by Ben Okri
Imperfection was a great law of the tribe; and so they were always learning to unlearn. They begin as masters and end as children. They end as babies, innocent and not quite here, rooted in the central place that is not a place, in heaven and on earth at the same time. Sophistication, vigour, brilliance, cleverness, allusion, richness, metaphor, subtlety, wisdom, power, profundity, multiplicity, variety, simplicity, politics, beauty, in a work, were all signs of youth and its greatness. The great masters, however, had nothing. Their works were empty. The world read everything into this emptiness, especially their greatest fears, desires, intuitions and communal prophecies. Sometimes a mighty work of art is a charged empty space on which multitudes converge and witness mass revelations that concur. A space designated by the artist. Like the space which became a form, which was the work that now so obsessed the maiden.
CHAPTER TEN
Everything that happened to the tribe, to the individual, became art, had to become art, if it did not become illness. And so when ill, when obsessed, when they had troubles of the mind, it was designated that they had to create, to create the work of art that would heal them. Other tribes came to this tribe purely for this need: to have works of art created for them that would heal sicknesses in their land that nothing else could heal. But this was especially true for the individual.
There was a work, of some kind or other, that would heal them, or lead to their healing. It could be a carving, an act of cooking, a design of cloth, a new game, a walk by the river, a meditation on a leaf, a song with a magic refrain, a dance with a turn of the body that felt just right, or standing and facing the sun at the best angle, a measured breathing. A good conversation was a work of art. A good argument too. An excellent act of cursing, even. The invention of riddles, parables, word-play, puns, sounds without meaning but with hidden power, an insight, an intuition, a symbol contemplated or invented, a blending of herbs, all these were works of art. Initiation into the mysteries was a great work of spirit art, too. And so, as the maiden lay obsessed by the work that gripped all minds, it became clear that she had to create the art of her own healing.
This was something the tribe much looked forward to: when someone was ill, and they had to create the art of their own cure. This art created was generally one that all paid keen attention to; for it revealed the secret cause or source of the problem. Often it might reveal something about the tribe. Often it might be purely personal, and the result enriched the gossip of the tribe. As with all people who work with matters of the spirit, gossip was almost an art form in the tribe. And rumours were either hints of what will become true, or that which was essentially true, awaiting clarification.
It was soon rumoured that the maiden, daughter of the most enigmatic master of the tribe, was preparing to go into seclusion, for the purpose of vision. Some said she had chosen a cave. There was excitement as to what she would create, and whether she had inherited the mystery of the master's touch. She was the test of the power of his loin, his blood. If she revealed herself average, this would diminish the rich air of myth that surrounded him, which he never encouraged, or even knew, or cared, about. Gossip is thus; one becomes mighty, or nothing, in absentia – to one's indifference, but to the unending amusement of the tribe.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
During this time the maiden often followed the path of ants, to see where they led. She kept watch on little snails, and for hours would learn of their destination. Her mother fed her on unripe plantain and fresh spinach and watercress from distant markets. Her mother bathed her like a little girl, and prayed over her, and tempted her with lovely bales of new dyed cloth. Nourishing her daughter, singing to her, beautifying her, watching her wander off towards the river, watching her return, swaying, with a gourd of water on her head, or a basin of washed clothes, or singing gently a sad song to the wind, these moments saddened and gladdened the heart of the mother.
'What will we do with you, my strange child,' her mother would say, sighing to herself.
From birth an odd destiny, told in an enigma, a riddle, had been foretold for her daughter. It was as if an ambiguous star had hovered over the moment of her conception. This was not a child from here. Not from these parts. She is from a star no one has seen yet. And her ancestors are not human. They have faces like the gods. They are huge and mighty like lightning. They travel from one end of the world to another like the light of the moon. They are thousands of years old when they are children. And every now and then they are sent to other places among the stars to suffer and see and to live out a story that has one meaning to the people of that star or planet and another meaning to their own true people. What might seem a life of suffering to the strangers they were born to, might be a brief time in a playground to their own true people. The suffering is felt only if they forget the true meaning of their life, if they forget they are in a playground, a fair, a dream. They suffer much only when they take too seriously the stage on which they are playing a role, and forget that they are free, and are the sons and daughters of gods. They suffer because they forget. No, she is not from here. But she will not leave, as some children do, because of the terrible lives they see. She is of a different kind of star. For most of her life she will live as if lost. Then one day she will wake up, her body will remember something, and she will be comfortable with her life. Then her real life will begin, beyond the sea, and she will be a great voice in the world, bringing the music of a distant star into the narrow spaces of this remote earth. And she will reconcile the people to their forgotten homes.
But who says these things? Who whispers them, in dreams, to the heart of a mother? There are voices in the air, and in the mind, that whisper all over the universe in the heart and dreams of mothers. There are things seen that speak from the invisible future. Messages appear from the book of life. The past is untold, the present is unrolled, the future has been and gone, and whispers in dreams, in signs, and a song. Fortune-tellers of the tribe catch stories of distant stars in a sleep by the shrine when it is the hour of prophecy, when all are creating dreams in the square. How does anything get here? They travel from nowhere. They are always here, where the gods are, in the centre of the heavenly fire that lies hidden in the stone, and the wood, in the flesh of each living child, and the flight of the sunbird. Whispering the way. The way to the home that is in the heart. The heart of the art. The art of the tribe. The tribe of living. The mother listened to all, as she fed, coaxed and nourished her daughter, who prepared to create the art of her own healing.
The mother fed her daughter rich vegetables and the intangible minerals of clear water. The mother fed her daughter on her love. And she watched her daughter grow plainer, stranger, slighter, as if she were becoming a human bird, frail, distracted, puzzled by the mystery of flight, without the knowledge of flying. It was as if she were troubled by an ability to fly that she didn't know of, and yet it was as if she could taste the clouds already.
The mother nourished her daughter and gazed on her as one lost to the dictates of the gods ...
CHAPTER TWELVE
And enigmas grew about the maiden's heart, and made strange her simple life. The rituals of the tribe became distant to her, and she felt herself becoming evermore a stranger to her land, to her body, to her own life, and didn't know why. Often, at night, she would awaken in the stifling heat of the clay hut, and bring out the doll she had made for herself, and would whisper secrets that she had invented into its delicate ears of fragrant wood. Often she would bring out the bust of the young queen she had sculpted and would address it as herself. She felt, on those nights, that she was a young queen misplaced in the world. She felt that as she was so misplaced, lost to her kingdom, that she might as well be a servant girl. She liked the idea of being either a queen or a servant girl, but she didn't like not knowing who or what she was. So she played the role of the servant girl to the bust of the young queen. She asked, in a whisper, if there was anything her queen wanted; and, in the dark, with little gestures imitating
actions in the larger world, she set about obeying and fulfilling the desires of her queen.
On those nights she was both queen and servant girl; and in the role she would fall asleep, and live out many adventures which she did not remember, with people who were very familiar but whom she had never seen before. And then she would awake in perplexity when she found herself on a raised clay bed, in a hot clay abode, in a room entirely strange to her. Then the despair brought on by her encounter with that obsession-making work of art would take hold of her again, like a sickness of the mind.
She would set about her tasks for the day like one divided, broken in two. Half in a dream, half perplexed, she fetched water, helped her mother prepare breakfast, washed clothes, brought in firewood from the forest, cleaned the house with broom and wet cloth, and when her morning's tasks were accomplished she would hurry to her father's workshop to see what the master-artist was doing. And that depended on what he would allow her to witness.
She would sit quietly on the floor, and watch the master work, or pace, or sit staring or suddenly pouncing on some half-dreamt piece of sculpture. Then, in swift sure motions, he would carve greater suggestivity from a figure that a moment ago didn't want to live.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Her father's workshop was rich with dreams and deep indigo moods. She was convinced that spirits came there, and that her father created his astonishing works with their help and ministration. How often had she heard him utter to them definite commands, in his stern voice, as to intractable servants. How often had she seen him utter directives and issue orders to this or that portion of empty air, as if to slow-witted attendants that needed everything spelt out for them or they would create havoc from a too literal carrying out of their instructions?
Her father's workshop teemed with such invisible attendants; and while she dozed, in that mood of teak and smoky presences, she often saw them in the transfigured space of the workshop, planing, glazing, polishing, varnishing, casting, carrying and shaping the wooded creations that populated the workshop. She saw them, as she dozed, as rather pleasing, intelligent, bright and humorous-looking beings. They did exactly what they were told to do, the spirits, no more and no less. And they followed instructions to the letter and to the limit. They were always cheerful, in an oddly neutral way Nothing affected their mood. They seemed peculiarly indestructible, though they were made of pure air and pure light. They worked tirelessly, unendingly, even when her father had shut up the workshop for the day. The work always went on, never stopped; for the spirits were always at the endless artistic tasks which the master had set them.
But when the maiden awoke, she never saw the spirits at all. They seemed, in an instant, tantalisingly, to vanish. All she saw were the multitudinous brooding sculptures that jostled for space in the crammed workshop. The sculptures were everywhere; and they seemed so fiendishly, so mischievously alive. They seemed to breathe out of their wooden mouths. They seemed so to stare, pitilessly, at their surroundings. They seemed to listen, to hear everything, rather intensely. They seemed, more than anything else, to be thinking, and their definite opinions and judgements were almost tangible, like dark wooded dew, in the darkened shadow-filled spaces of the workshop. There were, therefore, many kinds of thoughts, moods, opinions, notions, judgements and mental arguments in that air.
Crowded together, in that workshop, were sculptures of demons with wild eyes and tranquil brows, children with wise adult eyes and ears of antelopes, twins and triplets facing different directions and alternately upside-down and right side up, embossed on huge panels. There were crocodiles, giants, monsters, noble and severe warriors, sages who had pierced the veil of human illusions and gazed with sublime indifference upon all phenomena, kings who were lascivious, cruel, cunning, and lazy-eyed like lions who never need bother to gaze down on the feeble subjects under their reign. There were sculptures of tiny human beings, and half-human creatures of unimaginable beauty, and the radiant forms of gods and goddesses who stood in the shadowed places in an undimmed light of their own astonishing sublimity. There were figures of fools who were lovable, of village idiots, of the mad, of lonely old women, of girls in love, of puzzled law-makers. In short, all manner and permutations of imagined and real beings lived in wood and stone and bronze and they all seemed to breathe and move in the dark spaces of the workshop. One of the maidens favourite works there was a tortoise so real that it seemed ever so slowly to move; and the mystery of this movement, which she could not disprove to herself, never ceased to fascinate and delight her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Her father was now at his trestle. He was in his work-clothes. His hands moved as if he had seven arms. He worked as if there were three of him. Often she counted her father being in four places at the same time. Planing here, hammering there, stretching the skin of an animal over a wooden shape to fool the eye, or in the shadows, somewhere, rooting around in his secret shrine; always working with spells and incantations that enlarged, charged and transformed the atmosphere of the workshop, and sent her off into dreaming.
What odd dreams she had in her father's workshop. Now she dreamt she was in a ship that tossed on the waves whipped up by the demons of the deep. She was in the ship, in its bowels, in chains, lying upside-down, or sideways, facing the feet of another, who was also chained. Blood on the chains was like rust. Her agony had passed beyond bearing and she was in pain like one dead, floating above the figures lying in opposite directions, head to foot, and foot to head, in the vile-smelling hold of the ship, tossing in the nightmare of demons. Wailing sounded everywhere in the crushed space, and women were dying, calling out the obscure names of their ancestors in languages no one understood. And death and doom was thick in the dream as she floated and saw hundreds of bodies like writhing ebony sculptures bleeding and drowning in the white waves. She howled in the dream, in a white space, and drifted away into eternity, among the stars, where forms in mists of gold led her back down to a land where dead bodies were planted and long green sweet canes grew from their bodies, and at last she saw the sea differently, and returned to her home among the giants of the stars.
What dreams she had, in her father's workshop, as she listened to his sonorous incantations used for the moulding of gold into magic objects.
And then, in the midst of evanescent dreams, she would see the spirits appear in the workshop, as if conjured out of the dark mystic atmosphere.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
They appeared one by one. The first to appear was the spirit of the forge. He was made of fire, and shone like polished bronze. His face was impassive, impressive, mighty, severe, humourless, and his eyes were full of flames. Upon his appearance, crackles of heat fizzled in the air. He was silent, and awaited his instruction. The maiden's father, uttering further grim incantations, sent him to the forge at the back of the workshop, and immediately the blazing copper would be glowing on the plates and moulds. They would soon become the living busts of kings and queens soon to be dead, or the sacred forms of the almighty father god who created all things from the great word that was brought on golden tablets by the mysterious ancestors of the tribe, who came from somewhere not of this earth, who perished under the seas, and whose legacy had come down to the master, working now, with the secret of the ages, while his daughter slept.
The second spirit to appear was the spirit of making. He had a smiling face and seven hands and three heads and many eyes and was powerful and muscled and lithe and his eyes shone like moonlight. Upon receiving his instructions, with big smiles, and a happy mood, he was amongst the unmade objects, the wood awaiting their dreams, and he began carving from their raw shapes the figures that the master had outlined in their rawness. Among much chipping, hammering and carving, the second spirit was happy.
The third spirit was the spirit of inspiration. It was light as air, luminous, beautiful, mysterious. It kept changing form, and had a pure glow of delight. Its face was turned inwards, and its eyes of purest airy gems shone a clear r
adiance on all around, transfiguring the rough workshop into a promised land, a paradise of dreams. It seemed as if there were flowers everywhere amongst the stones and shadows, and an open sky visible through the dark rafters of the workshop, and stars in miniature among the ruins of visible forms, and all the gods as one, and all the goddesses as one also. There seemed a gentle song brimming from the heart of form, and music tinkling amongst the tools. The third spirit was a being of pure unfixed magic and enchantment, like a fluid angel, awaiting a simple instruction to turn all things into gold and all living forms into their own paradise and wonder.
The maiden was happy as a happy child at the appearance of the third spirit; and she marvelled at how, upon receiving its instructions from her father, the spirit vanished into the air and became the very glow that shone from all things, as if the great god was revealing itself in all that was.
Her father shone now in majestic splendour, his taut skin seeming to radiate a transforming light through the sweat of his brow and from his three eyes that shone so in the dark light of the workshop.