by Ben Okri
28
Jim was puzzled, the cameraman was impatient, Husk had to get many of the passengers to go back again so she could make sure they got a shot of Lao in a crowd. Lao said:
‘Society always has invisible lines and nets, points of interrogation. Not so long ago being of a different blood, and belonging to the main trunk whence sprang the dreams of Jesus Christ, set off fatal chain reactions at those invisible lines. And the lines determined those who could live normally, as though life were a fairground for the favoured, and those who were bundled off to death camps, to be tortured, gassed, exterminated, made into soap, for the cleansing of society. I am one of those now who get in the way of such homogenising. You can’t see it. You are not meant to see this process happen. But it is supposed to happen for your own good, and the good of your children. It is meant to be an invisible process. One is merely weeded out, quickly, efficiently, and carted off to some place away from the eyes of people like you. You aren’t meant to notice, and all your life you haven’t noticed, and for the rest of your life you will not notice, nor will your children, nor will any upright citizen. At the line, as I am being questioned, you will avert your eyes. You will think it’s not your business to notice. And deep inside you will suspect that I have done something wrong anyway to deserve such treatment. You will have been thoroughly prepared for this by sundry information, released now and then, that is suggestive of my vague criminality and social aberrations. You will not care. Besides, you will be too busy, you will be in something of a hurry. But, as you cross the line, you will go on, undisturbed, into normal life. And I will be dragged off to society’s hidden inferno.’
29
Jim looked at Lao intensely, as if seeing him with new eyes.
‘Are you trying to tell me that…?’
‘Absolutely! Suddenly I spring to your eyes differently, don’t I? Familiarity has somehow made you forget that different laws operate for the two of us. Here is a tiny moment of truth, old boy. In the eyes of friendship, we concede equality, even if some of your unexamined behaviour and thoughts don’t quite live up to it. In the eyes of society, however, you are normal, and I am condemned. The moment I step into your world, which is not really your world but a bit of God’s world, I suffer the impossibility of innocence. It’s amazing; I sound like I’m in court, pleading my innocence with all the passion of the suspect. The more I state my case, the more guilty I sound.’
‘So what do you want us to…?’
‘Nothing. Do nothing. I just wanted to say this. To risk being awkward. To crack the complacency with which you regard this world. There are torments that we go through, because of a different sun, that you will never suspect. Society has an invisible hell which people like me are made to reside in, and it is normality. No one else ever knows this. And if I cry out about it no one believes me. That’s because, blind and complacent as they are, they want to believe in the inherent fairness of their world, of the society and its laws. For me to cry out is to implicate them in this daily crime of silent genocide. They recoil. They accuse me of being paranoid. They assure me, quickly, that all their best friends were marked too by a different sun. They advise me to be better adjusted. I nod, and go on living in that different hell, under everyone’s gaze, unnoticed even by my best friends, or my lover. It is perfect, this differentiation, this invisible hell. A perfection of condemnation, punishment, and absence of evidence. I am, by all accounts, living a fiction. If I cried out who would hear me down here, among the human orders?’
‘What was that?’
‘I’m rephrasing Rilke. Opening of the Duino Elegies.’
‘Oh…’
30
With a tender, smiling, ironic glitter in his eye and with the gentlest voice, Lao pressed on.
‘And so, dear Jim, remember this when your next despair falls upon you. I live in despair all the time. Society has perfected the conditions for it. I live a life of endless stoicism. It’s a wonder I get from day to day without suddenly going berserk and screaming genocide myself. It’s a wonder I get from day to day without cutting my throat, unable to drag myself through one more minute of endless rage and humiliation and being excluded, judged, misperceived, colour-coded in all things, denied intelligence, suspected of crimes, burglaries, drug peddling, muggings, murders, robbing old ladies, of somehow always being in the wrong place at the wrong time, for the greatest crime of all which is simply being alive and breathing the air on this good planet. It’s the little things that tip the balance. How often do women on seeing me clutch at their handbags, as if in my colour they read an inscription which says “Ecce mugger”?’
Lao smiled lightly, as if at a bad joke politely received. Jim shook his head and was about to say something, but Lao continued, gently, as if he were addressing a flower, and yet powerfully, as if addressing a fellow warrior.
‘I live a permanent existential condition: most things conspire to deny me existence and historical validity. Sometimes I wonder if I exist, or whether I am not an invention, a nightmare invention, a regrettable invention, in the mind of society. Forgive this long speech, but so much silence about so much agony for all the days of my life was bound some day to unleash a torrent of words or deeds. And I’d rather get it all out now, once and for all, on this journey, so that I can return to my inner condition of Eden. I am word purging. I want you to hear this, and not forget. And then I want you to forget, and return me to my ordinary humanity, so that you don’t commit the intolerable penance of bending over backwards trying to compensate for all the stuff one suffers in silence. Don’t dehumanise me or insult my intelligence by trying to make up for the vile invisible laws that try to fuck up my pleasant existence. Just be more aware. Don’t let them deceive you. Notice. Be alive. See through what they don’t want you to notice. Don’t sleep through life thinking that all is well under the sun and within society. If you see them dragging me off don’t look away. If I cry out listen. Don’t doubt first. If an unnatural mug-shot of me appears in the papers, and I’m accused of having murdered ten people, don’t pass sentence on me in your mind because of the gruesome blown-up nature of the picture. Don’t let them manipulate your response. Be aware that there are secret laws for different people, and these secret laws are carried out by the most innocent of citizens, by you, by your handsome sons and lovely daughters, and by most of the people I know and like. Be aware of how much you are secretly conscripted into complicity through fear, misinformation, lack of contact, casual demonisation, distortions of history, irresponsible novelists and journalists and poets and film-makers, and by certain pigmentational developments in photography. Being more human means being more awake to the beauties and injustices of life. I’m shamelessly on the side of beauty, of the spirit, of the heroic in humanity. But as a daily victim of the human capacity to cast one into darkness, I cannot deny humanity’s capacity for meanness, complacency, and cowardice. I don’t believe in being in a state of perpetual rage. I choose humour, intelligence, imagination, elliptical angles, love, and wild wakefulness as my weapons. And I know that all these words are but as water poured into desert sands. You do not hear them. As the singer said – who feels it, knows it. Let’s get back to work.’
Jim stood as if thunderstruck. He waved his hands about. His mouth opened, and shut, unable to speak for not knowing where to begin.
Lao said:
‘One of my trials right now is simply whether as a black human being I’ll be allowed in.’
31
Jim stuttered, stammered, tore at his hair, crumpled in distress, stood back, waving his hands in the air, and no angels descended from the faintly renaissance clouds to help him, to bring illumination, understanding, instant empathy, so he could feel in his flesh and bones the full force of the troubling speech he had just heard. And so he fell back on his learned response, his declaration of colour-blindness and universal amity. He turned in a space that he wanted to vacate, the space created by colour, excluded from him, one he had heard so muc
h about, that amounted almost to a negative myth and legend, the suffering and mistreatment of the other. And nothing in him, in his bounteous good nature, his universal love, his wonderful simple-heartedness, his profound sense of injustice, enriched by his life of sundry failures, made it any easier for him to empathise. He still felt excluded from the legend of the lifelong quiet humiliations inflicted on those burnished by a different sun. And this tormented him. He felt like crying out himself in his incomprehension. But Jim did the most extraordinary thing instead; he did something which sprang a gentle leak in Lao’s eyes, a gesture he never referred to again, but which he never forgot, and which forever made him see Jim as a true brother on this earth, a brother in affection, in human fellowship, and across the artificial divide created by the eyes and thoughts of men and women. A brother on the great journey to Arcadia. Jim embraced Lao, and wept on his shoulder. And then he pulled back just as quickly, under the force of in-born embarrassment, and effaced speedily the evidence of tears on his face, and said to Lao:
‘I’m being tried too in your trial. It’s better to fail than to not see. Let’s get back to work. Camera!’
And Lao, mingling with the crowd, with the gentlest smile of irony on his face, sauntered towards one of the more minor invisible lines in the world.
32
Because of the presence of the camera, a peculiar thing happened. The law of different treatment became, temporarily, suspended. Lao’s passport was checked only marginally longer than anybody else’s – long enough to be noticed if you were aware of what was really going on, but perfectly natural if you weren’t. Without the presence of the cameras, Lao would have been there for hours. Innumerable phone calls made, passport numbers checked, identity doubted, reality questioned. But the entry was painless enough, and the wings of good feeling brushed past his head as he burst into a little smile, saying:
‘Ah, yes,’ to an unfinished question.
And then, flowing now in freedom and lightness, regaining his state of grace, dancing on the sunlight of a romantic nation, followed by the tender gaze of the camera and the crowds, Lao wandered towards the train driver’s compartment, to interview a man who loved speed but cultivated stillness.
Book 4
1
Stillness in motion, motion in stillness. Lao loved such paradoxes.
The train driver crouched in the doorway of his beloved train. He was genial and a bit hot. Crouching made him seem very tall. Sam loved the awkwardness of the angle, loved the idea of the train driver high up on the steps, crouching, and of Lao, low down on solid ground, talking up.
The conversation was difficult because the driver spoke in French, Lao in English. But the spirit was somehow right. Lao noticed the driver’s eagerness, his willingness to comply, and his nervousness in front of the camera. It was endearing.
A paradox emerged and Jim, strangely animated by a new sense of mission, latched on to it, and wanted it amplified. Mistletoe stood away from it all, in an enchanted zone, drawing, sketching, seeing nothing but colours and emblems.
The driver’s name was Luke. In his diffidence he revealed something interesting. It struck Lao that being a train driver was one of Luke’s fantasies. But he learned that his greatest love was gardening. One was the perfect antidote to the other. The perfect complement. And so their conversation revolved round this circulum – the love of speed, the cultivation of a garden, of stillness.
Lao was struck by the facts: four times a week Luke spent most of his working hours with trees, roads, houses, and sometimes rain hurtling towards him at nearly two hundred miles an hour. While the train, from a distance, seemed to be an enchanted thing, weaving a graceful curve through languid countryside, in the driver’s compartment, however, it seemed as if the whole world was throwing itself at him, tearing towards him, then vanishing past him, like a life lived at high speed.
Contemplated metaphorically, Lao couldn’t help wondering if it didn’t make of his life something of an hallucination: with the train as the mind dying in a dying body, reviewing in swiftness all the events of a life in time’s duration. How swift is the passing of terrestrial things. How brief is a moment of time lived. How tenuous can memory be when things pass so swiftly. How illusory time must be when maintained at a principle of speed. How passing over the same landscape hundreds of times does not make it many landscapes, but the same terrestrial dream, incapable of expansion, or of minutiae. How a brief life, crowded with significant activity, becomes a long one. How speed makes of nature a painting, a stillness, thus contradicting the laws of visual motion. How a new life paradigm can be sketched from the rapid progression through a life that is swept along by the marriage of fate and will. How reality curves. How speed distorts time. How time distorts vision. How memory is a blur, but becomes a briefer blur when speed enters into the picture. How with such quickness it is impossible to linger, in memory, on a single witnessed incident – an adulterous kiss snatched in an orchard, a beautiful girl’s skirt blown high by the wind and revealing curvaceousness in a flash too quick to translate into desire, a moment caught in a field of wheat, a man striking down another with a shining sickle, seen too fast to ascertain whether it was merely a farmer at work, a moment registered in wrong perspective, or a legitimately witnessed murder. Things that tantalise and infuriate the mind, and which also blot out of perception things subsequently seen. Because for something to be seen requires consciousness, and if the mind is dwelling on a previous detail it sees nothing afterwards but its own thoughts and reactions. And so much remains always unseen where there is much that fascinates the mind and eye.
To Lao it seemed a whole philosophy lay in the paradox, a life lived at speed, with many gaps in perceived reality, many things and events not looked at properly or deeply, which would later haunt one as fragments of dreams. A life viewed all mixed up, with dreams unclear. Life tending towards dream. Like the swift mysterious life of Alexander the Great. A life which because of so many mental puzzles, so many incidents to report, to perplex, leads the mind towards a preference for stillness. Preference for a life where things are given time to unfold, to reveal their hidden wonders or terrors. Preference for a life where seeing is just as difficult because it requires such stillness of heart, such patience, such concentration, such quietness of mind, such motionlessness of spirit.
2
While he was interviewing the train driver, Lao was wondering whether a life really could conform to such a conscious neatness of shape. Or whether the internal principle of living needs that neatness of shape for itself and thereby creates an unconscious urge for its complement and cure that results in such harmony, such a circle.
Lao thought about the madness, the chaos, the sheer speed, the hectic movements, the unholy bustle and mixtures of modern life, the noise and pollutions, the rages and frustrations, the neuroses and the mad desires, the crazy dreams and the unquiet fantasies, the raving hungers and the babbling lovelessness, the mad motions of the spirit, the turbulences of the mind, the fevers of the heart and loins, the uprisings within, the tyrannies and the unjust democracies, the howling unfreedoms. Lao wondered if it weren’t all these things that were giving rise to a new cry for peace, an unarticulated cry and scream for a homeland where the human spirit can be serene and where the best dreams can take some meaningful form. Lao wondered, as he listened, if the great boiling unconscious of humanity was not finding the notion that could heal its deep unrest in forgotten dreams of Arcadia.
He was thinking whether in times when life is so much like an hallucination, when cities are so crowded with monstrosities, wonders, and incidents, when things are too complex and complicated, when life is increasingly intolerable, twisting human beings into odd and fiendish shapes that they would not recognise in a clear mirror – he was thinking whether out of all the fury a new Arcadian ideal isn’t the secret cry, the powerful cry.
Consider the speed and hallucination. The fragmented realities. The things partially glimpsed. The events witne
ssed but not understood. The welter of meanings and signs and auguries. Consider the loss of belief. The empty universe where the mind spins in uncertainty and repressed terror. The vacant sky where the heart sees nothing but desert. Consider lives crammed with confusion. With each person to his or her conflicting notions, philosophies, scraps and shards.
Out of all these juxtapositions doesn’t the spirit throw out its own dream of clarity, its own clear countryside of the soul, its own clear lake mirroring the sky? Doesn’t the spirit dream of its own slowed down pace, its own heaven, unrealisable in the world, but found within? For the world corrupts all ideals. And maybe only within can paradise be refreshed, can stillness be magnified, for the real forgotten self to come through, thus renewing life with renewed purpose and dream. Lao was thinking about these things while he was talking with the train driver.
And when Luke offered to show the crew his garden in the eastern suburbs of Paris, Lao was surprised and delighted.
3
Jim was beaming throughout the interview. He had planted the idea of the offer, in Luke’s mind, behind the scenes. But the journey had been planted on him, behind the scenes too. And he was beaming because he was following the instructions he had mysteriously found on his table on the train. Instructions outlining a trip through Paris. With clues concealed in the region of the train driver’s house, if not in the garden. A conundrum and riddle that were part of the whole fabric of the journey, and Malasso’s peculiar shaping of it.
