by Ben Okri
I felt glum, and my glumness cheered me up. The world isn’t as dreadful as all that. It’s just that we are shown only the dreadful things. Or maybe the world is even worse. Maybe, late in the morning of humanity, we killed off the secret springs of regeneration, and one by one the magnificent motors of nature are breaking down, leaving us stranded on a planet that will no longer sustain us because we have insulted and abused her too much. Maybe we have filled nature’s belly with vile radioactive dinners. Should we be surprised if nature starts to give up the ghost on us?
I got up, finished my drink, and staggered towards the others. Mistletoe was already ahead of me. The world weaved a little. Death wandered everywhere, having light-headed conversations with commuters, travellers, children, their distracted mothers, their pompous fathers, the preening young, the City gents, and the workers. How death conversed with them all, in a fluent cockney accent, or a high-flown accent, or a flat nasal Northern brogue. How death talked, how witty death was, witty to the baby, witty to the old, witty and jocund, talking to all and sundry, like a used-car salesman, or a garrulous taxi-driver. I saw death on the concourse, standing under the clock, looking out at us all, with a kindly smile on his lean face. And if you caught his eye, he nodded like a splendid gentleman with impeccable good manners. And he might sidle up to you and offer you his help. He’d talk you all the way to your train, or bus, soothing your unease at the beginning of your journey, laughing at your jokes, making a few witticisms of his own in a kindly voice, a few devastating cracks spoken softly, and said almost in passing so that you don’t notice them till much later when a lethal thought bubbles up in your head with the question: I wonder what he meant by that?
As we collected our luggage, death came and helped everyone like a friendly porter. Our luggage felt heavier than it had when we left home. (It is always heavier; other invisible luggage have inevitably joined their brothers.) As we begin to set off we look about us and for a moment we see beauty everywhere. The women seem sexier at the beginning of journeys; the men more mysterious. Everyone dreams a little of an incidental romance, of a pleasant adventure, of desirable distraction, of kindly forgetfulness. Travel is a sort of narcotic which you take in through the eyeballs. And death, ever officious, casts a spell over all voyagers, sprinkles us with the enchanted powder of romance, the magic powder of dreaminess, of vanishing vistas, of quaint nostalgia, of dissolving memories. We are leaving our world behind. Things start to recede from us before we begin to move. Our mind says farewell. Every journey is a little dying. Death is the train on which we travel, the bus on which we journey, the car that speeds us there, whether we arrive safely or not. Death is the vehicle of the voyage, but death is never its destination. For, really, if you have drunk as much as I have at the beginning of a journey, you will sense that there are no destinations. Destinations are illusions, merely where the eye comes to a stop, like seeing a wall, an apple, a table, or the face of a loved one. The gaze rests on an object; that is not a destination. A life rests in death; that is not a destination. A destination is different from a destiny.
7
As we lumbered towards the train, Jute hurried up to me, slightly breathless, and said:
‘I don’t trust any of these people. Don’t trust any of the crew.’
‘Then you are a fool working with us,’ I said.
‘I’m not including you.’
‘I don’t want to be excluded. I don’t want you to trust me, it bugs my space.’
‘You don’t really trust the others, do you? I mean, look at them.’
‘They seem as disreputable as ever. There’s been no change. I’d be worried if Jim had become fantastically successful since the last I saw him. I’d accuse him of sorcery. They are all still a bunch of losers, and that’s kind of comfortable.’
‘I’m not a loser,’ Jute said passionately.
‘No, you’re a corporate spy.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Oh, yes, you are.’
‘You don’t like me very much.’
‘I’m just being honest about what you are, a spy for the company, spying on us. You’re on their side against us, a little brave and incompetent band of outsiders. How can anyone spy on Jim, for God’s sake? Don’t you have a heart? It’s like spying on a tramp, or a baby. Anyway, what do you want? Why are you bugging me, if you get my drift?’
‘I’m not bugging you. I just want to talk.’
‘You’re still worried about your message?’
‘Yes.’
‘The only time people really want to talk,’ I said with malicious insouciance, ‘is when they’re scared of something. Did the message warn you about death?’
‘I don’t know if I’m supposed to say.’
‘Then don’t,’ I said casually, knowing it would make her spill.
‘Maybe I should.’
Then suddenly I didn’t want to know. To know would involve me in her problem. It would become my problem too. I’ve got enough of my own, thank you, to want to go taking on other people’s. Suddenly I felt something contaminating about Jute. She was definitely trying to pass on some of her terrors to me – a famous psychic device used by people all over the world. It works like this: you find someone to offload your deepest troubles and nightmares onto. That way you halve your nightmares and fears while the other person doesn’t get a decent night’s sleep till the problem is solved. Find enough people and you can keep halving your worries, till you’ve spread them out thin, and made your life bearable in the process. No, I don’t like being in people’s confidence. It’s like having a dose of radioactive fluid dripped in your ears, or injected into your blood. I hurried away from Jute before she shared her sinister message with me. I hurried and joined the others.
Sam, the cameraman, was talking to Mistletoe about art. Sam was saying something about Vermeer’s ability to tantalise without frustrating. Mistletoe spoke about Vermeer’s fascination with letters that were being read, secret messages received, about the moment of reading a private missive, the way he makes a private moment oddly public. She reflected on the fact that it was always women who received the letters, reading them alone; as if the paintings were private letters to us meant to be read alone. Then she talked about the mystery of the letters, and how we wonder what they say, and how Vermeer never tells us, leaving us in a state of an unanswered question, in a state of unresolved wonder, the way nature, or life, does.
Sam and Mistletoe had both studied art. Sam used to be a painter and felt he was no good, which he wasn’t, in fact he was abominable, and so he had decided to study to be a cameraman instead. He spoke often about wanting to use the camera as a brush, or the screen as a canvas. But, really, all he did was penance, punishing himself as much as possible for his failure to become an artist. And so he had made himself into a sort of stunts man, believing so much that he has to feel the pain if there’s to be any value in the work he’s doing. He was one of those nut-cases. One of the deluded. If he gets a simple shot, a perfect shot, as a gift of the moment, he distrusts it, and puts himself through incredible contortions to get a mediocre shot, which he values much more than the perfect gift of grace. Well, I think it’s a damn inefficient way to work. Or to live. Also, I think it stinks. It’s not the suffering that confers the value. If that were the case then we should come close to dying every time we breathe. We should nearly drown every time we drink. The heartbeats would be like hammer blows against our ribcage. The blood would scrape along the canyon of our veins. Walking would be agony. Sex would be excruciating. And going to the toilet would be like trying to expel the Empire State Building. I think the attitude that suffering confers value, confers authenticity, is decidedly suspect. I think it’s a neurotic relationship with life, with art, with value. The thing is its own value. And the value of things is always mysterious and enigmatic anyway. Diamond is worth more than water, unless you are dying of thirst. Suffering and martyrdom cannot turn bad art into good art. To my mind, waiting for pain and
suffering to confer value is a failure of imagination. And a victory for sentimentality. Some things are easy to look at, but take a lifetime to understand, and they keep changing with your understanding anyway. Some paintings. Some books. Some people. Anyway. Sam is hung up on suffering. I call it his Van Gogh complex, except that Van Gogh is a great artist, and I love his letters, his letters meant for me alone, I mean.
So there is Sam expounding his doctrine of suffering to my Mistletoe, who believes that art ought to be like breathing – breathing not as we breathe habitually, but proper breathing, which has to be re-learned, and practised, almost as a yogic discipline. That is her attitude to art. It ought to be like true breathing, breathing the way God – bless her heart – intended us to breathe, but which we’ve forgotten. We should create the way nature creates. So you can imagine their conversation. They would agree enthusiastically on most things, and think they were getting along splendidly, and each would think for a moment that they’d found a soul mate, till they would stumble on their central gospels, their artistic credo. Then the awkwardness would set in. Then one would seem like a stranger, suddenly, to the other. Then one would appear an impostor, a fraud. Then estrangement would creep between them, and disillusionment too, and the faint sadness at the loss of an ally, a fellow traveller, that they never had. Then silence would drift between them. Then, afterwards, mild suspicion. And then, forever afterwards, a mild resentment at the other person for not sharing their cherished doctrine, while sharing so much else of their taste in artists and writers, fashion and music. That’s what we are most intolerant of: other people who don’t share our private central doctrines, the pillars which hold up the secret deficiencies and visible strengths of our lives. Find a person’s secret doctrine and you have the key to them, the key to their distress and despair, the key to their self-love.
I gave Sam and Mistletoe another two minutes, predicting to myself the time it would take for her to declare him masochistic in his attitude to art. Meanwhile, we had been walking slowly in the thick crowd alongside the Eurostar train. My mind wandered. And I was beginning to think about the god of journeys when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Someone in the crowd had recognised me from previous documentaries I had foolishly fronted. The horror of recognition passed over me. I scampered away from the greeting that so seduces both the truly famous and the aspirants to fame. I am filled with dread at the easy familiarity which being recognised confers on you; the familiarity and the transparency, and the not knowing what to do with one’s face, and not having the right any more to one’s private dreams and fantasies. Not having the public freedom to be, the right to one’s reveries, one’s mind-wanderings, one’s easy occupation of space. One now had to properly acknowledge, with graciousness, tact, and forbearance, another human being, a complete stranger, smiling at you with warmth and tentative friendliness. I scampered away. I’ve seen too many morons quiver with shameless slobbering delight at being recognised. I’ve seen too many semi-famous idiots whose eyes fairly roam a crowd wondering when they are going to be recognised. I’ve seen too many who live only for the inanities of fame and I don’t want to be in the same bracket of perception. Call it pride. Call it shyness. Call it cussedness. I don’t care. But I can’t stand the distortion of it all. Besides, till that chap touched me on the shoulder, I was having a perfectly pleasant thought about the god of journeys.
Trying to get back to the thought, which was lost now much as a fish is lost when it wriggles out of your net (too bad, catch another), I heard Propr calling to me. They wanted to take shots of me moving with the crowd. I went over. The shots were quickly set up. I rejoined the crowd. How different everyone became when they knew they were going to be seen, however briefly, by millions. How stiffly some began to walk, how much more animatedly some talked, and even in those that affected disdain or indifference, how studied. That thing they call the camera, it chases away grace, it affects the truth it’s supposed to be recording. I wonder if the camera isn’t as corrupting as money. The shot passes; sweat gathers on my forehead. Mistletoe comes up to me.
‘Been talking to the cameraman,’ she says.
‘I know.’
‘Monstrous attitude to art. Believes good art can only come out of suffering, out of torture. He claims to read only prison literature, the literature of concentration camps, if there is such a thing. And the literature of true-life horror stories, the literature of pain. He’s mad.’
‘I knew you’d overstate your case.’
‘But he’s barmy.’
‘No, he’s not barmy. It’s just his own thing. If there’s no suffering, there’s no art.’
‘Someone ought to crush his fingers, then he’d be a genius.’
‘Even if you crushed his balls he wouldn’t be better than he is.’
‘It’s not suffering that makes an artist. It’s awareness.’
‘I know a lot of artists who suffered, and it made their art stink. Still, I suppose he’s got a point. Suffering frees some people from their fears, from their mediocrity. For once they can be true. And if they have joy in their souls that joy can be uncaged. They sing for their own consolation, and not for us, an audience. But one ought not to make a principle of it, one way or another.’
‘But for him the value of a work changes in relation to how much pain has gone into it.’
‘I know. It helps him be better than he might be. He drives himself, he punishes himself, and this makes him work harder…’
‘At being worse.’
‘Maybe. Actually, yes. He’s not the best in the world. But he works hard, and he has a certain naïveté, and he’ll do anything for a good shot, which means he is nice to work with if you don’t get into a deep conversation with him about art and suffering.’
Jim called me. They needed a different shot. I left the endless crowd. Sam was perched on the edge of a metal fence, upside-down, trying to get a unique angle on the crowd.
I said:
‘Why don’t you just turn the camera upside-down?’
‘Because it would be a different shot,’ he replied.
‘How?’
‘It would look different. It wouldn’t have the effort and strain of me hanging upside-down in it.’
‘That’s mystical nonsense,’ I said.
‘These things show,’ he said. ‘They come through.’
Jim wanted me near the front of the train. Propr was taking sound recordings of the crowd murmurings, the platform announcements, the screech of trains grinding on the rails, and, it seemed, the very air itself. Riley ran everywhere Sam went, carrying cases, reloading the camera, and helping him get into contorted positions. Husk bustled about with baggage, and hurried to sort out our seating arrangements and to get good carriages where we could film peacefully. Jute, overcome with a sluggishness more akin to resignation than to laziness, was helping with the movement of the luggage. She had a worried expression on her face, and she kept looking in all directions as if expecting something dreadful at any minute. Mistletoe was already at the door of our compartment, and she was making quick sketches of London’s skyline seen from the station, of the tumultuous horde pressing forward to get on the train, of birds in the air, of the pervasive brilliance of a late summer’s day, with strong shadows everywhere, and the clear outline of the glinting geodesic dome of transparent glass above us. The long smooth reptilian thread of the blue and yellow train was poised to set off, poised to rush past the countryside, beneath the waters, at wonderful speed designed to postpone time; rushing us away from home, in that mental free-floating state akin to dying, or being born.
8
Instead of following the ancient example of the sage who set out alone and travelled under the stars in a state of bliss towards the highest point of the white mountains, there to sit and contemplate the mortal aspects of eternity – I like a fool travelled with a band of fools in the womb of metal at the speed of thoughtlessness towards a reality that poets found it necessary to invent.
; The homeless are all there, left behind in the streets and the effacing arches. The dying swell and heave in hospitals and alone in lonely rooms. Those ridden with excruciating diseases and terminal illnesses writhe in courage and terror in private places or in hospital wards or amongst friends and family who look at them with fear in their eyes as they slowly disappear from the world, limb by limb, devoured by an invisible realm that encroaches on this one. The mad swing still in the broken axis of their beings. The troubled in mind can’t find a way out of their troubles. Refugees anxiously pace black rooms praying with rosaries or beads for a new hope and a new freedom, while bureaucrats turn their files into endless corridors of cold facts. All over the world famines and wars are in great unholy feasts, gobbling up the bodies of men and women and children, with young babies left to starve, and young men wildly roaming the countryside full of hate, and death growing luxuriantly in fields and breeding in refugee camps. All over the world hatred kindles, death squads fly, dictators execute dissenters, terrorists generate havoc, serial killers buy drinks and chat up innocent women in bars. There are aeroplane disasters, earthquake victims entombed alive beneath indifferent rubble, ships that sink at night, hurricanes and tidal waves that crush the lives of thousands, buses with school children that overturn, and scientists without accountability playing the sinister Frankenstein game, meddling with the matchless mysteries of mortal life. All over the world, presidents are deaf, prime ministers are out of touch, the young stumble towards rude awakenings, the aged stumble towards the long dream of reckonings, those in between are weighed down with the apparent pointlessness of it all. And I, in my heart, where no poison or cynicism ever reaches, I seemingly with a band of fools, who might well be a band of seekers too, I am travelling in disguise towards the place where Hades is averted, turned away, transformed into something else: a hint of paradise lurking in this great universal wound of living.