our boats are made of dreams.
In our farms we plant light. The wheat and the corn, the tomatoes and the roses and the beans grow from this light. Our harvests are rich with songs. Things grow silently here, but at night you can hear the moon waxing. It makes a low hum over the farms and the blue rooftops, and swells our bodies with fat dreams. Often we have to strap the children to the beds to stop them lifting into the sky.
The house that our forefathers and foremothers built on the hill was built with stones from the river. The women found the stones and washed them with their hands and their tears. They dried them on their breasts. Sometimes they nestled the stones in their beds and warmed them with their sleeping breath.
When the stones were too big, the women slept on them by the river. The men bore the stones at dawn before the river rose from the face of the sun.
The house was built slowly, as all true houses should be. A wall took a hundred years. The floor took two hundred. Each pillar took a hundred more. Three generations raised its roof. Its door made from an oak felled by lightning took seventy years to shape. A long line of artisans honed the images on its face. Every child lent its life and its play to the house. The sun lent its humour. The air cleaned the face of our labours.
Three thousand years and no one noticed the house was growing, because it grew from the silence of our lives. Then we forgot the house that the sun had been building, forgot it in the times that came. The turning of the mills and the spreading roads took us away from the river.
Only now when we had long lost it, long forgotten that the river rose from the rising sun, do we see the picture that time has made. Only now do we notice the smile on the house, the smile on the face that has always been there.
The Domain of Uruk
No one knows when the domain of Uruk came into being. Some say it has always been here. It was here when the earth was young. Some claim that a voice from the sky reshaped the mountain into this brooding form, this giant head of an eagle.
It is a living form. At night the whole mountain, with its stone wings, soars into the night. The vast wings, spreading darkness over the realm, give the mountain a vertiginous lightness and monumentality. When it takes flight the land quivers. We have no idea where it goes. Wherever it goes, there we are. Whenever it returns, there we have always been.
There is a secret legend that the domain was shaped by a sorcerer artisan. A hundred thousand gnomes who were his slaves chiselled away at the rockface till this grim monolithic form was revealed. It is believed that the revealed form is the god that inspired the artisan in his atrocious labours. Since its revelation it has haunted our lives with sinister laws and stern silent command.
I am one of the watchers in the domain. I watch the moods of the land. I watch the moods of the people who live under the aegis of Uruk. From the unchanging countenance o
f the monumental form come the laws we live by. I study the laws. The generations come and go under the severe justice of the domain. I contemplate the generations.
Everything is seen by Uruk. There is nothing done or thought that is not witnessed by the all-seeing presence of the revealed form.
I am a watcher of the domain, and it is Uruk who watches through me.
Gazing into a Dream
My people are strong gazers at the world. They can see a blade of grass quivering in a distant field, or the minutest grain of wood on a granary door. With a single gaze at warriors on horseback they can tell whether victory or defeat awaits them. Seeing clearly has been our strength. Those who see best become masters among us.
From childhood we learnt to see the world as it is. Those who see things as they are can see things as they will become. This is what we thought.
I too learnt to be a gazer at the world. Many times I won the seeing contests. From a thousand steps I could tell the difference between two grains of rice, or distinguish between identical twins.
Maybe we saw the world too well and could not see how it could be different. We came to think that the world we see is all there is.
But even with our clear seeing we began to be surprised by things that happened to us that our clear seeing could not foresee. Unexpected changes came upon us. The world eluded us in the new forms it took. People that we trusted betrayed us. The works of our hands no longer satisfied the depths of our souls. A new hunger came amongst us. We didn’t know what we hungered for.
We who saw so clearly found that we had never really been seeing so well after all. The way we saw the world determined how the world revealed itself to us. The world had all along mirrored our seeing.
Then something changed our seeing. That changed the world we saw. I have no idea how it began.
One day I discovered that by gazing into the distance, without thought or focus, I could see things people only glimpsed in dreams. Often something happens in the world which I understand before it happens.
I became a gazer into distances. I peer into open spaces as if into another world. Then time dissolves. In the stillness of all things, I enter a place of simple happiness.
This is the place that my people have sought, a paradise among simple things. Sometimes the shape of events makes no sense till they hover on the rim of fulfilment.
I cannot tell what happens in this gazing place. But I have many beautiful experiences, many magical encounters. They seem to leave no impression on me except what is visible in my art.
When people ask where my ideas come from, I have no answers for them. I am of the tribe of artists. My happiest moments are spent gazing into a dream.
From the Magic Lamp
I was at a bazaar on a day when the light was blue. I travelled there through the medium of colour. Sometimes I sail there on the open carpet of a mood. It is a bazaar where only the things you don’t need are conjured all around you.
To those with ordinary eyes, it appears empty: a blue space with a solitary mat on which someone had prayed. Many mistake it for the island of lost desires. Some take it for the ghost of marketplaces in the Orient, at the end of the long silk road.
Some I have known have found their way there on a flute melody. Some are drawn here by the slender music of the reed pipes. If you find your way here it will be because you have at last been overcome by those things which you sought but would not acknowledge.
I am drawn here by a lamp, which I saw once in a dream. It gave off a blue flame. When you spoke the right words to it, the flame transformed into the perfect form of your most secret wish. The tragedy of life is that we often don’t know what our most secret wishes are. If we knew what they were the lamp we seek would find us.
The bazaar today is empty and yet full of people searching for things with backward turned eyes. I see them looking at stalls and kiosks and tables piled high with lost treasures. They wander through the intersecting paths of the bazaar with their eyes facing backwards.
It seems everyone looks for something sinister and secret. One lady I saw sought hands as big as a wall. There are arcades for such things towering over the palm trees. One man I saw sought white shoes with which to walk the roads of the dead. But I sought a lamp in that empty bazaar where the spaces are blue. Then I saw him. He was sitting there with a turban like a quivering form in the air. He sat cross-legged. Lines of his spirit ran about him in a continuous zag of energy. About him there was nothing but the teeming emptiness of the Orient. With a shock I saw that his hand was a lamp. Out of the spout of the lamp stood a long flame of an unimaginable form.
Maybe the first moment of seeing that which you have sought all your life is the most perfect of all. Like a dream, it stands before you. Everything before – the long roads, the failures, the lost wanderings — has led to this moment. All the moments after – the disillusion of dreams, the return of magic forms to their source – lead away from it.
I stand now in such a moment. The world pours through these blue empty spaces, dreamers seeking their most secret dreams.
Then I stepped out of my dream. I reached out and touched him, and found that he was not there. I found that the seated figure was unreal. The lamp too was unreal. It seemed that the form conjured by the lamp had dreamed the lamp and the figure into being. Maybe it had dreamed the bazaar too. It seems the dream has dreamed the dreamers.
I am here with the others. Maybe I am lucky to have sought the wrong thing, and to have found what makes things true.
Things Not There
His grin stretched across the landscape, intersecting the altar of the sleeping church. The house sloping on the hillside slid that bit more down towards the sea. The green was encroached upon by yellow.
A purple wind of trouble blew along the street. In the yellow house where the children hadn’t eaten an argument started between the parents. The argument had sprung up from their bed.
His grin stretched across the landscape, and a bird flying past was stunned by a haze of blue. A flower behind the house thought again before it unfurled a bud. Somewhere in a barn troublesome dreams made the roosters tremble. Someone walking across the street was scorched by the distant glint of the celestial eye.
That day we were troubled by the memory of a yellow rose. The blossoms fell from the apple tree because he smiled. The rim of the sky darkened a little. Somewhere a girl who could have been a poet started to weep. No one knows why.
His grin stretched the landscape, altering the spaces between the house and the church. But he was an outline in our minds, like the indeterminate silver of the horizon. Only the landscape saw him for what he was. The most potent things often appear not to be there. All we saw was a fading yellow mist in the air.
Return to the City of Dreams
He had left the city of dreams in his youth. It happened on a day when his parents told him it was time he realised who he was in the world. It was a morning of butterflies. The sun rose late on the green horizon of the river.
He had set off from the city of dreams with the bright stones of his father’s words in his head, and the pearls his mother had made with her tears. His father had waved him off from the doorstep of their little house. The house overlooked the mountains and the distant waterfall.
His father was getting old now. The stick on which he leaned writhed with stories. As he left he was not sure he would see his father again and he looked back one last time. His father was bent in the doorway, a smile on his face whose meaning was too deep to understand at the time.
His mother walked him down the yellow path. It led through the blue fields to the river. She too was getting on in years. But there was something almost eternal about the freshness of her eyes. She was silent the whole way. There was about her silence a wealth of parables which later he would unfold into his living experience.
At the edge of the river she said only one thing to him.
‘My son,’ she said, ‘It is easy to leave, but hard t
o return. I pray that you return full of the meaning of the suffering of the world, and yet simple as the flower I am about to give you. The world will break you, tear you apart, rearrange you, disillusion you and maybe even destroy you. But if you keep this flower in your heart, you will return to the pure surprise of this dawn, to these gentle colours of our secret city.’
Then she did something strange. She plucked from the river-bank a blue flower. It was the only one that could be seen all around the river’s edge. She pressed the flower into the middle of his forehead. To his astonishment, it disappeared into the thickness of his skull. A blue haze passed across his eyes.
The sun rose, turning the greening of the horizon into a shimmering light on the river. A gentle breeze was blowing his yellow robe. He looked about him and was surprised to find that he was on a boat that was like a half moon. The ferryman was crouched on the prow. His mother was halfway down the yellow path. She had turned to look at him, but she did not wave. Then with the severity, which is also the tenderness of that land, she turned away and was soon lost amongst the yellow and blue.
The boat took him across the river, to the land beyond where dreams are forgotten. The land was called the real world. When he landed on its shore, the stones bruised his feet. When he looked back across the river, the city of dreams that had been his home was not there. Only a faint shimmer, a passing illusion maybe, lingered in the space where it used to be.
Many years later, when the world had beaten, re-arranged, and destroyed him, when he thought he had no home anywhere in the world, when the hearts of men and women had proved cold to him, when there seemed nothing to live for, nothing to fight for, because all things in that world of the real turns to dust or to ash, when all this came to pass he set out to return to the city of dreams.
