The Age of Magic

by Ben Okri

  He knew he wasn’t alone in his confusion. Many have thought Goethe’s Faust Part Two incomprehensible. He knew that even the great French poet Gérard de Nerval, its first French translator, deplored its obscurity. But Lao was fascinated by its boldness and wildness, and how it belonged constantly to the future.

  To read the book is to journey into the mind of Faust, the representative mind. It was in the underworld of that mind that they sought the ideal that is Helen of Troy.

  4

  Why was Lao making this journey? Because he suspected that on the journey might be found the keys to the treasure house of Arcadia.

  So far they had been travelling in the world, by train. But to find the essence of Arcadia he would have to travel in a different way, into a text, into himself, to its original and lasting place. He would enter Arcadia through the collective unconscious. This Arcadia would not be found on the map. Helen of Troy is the key to that realm.

  5

  Lao lost himself in Goethe’s verse, the peculiar characters, the complex philosophies. His mind cleared only when he looked up and saw Mistletoe’s outline against the mountain. She sat still, lost in the rugged mountain of her ancestry.

  All things are ideas, he thought. Solid things are condensations of primal energy. That is why mountains near lakes enchant us. They suggest different stages of the creative process. Things we touch and feel reassure us. That’s why material things are comforting. They make the body feel at home. But something in the body must also feel at home in the body. It is that something inside us that responds to beauty.

  The mountains move me because they touch something in me older than time. It is to the beauty in me that the beauty of the lake and sky speaks. The body, alive, breathes air. The spirit breathes light.

  6

  Inspired, he went into a deeper meditation. Arcadia, he thought, is an idea. It began inside us. But abstractions defeat us. We need real and visible things. Even miracles must be concrete. To believe in the existence of God we need God to put in an appearance, to be visible, which would make us believe less. We lose our way because we can only believe in evidence. We lose our way with the very senses we use to verify.

  Seeing is believing, they say. But what is seeing? Do we see with the eyes only? Do we not only see the effects of light? The eyes are imprecise instruments of complete vision, he thought. We need higher instruments. The instrument of poetry, the organ of intuition, which could supply to consciousness the highest data.

  7

  While he was reflecting, he attempted a definition of Arcadia.

  A resting place between journeys.

  Flowers in a garden.

  Trees among rocks.

  A beautiful little town along a highway.

  An oasis.

  A weekend among week days.

  Poetry in the midst of prose.

  A drawing among words.

  A song on a journey.

  Music in the silence.

  Silence in the music.

  An act of love in the midst of hatred.

  A dialectical pause.

  Holidays.

  He let his mind soar. He remembered that Novalis somewhere had written that philosophy is homesickness. So is beauty, he thought. But homesickness for where, or what? For a home that no home on earth can satisfy, a home of which Arcadia is a symbol. A balm for that perennial homesickness. The promise of complete happiness, deferred.

  Book 7

  An Interval in the Enchantment of Living

  Section 1

  1

  That evening they had a muted dinner with the rest of the crew. Everyone seemed different somehow, and a little preoccupied. Jute, strangely on edge, kept looking at the door, as if expecting someone to walk in. She was wearing a velvet evening dress and looked pretty in her make-up. Riley kept twitching in her seat. Propr hummed a tune to himself through most of dinner. They all drank rather a lot and talked at length about the day’s shoot. Sam had achieved his wish. Hanging from the helicopter door with a winch, he had managed splendid and difficult shots of the mountain.

  ‘I have never been more scared in my life,’ Husk said about her first helicopter experience.

  ‘How did you overcome your fear?’ asked Mistletoe.

  ‘Sheer necessity,’ replied Husk.

  They talked about the flight, how the winds on the mountains had caused hair-raising moments.

  As they were talking, Jim was drinking steadily. He looked haunted. He muttered something about the budget and about money expected which hadn’t arrived, but the others were too engrossed in the technicalities of filming trains from helicopters to hear him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Lao asked Jim eventually.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘You’re unusually quiet.’

  ‘I talked too much yesterday. I hope you didn’t pay any attention to what I said about you at dinner. I got a little carried away. I’m not quite myself.’

  ‘None of us are. It’s something about the journey.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Did you know that the word devil means the father of lies?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So your experience was with the father of lies.’

  ‘Right,’ Jim said dully.

  ‘The Devil, it would seem, is the greatest illusion of all.’

  ‘Really…’

  ‘In the Tarot, The Devil represents adversity. They say it is the reason why we sometimes run with fire on our heads towards the sea, or towards Arcadia.’

  Lao could see that Jim did not want to talk about any of it. His face was closed and turned away. Then as if a new thought had occurred to him, Jim said:

  ‘So you believe, like Goethe, that in some weird way the Devil’s doing God’s work?’

  ‘I have heard it whispered,’ Lao said, surprised himself by what he was saying, ‘that behind the mask of the Devil is an angel’s face.’

  Jim said nothing.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Lao asked again.

  Jim looked at him thoughtfully for a long moment. Then he said, ‘This journey will either destroy me, or it will be the making of me.’

  2

  On that late summer’s evening, Lao and Mistletoe crept away from the group and made for the party. The wind was warm. The sky was gold and blue, deepening to indigo. The breath of summer flowers on the wind made them feel good to be alive.

  Above the houses, something glowed. It was as if the visible world concealed an enigma whose answer lies in pure dream. As they walked, Lao had the weird sense that the world was a dream, and that behind that dream unknown gods watch humanity. The notion troubled him, made him shiver. But the sense of being watched persisted. Maybe I’m imagining it, he thought. But what if I’m not? Who is watching and why? Is it to see what we do with this magic stuff of life? Then why don’t they intervene from time to time, Lao wondered?

  Maybe they do, he thought. Maybe it’s all a dream in which the dreamer learns. Then we wake to an understanding that we dimly had all along.

  3

  They passed gabled houses, wooden chalets, picture-book buildings. The clock on the clock tower impersonated the moon. The streets were empty and the houses silent. The statue of a legendary hero appeared in the dark. The town was like a stage upon which an arcane ritual was to be enacted.

  ‘Do you get the sense we’re being watched?’ Mistletoe asked.

  ‘I was just thinking that.’

  ‘Maybe we’re the ones…’

  ‘Doing the watching?’

  ‘Watching ourselves?’

  ‘In a supernatural way.’

  ‘I was just thinking that too.’

  It occurred to them then that this feeling might be happiness. They were perfectly balanced between illusion and reality.

  4

  If they knew how, they could have walked through the mirror of beauty into a shining world. In that moment, between strides, they could have seen that nothing was meant to be, but on
ly what they made it. They could have rewritten their lives on the margins of the book of life.

  It was a near perfect moment for them under the stars.

  But the mood of the party would change all that.

  5

  The dancehall was dark, smoky, overcrowded. The music was loud. Strobe lights writhed across walls and snaked over dancers.

  Everyone seemed a little nervous. The women had glassy-eyed stares and the men hung around striking listless poses like people awaiting the messengers of the new.

  Then the music improved. Lao and Mistletoe began to dance. They danced to cleanse the body of staleness. They danced themselves into a controlled trance, into their private myths. Mistletoe’s movements had a jagged beauty, a style all of her own, fractured geometries of Dionysus. Lao combined flamenco, salsa, and African, surrendering himself to a compendium of dances. When they had run out of their personal repertoire they began making up new dances in spontaneous invention.

  An electrifying energy gathered in the dancehall. Something strange was brewing. Everyone was soon carried away by the inspiration of the music and by the zeitgeist mood that descended on them. Happy thoughts in the music brightened the eyes of the dancers. They were all briefly magnetised by a new rebellion, and every part of their bodies smiled seductively. They danced themselves into signs and symbols, and celebrated the depth of mystery and joy in the body.

  Mistletoe threw herself into a mountain bodysong. Lao danced himself into a blue space in which he heard someone say:

  You have to find the treasure or die. The clues are everywhere.

  He spun around, and saw a six-pointed star on the wall. Everyone else was lost in their dance. Across the hall a stranger in a white suit smiled at him. Lao blinked, and the stranger was gone.

  6

  Mistletoe was shouting something at him. He leant towards her.

  ‘All we need is a clear sign,’ she said loudly in his ears.

  ‘For what?’ he shouted back.

  ‘Often we just don’t know how to be.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That’s why people need gurus and icons.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To know how to be.’

  They were shouting into the music and dancing at the same time. Lao could not entirely make out what she was saying but he felt she was speaking as if an important notion had occurred to her under the inspiration of the dance. She began saying something about how people are inducted into the zeitgeist when her face clouded over. An anxious look came over her.

  Lao turned to see what she was staring at. In a corner of the hall the young man still knelt. He hadn’t changed position since the afternoon. He had merely moved indoors.

  7

  Mistletoe was upset that the young man had taken her remark to such an extreme. Such a thing had never happened to her before. She took Lao to a quiet corner and explained what had passed between her and the young man. She was careful to place the whole incident in the realm of youthful folly. She left it to Lao to dispense a solution.

  ‘Send him on a quest,’ Lao said after thinking for a moment and still breathing heavily from the exertion of the dance. ‘That will transform him, and he’s ready for it.’

  ‘What kind of quest?’

  ‘Give him something noble to do.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Up to you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘You cast the spell on him. Use it now for his own good.’

  ‘I didn’t cast a spell on him.’

  ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘You did. Why would he still be kneeling otherwise?’

  Mistletoe was silent.

  ‘Either you use that spell for his own good, or you have to be cruel to him. And I’d rather you weren’t cruel.’

  ‘Why do I have to have anything to do with him, for God’s sake?’

  ‘You already do.’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Look at him. He’s a small town kid who’s bored. He’s just looking for something to be obsessed about, to give his life meaning.’

  ‘Then use that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Send him to find what he’s looking for.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You must have an idea.’

  ‘All right. Send him to find the Grail.’

  ‘The Holy Grail?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘No one goes looking for the Holy Grail nowadays.’

  ‘Don’t they?’

  ‘It’s not the Middle Ages, you know.’

  ‘So much the better.’

  ‘Why don’t you do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Send him on the quest for the Grail.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t cast the spell on him. You did.’

  ‘I did no such thing.’

  ‘The evidence is kneeling right over there.’

  ‘He cast a spell on himself, using me.’

  ‘Then use him to uncast the spell. Or use the spell for something good.’

  Mistletoe paused, then she said:

  ‘What do we even know about him anyway?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He might have something to do with him whose name can’t be mentioned.’

  Lao scrutinised the kneeling young man again. Already people were gathering to look at him in puzzlement. Lao said:

  ‘Even if that’s the case, use it. Use the energy for something amazing.’

  ‘Okay,’ Mistletoe said. ‘But you do it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You seem to know what to do. You had the idea. The whole thing just irritates me.’

  ‘But I didn’t cast the spell.’

  ‘In which case,’ said Mistletoe, solemnly taking his hand, ‘I give you the power of the spell and the right to use it.’

  Lao, taken aback by her remark, gazed into her eyes.

  ‘Okay, I accept,’ he said, as if he too had been put under a spell.

  8

  At that moment the young man caught sight of Mistletoe. His eyes lit up, and then dimmed. Lao indicated to him and he stood up and came over, many eyes following him as he walked. He stood before Lao and Mistletoe, pale and ardent, with a delirious passion in his eyes.

  Lao looked deeply into the young man’s eyes. He saw a fine pure soul, a confused young man waiting for the call. He saw idealism, sensibility, and suicidal thoughts. He recognised him as one of those rare youths who have once been spirit children and he was surprised to find him here in the west. He saw in his eyes the mark of one not entirely of this world, one who would have to make a great effort to accommodate himself to it. He felt sadness for the difficulties the young man would endure, and admiration for his eventual triumph.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Nothung,’ the young man said.

  ‘Who gave you that name?’

  ‘My father.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘No.’

  Lao wanted to address the young man’s soul in a language beyond words. He was thinking, we are made in freedom but live in our own prison. He was thinking, we are actors in a play. He was staring at Nothung, holding him fast with a penetrating gaze. Curious notions began to drop into Lao’s mind. He found himself thinking about the silent watchers of the human drama who are fascinated by what each person chooses to become. He had the notion of being in the same drama, over and over again, actors in an infinite play.

  ‘My name is Lao,’ he said, ‘and this is Mistletoe. We are on a journey to Arcadia. What do you seek?’

  Nothung touched the pendants round his neck with nervous hands.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you are seeking something?’

  ‘Yes.’ />
  ‘You’re a musician?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And music is not what you seek?’

  ‘No. I have music already,’ Nothung said modestly.

  Lao was about to speak, but Mistletoe touched his shoulder. She stepped forward and took Nothung’s hands in hers, surprised by how cold they were, and she said, ‘I want you to go find the Grail.’

  ‘The Holy Grail?’ the young man cried.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But where?’

  ‘That’s what you have to discover.’

  ‘But I’m nobody, a simple musician, in a small town.’

  Mistletoe was silent. Nothung looked at Lao for help. Lao shrugged.

  ‘Everyone must find their own grail,’ Lao said.

  Nothung stood transfixed.

  ‘This is what you must do,’ Mistletoe commanded softly, ‘or you will live on your knees, even if you are the king of the world.’

  The young man blinked, as if he had just woken up.

  ‘Then that is what I will do,’ he said quietly.

  He looked around, saw people he knew staring at them and, suddenly overcome with embarrassment, hurried out of the dancehall and into the dark.

  9

  When the young man left, they tried to continue dancing, but inspiration had deserted them. The spirit of dance had gone.

  Lao began to find the party raucous and the music displeasing. They had a drink, tried another dance, but all at once the music seemed out of tune with their mood. Deciding that their revels had ended, they went out instead into the warm breezy night.

  They walked through dream-currents and enchantments. They walked through past and future time. They did not much notice the present. The lake quivered with dark-light. The mountain brooded, dark against dark. They lingered at the lake’s edge, and listened to the wind in the mountains.