by Ben Okri
‘Why do we keep losing our best dreams?’
‘Greed mostly,’ said Scott. ‘Power and corruption. With corruption it starts a downward curve, then it falls apart, then we go back and start all over again. We never learn.’
With perverse timing Propr, the temperamental sound man, announced that the recording machine needed new batteries. He also wanted Lao and the Americans to speak more clearly. There seemed to him too much noise in the carriage all of a sudden. His delicate ears had picked up intrusions no one else had noticed. With his gangly frame and his comic moustache he fussed over the batteries. The passengers looked on with forbearance.
When the problem was fixed, Jim whispered in Lao’s left ear that he should move on to his key question.
An almost sacred stillness came over the crew as the filming began.
The nature of the conversation was about to change.
12
‘I want to ask you all what your personal Arcadia might be. What is your idea of a private paradise? Is it a place, a book, a person, a piece of music, a painting?’ Lao asked them.
‘I feel it is when we have our family together,’ said Scott.
Bob was about to speak when an overlap began. Two voices in the same space. But the gentle one commanded the ear. The camera, lover of novelty, turned in the direction of the new voice.
Her silence had gathered all the missed opportunities of the conversation. She spoke without any special emphasis. She spoke not to be heard, but because things had reached their limit, and a little transcendence was needed. There is something poignant about having to use words when silence would be best. But the camera cannot transmit the wisdom of silence. The Bhagavad Gita says: More blessed than a thousand words, is one word that brings peace. The camera might reply: If you want to touch the hearts and minds of millions, make it visible, speak the words. Then you can use the power of the devil to serve the sublime.
13
And so Emily, the silent one, from New York, an unsilent city, said:
‘When we’ve been travelling around I’ve often thought: Oh, this would be a good place to be, and that would be an excellent place to live. And yet, after I’ve seen everything I’ve decided that home, wherever that may be, is the place for feelings of peace. And if I can be at peace with myself then that is the most important thing. I think travelling teaches one that. It teaches you that the grass may be greener on the other side, but that basically most of us are happiest wherever we feel at home.’
There is a moment in all endeavours when, after much effort, one comes upon something. At the beginning one may have imagined that what one is searching for is a castle or a mountain or a lump of fame. But one comes upon something truer and simpler. It is smaller than one imagined, but it is right and best for one. It is what the heart needs. This humble thing will do. That’s how it was after the silent lady spoke.
The film crew knew that the camera had found what it sought.
14
The train sped on past run-down houses on the edges of small towns. The interview was over. As Lao made his way back through the carriages to his seat, he fell into a stained-glass reverie inspired by the rhythm of the train.
The best thing about death is having lived fully, Lao thought. Lived richly the possibilities. The best thing about life is death. Going back home. Living teaches us that home is best. Home is where we never left, but only thought we had. But you have to live fully to know that. And you have to know where is truly home.
A train gliding
Into the dark light.
Oxen in the grass.
The fields singing.
A lost dream.
Book 2
A Little Meditation on Eviling
1
It was only much later that Lao noticed the graffiti on the broken walls, the dust-covered vegetation, the families in ragged houses staring with pale eyes at the passing train.
It was only when he was sitting down that he realised what he had not been seeing. Mistletoe was drawing a long jagged wall, and the drawing brought the realisation to him. He became aware that he was living backwards. He was dimly conscious that he was rarely in the present moment, and that, as in a time-lapse, he was always arriving at the place he had been minutes or hours ago.
Maybe it was being on the journey, maybe it was having acres of time on his hands, but he found himself thinking in a way he hadn’t done in a long time.
He saw how, in not living in the present, life was always slipping away from him. How could he catch up? It occurred to him that this was one of the benefits of illness: giving people time to catch up with themselves, to arrive at where they are in life’s fast-moving story. But if the dislocation has become too entangled and confused, what is to be done? How do we disentangle? How do we stop living backwards, he wondered?
2
Lao could have sworn that someone whispered into his ear that the inverse of the word live is evil. He had never noticed it before and it surprised him.
Without allowing himself to ponder what other revelations might be hidden in the inversion of words, he pursued the implication of the insight. If the opposite of live is evil then to die in life – that is evil. To live is to love, evolve, create. To live is to be replenished by the origins. Evil is exile from the water of life. Then, thought Lao, Arcadia is the place where life is renewed, where evil is turned around.
3
Staring out of the window, Lao became gloomy. Where had it come from?
For a long time gloom had been his normal mode of being. It was an inseparable shadow.
But on this journey his gloominess had become less familiar, like an old shoe not worn for a long time. It still felt comfortable, but Lao was becoming comfortable with something else.
Then he realised that he had wandered away from the Arcadian mood awoken by the silent lady. Or maybe it was her glow that made him aware of his gloom.
Across from him Mistletoe was still drawing. She had that smile on her face.
Outside the window, urban ruins tumbled past his eyes. Maybe that was what had induced the gloominess. Then a shadow fell across him and a voice said:
The way you live depends on the pact you made with your spirit.
Lao leapt up and looked around. No one was there. Only the other passengers in their seats, reading newspapers or staring into the distance. Lao sat down again and something, a passing presence, whispered the word Malasso. Lao looked around anxiously again. Mistletoe smiled.
‘You fell asleep and something woke you and you jumped up suddenly. It’s okay. Everything’s fine.’
Lao stayed silent. He stared at the urban ruins. They seemed endless. Tenements and dilapidated buildings. Edges of towns in decomposition. He wondered why the worst aspects of cities were always visible from trains. He found himself paying more attention to the ugly sites they were passing through. He found himself eviling, reinventing the world in malice. He liked nothing that he saw. He tried not to look at Mistletoe. In that mood she would be re-made in his eviling. She must have sensed this for she got up and quietly went away.
4
The rest of the film crew were coming through the carriage, busy with shot sequences. Sam, with a hand-held camera, was taking close-ups of people’s faces. Riley, Sam’s assistant, was just behind him, holding canisters, ready to change the film when required. Lao stared at them, eviling.
Sam loved focusing on faces and objects on tables, the books people were reading, the games they were playing. He took pleasure in catching the expression of an old lady with a pixie face engrossed in a French novel. He lingered on a young man staring dreamily out of the window into a field of yellow flowers.
Most of the passengers were asleep and Sam stole their faces while they dreamt. Sleeping faces are a gift to the camera. There is in sleep an angel of distortion and a demon of beauty. In the far corner a man slept with his mouth wide open. Across, at a table of four, a child was asleep with its head tilted back in its moth
er’s arms. A girl in jeans and a yellow blouse lay with her head on the shoulder of her sleeping boyfriend. Sleep had given the girl charm, the boyfriend anxiety, the child abandon, and the grandfather who slept by the window an expression half grotesque, half benign.
While Sam filmed these faces, Lao was tempted to essay a character-reading of faces in sleep. Do criminals reveal their criminality while they doze? Do killers reveal a murderous aspect? What do our faces tell about us when we sleep, when we cannot hide the mind’s construction in the face? What aspect of us comes through?
Sam had finished stealing faces in the carriage, and had passed on to the next. But Lao went on eviling, staring at faces, seeing cracks here, delighting in ugliness there. He thought of Da Vinci’s grotesques, and revelled in the wicked humour of sleep.
5
The train sped past a landscape with blue flowers, a countryside with an ochre church, farmlands with oxen and tractors. Lao was stuck in his eviling. The mood of evil-mindedness had settled in him like a gnome. He couldn’t seem to shift it.
Staring at the red fabric of the seats and at the faces tinged with the redness, curious notions jumped into his mind. If travel is an escape, he thought, might we not be carrying with us the very things we are trying to escape?
At that moment the train plunged into a tunnel, there was a momentary blackout and Lao caught a glimpse of a figure at the window, attired like a dark magician. Again Malasso’s name slid into his mind. With a bow the figure pointed at something behind Lao and then vanished.
When Lao looked round he saw, in a flash, a horrible spectacle. He saw imps of regret, goblins of worry, red-eyed monsters of nasty thoughts, giants of deeds done, hybrid creatures of fear, ghommids of envy, bats of guilt, cloven-hoofed figures of lust, beings of terrible aspect. He realised they were the problems, fears, nightmares, worries, and guilt that people carried around with them. It seemed everyone’s troubles had accompanied them and crowded the compartment.
Lao saw them all in his eviling. He had seen them at the beginning of the journey, but had forgotten them. He noticed that not all the monsters had continued on the journey. Some might have dissolved on the way. Others might be lingering behind at immigration, faithful servants awaiting their master’s return. But most of the creatures were still on the train.
Our past obscures our future, Lao thought, grimly. We travel forwards, but live backwards. Travelling is no escape; only the panorama changes. We are stuck in ourselves. There is no escape, but maybe there can be a change of direction. Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.
6
Lao dozed off in the midst of these thoughts and when he woke he saw that Mistletoe was back. Her drawing book had been put aside and she was asleep with an innocent smile on her face. Lao imagined that she must have been a happy child before life brought her some unhappiness. He could see that travel brought back a measure of her happy childhood.
Maybe, Lao mused, staying in one place makes our monsters loom too large. Travelling gives them something to do. When we travel we take our troubles for a walk.
Maybe our monsters want their own Arcadia, somewhere they can be at peace, Lao thought, laughing to himself.
Then Mistletoe woke up, scanned the world beyond the window, and said:
‘We’re near Switzerland.’
‘That figures,’ Lao said.
‘Why do you say that?’
He shrugged. ‘Just when I’m beginning to understand something, we always arrive.’
‘I know,’ Mistletoe said. ‘Journeys are perverse. We arrive at our destination before we arrive at our revelation.’
‘Did you just make that up?’
‘I don’t know. It just slipped into my mind.’
‘Maybe it’s the spirit of the journey,’ Lao said.
7
They did not notice how the journey was altering them. They did not notice how each place they had arrived at, stayed in, and passed through, was subtly transforming them.
When they got off the train, they also did not notice the purity of the air, or the late afternoon light, or the porcelain blue of the sky. They were too engaged with the hassle of disembarkation. Jim gathered the troops together and each person was not only responsible for their own suitcases, but also for carrying down the film equipment in its tough cases.
A sort of military mood came over them as they got their luggage off the train at Basel. They had twenty-two pieces altogether. The luggage seemed to have acquired new weight, to have grown in size. Grown also was the crew’s capacity to bear it. It was as though their luggage had made them stronger.
Riley, with her fragile frame, carried the heavy camera cases as though she had become a slender female Hercules. Sam, with professional stoicism, helped his young assistant. Everyone pitched in – Propr, the temperamental sound man; Jute, the dour manager; Husk, with her nervous beauty; Mistletoe, with her smile; and Lao, presenter and poet. All pitched in, silently.
And even as they struggled with the chaos of their baggage, they were being worked on by the theme of their journey.
8
Is there a name for that peculiar feeling of getting off trains? The hermeticists say that things on earth are mortal counterparts of things in heaven. Plato’s ideal forms express the same idea. The person on a train does not move across a landscape: it is the vehicle that moves. But there is an illusion of movement. A train is a bridge between two realities, a space that enables people to take stock, to dream, to muse. It gives a sense of freedom. Maybe that is why people like train journeys.
At the end of a long train journey a phase is over. Gone is the fluidity of the place between. A new reality beckons.
To arrive means to become defined. To be, to do, to be done to. It may also mean having serious work to accomplish, with no time to adjust.
9
Their battle with the luggage, conducted grimly, had a comic side. Their boxes and cases were heavy and resistant. They fell when they were lifted, they acquired odd angles that made them more than an armful, and they managed to achieve all kinds of collisions between those carrying them. The luggage took on a life of its own, as though impregnated with the spirit of perversity. It became abstract and severe. Those rectangular shapes, those faceless lumps that people lug around with them, made the travellers seem like sinners with their sins in Hades.
Those inanimate objects, crammed tight and bolted, that carry useless necessities, mean everything to travellers and nothing. To lose the luggage would be traumatic but not fatal; and yet they drag their luggage behind them like crimes, like secrets.
10
Lao paused in his shifting and carrying and again a presence passed across his eyes. He saw the monsters had also come off the train. He realised that the monsters had not been left behind. They had merely grown more invisible on the journey, till it was as though they were not there.
Skulking behind the twenty-two pieces of luggage were the monsters they had brought with them. On the station platform they were getting acquainted with one another.
Lao was astonished to see his ghommids chatting with Jim’s trolls, to see Jute’s niebelungen gibbering with Riley’s gnomes, Sam’s harpies conversing with Mistletoe’s sprite. They seemed to keep no secrets from one another. They talked and laughed about their owners as if the evils they knew about gave them much amusement.
11
Lao saw all this, but didn’t register it. He didn’t really grasp it at the time.
‘What are you looking at?’ Jim said as Lao stood there staring at the stacks of luggage.
‘Nothing,’ Lao said, shaking his head. ‘It’s just that, for a moment, it seemed as if…’
‘Are you seeing things?’
‘I think so. I’m not sure.’
Jim slapped him on the back.
‘Join the club,’ he said, and went off to supervise the moving of the film equipment.
The luggage that
had been hauled off the train had been piled high on a motorised trolley and driven off to the exit, where it was to be loaded on to their waiting coach.
Lao stood on the platform aware that a theme-note was being played in him, with its variations and inversions. As he watched the others head for the exit, after all their exertion, it seemed to him that there were two kinds of experience in life: the experience of the moment as it is lived and the experience of it afterwards when the whole is sensed. Micro-experience, and macro-experience.
He watched the twenty-two pieces of luggage being driven away. There are twenty-two letters in the Jewish alphabet, twenty-two cards in the major arcana of Tarot, and twenty-two paths on the tree of life. He only discovered this synchronicity much later.
Then he would pay attention to the small print in the text of life.
12
While waiting for the luggage to be loaded on to the bus, Lao went wandering in the station. He came upon a large object on a plinth. All wheels and pulleys, it was like a whirring mechanical insect and it made screeching factory noises. He felt he was seeing something familiar in an unfamiliar guise. The machine disturbed him and he had to find out what it was.
Something about his encounter with the mechanical sculpture suggested the strangely pleasant feeling of being in the midst of a language he did not understand. And because he understood nothing, everything took on the quality of an encryption. Objects appeared in a new light.