Starbook

by Ben Okri

  CHAPTER SIX

  This dreaded apparition, this inexplicable manifestation overwhelmed the town. And every night the space of the invisible sculpture shone brighter, like the moon, and took on a greater form, as if it were being given greater power from the minds of the massed multitudes that came and saw it in its invisible place. Together, as one, the huge crowds brought the absent image alive with their minds and their eyes. Sobbing, fainting, illnesses and wailings abounded. Work slowed down in the village. The square became overrun. Hallucinations flashed among the people; and soon the sculpture began to appear everywhere.

  People saw it by the river; people saw it in the sky, sailing past. Farmers saw it in their farms, among the cornstalks. Hunters saw it in the forests, disappearing behind baobab trees. Women saw it at the bottom of wells, when they went to fetch water. By day or night, at noon or at dusk, suddenly there would be a cry, and someone would rush out from a hut shouting that the absent sculpture had appeared near their bed. It became a plague of the mind.

  It roamed the countryside. It vanished among the hills. And soon it became a rumour that ran wild in the land, and became real in the dark, as people reported that the image was multiplying. It became not four figures chained to one another, but ten, then twenty, then a hundred. Then it became a whole tribe, then a whole people, then a vast chain of people that stretched all across the plains and forests and savannahs and vanished into the mighty sea and was swallowed by the hallowed waves of the unnamed and feared ocean. And then, after a while, the people didn't see the sculpture any more. It vanished. It died in its space. The space where it was became empty. Its spirit went. No one saw the image any more. And a strange peace returned to the tribe.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The maiden had gone to see the work just before the elders had it removed. She had gone to see the work that was the most significant revelation in art that the tribe had ever known, and she had been so oppressed by it that she couldn't sleep for weeks. There are some works of art that the eyes shouldn't see. There are some works of art so terrible that they should only be seen as a reflection, in a mirror, like the heads of the Medusa. There are some works of art that should be seen only by initiates and strong-souled masters and then kept in silence for generations for their power to be changed by time into the gold of their highest fruition; works that should be described to the young, hinted at, till the people are themselves strong enough for such terrible truths. This work which had caused such upheaval in the tribe was more troubling and mysterious than any of these.

  This work which the maiden saw, in the flush of her youth, her awkward, her dreaming years, was instantly intuited by her to be the beginning of the end of a great cycle. She did not know what cycle that was; but she knew that in some way the work signalled the end of a world. The end of her world. The end of the world of what was known. The end of dreams and spirits. The end of the playtime of the tribe. The end of the clear stars and the story-telling moon. The end of the clear easy spaces between the living and the dead. The end of art that can heal sicknesses of the body and mind. The end of myths. The end of a life of story-telling with intervals of deeds. The end of flowers that sing. The end of nakedness. The end of the life of the gods who now will die in their mountains in the empty hearts of the tribes that have turned their eyes, by a destruction, to new and strange horizons. The end of song and the speaking drums, the dancing flutes, the incantatory cymbals. The end of dance that spoke without words of everything under the sun. The end of the sun, and its light, and its power to recharge the spiritual journey of the tribe. The end of meaning in life, or purpose in living. The work the maiden saw filled her, in a flash, with all these intuitions. And, indeed, she could not sleep for weeks afterwards when she set eyes on this work that had so transfixed the strongest minds of the tribe, and broken the spirit of the people in its sublime foreboding.

  For it was a work beyond art. It was a disaster of the soul. It was a splitting apart of the mind. It was a breach of the heavens. It was a sign that the gods had somehow abandoned the people. What else could it be, this work, this colossus, of three men and a woman, all of them huge, giants, chained together, heads bowed and broken, all blinded and tragic, as if the greatest humiliation had been heaped on their bodies. And yet how they shone, these beings, as if they were gods, unconquerable even by the vilest suffering. How they shone, unknowing, in their mighty godlike suffering. It seemed like the suffering the gods visited only on the greatest beings, because they are the only ones who can bear it, bear the evils of humanity and still let the light of their sublimity shine through. It seemed like a suffering they bore as a sacrifice and purification for the continued history of humanity on earth. Only the abysmally great can bear such abhorrently great suffering. And the injustice of it, along with the hinted nobility of it, was what so broke the heart of the maiden who saw the work and was never the same again, as if she had been poisoned by a glimpse of her own destiny ...

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The maiden was unable to sleep after her encounter with the work. At night she stared at the moon or the stars and sang lamentations and wept. At dawn she would be found muttering disconnected phrases about suffering and evil, pursued by demons and white spirits of the mind till she drowned at sea amid a chorus of alien hymns. She became obsessed, hounded by the oddest notions, surrounded by children that had been borne to her by a fat servile wife in a blond wig. Her mind opened up into disturbing vistas. Obsession chased her eyes inwards. The sculpture tormented her, accused her; in waking dreams one of the figures was her father. And leaning over her, enchained, bleeding, but not blind, he said:

  'My daughter, if God cracks the gourd, God leaks into it. What God breaks, God fills. Nothing is spilt from the sacred vessel that is humanity which is not filled with the sacred spirit of heaven. We break, that we may be blessed. We had a choice in it, but we failed, and we suffer, because we didn't make the choice of power on earth; and we till the earth, like animals, and later, when time has flowed, like blood, back to the kingdom, and after many disasters, wars, suffering, folly, injustice, rage and music, my daughter, afterwards the blood will flow back as the spirit of the highest, changed into the gold of the soul. And history would be a strange dream read in an invisible book among the stars.'

  But the maiden didn't understand these bewildering words and raved and muttered at dawn and cried out about the horror of the work. And her father, smiling, ministered unto her healing potions, and played a flute gently above her ears, and uttered tender incantations that soothed her obsessed spirit. She was hard to soothe; and maybe she was evidence that there is an evil when a work succeeds too well. Her father pondered this; pondered the responsibility of master-makers. If what they make creates such troubles and brings such paralysis to the people, mustn't they also be master-healers of the excessive power they have unleashed? How do you heal what must be ruptured in order to grow? The gourd of man must be broken for God to leak in; how do you heal what will, in the monstrosity of time, be in the higher glory of all things? The father contemplated his ailing daughter.

  'What ails you, my child?'

  'All the evils in the world.'

  'How do you know of them so young?'

  'I saw them in the work.'

  'The work is but a dream shared amongst dreamers.'

  'It has awoken us to horrors, but not shown us how to live awakened to horrors. Better to die than to know.'

  'You blame the work?'

  'Everyone curses the work and its maker for disturbing our dream,' cried the maiden.

  The father was astonished, and stayed silent, and stared into the amber of things, the dust and red gold of the mould he saw encasing the light that enters through the wounds of humanity bleeding history on an invisible sea. Silent, the father stayed. Lions roared from the shrine. Death called from the door, and life answered in the wind, like a twin. Stillness became the father. History howled in the forests; trees called out the names of the fallen, the take
n, those that will be snatched, and broken; and no one heard the trees, or the names, which vanished, and never were heard again, even in the memory of those who wept for them as rivers weep the moon.

  'The maker too was in a dream,' the father said at last, wearily.

  'Then curse the dream, if we must wake from it, and see. We cannot bear to see, my father, it makes us mad to see.'

  The father stayed silent; the maiden slept. With incantations and words that spoke to her future as she slept, her father strengthened her soul and prepared her for the great difficult destiny to come.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Everyone in the tribe was an artist. They were born into art, and they were born of art. Art conceived them; art gave birth to them; art nourished them; art helped them grow, sustained their lives, and guided them to the mighty mysteries and to illumination. Art aged them, art devoured them, art made them old. They grew old in art, and they died of art. They were buried in art. And in art they were remembered and immortalised by its continual practice and renewal in the great rituals and initiations of the tribe.

  Art was their god and their devil; their destruction and regeneration. All things came from art and fed back into it, as far as the tribe was concerned. Art was their religion, science, dream, temptation, seduction, recreation. Art was their hell and heaven. Every cataclysm or disaster, every crisis, came out of art or was absorbed into it. Plagues were seen as a failure of their art in some way, a failure to listen, to see, to dream, to interpret, to prophesy, to envision, to be silent at the oracles. Famines were seen as a curse from the god of art, in the tribe's failure to create, to anticipate, to adapt, to work, to change, to move on to fruitful places, to be free. Diseases, illnesses, bad fortune, abominations, were all perceived as failures of art, for not being humble enough at the secret shrines of creativity, which creates balance and harmony in the universe.

  Their great good fortunes, the beauty of their children, cornucopias, wonderful harvests, fruitful seasons of productivity, happiness and festivities in the tribe were seen as success in the communal practice of their art. For then all doors between heaven and earth, between the ancestors and the present, between spirits and the living, between past and future, between nature and human beings, between dream and living, between man and woman, were open, and no bad things festered because they were unable to emerge, be seen, be freed, released, overcome, transcended.

  Their laws were laws of art, the obvious ones and the obscure ones, the known laws and the unknown, the familiar laws and the arcane laws, the exoteric and the esoteric, the public laws and the secret ones, the superficial and the deep. Harmony, balance; disharmony, too, was one of the laws, in the right place, in the right way; and imbalance was a secret law that played its part. Chaos was a deep law, applied judiciously. Order was its obvious counterpart. Asymmetry was a great law, if used with a sense of greater balance.

  The tribe did not favour such simple things in its art as order, balance, harmony. These were easy, and had been fully explored for generations. The tribe had advanced to the higher harmony of broken cadencies, discord as beauty, warring elements, violent forms like storms flashing pure lightning of fleeting beauty that cracks the soul asunder till one glimpses illumination. It favoured tactical rawness, indirection, eyes where the navel should be, for the navel is a kind of eye, and the eye is a kind of navel linking us to the known world. It favoured disjointed metaphorical thinking; fusion of unthinkable elements. The greater the discord, the greater the artistry required to bring forth the highest beauty and, paradoxically, the greatest simplicity. The most complex productions must appear simple and clear to the mind, like a portrait, or a line of rhyme, or a famous song that children sing. The works of the greatest masters must be able to speak to the smallest child, or the village idiot.

  The tribe's central tenet, unspoken, was that art was the bridge to the creator, and thus to all things, all mysteries on earth or in heaven. Art was their prayer, and their confession, their meditation and their rest, their work and their play, their illness and their cure. They wooed one another with art. In other tribes camels, yams, fame in wrestling, land, were deemed the attractive items in marriage – beauty, strength, prowess, and lineage too; but in this tribe, it was art. The men competed for the hands of the women with their works of art. The works that pleased, that delighted, that surprised, that astonished, that amused the women most tended to incline their choice in marriage. If you weren't a good artist you didn't stand much of a chance of having the kind of wife you wanted. Men too chose their wives by their art; the works that showed the greatest delicacy, patience, love, tenderness, resilience, beauty, strength of spirit, capacity for reconciliation, fruitfulness of invention and conductivity to good dreams tended to win the best husbands. If you weren't a subtle artist you didn't stand much of a chance of having the best husband. When families wanted to bring suitor to encounter prospective wife, they first exchanged the couple's works of art. These works were lived with, slept with, thought about. The inner character of the couples was thus allowed to emerge; great readers of the personality lurking behind a work of art were hired to interpret the tendencies and spirit of the prospective husband or wife.

  The tribe believed that nothing revealed a person more than their art. As individuals, there is much they can conceal, mask, or deceive with. In their art everything is there, unveiled, naked. Beauty was therefore not enough in art. For beauty sometimes revealed suicidal inclinations, or a personality troubled, or a mind unstable. Even what is concealed in a work reveals what is absent. Thus coolness may mask and reveal too much passion. Too much passion in a work may reveal too little feeling, or frivolity, or being too easily moved, or a lack of perspective on matters in the greater scheme of things. Size counts for nothing. The small may reveal great ambition. The large may hint at laziness, sloppiness. The small may also point to over-fussiness, a tendency to too much control. The large may reveal plain generosity of spirit, if allied to great care and focus in execution. These matters of reading the soul behind the work were intrinsic to all of the tribe. All were born interpreters, after their own temperaments; but there were those who were specialists at this, and these too, who must be great artists and sages, sat on some of the highest councils of the tribe.

  Agriculture, warfare, athletics were all aspects of art, to the tribe. Farms and farming methods were based on firm artistic principles. Warfare was conducted on the greatest artistic principle of maximum effectiveness from minimum effort. In short, winning without fighting, overcoming without warfare. The tribe was the only known tribe that had perfected the art of war. They rarely fought. When they had to fight, they fought spiritually. Artistically. And their victories were never public, or visible. There was no bloodshed. No one felt conquered or overcome. Winning did not bring enemies. Often it seemed as if they had lost. And so they thrived. Warfare was anathema to them, because it reduced the number of artists in the world.

  Another great tenet of the tribe was that all men and all women were artists, in one way or another, but did not know it. To be alive was to be a creator, or a co-creator. At least you helped create a destiny. Therefore, with all being artists, humanity was considered to be the greatest work of art that is being created. One way or another, all are contributing to the greatest vision that ever will be, the vision of all above and below, in life and in death, on earth and in heaven. The tribe was therefore fundamentally serene about all things, and lived in the secret freedom of this knowledge, which was more than knowledge.

  From birth children were encouraged to create, to make, to dream things, and to be as artists. They therefore had no word for art in their language, it being the all of their all, much as God is to believers, except that to the tribe art was not God, but was one of God's ways of creating the universe. Therefore, to the tribe, vision was primal: the vision of creators, what they dreamt of, their ideal, their hopes, what they bring, the purpose behind, even when purpose is denied. No-purpose was highest, for
it implied the artist had submitted to a vision greater than them, of which they were vehicles, conduits, the means by which mysteries came to be. Only a poor artist knows what they have done. The greatest masters say nothing about their works because there is nothing to say, save that it was done, it was seen, it was unseen, it was rendered, it was remembered, carried across, brought here, imperfectly. The less one makes, the more is made.