Astonishing the Gods

by Ben Okri

  His guide was silent. But at the darkest hour he seemed to notice a golden glow beside him as they passed the open spaces with marble fountains and elegant stone monoliths where the founding fathers of legend had made the public declaration of the creation of a new civilisation.

  The glow that was his guide was intense in the open legendary spaces. The marble fountains, seven in all, had the sculptings of rare ocean-bed fishes with brilliantly lit water spouting from their mouths. On the stone monoliths had been inscribed the original words of the initiators of the new civilisation – words that had the brevity and authority of universal laws. They were words of a language that he couldn’t decode, a language no longer spoken. Then he realised that all along he had assumed a similarity of language, when in fact he had been communicating with his guide beyond words.

  They crossed the shining open spaces and came to an array of streets. The houses, buildings, and offices were all majestic, and all of stone, but it was of a stone that seemed in a permanent state of dreaming.

  As he passed them he felt that one day he would understand their dreams.

  2

  The air was full of harmonies. He breathed them in. Elated with the harmonies in the air, he was surprised to find that it wasn’t the buildings with their clarity of construction, their musical forms, their chaste pillars, and their ancient moods that so affected him. There was no denying the nobility of the tenements and the purity of the abodes: they made the spaces into something dream-like. But what affected him the most, as he went down the narrow streets, were the myths and the magic in the air.

  All things invisible had a hidden glow to them. He sensed in that world something higher than marble and gold. He sensed a spirit of hidden light everywhere, concealed behind the mighty churches and the great basilicas of justice.

  The myths in the air made him feel as if he had left his body and entered a temple of world dreams. This was compounded by melodies heard and not located. It occurred to him that the city was composed of songs, and that the stones were singing. It occurred to him that the marble facades and the radiant statues, the stained-glass cathedrals and the merchant banks, the emporiums and the visible buildings of state, the yellow order of it all and violet perfection of the streets had been erected, put in place, and shaped purely by music, and by spirit.

  It was the harmonies in the air that made him sense that the visible city was a pretext and a guise for an invisible realm. All things suggested something divine.

  As he passed the silent mausoleums and the celebratory arches and the temples touched with the blue light of that darkness, he sensed that the visible city was a dream meant to deceive the eyes of men. He sensed that everything seen was intended to be visible only that it should pass away.

  The hidden harmonies in the air seemed to mock the grandeur that he saw in the golden cupolas, the oriel windows, and the sprawling palaces.

  Then, as he contemplated this hint of the destructíbility of all things seen, he became aware that what first seemed like a city of stone was really a city of water. It appeared briefly to be a realm beneath the deepest ocean, where the purest sunlight pours out from below, where memory no longer reaches, and where living eyes have never been.

  3

  He was about to ask a question of his guide when he felt from the harmonies in the air a modest injunction to silence. The glow that was his guide floated serenely beside him, illuminating the way.

  He walked on in the silver melodies. He breathed in fragrances of tenderness, and breathed out his anxieties. He swam in his questions. He had never felt so weightless.

  The city was a world; and the world was telling him things that he couldn’t understand for many years to come.

  As he walked though, listening to his happy footfalls, he felt the world was telling him to stop looking, for then he would see beyond; to stop thinking, for then he would comprehend; to stop trying to make sense of things, for then he would find the truest grace.

  4

  Then, quite imperceptibly, things began to change. The rooftops, which at first seemed uniform under the blue light of darkness, became more distinct. And yet, all about him, the city was yielding its forms. Houses seemed to turn into liquid, and to flow away before he reached them. A horse in the distance became a mist when he got there. Fountains dissolved into fragrances. Palaces became empty spaces where trees dwelt in solitude. Cathedrals became vacant places where harmonies were sweetest in the air.

  It suddenly appeared odd to him, but the solid things of the city seemed like ideas. And ideas, which were alive in the air, seemed to him like solid things. A house of justice became a mood of green. The fragrance of roses turned into the statues of five Africans along the street. A melody which he started to hum became a giant sun-dial. And a happy mood which seized him turned into the great tombs of the earliest mothers of that land.

  5

  ‘What manner of place is this’, he asked eventually, ‘where nothing is what it seems?’

  ‘Everything is what it seems,’ replied his guide. ‘It’s only you who are not what you seem.’

  ‘What am I then that I am not what I seem?’

  ‘That is for you to say.’

  ‘I think I am what I seem.’

  ‘What are you then?’

  ‘An ordinary man in a strange place.’

  ‘Might you not be a strange man in an ordinary place?’

  ‘How can you call this place ordinary?’ he cried to his guide. ‘Everything keeps becoming something else. I thought I saw a horse back there, but when I neared it the horse turned into mist.’

  ‘You saw the horse in the mist. You did the seeing.’

  ‘But everything seems to whisper.’

  ‘You hear the whispers.’

  ‘The air is full of sounds.’

  ‘The air is always full of sounds.’

  ‘Even the silences have melodies.’

  ‘Silence is a sort of melody.’

  ‘And where is everyone? Is this an empty city, are there no inhabitants?’

  ‘The city sleeps. The inhabitants dream.’

  ‘So you mean that this is an ordinary city?’

  ‘As it should be.’

  ‘And there is nothing odd about it?’

  ‘Only the oddness that the few visitors bring, or that the inhabitants choose to feel.’

  He was silent. It amazed him, for a moment, to think that he could hear his guide smiling.

  6

  He had been walking for a while, listening to the smile of his guide, when it occurred to him that he was entering the city for the second time. He seemed to have come back to the place just after the bridge. He became aware of it because of a mood of orange jubilation that passed above him. When he looked up he saw himself under a celebratory arch. He had passed that place before but hadn’t been aware of it. He had only been aware of the mood.

  To his consternation, he found himself walking into the city again. He went down its narrow streets, past its stained-glass houses, and past the mist which turned into a horse.

  When he looked back and saw the horse turning into fire, he screamed.

  His guide smiled. He felt the smile as a radiance of warm light, a gentle blaze.

  The melodies in the air became something that either cooled or heated his body. Some melodies almost made him quiver.

  Houses that he had passed, with their inspired rustications and their perfect caryatids, burst into splendid flames when he looked back at them. The air was full of fire. The street began to burn. The fountains spouted golden flames. Marigold fires erupted from the churches. And the house of justice was a blue furnace, burning with cool intensity into the unaltered night.

  The golden cupolas were majestic balls of rotating fire. The palaces all over the hills were a dance of flames, burning in rainbow colours. And the spires, pointing like golden-blue swords of incandescence towards the cool constellations, shimmered in the city air.

  Everything was so touc
hed and possessed by this almost divine fire that for a long moment he could not breathe.

  The jade dragon projecting from the entablature of a bank seemed to roar with a tender blaze. The banks were aglow with silver and yellow. The streets, like a flaming ultramarine river, flowed underneath him. And yet he was not consumed. Instead, he was possessed with a happy mood, a mood of joyful fervour, of sublime terror.

  At first he had seen the place as a city of stone, then as one of water. Now he knew it to be a city of the purest fire.

  7

  It was only after a while that he realised that the pure fire of the city was burning parts of him away, burning away something within him. He breathed in the fire, and began to see things differently.

  He saw an illuminated world, a world that was a living painting. In the animated painting he saw blue houses, yellow trees, black flowers, golden farmers in their diamond fields, a blue and yellow and red earth, yellow riders on blue and yellow horses, aquamarine birds, and an emerald dawn.

  The world was aflame with colour. The world was drunk on colour. He became quite colour-mad.

  The street was now of burnt sienna. The statues were of vermilion hue. The fountains spouted twinkling water that seemed to smile. The stars were green. The earth became topaz. And the air was oceanic blue.

  He breathed in the colours, amazed at the cities hidden within the city.

  8

  And as he breathed in deeply the changing colours of the air, he noticed that the glow that was his guide seemed to be floating.

  ‘What is the first law of this place?’ he asked his floating guide.

  ‘The first law of our city’, the guide said, with that almost ironic smile in the voice, ‘is that what you think is what becomes real.’

  He pondered this as he walked past fountains and alongside the fields of dancing colours that he had already passed before.

  ‘Does that mean if I think I have passed the same place twice it too becomes real?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what if I pass it twice before I think it?’

  ‘That means you were not aware of it the first time. Anything you are not aware of you have to experience again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if you weren’t aware of it, you didn’t pass it. You didn’t experience it.’

  ‘But what if I am aware of the second time?’

  ‘Then you experienced it once. The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.’

  ‘Why is this so?’

  ‘It is one of the foundations of our civilisation. At the beginning of our history there was great suffering. Our sages learnt that we tend to repeat our suffering if we have not learnt fully all that can be learnt from it. And so we had to experience our suffering completely while it happened so it would be so deeply lodged in our memory and in our desire for a higher life that we would never want to experience the suffering again, in any form. Hence the law. Anyone who sleeps through their experiences would have to undergo them for as many times as it takes to wake them up and make them feel the uniqueness or the horror of their experiences for the first time. This law is the basis of our civilisation, a permanent sense of wonder at the stillness of time.’

  ‘Is time still?’

  ‘Does time move?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Have you seen it move?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On a sundial.’

  ‘That is the measurement of a motion. Time itself is invisible. It is not a river. While you are in time all time is still. As in a painting.’

  ‘But day turns into night.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So time moves.’

  ‘No. The planet moves. Time is still.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘That’s because you move your mind too much.’

  ‘What then is the second law of this place?’

  ‘When you need to know it you will find out.’

  ‘You are a difficult guide.’

  ‘Wait till you meet the others.’

  With this remark, his guide fell silent again.

  9

  He had been walking, had been listening to his guide, been listening to the colours in the air, but he hadn’t been paying much attention to the world about him. He hadn’t noticed that scenes he was passing were ones he had already passed without being aware of the repetition. The journey seemed endless.

  He saw the apple-green towers, and he noticed the horse as a white mist on a floating cloud of stone. He felt himself to be weightless again. He looked about him in shock, as if he had been rudely woken from sleep, from a dream in a painting. The spires were bright red, quivering beneath the dancing silver specks of the stars. The great dome, now barely visible amongst the clouds, was a revolving whorl of yellow and rose. The street was floating. The whole city seemed to be a great island on a cloud. The distant hills were adrift. The stained-glass cathedral was a song of glinting emerald. He saw that the city was in the air, and he felt dizzy.

  It occurred to him for the first time that he wasn’t walking into the city but that he was walking through realms, through dimensions.

  His guide said:

  ‘When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.’

  He said:

  ‘But I can’t seem to stop.’

  His guide said:

  ‘There is a time for inventing reality, and there is a time for being still. At the gate of every new reality you must be still, or you won’t be able to enter properly.’

  ‘How do I learn to be still?’

  ‘No one can teach you such things. You have to learn for yourself.’

  10

  His guide paused. Then, as if conscious of the wasted generosity of what he was about to impart, but having faith anyway, the guide said:

  ‘Do you realise that you know more than you think you know? Do you realise that if you use all you know, and all the possibilities within you, that there is almost nothing that you can’t do? More serious than that is this fact: if you use more than you know that you know, the world will be as paradise. What we know compared to what we don’t know is like a grain of sand compared to a mountain. But what we don’t know, our unsuspected possibilities, is immense in us. That is our true power and kingdom. When nations do amazing things, that is because they create from what they know. And that is a lot. When they do extraordinary things, that is because they create from places in themselves they didn’t suspect were there. But when a nation or an individual creates things so sublime – in a sort of permanent genius of inventiveness and delight – when they create things so miraculous that they are not seen or noticed or remarked upon by even the best minds around, then that is because they create always from the vast unknown places within them. They create always from beyond. They make the undiscovered places and infinities in them their friend. They live on the invisible fields of their hidden genius. And so their most ordinary achievements are always touched with genius. Their most ordinary achievements, however, are what the world sees, and acclaims. But their most extraordinary achievements are unseen, invisible, and therefore cannot be destroyed. This endures forever. Such is the dream and reality of this land. I speak with humility.’

  11

  His guide laughed for the last time. It was a prelude to a long silence. But before that he said:

  ‘All that you will see are the lesser things, the things meant to perish. The most important things are the things you don’t see. The best things here are in the invisible realm. It has taken us much suffering, much repetition of our suffering, much stupidity, many mistakes, great patience, and phenomenal love to arrive at this condition. However, changes are coming. You are the herald of changes. We have not had a visible being here for a very long time. The changes may be terrible, and would s
eem to be catastrophic. But it has all been foretold. The changes, however, would be an illusion, an excuse for the invisible powers to continue on higher and hidden levels. Without these changes we tend to forget.’

  The guide stopped suddenly. Then, just as suddenly, he continued.

  ‘And so, as you are about to enter our realm, and as I might not see you again, let me tell you two things. The first is that a great law guides the rise and fall of things. What is of the greatest importance grows and keeps on growing as a result of this. Don’t despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret. We have discovered an invisible way. The next stage of our evolution is to be free of our visible things. Then we will become sublime forces in the universe. Therefore, don’t despair if you see death. Nothing really dies. The unseen things are our masterpieces. The seen things are merely by-products. What would seem like victory would be a defeat. What would seem like defeat would be a victory, an eternal victory of Light.’

  12

  He was overwhelmed by what his guide had revealed to him.

  ‘You have told me many things,’ he said, humbly.

  His guide replied:

  ‘No, I have told you less than one thing. Forget what I say, then maybe you will remember. But you will remember in spirit.’

  The guide paused, then said:

  ‘The second thing I have to say to you is this.’

  And the guide, filling the spaces with the warm brilliant glow of an invisible smile, seemed to take a deep breath as if for a great speech. But he stayed silent. The silence changed the colours all around. The silence seemed to go on forever, in wave after wave.

  After a while, spinning in this silence, he became aware that the glow that was his guide was no longer there. The space about him was devoid of that intense and ultramarine personality, that presence of gold. His guide did not speak again. His guide was gone.