Starbook

by Ben Okri

  The prince was taken aback by this strange speech from his father. The king had never spoken to him like that before. The prince was so amazed, and oddly touched, that when he recovered from the mild delirium of joy, his father was gone from his presence.

  On the evenings of his return, however, driven by an inexplicable passion and a silent empowerment he sensed from the king, he summoned the elders and demanded answers from them about the multiplying gaps in the kingdom that were threatening, undermining, the foundation of things. This puzzled and enraged the elders more than ever, because they had no answers and could do nothing about the gaps that were spreading through the kingdom like a nameless disease.

  CHAPTER THIRTY–TWO

  The prince went and lived among the tribe of gate-makers, masquerade-shapers, bronze-casters, and dream-revealers. He lived among the tribe of artists in disguise, as an ordinary man, following one of his favourite principles of invisibility. He worked as a servant for the father of the maiden of his heart. He worked with him for seven seasons. Often, with permission, he stole back to his kingdom. He never spoke to the maiden in all that time. And she never spoke to him. She didn't see him. She didn't notice him. He never spoke to her, seldom looked at her directly, but he watched her in his spirit and listened to her in his soul. He studied her heart, and he followed her ways, and he absorbed the peculiar philosophy of her being.

  She was one of the strange ones who did not know quite how strange she was. She was so strange to herself that she took it to be normal. The new servant learnt, for example, that she was not much interested in the reflection of things. Mirrors did not unduly fascinate her. She was more interested in being than in things. And yet she avoided people and hid among things. She was more interested in fruits than in roots. Others kept probing what lay behind things, where people came from, where they were in the hierarchy of things, who their ancestors were, but she was interested mainly in what people produced, their fruits, their art, their deeds. The new servant often noticed how with a glance at someone's art she took in all that she needed to know about them. With a glance at their production, her silence spoke. To her nothing was more revealing than the signature of a soul in the works of art they created. In this she was merciless. In this she was absolute. Everything lay bare to her, like a true secret confession, in every work she saw. She could read minds in their works. Courage, humour, patience, capacity to grow, freedom of spirit, meanness, a hidden greatness, cowardice, a mystical inclination, the state of their health, how long they would live, what kind of husbands or wives they might make, their trustworthiness, their capacity for love, all these and many more things that can only be intuited thus could this peculiar maiden read in every work of art she saw. This was a strange gift indeed. It was almost a curse. It weighed her down. It was almost like divination, like prophecy. It was a wonderful witchcraft of the eyes. Everyone in the tribe feared her eyes for this reason. And this power had grown more acute since her initiation. To look at the works of art around was to suffer. She saw only too clearly the inadequacies of the best. Very few works had ever affected her as being beyond. And these had affected her very powerfully indeed, like a wound, or like a mental breakdown, or like a revelation in which she was somehow destroyed. She craved this destruction. Only through such a destruction did she feel and get a great sense of the mystery and unspeakable truth of life that so haunted her in her daydreaming hours.

  The new servant, in his stillness among the statues, never ceased to study her obscure heart, and her ways. Using the powers that death had given him, he strove to roam and listen to the philosophy of her being. It was his primary reason for dwelling there, in the shadows, under the wall, in the realm where he was a stranger, and where he was unknown, and unseen. All he wanted, whether he admitted it to himself or not, was to live in her being. And more often than he realised, he did.

  He sensed that she saw straight to the heart of whoever she encountered, but she seldom believed that what she saw was what she had seen.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Often her mind would drift to another world, far away, where she would have long converse with beings of radiant beauty. They were beings of all colours and they were pure in form. To them all things had gods and philosophies. To them magic and miracles were primitive dungs. To them science and technology were the ancient arts of a prehistoric people who were not even legends in the annals of that realm. They did not believe in remembering anything. They did not believe in too much memory or history. They believed that it was important to forget for a civilisation to be quantumly creative. Their forgetfulness was an act of genius, because they knew that everything that ever was ever will be, and so to even strive to enshrine history was to commit a tautology and to clutter the path of the future. All things that were important, they believed, found their way to the present. They were masters of the present moment, in which all things, all worlds, all time and all possibilities exist. Their sense of humour and irony was inexhaustible. These beings showed the maiden many wonderful things and notions that filled her heart with delight – the past and future, they showed her, under the aspect of sublime irrelevance seen from the infinite perspective of the stars.

  The maiden loved the hours she spent wandering the forest and half dreaming on the shores of the river, in converse with these beings of a remote place that was her true home. What sort of things did she talk about with them? Once they conversed about the art of misunderstanding.

  'Misunderstanding is all that is possible between your people,' said one of the beautiful beings. 'It is simply not possible to understand one another, given the way you people are made. You do not hear what you hear, you do not say what you say, what is said is not what is intended, what is intended is not what is said. How can that which does not know itself know what it is saying, or wants to say? Nothing is as you see it or feel it or hear it. Your bodies are inefficient for the collecting of true information. All you can do is misunderstand. And so you may as well make an art of it.'

  'How can you make an art of misunderstanding?'

  'By assuming that you can't understand anything, and that nothing can be understood, because nothing is what it seems.'

  'But where is the art?'

  'The art is to communicate through misunderstanding. To make misunderstanding the very tool itself.'

  'Like people who talk in different languages and yet do good business at the marketplace?'

  'Yes.'

  'Is that what art is?'

  'Yes. Being misunderstood and yet speaking clearly to the spirit.'

  'What else can I learn from this?'

  'If you begin with the art of misunderstanding you will find your way to the gate of illumination.'

  'Then what?'

  'Then everything will be simple and clear and you will know what to do and what not to do and you will have no beginning and no end any more and you will be with us and wherever you want to be.'

  The maiden often spent hours in the company of her true people so far away; and their conversations were so far removed from her life in the tribe of artists that they were useless to her except as refreshments to the spirit. Sometimes though they gave her hints and signs of things that were to burst into faint reality and which she caught in art and forgot that she did, thus adding, as if in sleepwalking mode, to the enigmas of the race.

  Sometimes one or two figures from that distant realm would pay her a visit, in a form she didn't recognise, in that kingdom where artists are not seen ...

  CHAPTER THIRTY–FOUR

  Silently there among the statues of an ancient mood, the new servant sat, while all the stars in the galaxy revolved, while the story of all things approached the ultimate secret of their ends and their beginnings, while death crept over the kingdom, and darkness stole into the name of that realm.

  Drums broke their voices in the evenings and held the steady beat to the public festivities. The drums were charmed with sculpted figures of bards singing death back to
its cave. Deep voices sang, dances thumped the face of the earth, libations poured into the cracks, and laughter rose among the flute melodies that imitated the enquiries of newborn babies about the fitness of the times for their arrival. The new servant sat in the silence of statues till the spiders wove their nets about his face, entangling his hair, imprisoning him in their fine web from which he did not stir. How quickly did the spiders work? He would be still a while, wandering in the delicious philosophy of the maiden's being, when he would come round and find himself enmeshed again in fine-spun threads of darkness. He would hear his father's laughter in the irony of it all, and he would smile.

  And still he sought a way into the subtle notions of her sweet existence.

  By the river he would linger with her in the errands she made as a daughter to a mother. He would learn in her the art of weaving stories in cloth, of dyeing tales on cloth, of painting symbols and signs, figures and forms, hints of dreams, shapes of prophecies on the bales of wrappers which the women and men wore on ceremonial occasions. The maiden and her mother dressed the tribe in prophecies. Shapes of fishes that mean many things, forms of beings with eyes of gold and moonstones, dancing with angels of blinding colours, were charmed on to the cloths. Cowries arranged in forms of changing divinations, images of stars in space in unique constellations, visions of men in space, among the stars, with arms embracing the universe, were patterned on to the materials that would become blouses, dresses, wrappers, coverlets. The tribe and the world would be draped in dreams, in visions, in cheeky myths, in divinations and inscriptions to the future. The maiden loved this working on cloth with her mother; and they laughed often and told stories and challenged one another in images and inspiration.

  Then later, when evening fell, and the day's work was done, the maiden would go to the farms, with water and refreshments for the farmers as they prepared to come home; and often the new servant would sense her wandering among the golden sheaves of cornfields, leaning against a tree, lingering among the cassava plants, gazing at a remote constellation.

  And then he would be surprised to see her burst into tears, as if she had lost a lover to the stars.

  Then, just as suddenly, she would be re-composed and would be with the women, returning from the farm, carrying a basket of yams, or dandling a child on her back while its mother rested a moment in the shade.

  The new servant sensed a profound restlessness in the maiden. One day she burst into her father's workshop and said:

  'My father, something is supposed to be happening to me, but it isn't. What is it?'

  'Are you ready to make your choice of husband now?'

  'No.'

  There was a pause.

  'Then what do you mean?'

  'I am supposed to be happy or sad, but I am not.'

  'What are you then?'

  'I don't know. Do you?'

  Her father said nothing. The silence lengthened in the workshop. The new servant could hear the statues whispering. He could hear the spirits at work in enriching the forms of the statues, polishing them with the invisible wax of myth, and infusing into them moods of amber and of unfinished stories, breathing an odd quality of life into them, till they fairly bristled with a condition that partook both of something lifelike and something mineral, alive in a hidden, troubling, dreamy kind of way. The new servant listened as the spirit-servants performed their finishing touches on the statues and figurines, making them take on an ancient immemorial mood, under the father's precise instructions. They worked on the masks too, silently, the masks that would adorn the masquerade's faces, that would be the faces, on the day of the ancestors or on feast days when the select ones were possessed by the gods. These masks were carved with the mysterious art that made them take on their true personalities only when in motion, only when in the dance. Motionless, they acquired a kinetic stillness. This fusion of motion and stillness would transform the art of the future. The spirits infused into these masks the eternal longing to dance, in order to be free.

  *

  In this silence of statues changing from their recently created states into their enigmatic natures, the new servant listened to the maiden awaiting her father's reply. But her father didn't speak. So the maiden absent-mindedly wandered amongst the statues in the workshop, to see how they were coming along, and to see how much they had changed by just being there in that space, immersed in the radiance of the master and deepened by the atmosphere which enters the body of the statues and enriches them with dark and wonderful notions.

  The maiden lingered at each statue and gazed at it dreamily. And then she came upon the new servant where he sat motionless under the wall in a sepia and amber mood of spiders' webs and the silence of old royal trees. And, suddenly, engulfed by an arboreal mood of unknown kings of the forest, she was amazed at the new perfection of her father's art. She drew in breath and cried out, half horrified and half enchanted at this statue of a frail-looking and beautiful young man that sat there like a visitor from an unknown world. Her heart couldn't stop beating so fast and a wild delusion flooded her head and for a moment she went quite blind and then a white light, like the brilliance of the sky, quite conquered the top of her head. Then everything suddenly cleared. Her mouth was dry. She saw nothing as she did before, and she drew back. Shaken by a nameless wonder, she was astonished at what she beheld. It seemed incredible to her that her father had now created a work so real that it had become virtually human. If there was any flaw it was that there seemed something altogether too kind about its face, and too adorable about its lips. But overcome by the sorcery of the accomplishment the maiden feared that her father had gone too far; and this time, in his terrifying perfection, he might have tempted the gods with the greatness of his art ...

  CHAPTER THIRTY–FIVE

  The maiden retreated from this new art of sorcery and went and sat at the far end of the workshop. To her mind the darkness where the new sculpture sat was now a place faintly touched with dark magic. In her mind the new sculpture conjoined the weird and the enchanting. And so she set about forgetting that she had endured such an unsettling and yet such a beautiful experience. But what was beautiful about the experience she had felt only as bizarre. There was something unnatural about the beauty of that face that she didn't quite want to think about.

  She had also forgotten the question she had asked her father. She sat in a mild confusion, feeling scared and miraculously changed, but not knowing why. Soon the mood of the workshop crept over her in its whispers and its fragrance of old wood and stone and spirits, and she drifted into a deep and wonderful sleep. When she was far away from the workshop, and played like a child among the beings of her secret homeland in a remote constellation, her father turned to her and rose. Then above her sleeping form he chanted potent vowel sounds, intoned certain reality-altering incantations, and spoke to the master-spirit that dwelt within her, saying:

  'Forget that which wouldn't do you any good. Remember things in a manner that is best for you. Open your heart towards your marriage, and choose only he who would best help you fulfil your destiny, whatever your destiny may be, and he whose destiny you can best help fulfil, whatever that too may be.'

  Then, intoning another complex sound, he went and sat down again, and worked in silence.

  Shortly afterwards he summoned the spirits of the workshop and gave them fresh instructions about the new work he had slowly been gestating. The spirits set about their tasks. The new servant hadn't moved. Breathing gently, he felt the spirits working all around him, enriching the air with ideas, with open dimensions to other worlds and other ages. They worked on the air, the atmosphere. It seemed as if they impregnated the air with moods of ancestral wisdom and future realities, and that this charged atmosphere, seeping into the statues, into the carvings, the masks and sculptures, was what created the highest mystery in the works of art. It seemed as if the works when finished were not complete. They needed to absorb an atmosphere richly treated in enchantments and sorceries, in dark b
eautiful suggestiveness, and moods combined from remote eras in the infinite museums of universal history. This was the most important work, it seemed, that the spirits performed. They marinated the completed creations in enigmas. It wasn't long before the servant realised that he too was being treated and woven in enigmas ...

  CHAPTER THIRTY–SIX

  The maiden woke with a shock and sprang out of her chair and hurried to her mother and said: