by Ben Okri
A man walks across the lonely immensity, going from nowhere to nowhere. Each step he takes is on burning sand. Fire in the soles of his feet, and fire on the scalp of his head. In the shade, resistance to green. Fire on the horizon.
But up here things resolve into laws. A man becomes a principle in eternity. The distant mountains like sleeping gods. Up here I see cycles, involutions, whirling planets like atoms in the cell of the universe.
I would rather be always poised in flight, with my wings touching the cool yellow heavens. It seems to me that one has a choice. One lives under a symbol, or one soars above it. A man walks across an immensity towards death. He lives under a symbol. I am perched on the crown of the sphinx. I live above a symbol.
Below, the horizon is ringed with fire. Above, there is the limitless home beyond fire, where a grain of sand and a giant planet are the same.
A man walks across the heat of the desert, and yet the universe feels it.
The Star Tree
I am a keeper of the star tree. Legend has it that this is the tree of our destiny.
There are moments in our history when we encounter grave and insoluble crises, when it seems our world is coming to an end. Sometimes the crisis is a failing of crops, sometimes it is that our women are barren, and sometimes wars are brought to the edge of our orchards.
When these great moments of crisis come, and every human form of thought and action has been exhausted, and when the oracles have no answer, and the wise men and women are baffled, when even our strange children have no prophecies, and when we are at the very end of our tether, then I am called upon.
That is when we take down a star from the tree, to transfigure our crisis. We can do this very rarely. Each time we use a star we are all a little diminished. It is very rare in the life of the keeper of the tree that a star is used.
My days are anxious and my nights are dark. I have nightmares. My nightmares are about the tree. Sometimes I dream that all the stars have fallen from the tree and burned holes in the earth and left our village covered with volcanic dust.
The tree makes me anxious. Its constant light is my unending delirium. Its curious inward blaze crowns the air with a hallucinatory radiance. Sometimes out of its unnatural glow forms appear from other dimensions.
The space all around it is pure. It has an edge of madness. Its light is too hard for humans to bear. No one comes close to the tree, not by day and not by night. The night of the tree is brighter than sunlight.
The birds love its light. They fly all around it and disappear into its brightness. They never settle on the tree though. The cats bask in its glow, their eyes like spectral fires. Animals no one has ever seen before, nor will ever see again, sometimes leap from its light into our world, and disappear into the forests.
Sometimes the light of the tree is green at night. Sometimes it is bluish yellow. When the light touches my face I feel my head become distorted. My eyes then see things that leave me wrecked for weeks.
We are on the edge of a crisis now. I have to take down a star. When I step into the circle of its light I lose my identity. I become as big and mindless as a giant. The people are watching in the darkness outside the circle of light. The pipes are playing and the drums sounding and the women praying. With my skin on fire and my hands raw, I wrench a blood-red star from a branch, and collapse into a millennial dream.
When all the stars are gone from the tree, what will happen? This is my nightmare. When all the stars are gone from the tree will it become the tree at the end of the world? Might the tree, devoid of light, then become a tree of evil? The land will have to learn to live without this light. We have to find more enduring illumination.
There are only so many stars on the tree.
When We From an Angel Fell
Before the fall our wings were like eyes that saw the golden fruit in the tree of the upper world. There was an abundance of promise in all things. To think a thing was to have it realised. A desire was its instant fulfilment. A dream was its instant reality. There were no distances for the soul. The air was a pure kind of love, and to breathe was constant ecstasy.
Everything there held the memory of infinite worlds. In that world, I once held a feather that took me faster than the speed of thought to the edge of the eighth heaven. I held a pen there once and it folded into my hands the immeasurable, magical literature of an entire universe.
Oh, those books I read there that were life in the living. A single line of a poem once released into my veins a doomed enchanted history of Lemuria. An unfinished sentence was like water from the dark wells of Atlantis, and it filled my heart with visions of successively extraordinary worlds. I held a brush there once and vast frescoes of walled cities in the seventh realm bloomed in my mind like technicolour mirages in a golden desert.
The spaces there house possibilities and impossibilities alike. I heard a note of music in that space and celestial symphonies lifted my wings into a strange blue air where I saw a multitudinous generation being born, living in ignorance, and expiring with a cry of gratitude.
But all that was when we were insiders in the unbounded temple of nothingness.
When we from an angel fell, time opened up beneath our feet. Love came rushing from the abyss. Nature snarled at us. That which sprang into our hands from a thought could only be hewn from the air with all the toil of our sinews. Meaning ran into every crevice and spilled out from the innocent surface of leaves.
The clouds above us reminded us in tattered fragments of that first space in memory. From the ever evolving seabed, a path unwound with our footsteps, tracing its way over the lands of the earth. What were dreams became storms. Before we had no need to breathe; now we have fire in our lungs. Before we saw without eyes; now with eyes we do not see.
Oh, but to discover that poignant woodsmoke of history, where bodies are growing from where bodies are burned, where flowers distill our putrid past into the fragrance of an unknown promise.
When we from an angel fell, all things were reversed, even hell. Now we fall downwards, climbing up. We rush outwards, turning in. The sea is mirrored in the sky. The substance that made all things is in our hands, like the lost word, which we have without knowing it. We forget how much we are at home.
When we from an angel fell, we became outsiders. We could become dancers in the infinite...
Prophecy
Once, when I was gazing into the air, a man with a crown, who was seated on a throne of gold, summoned me. He whispered things in my ears which became a green fire in my head. Sometimes out of this fire images take form.
I had always been gazing into realms of prophecy right in front of me and not known it. Sometimes I would stand in an open field, staring into nothing, and an event that would happen in ten years time would pass before my eyes.
In this way I have glimpsed lost wars, future births, the fall of empires, the rise of unknown powers, the changing fields, the dwindling river. I have witnessed lands devastated because the people brought to the surface that which should have been left in the deep. Sometimes I have seen things which the ancient ones told me I could not have known, things that took place when the world was still forming. I have seen visions of our elders when they were boys and girls. I have glimpsed their dread initiations in the dark blue forest.
All this I have seen, just by gazing into the air. It is as if all time were here. It is as if everything is here, if we know how to see.
The grass stirs, and a heron considers the world with a question in the shape of its beak.
By gazing and not gazing into the infinite present, it seems all worlds are here.
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Acknowledgements
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Acknowledgements
With
gratitude to Mike Goldmark, for his support;
To Ed Victor, for seeing the possibility.
About Ben Okri
BEN OKRI, poet and novelist, has published many books, including The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize, and The Age of Magic. His work has been translated into 27 languages and won numerous international prizes. Born in Nigeria, he lives in London.
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About Rosemary Clunie
ROSEMARY CLUNIE is a painter, printmaker and video artist, born in Scotland and living in London. She has exhibited at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, amongst other places.
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About Apollo
The Apollo list reflects in various ways the extremity of our time, and the ways in which novelists responded to the vertiginous changes that the world went through as the great empires declined, relations between men and women were transformed and formerly subject peoples found their voice.
Selected by the distinguished critic, poet and editor Michael Schmidt, in conjunction with Neil Belton, editorial director at Head of Zeus, Apollo makes great forgotten works of fiction available to a new generation of readers. Apollo will challenge the established canon and surprise and move readers with its choice of books.
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First published in the UK in 2017 by Apollo,
an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd
Text copyright © Ben Okri
Paintings copyright © Rosemary Clunie
Artwork photography by Christine Soro, Goldmark Gallery.
The moral right of Ben Okri to be identified as the author and Rosemary Clunie as the artist of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB) 9781786694508
ISBN (E) 9781786694492
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