The Magic Lamp

by Ben Okri

  The canoe that bore him across was simple as a new moon. He stood straight, while his suffering steered the canoe across.

  The city had changed. Gone were the blue fields and the yellow path and the huts built with storytelling hands. An enchanted metropolis rose beyond the face of the young bride of a moon. Everything was bright. Music rose from the flowers and the trees.

  As he neared the shore, he hoped to see his mother there. He hoped that she would sense his return in the crushing of his hopes. But there was no one there. From afar he could see that his father’s hut was a lost memory. He knew before he got to the shore that he was alone.

  When he stepped on shore tears fell from his face. Where they landed a blue flower sprouted. He plucked the flower. At that same moment he felt in the air the inaudible music of a vast chorus of delight. He felt in that chorus not only the voices of his father and mother, but also of the illustrious ancestors and the ever-watchful masters. Presences in the air, which he could not see, cheered his return to the city of dreams. But what they truly celebrated was that he had not lost the blue flower in the furnace of the real world.

  Life is a Street Corner

  A face is where roads meet. One road cannot make a city. It takes many roads to make life a fiesta.

  A face is where rivers meet. It is where times meet. Each person is a marketplace.

  On days when there is a hint of a rainbow in all things, do you not sense that buildings that have sustained our gaze begin to look like us?

  Through those invisible greens and purples in the air, we look upon some facade and see our faces there. Cities are portraits of our minds.

  That portrait is best where a touch of silence surrounds the figure. On a building where three streets meet a delicate face is discerned. This face is made of all that dreaming, all that suffering. Beauty squeezed from time.

  Life is a minaret. Life is a crowded square. A stock exchange. The winding shores of a river.

  Life is also eloquent in the pastel of a street corner, where silence meets destiny.

  The Blue Crusade

  We made many discoveries in the unseen realm. One of these discoveries was the colour blue. We could travel in this colour. We could pass through a certain tone of blue into the world beyond thought, where gods dwell. We dreamed in blue. Some of us made magic carpets of blue on which we visited our friends in remote constellations.

  Our sages made magic with blue. They conjured with it, invoked it, and created protective spells with its inner nature. Our best potions are made with sprinklings of blue enchantments.

  We made realities with this mystic colour. We destroyed evils with its potent flame. In our ecstasies we went through portals of blue to the source of our highest joys. No darkness of mind but cannot be soothed and dissolved by its ministrations.

  Then, over time, this blue wisdom was lost. We lost it as we grew more successful in the world. We lost it in the age of realism, as we became masters at manipulating the forces of nature and the power of the machine. We acquired more knowledge of the world and less knowledge of ourselves. We knew more, but somehow we knew less.

  We became more powerful but lost the art of wonder-working. We lost the art and the magic of the beyond. It was only a matter of time before our power and our success would diminish. It would diminish and fade because of the lost art of blue.

  Then, as if waking from a dream, a few of us realised that we could no longer travel on magic carpets of the mysterious hue to our friends and lovers on distant constellations. We realised we could no longer pass into the immeasurable world where the gods dwelt. We felt keenly our diminished mysteries. We sensed the hollow times that were already looming above us in our faded vitality, our creative impotence, and the neurosis that had crept unseen into the minds of our children.

  The silent ones among us sought out the paths of the lost tradition. The listening ones among us left the cities and went deep into the forests and hills and sought out the forgotten mages. Through symbols and rituals, passing through death into new life, we re-learned fragments of the lost dream. Then we were charged with the noblest and most secret tasks. We were to take, to all corners of the world, the blue crusade. We were to awaken it in all those who secretly quivered to the music of the spheres.

  Through the eyes of history this underground crusade had no apparent cause. But maybe, from the invisible world, the forgotten beauty of blue, missing our love of transcendent travel, took us up as a crusade. In this tentative world one can never be sure. The cause could well be the effect, and the effect the cause.

  Poet by the Sea

  He emerged from the sea early in the afternoon, having spent the morning deciphering hieroglyphs. He had been contemplating the meaning of footsteps along the shore, and interpreting the cries circulating from the other side of the world.

  The sea, in its obscure rage, had destroyed ancient temples and prosperous towns. Earthquakes had inscribed gaps in mountains and human destiny. The gossip of fishes had brought him news of imperfect revolutions in crescent lands.

  Labouring among the symbols of alchemists, he had been aware of the murmurings of history. Late in the morning he had wandered among the seaflowers and the riverbed acacias. He had been charmed by the flight of the water swallows emigrating to temperate seas.

  It had been a long morning. It had been a long morning of human history. From the moment when man, touched by an obscure impulse, stood up on two legs, to the moment, a million years later, when he stood up in his mind. A long morning. Barely enough time to witness the growth of pyramids and the regret of nuclear realities. But long enough to have a conversation with those multicoloured fishes that swim in and out of dreams.

  Late in the morning a message from his guide appeared among his poems. His guide sometimes appeared as a blue fire and sometimes as a golden wisp of incense smoke. This was the message:

  ‘Time to leave the deep. Time to wander among the debris of human dreams.

  Time to read the signature of the sublime in the fallen trees, the orphan’s voices, and the songs of abducted women.

  Time to rebloom the withered trees, without the super-natural.’

  He finished his tea, put on a high-collared coat of fuchsia, and emerged into the early afternoon. Like a poem drifting in the wind, he merged with the blue doorways.

  Only those who love the myrtle and the dove and the wand of Merlin saw the poet, wandering by the sea.

  The Rose and the Vine

  Their conversation was often deeper than the world. It passed between them in silence and the unheard rustle. Sometimes it lived in their fragrance, which the wind shared.

  ‘Oh, that chequered road,’ said the Rose indirectly to the Vine. ‘It is not just black and white, you know. It goes through blue fire and yellow sands.’

  The Vine was silent, but quivered lightly with the flame of those silent words.

  ‘The road passes over a bridge made of the tongues of martyrs and across those hedges of insanity and through that delicate blue of awakening minds in the remote temples,’ said the Rose, concentrating its speech into the air.

  The Vine listened to the broken tale.

  ‘You may not know it, but this road I speak of passes through the dreams of gods and the screams of children. It beholds the slow rot of daily life.’

  A faint troubled blush rose deep within the Vine, and made it tremble, as when a fable of the wind turns suddenly dark.

  ‘Sometimes the road leaves the earth and ascends to the fiery moon, where it is repudiated by the stars,’ said the Rose with the joy of its radiant mood.

  The Vine sensed now the enigma of that mood and allowed itself to be shaken by its magic.

  ‘You too have heard the obscure sounds the Sybils make that trouble our sleep with prophecies. The sounds come from the earth, and the earth is pregnant with dreams and nightmares. Sometimes flowers sprout from the blood and bones, and carpet the road with colours. Those who walk the road breathe the colours as ho
pe.’

  The Vine, full to its edge with the fable, replied:

  ‘That is the road that flows in my veins. But with my grapes it is crushed into that liquid, touched with the gold of the stars, that makes men free.’

  All around them was the many-coloured wind in the arbour, and the fable shared was their conversation with the sky.

  The Falcon Dreamer

  In tales older than the land there had been a prophecy. It was a prophecy about the coming of the Falcon-God.

  Many sunsets had passed across the face of the land and the prophecy had not been fulfilled. The people worked at their farms and by the river and they built houses and raised generations. But their dreams grew sad. The sunlight drained from their lives, and their lives became empty.

  The centuries roamed past with the stars. The oracles fell silent. The stones which sang on nights of the full moon now gave forth only a hot and hollow whistle. We of the land had suffered one long airless waiting.

  What were we waiting for? We were not waiting for the prophecies to be fulfilled. We no longer believed such things. Those things belonged to myth, and the sunlight had been drained from myth.

  Our days grew barren. Our nights became stale. Our days and our nights passed with undifferentiated steadiness. What did we have to live for? Nothing that we could remember. We just lived because the air sustained us, because some fragments of tales older than the land still whispered something to us. Whispered something we did not understand. In our not understanding there were occasional moments of beauty, but it was beauty as a promise of something unknown and maybe unknowable.

  Then in that long barren century there came a man among us who learnt how to dream things into being. He learnt it from the myths we had discarded at the edge of the farms and along the broken shores of the river. He learnt it in the long silence and in the silent stones of the oracles. He learnt it from the old women who kept alive the last fires of the tales older than the land. The things he dreamt at first could not be seen by others.

  One day, after we had been living a long time in fear and emptiness, the dreamer dreamt something he did not understand, something even he could not see.

  Maybe a hundred years passed and no one saw it. No one knew it was there. But it was there all along. I have often wondered how long it takes a people to see that which has always been there. It is as if, over the millennia, we acquire the eyes to see that which we need to see.

  One morning, when the mist cleared from our souls, we saw something we had never seen before in front of the great pylon of the temple. It must have come among us during the long sleep of our minds. It must have grown out of our souls while we succumbed to darkness and doubt. It came out of those tales we forgot.

  There in front of the great pylon was the quivering form of the Falcon-God. It shone in majesty as though it had been there since the beginning of the world.

  No one knows what to make of it. Not even the high priests of the temple.

  In one of the tales that treat of the prophecy as if it had already come to pass, there is the following enigma.

  Had we dreamt the Falcon-god, or had the god dreamt us?

  The Stoic’s Season

  It has been rather dry of late.

  There’s not much food on anyone’s plate.

  Even in the marketplace

  Hunger speaks from every face.

  Everywhere shops are closing down.

  Even bankers wear a frown.

  Misery lurks in every room.

  In the papers there’s economic doom.

  The old have lost their creed.

  The young are devoured by greed.

  We’re all drowning in fear.

  This has been going on year after year.

  But in a garden called Integrity

  Dwell two wise souls, with dignity.

  In lean years they kept faith and reason.

  Lean years are the Stoic’s season.

  The Spirit Lifts

  My troubles are all around me. They are all in me. They are like the ochre of our sentient stones. I am weighed down by the buildings and the yellow earth. I have forgotten about breathing, because I am always frowning. The flowers are gone from the edges of the green. The life and the light to me are lost. I stand on my feet, but in truth I am on the ground.

  I bear more weight in me, more troubles, than the earth does. Small wonder I feel so heavy. But I am as lithe as a vine, light as a flower. Weighed down by time and thought and all the obscurities of the light. Weighed down by my own eyes. Everything I see takes on density. I roll the great boulder of the earth with every thought.

  Maybe it was the glimpse of colour. Maybe it was an unexpected breath. Maybe something beyond the limit of the air touched my inward eye. But in the midst of my anguish, surrounded by the dark storm my own thoughts create like gods, I caught a glimpse of something within me, something formless. It was something that had an affinity with the air. Something made of an unseen light.

  Suddenly I am in my true element. The spirit lifts. The mountain I carry within me is inexplicably dissolved, left behind.

  My arms have turned to feathers, my upturned face acquires the pure shape of a beak.

  As the air loves the sky, so am I soaring above the rooftops. My fears have been abandoned to the ochre of the earth. Upward lifts the spirit beyond the measure of the sky.

  I have found my true form.

  I am touched with something higher, something like the clear spaces, something like love.

  Those Enchanted Songs

  There was something about those afternoons. Summer’s dream was golden in the leaves. In the winter and spring had been done the harvests of love and art. The wind’s nostalgia for the mountains ruffled the lake.

  It was that time of year. The open spaces among the leaves were full of gaiety. The earth had been turned, the seeds had sprouted, and their buds promised seven fingered leaves. There was dancing in the air. Even the castle was dancing in the charm of the sky.

  The farmers were full of wine, the young women were full of love, and the children were full of the shapes of the birds in the summer sky.

  We were in a clearing in the blue forest. The constellation of Orion was presiding over that late summer afternoon. Maidens were discovering the magnetic pull of their hips as they danced. We had been dreaming of Stonehenge and those ancient festivals in the ripe spaces. The air was tinged with those ancient presences. Out of the fluting call of the summer birds we almost expected their manifestation.

  Then it seemed that something was rising from the earth. Some swelling in the air made me throw my hand up in exclamation. Then I noticed the one with the horse’s head and boots of wolf’s hide. He had a stone dagger in his belt. He had a horn for calling warriors out of the summer heat. He stood before us and made a gesture, compelling us to listen.

  We listened hard. There must have been music out of which so much shone. The wind swelled the leaves and the trees seemed to rise. The bushes and the hidden bees in the flowers were full of the presence of the gods.

  The afternoons were conjured from those enchanted songs, which no one heard.

  Walking the Fish

  It is common to take the dog for a walk. It is less common to take a dream for a walk.

  To set out with the rising sun and an empty mind and wander the narrow path that leads to the sea. To find rising in the mind a dream one had but didn’t remember at the time. To ponder the dream and relive its mysterious hints.

  To find, walking beside one like a pet unicorn, the vision of a happy future. This fills the world with rich colours.

  Walking with a dream works wonders on the malleable forms of the world. Obstacles bend into the shape of one’s hopes. Difficulties refigure themselves into triumphs. One’s cross becomes a leaping place to the stars. The blues and reds and yellows turn into tangible currencies of fortune. One plucks gifts from the air. The tree of thorns becomes that tree of the Hesperides, bearing golden fruit.
/>
  Lucky are those who walk with gods. Only strong dreamers shape the magic that makes all things real.

  But how strange it is, on a morning when the air disperses colours like birds in flight, to find a woman wandering along the shore, walking her fish. She is curved like music from an Aeolian harp. The air bears the sea blues and the dazzling gold of her dress, in an aquamarine dream.

  In truth she was not walking her fish. The fish was taking the lady for a walk. She was in a philosophical mood that morning. Not so the fish, who preferred the silence of colours.

  ‘What are things made of?’ asked the lady.

  ‘Things are made of the way you see.’

  ‘What is it that makes the way you see?’

  ‘The way you are makes the way you see.’

  ‘What makes the way you are?’

  ‘Sometimes it is the way you feel.’

  ‘And what makes how you feel?’

  ‘The spirit,’ said the fish, testily, ‘whether it be open or closed, narrow or wide, whether it flows like the sea or is frozen like ice.’

  ‘But what makes the spirit?’

  ‘That’s enough philosophy for a morning’s walk,’ said the fish.

  It might have happened in a parable. It might have happened in a missing gospel of women. The miracle then would not be the multiplication of loaves and fishes. The miracle would be our conversion into the mysteries of the sea.

  Under the Sign

  I stand high upon this crag and symbol, gazing down on the terrestrial world. Up here, beyond the brows of the sphinx, colours penetrate the sky. Far below, the world is made up of things, dunes, scorpions in the sand, and the shifting surface of the earth.