by Ben Okri
And it was the horror that hides in all journeys that leapt out at me that morning on Waterloo Station.
3
The crew had lost its sense of humour; and I was beginning to find my sense of purpose. There was some agitation amongst the crew members. Filming had to be briefly halted. Jute was semi-hysterical, and Jim was trying to quieten her down. At first I assumed that they hadn’t quite recovered from the horror of being stuck in the lift. I stood there a while, looking at the mild frenzy of the travellers milling up and down the concourse, dragging their luggage, glancing anxiously up at the clock or up at the giant destination board. I dawdled. The hidden horror beneath journeys yawned in front of me. I was about to go and get myself another beer, while the commotion among the crew settled, when I saw Jim summoning me, waving frantically. I hurried over and learnt, to my surprise, that Jute had received, in her palm, from a completely unknown source, a blood-red piece of paper just like the one I had found on me. She too had received a message. She had read the message, was horrified by it, and knew she couldn’t possibly show it to anyone else. She stood there, surrounded by the entire crew, with the red message in her hand, looking round frantically and suspiciously at everyone, unable to believe that she had been slipped the note without being aware of it.
‘Surely you must know when you got it?’ said Husk impatiently.
‘Yeah, I would,’ said Sam.
‘You said you found it in your hand. So think back. When was your palm last empty? Was it in the lift, was it just now? It would help if you tried to remember.’
But Jute wouldn’t try; she just stared at us all as if she had suddenly found herself in a nightmare.
‘What does the note say?’ asked Propr.
‘We don’t know,’ replied Jim. ‘She won’t say.’
‘This has happened before, hasn’t it? It happened to you, Lao, didn’t it? What did your note say? You never told us.’
‘It didn’t say anything that’s anyone’s business but my own. Everyone should attend to their own nightmares and not go sniffing around in other people’s. And if you ain’t got no nightmares, acquire some. I’m off to get a drink.’
And so saying, I was gone. I went to the nearest bar, ordered, and drank. Mistletoe came and joined me. I got her an orange juice. We were silent.
The bustle of arrivals and departures was everywhere. Odd to see such whirling despair. The air fairly quivered. For every traveller there was a whole train of other people, invisible people, that they had brought with them. They were dragging their dead, their ghosts, their monsters, their etiolated shadows along with them, along with their luggage. I didn’t know that the world was so densely populated. Each person seemed to have five others with them. That’s what made the crowding so edgy. That’s why journeys, at their beginnings, are fringed with such tensions. Some people leave their ghosts, their dead, behind on the platform. Others carry them all the way. A few acquire new ghosts on their journeys, and on their way back home. I looked and saw that our crew fairly bristled with ghosts. We had brought more shadow-beings with us than anyone else in the station, apart from the tramps and a few big shots travelling first class. Maybe that is what failure is, carrying more ghosts and shadow-beings around than one’s psyche can manage. I could not tell how many I had with me, but judging by the freakish state of my mind, I must be fairly mounting with them.
4
Our initial instruction had been quite simple. At the end of our first meeting, Jim had said:
‘Let’s meet under the clock.’
We hadn’t met there. We had met haphazardly. They had been stranded in a lift while going up to film London from the air, and I had been early, for once, and had been wandering around, looking at faces, bumping into the restless neurotic energies of the crowd, till I had picked up so much psychic debris that I needed a drink to straighten myself out. And drinking now, in silence, pondering the crowd that seemed to replenish itself, full of individuals going nowhere except round and round, as if taking their private demons for a walk, I thought about the meeting that hadn’t taken place under the clock. I’m a bit like that; I think about all manner of tangential things. I like angles and odd turnings. Straightforward things bore me. In order to think about a straightforward thing I have to somehow first make it tangential. And so I thought about us setting out on our journey from under the shadow of the great clock, and what a different journey it would have been, launched from beneath such a symbol.
It occurred to me, as I got mildly pissed, that one way or another, we all set off on the road, take to ship, steal off at dawn, catch a lift on the highway, sneak out of our houses, under the shadow of the clock. I gazed now at the great black clock of the station, with its little white markings, its time partitions, and its hour and second hands crawling or speeding round the mighty sombre disc that makes time visible, makes it go round and round. I watched as it regulated and spun and made us nervy and neurotic. I gazed, mesmerised, at that great disc, on which so many eyes were riveted; and then something happened to my mind. I think I slipped off sideways into the mythical world that lurks within the giant ice-cube, where my great white horse dwells protected under the blistering sun of an endless desert. And my mind slipped in there, into its cool interiors, its boundless worlds, and I went a-wandering in free space, in time space, amongst the playthings of the spirit, in a place where there are no ghosts, no monsters, no nightmares, no evil, no failure, no fear, but only the original world, fragments of the original world, with Eden’s dawn in the air, and fresh flower fragrances, and a gentle sunlight of joy. This is the place I go to sometimes, if I’m lucky, when I’m lost in the desert. There I get to be happy amongst the first things, the first night, the first flowers, the first dew, the first thoughts, the first caress of breeze on the first living flesh, the first awakening from the first consciousness, the first blooming of the first flower, on the first garden, of the first earth, with the first thoughts of love opening in my first mind of an upright being on creation day. And it was there, in that zone, in that giant ice-cube space, concealed beneath the great white horse, that I danced among notions of the first Arcadia.
5
Intuitions in the Garden (1)
The sun was always the same, and summer was always touched with enchantment, and the garden was always fresh, and the flowers in their fragrances always seduced the air. And the wind blew over the gentle waters that had settled now. And the water flowed round the world, engirdling the earth, majestic and pliant, shimmering and mysterious. And the earth rumbled in its depth, and settled into solid crust on its outward form, and became impatient to adorn itself, so that it would look beautiful to the eyes of eternity. And so the earth became creative, and gave birth to trees with leaves that decorated its nakedness, and to flowers whose petals, varied in colour, manifold in form, waved to the loneliness of space. And the earth filled its vastnesses with grass and savannahs and the fine sheen of deserts and hid hope in the desert wastes in the form of oases. And it farmed its face with brilliant greens and blues, golds and reds, flaming pinks and diamond emeralds. And then, alone with all its beauty, the earth discovered the moving forms of birds and animals and humanity, and it fell in love with them, and made a home in its womb for them when they died, and provided them with all they needed when they were born. And the earth fed them, clothed them, housed them, admired their freedom and innocence, and was pleased that though they had the stars and galaxies, the immeasurable heavens above them, below them they only had her, the earth, a small globe of a garden in the fathomless reaches of the universe.
Here things bloom; things die; things are born; silence attends their beginnings and their ends. The wind wreathes the world with havoc and tenderness and songs. Freedom is woven into the fibre of things. Happiness is laced into the breathing material of all things. Love flows from the bird to the flower, and from the enigmatic calyxes to the bees and butterflies that know their language and take part in their dance. Rivers run through the
dreams of the earth. Lightning separates the realms. Gods hide in all things, folding infinite forms into the tiniest spaces, dispersing their formlessness into the wind and rain, into disasters and regenerations, into the sprouting of seeds or the rotting of dead flesh, into the insubstantiality of rainclouds or the substantiality of diamonds, or the heaving of volcanoes.
Intuitions in the Garden (2)
Creation and destruction were both part of the same song. No one looked from on high to pass judgement on them. No one suffered from close by to curse them with value. Life and death were the same thing. No one mourned from on high the passing of a robin, the death of a doe, the stillbirth of a dromedary, the collapse of a man in a cave near the mountain or the expiration of a woman on the banks of a passionate river. And no one mourned from nearby either. The earth accepted its guests as it does the falling leaves of autumn, the descending spiral of a meteor, or the quiet extirpation of a worm wriggling its last within the runnels of dust.
Everything was woven of the cloth of mystery. The earth was mysterious to herself; and flowers seeded and bloomed within its own mystery, its dark timeless smile. Rivers ran and danced in space, and ribboned the earth, silvery and changeable, unique in space, harbouring its own cities and indolent fishes, deep and darkly joyful in its own mystery too. And the wind blew from the first breath, and cleansed the world roundabout, and chased the waters on, and ruffled playfully the hair of trees and bushes, and sped the gentle seeds of lazy flowers over the great distances between being born and being real; and the wind cavorted and played, danced and was free, whistled and raged, whirled and twisted, as it felt, in its own immortal mystery.
And the sky had no name; and the stars had no designation; and the deep blue of the expanse, dotted with universes, with worlds, was deep in silence too. And outwards it all opened, and there were no measurements, no songs, no hope, no fear, no emotions, no signs, no horrors, no nightmares in space, or wandering the earth. The planets glided, elided, dissolved, stewed in vapours and gases, and regarded one another, across impossible reaches, in complete silence, and without wonder. And the sky, holding such incomprehensible wonders, was itself the home of dreaming, and its vastness soon became inhabitable when the faintly awakening beings on two legs began to find the vastness unbearable in its excess of mystery, their absolute terror of the unknown and the unknowable.
Intuitions in the Garden (3)
For the great sky, surrounding the nakedness on all sides, suggested a loneliness on earth that was intolerable in the mighty Universe. A loneliness that drove animals to extinction, a loneliness that would never trouble the flowers and trees, who have contemplated the loneliness anyway and found it fruitful and enjoyed the uniqueness it conferred on their blooming and terrestrial survival.
The trees and the plants, in pondering this uniqueness in all space, fell into a state of wonder, and began to produce their most beautiful flowers, their most flavoursome fruits. They delved deep into a happiness without end, a tranquillity without measure, a serenity deeper than the oceans, and a complete ease with their living and dying.
For they knew that, at one time, they breathed and were happy in the wide universe, with nothing like them weaving their colours or exhaling their fragrances anywhere in the world of innumerable stars. And in the knowledge of their originality they suffered not from loneliness but from the very source of consolation itself, from the very origin of grace, for there is something blessed about a unique thing, a thing of wonder.
And the trees and plants, the fishes and birds were enriched with this sober contemplation, and then forgot the nature of their contemplation, but kept the result, which was a serenity, a grace, a blessed carefreeness about the nightmares and the mysteries. And they incarnated beauty in their germination and fructification. They embodied solace. They breathed out tranquillity.
They had attended at dawn to the first things, had intuited the last things, had seen how all things are blessed by the star under which they chose to live, by the thoughts they chose to dwell on, and the orientation they grew by. They had chosen, at dawn, to wonder at self’s uniqueness, and happiness followed. They had chosen joy at self’s existence, and freedom followed. They had chosen the love of self’s regenerativeness, and prosperity followed; the necessity of self’s presence, and stillness followed; the certainty of self’s growth, and power followed. They had chosen the beauty of self’s death, and awareness followed; the sense of self’s continuance, and peace followed.
And so after the struggles of creativity, and the compensation of natural joy, nothing else concerned them. Nothing else was their business.
They left all the rest to the rest. The end of time, the beginning of things, the death of planets, the names of the force that made its sap to rise, the inclinations of the different winds, the taste of star-ash from far-flung galaxies, dying and living, these were not their business. The trees and plants, the fishes and birds, they had done all their thinking at dawn, and had the good sense to forget it all; but they lived out the results of their contemplation amongst first things, when the universe was still young.
Intuitions in the Garden (4)
And then came humanity, standing on two legs, making death into something bigger than life.
And then was born mourning, and great sorrowing, and death-mounds, and melancholy, and a terror of extinction, and a fear of the darkness, and dreadful speculations without solutions, only further speculations without end and without grace.
And then came Hades.
Then anxiety.
Then fear.
Then the fleetingness of happiness, and joy.
Then fled freedom.
Then grew the love of power, perceived antidote to dying.
Then confusion.
Then misery in the garden.
Then living became a treadmill, a thing to be endured, but not enjoyed. A thing not savoured, but soured.
Then fled our most intimate sense of immortality, the intuition that we are made of star-dust, and magic.
And then we dreamt of paradise, because we had lost it.
6
Hysteria was bristling everywhere on the concourse of the station. The crew were in disarray, like an army that is defeated before it sets out. The shabbiness of the whole thing delighted my infernal sense of humour; and put me in a mood to celebrate the omnipresence of hysteria, and to sing a hymn to journeys that go bad before they have begun. To begin with disintegration is wonderfully hopeful, because the resultant journey is either towards the finest pits of hell, or it’s a journey which can rise, by gentle gradients of unlikely grace, to a manageable kind of private heaven.
The hysteria of the crew, as hysteria generally goes, was magnetised to the point of maximum serenity, which is to say chaos, which is to say me. Jute suddenly took it into her head that she and I now had something in common because of the messages. I loathe having anything in common with anybody. It is distressing enough being human. Anyway, she came fluttering, no, storming over and asked to know what my message had said.
‘None of your bloody business,’ I snarled.
‘But we’re in this together,’ she pleaded.
‘No, we’re not. You’ve got your message, and I’ve got mine. You’ve got your stuff to deal with, and so have I. Why don’t you just get on with it, and leave me alone.’
‘You fight alone, you die alone,’ she snapped.
‘I fight alone anyway; and all death is dying alone.’
‘You’re such a miserable bastard.’
‘But I’m happier in my misery than you are in your happiness.’
She stared at me, and for the first time I saw tears sparkling in her eyes. She leant over to me and almost whispered:
‘The message scares me. I can’t tell you how frightened I am.’
‘Messages don’t kill,’ I said philosophically. ‘It’s what we do with them that matters. I’m ignoring mine, otherwise I’d spend all my time trying to puzzle it out, and then I’d g
o barmy, which I am already, anyway.’
This seemed to quieten her a little, but she still seemed different. She looked as if she was facing the prospect of an execution, or torture, or abduction. She looked a little dazed, as if nothing dramatic had ever happened to her before. I got a little bored with her anxiety, and was saved from being rude to her again by a signal from one of the crew. It was time to embark.
Jute, giving me a last look of sad solidarity, as if I were being left behind, hurried off to join the rest of the crew.
I went back to my beer.
My head was slightly spinning. Newspapers walking or hurrying past me bore notices of murders, serial killers, suicides, sex scandals, ministers entangled in fraud or corruption or vice, children sexually molested by teachers or parents or priests or strangers, or nuclear waste leaking into the world’s drinking water and poisoning the rivers, or acid rain devouring nature, of robberies, muggings, assaults on old ladies, or new space missions sent out to investigate distant planets, or racial murderers set free by blind justice, of genocides and perversions, or government cover-ups and dangerous scientific experiments. An endless array of horror stories. It’s amazing we don’t all go mad with the sheer avalanche of monstrous information that cascades down on us minute by minute. Sometimes it feels as if the planet is in its very last days, as if it is in a terminal spin, with everything screaming of an impending apocalypse. Nightmare stories on the news; nightmare stories wandering around in broad daylight. Our sleep clogged with horrors. Our waking hours crowded with despair. Death, decay, and destruction have taken over the air we breathe. We breathe in death, and breathe out neurosis. We killed off the mysteries in the name of civilisation; we murdered wonder in the crucibles of science – and left the world bare, empty, swimming with barren molecules, inert space, and glorified serial killers.