by Ben Okri
Inspiration is harmony. The mind loves patterns. If you have a creative problem, and you know how to keep your mind open, it usually comes about that the mind thinks of the problem in terms of filling a vacuum, filling a tense space, filling the pattern. One definition of style, or voice, could be: patterns of words guided by self-mastery.
There is no need to panic. The intelligence that shaped the universe shaped you. There is an inner part of us, for ever obscured, for ever mysterious, which is most alive during the process of composition. And that inner part, that inner glow, is timeless, and it functions beyond time. It drinks from deep waters. It has the stillness and the dance and the radiance of the firmament. When one is most absorbed in the act of creation one almost feels that one is wandering in the great corridors of all minds. Creativity makes us part of it all. There is no genuine creative or human problem that cannot be solved if you are serene enough, humble enough, hardworking enough, and if you have learnt the gentle arts of concentration, visualisation, and meditation. For me, tranquillity is the sign of the invisible presence of grace.
There are many mysteries, continents, and planets in writing that we haven’t yet discovered. There are many oceans of literary possibilities that we don’t suspect exist. We are still like Newton’s child, playing on the shore, turning over pebbles, while great possibilities of wonder stretch out ahead of us into eternity. This is the beauty of it all. The full potential of human creativity has not yet been tapped. Along with the ever-renewing miracle of love, this fact is one of the brightest hopes for the human race.
The Joys of Storytelling I
1
It may seem that because we live in a fractured world the art of storytelling is dead. It may seem that because we live in a world without coherent belief, a world that has lost its centre, in which a multitude of contending versions of reality clamour in the mind, that storytelling and enchantment are no longer relevant. This is a sad view. Worse than that, it is a view which implies that we no longer have a basis from which to speak to one another. When we do attempt speech or song we do it solipsistically, in fractured tones. This negative view of storytelling also implies that there are no continuities in the human experience, and no magical places resident in us that we can call up in one another.
The centuries have indeed been brutal. All the great systems have failed, or are failing. The fractured view of history is not even a tragic one, for it has no grandeur. At best it is pathetic, small, ironic, and glancing.
It must be remembered, however, that history may be fractured, that certainties have been crumbling, but that the human mystery remains. It is probably just as well that certainties are being broken. Certainty has always been the enemy of art and creativity; more than that it has been the enemy of humanity. In the name of certainties, under its illusory god, people have had an almost medieval belief in the rightness of the violence they have wreaked on others, in the destruction of other people’s ways and lives. In the name of certainties, nations and individuals had come to regard themselves as gods. This certainty, whether its name be religion, imperialism, ideology, class, caste, race, or sex, has been the great undoing of our measureless heritage, and has narrowed the vastness of human possibility and marvellous variety.
If the towers of certainty collapse one after another on the great landscape of History and Time, then this represents somewhat wonderfully the triumph of Time over the insane arrogance of human certainties.
Those who suspect that the true beauty of the human dream has not yet emerged from its hidden and silenced places celebrate, albeit with some sadness in their hearts, the fragmentary edifices of certainties strewn about the world. We await without wonder the collapse of the last remaining towers – for then and only then can the beginnings of a true world history and genius flower; only then will a new age of miraculous rivers, hidden dreams, flowers of unsuspected beauty, philosophies of unknown potency emerge and astound future generations; only then might the world hope as one and struggle as one, towards the first universal golden age.
2
On an ocean older than humanity, in a space between old and new, I made a very simple rediscovery. Rolled into a sea-shaped lullaby, aboard a ship bound for America, floating on the dreams of the great ocean god of the Atlantic, with porpoises swimming past under my astonished gaze, I reconnected with something old in me, older than fire, older than rage. I made this discovery accidentally, through one of the serendipities that come upon us when circumventing a fear.
Rocking on the vast expanse of water, I often wandered the corridors of the great ship. And one evening I found myself amongst a crowd who were watching the shimmering conjurations of a magician. I was in the gallery, looking down, and I noticed how the magician circled himself with lights, stage lights, lights of purple and gold and sapphire. He had a piano and on the piano there was a book. He had a wand, hats, white scarves, golden balls, silver ringlets, silk handkerchieves, and all the other brilliant paraphernalia of his trade. But most of all, he had the complete attention of the audience. He had their eyes. He had taken their eyes from them, had divorced them from their senses, lifted them from mid-sea into mid-imagination, mid-fantasy, a country without land, without boundaries, and whose only known laws of gravity are the three laws of enchantment. He had their eyes on his shirt and in his hands, and their ears were in the piano or their ears circled, swirling, in the air, wafted by the languorous strains of invisible music – music suggestive of mystery, voluptuousness, decadence, timelessness, and Prospero: the violin capriccios of Paganini, the études of Liszt, the elusive melisma of Chopin. The magician had the hearts of the audience too, and he made them all as one, as one people gazing into an ancient fire, under the awesome mystery of a dark-blue sky, with an emblematic oriental crescent moon above them.
Our ocean-liner magician was suave. He knew that there is nothing people in mid-sea like better than forgetfulness, enchantment, a visual focus, flashes of white, hints of unicorn lights, embodied charisma. He was their magus, their enchanter, dressed in tuxedo, exuding charm and effortless transatlantic professionalism. His props were numerous, his methods both varied and familiar. He titillated the men by having as his assistant a curvaceous blonde woman, partially naked, with hints of perfumed flesh beneath stockings glimmering with little stars.
The magician had a wonderful contraption that saws people in half, and while he sawed his assistant the collective mouth of the audience gasped and their lost eyes, for a moment, saw blood pouring on the lacquered, polished floor. A woman in the audience cried out, and the magician commanded us all to be silent. When our sights cleared, and the blood vanished, and we were no longer sure if we knew what we were seeing or not, lost as we were in the magician’s generation of illusions, he asked a sceptical donnish-looking man to step forward and ascertain if the woman had been cut in half. The don duly did so, and confirmed it; and the woman, wheeled around, indeed showed a remarkable gap in her voluptuous midriff. Then, just as the audience began struggling with their own senses, she was wheeled away, draped with a silk cloth. Then, surrounded by the Mozart of Don Giovanni, and with a cry as primeval as any uttered before an ancient fire by a timeless sorcerer making a dead hero manifest to his unbelieving people, and with the gesture of a prophet breaking before our eyes a great tablet of forgotten laws, the transatlantic magician reassembled the fractured woman, and lifted our enchantment into a comfortable realm of applause and reconstituted certainty.
But the magician hadn’t finished: before the evening was over he made his wand fly about the room with no cords attached, he sent little stars dancing round him, he turned silk into birds, and made the birds vanish; he pulled money out of a lady’s hair (but mysteriously didn’t make himself richer); and at the critical moment of the evening he brought down the strange book, and told us the story of a man’s pact with the devil (while the lights flickered in mid-ocean) and, while the notes of a Liszt concerto soared, rose, and changed, while the three helpers created
confusing sensations by moving across the stage in red gowns and horned masks, and just as the magician, with another odd cry, opened the book – it burst suddenly into flames at the same moment as the auditorium plunged into darkness. No one moved. No one breathed. The audience seemed too astounded at first to applaud. His greatest accomplishment was our silence.
When I went back to my cabin I was mildly exhilarated and unaccountably depressed.
3
In my cabin, looking out over the primordial waters, my mind made journeys back to the time when the sea was still a god, and when fire was a new deity – a deity that brought out terror and storytelling from the hearts of emergent humanity. I seemed then to travel back to those unrecorded ages when communities and families sat huddled beneath the undeciphered sky, gazing into the mystery of fire, with all the terrors of the world lurking about them in the darkness which was also a god. The fire was the home then of the living soul, and the refuge from the unknown shapes and monsters of the growing dark. It was terror that brought out the mystery from which humans gazed into fire, and saw their only hope. It was uncertainty, the unknown, the darkness, and the unquenchable fire in the human breast which made that a time of dread enchantments. And the masters of enchantment, of bringing the dark sky and the howling dark within the realm of the bearable, the masters of keeping terror at bay, were the storytellers.
The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled. They wrestled with the mysteries and transformed them into myths which coded the world and helped the community to live through one more darkness, with eyes wide open, and with hearts set alight.
I can see them now, the old masters. I can see them standing on the other side of the flames, speaking in the voices of lions, or thunder, or monsters, or heroes, heroines, or the earth, or fire itself – for they had to contain all voices within them, had to be all things, and nothing. They had to have the ability to become lightning, to become a future homeland, to be the dreaded guide to the fabled land where the community will settle and fructify. They had to be able to fight in advance all the demons they would encounter, and summon up all the courage needed on the way, to prophesy about all the requisite qualities that would ensure their arrival at the dreamt-of land.
The old masters had to be able to tell stories that would make sleep possible on those inhuman nights, stories that would counter terror with enchantment, or with a greater terror. I can see them, beyond the flames, telling of a hero’s battle with a fabulous beast – the beast that is in the hero. I can hear and see them as they raise storms before their people’s eyes, make great snakes appear before their mesmerised gaze, as they take them to the deeps of the sea and show them great monster fishes in whose bellies sit the last of human kind in serene acceptance of their fate till they are vomited out near untrodden shores. I can hear their deep voice rising in the dark, imitating the growl of two-headed beasts with resonant names, and I can see that terror-stricken community gather even closer together under the dreadful spell of the ritual stories. The stories were more terrifying than the darkness they feared, or the unknown that they cowered from, or the storms that threatened to tear off the roof of the sky, or their destinies – the greatest terror of them all. The stories, made real to them, and conjured up in their minds by wizened or blind old bards, made all the darknesses more bearable. The community could sleep well that night and carry on the long struggle when dawn, a benign god, brought light for the day’s new journeys.
The storyteller’s art changed through the ages. From battling dread in words and incantations before their people did in reality, they became repositories of the people’s wisdom and follies. They became the living memory of a people. Often, conscripted by kings, they became the memory of a people’s origins, and carried with them the long line of ancestries and lineages. Most important of all, they were the living libraries, the keepers of legends and lore. They knew the causes and mutations of things, the herbs, trees, plants, cures for diseases, causes of wars, causes of victory, the ways in which victory often precipitates defeat, or defeat victory, the lineages of gods, the rites humans have to perform to the gods. They knew of follies and restitutions, were advocates of new and old ways of being, were custodians of culture, recorders of change. They kept the oldest and truest dreams and visions of their people alive. They also kept alive the great failings, the healing tragedies of the never-ending journey towards their Utopias, the ever-moving dream of happiness.
These old storytellers were the true magicians. They were humanity’s truest friends and most reliable guides. Their role was both simple and demanding. They had to go down deep into the seeds of time, into the dreams of their people, into the unconscious, into the uncharted fears, and bring shapes and moods back up into the light. They had to battle with monsters before they told us about them. They had to see clearly. They had to see even what they hadn’t seen, and make it more real to us than our most ordinary or most frightening experiences. They lived lives of intense sacrifice, placing their psyches, dreams, hungers, and their lives on the altar of listening, seeing, sensing, confronting. And then they had to render all they had witnessed into comprehendable stories from the other side of the fire, in the deepest of nights.
They risked their sanity and consciousness in the service of dreaming better futures. They risked madness, or being unmoored in the wild realms of unknown interspaces, or being devoured by the unexpected demons of the communal imagination. When great storytellers die, a thousand years of unconfronted journeys, unguided journeys towards the deceptive lights of future civilisations also perish in their silence.
They hid profound truths within innocent-seeming stories. They spoke infuriatingly in riddles. They knew the power and meaning of signs, knew the universe to be a vast system of codes and signs. They compressed eras into enigmas, told secret histories in public ones, and public histories in secret ones. They dwelt in our unconscious, and had to know how to visit the underworld, and return intact. They told of history through stories of the unconscious, and rendered the narratives in our collective and individual dreams – the narratives within our sleep and forgetfulness which are more devastating than the factual narrative of lived history and linear time; internal narratives that are more explosive than facts, and truer.
The old storytellers were the first real explorers and frontierspeople of the abyss. They brought the world within our souls. They made living within and living without as one.
And I think that now, in our age, in the mid-ocean of our days, with certainties collapsing about us, and with no beliefs by which to steer our ways through the dark descending nights ahead – I think that now we need those fictional old bards and fearless storytellers, those seers. We need their magic, their courage, their love, and their fire more than ever before. It is precisely in a fractured, broken age that we need mystery and a reawoken sense of wonder. We need them in order to begin to be whole again. We need to be reminded of the primeval terror again. We need to be humble again. We need to go down to the bottom, to the depths of the heart, and start to live again as we have never lived before. All the terrors are still there. It’s we who no longer see them. They are getting ready to pounce on us again. Maybe it has already happened.
4
When I left the magician’s performance, as I told you, I was both exhilarated and depressed. In fact, I felt a little twinge of professional envy. The magician had possessed the full attention of the audience. Unlike at most poetry readings, no one had left, not even to ease themselves. His spell was visible in its effect. The magician had so many tools, so many props, so much with which to hold the attention of the audience.
Much later, in my cabin, I read from a verse translation of Homer’s Odyssey, and fell into a light sleep in which I found myself upon the singing waves, strapped to a mast, struggling to untie myself and jump into the sea to spend my days with the lovel
y sirens. I had just undone one knot when I found myself in a duel and woke up a moment before Don Quixote’s sword pierced me in the ears. It was on waking that I made the simple and obvious rediscovery that I referred to at the beginning of this essay. An obvious discovery, fundamental, but still capable, if fully explored, if flown with into new spaces, of effecting a modest revolution in the practice of one’s art. I realised, as you may have guessed, that novelists and wordsmiths have fewer tools than magicians – even magicians of stage and screen – but the tools they have are the most democratic, the most mysterious, and the most deceptive of all. They have the magical absurdity of abstract marks on a blank page, and the imagination of the reader. This is all that is needed. Good words, shaped and steeped in fictionality, and minds to receive them.
The writer, functioning in a magical medium, an abstract medium, does one half of the work, but the reader does the other. The reader’s mind becomes the screen, the place, the era. To a large extent, readers create the world from words, they invent the reality they read. Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train, planets that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.
The mystery of storytelling is the miracle of a single living seed which can populate whole acres of human minds. It is the multiplicity of responses which a single text can generate within the mind’s unfailing capacity for wonder. Storytellers are a tiny representative of the greater creative forces. And like all artists they should create beauty as best as they can, should serve truth, and remember humility, and when their work is done and finely crafted, arrowed to the deepest points in the reader’s heart and mind, they should be silent, leave the stage, and let the imagination of the world give sanctuary.