In Arcadia

by Ben Okri

  We never make the journey that we think we are making.

  Part 2

  Book 3

  1

  Everyone should have their own windmill, their own thing to tilt at, their own eccentricity. Every member of this crew was odd. They all had a little something wrong in their heads, and it was this little something wrong that brought them together. They were all engenderers of chaos.

  When they got on the train, speeding towards the great underwater tunnel, they brought havoc to the first class compartment which they had now established as a base for filming. Jim had managed to sabotage a whole family’s peace of mind by getting them to move three times because he needed their table. He managed to alienate all the fellow passengers because he kept pointing at them, saying how odd they looked, and urging Sam to film them all as interesting specimens of stressed humanity. And Sam, in his element, did close-ups of many faces, dashing from one to the other, pointing his camera at couples away on discreet holidays, at businessmen on secret missions, at old ladies who wanted to be left alone, and at families who had an instinctive dislike of the camera’s intrusiveness. Jute was herself busy on mysterious trips, tearing up and down the aisle, kicking and bumping into people accidentally. Husk and Riley were rushing around with clapperboards and films, behaving as if the most significant and sacred events were taking place. And Propr kept dangling his furry microphone over people’s heads like a white fruit or a Dada exclamation mark, as if he were trying to record their thoughts. Every now and again he would tell people to be quiet, till one of the passengers couldn’t stand it any longer and burst into an explosion of expletives, swearing at us for wrecking what he had hoped would be a peaceful journey.

  This man was so apoplectic that Jim became fascinated by his rage. Seeing him as an instant metaphor for the stress of the world that had given rise to the Arcadian legend, Jim immediately directed Sam to film the poor man. This made his rage even more towering, and self-destructive. It was wonderful to behold a man so vainly bursting his lungs to illustrate the leaping theme of our journey. For one illuminated moment we all gazed at him, mesmerised, for he was modern man, helpless in his illogical intemperate fury, ranting and lashing out against the universe, tumbling into madness, beyond redemption, powerless, alone, alienated, spinning out of control, less than a man, less than an animal. He raged like that against everything that his exhausted brain could conjure, government taxes, difficult women, asteroids, cancers, ruptured colons, hospital closures, shopping malls, terrorists, absence of private spaces, Loch Ness monsters, child molesters, inconsiderate musicians, pointless television programmes, too much sex everywhere, too many old people; then, abruptly, he sat down, collapsed into a heap, and then shrank, and went on shrinking till he was nearly invisible. The camera stayed on him the whole time till he had exhausted his radioactivity. The camera knew it, and recognised a distant cousin in the radioactive disintegration: the man had been possessed by Hades.

  After the possession passed, as after a thunderstorm, the air cleared, and we began to see.

  For a moment filming stopped. We sat down to our breakfasts and stared out of the windows silently.

  We watched our own lives go past in the shape of the suburban houses, the drab back gardens, the houses that seemed sadder and more monotonous as we sped on.

  We were in time’s hurtling capsule, death’s speeding capsule. Oh, those back gardens, those tilting houses, the lives lived in little paces, such mightiness in potential in such small places. Such drabness, such sameness. We sped past them all, past the back view of our lives. The way it seems to strangers, never to us. What have we settled for, under this glorious sun? How did our lives lose so much colour, so much outline? The back view of suburban houses is the very mirror of our receding soul: of Hades advancing, of time shrinking, of death anonymising.

  2

  First there was Eden, then the Fall; then the Golden Age, then the descending eras of Silver, Bronze and Tin; and then there was Arcadia.

  Arcadia is our secular Eden. It is both a real place in the Peloponnese and an imaginary place. In legend, it is the birthplace of Hermes. It was first dreamed up by Theocritus, but made more famous by Virgil. In Virgil’s hand Arcadia became an imaginary landscape of lovers and shepherds, a pastoral realm, a place of strangely disordered passions, faintly presided over by the absent shadow of the great god Pan. A place of dreaming, and songs, an oasis, a refuge from the corrupting cities, a semi-ideal landscape, a qualified paradise. A place with the quietly troubling presence of death, and exile, and stony mountains, and suicide, and sinister shadows, a place that cannot be dwelt in for ever. Then, with the passing of centuries, something happened to Virgil’s Arcadia. It became transformed into a terrain of the mind, a terrestrial paradise, a place of tranquillity and rural calm, the domain of the yearning spirit.

  Arcadia is a dream of city-dwellers, of people exiled from nature. In the old days, everyone had access to a bit of nature. Peasants worked the fields, and lived and suffered within nature’s cycles. In the days before the mass deforestation of the earth, even city-dwellers found themselves surrounded by woods. From the lowly peasant to the king, all had access to nature, to the cyclicity of things, to the reminder of something greater than themselves. Now nature is more and more absent. Eden has shrunk to a city back garden. But the little garden, the town park, reminds us of what we have lost. And they connect us to the quiet vastness of the lost thing much as a lake reminds us of the sea. It keeps the dreaming alive.

  Arcadia is always elsewhere. For Virgil and the Romans, it was in Greece. For us now, it is a vision of the countryside, of hills, dells, meadows, valleys, brooks. The great god Pan is not dead. The great god Pan is refracted, but forgotten. Our modern neurosis is Pan’s revenge. Our craving for nature is our craving for reunion with the sublime, for oneness, for rejuvenation.

  3

  Suburbia sped past, shabby under the brilliant August sun. Towns, fields, little churches, cricket greens, shopping centres with imitation brick structures. Back gardens, patches of dry green, like contemplating the ocean in an empty bucket. Dreariness. Pallidness. People sunning themselves and staring dreamily at the hurtling train, staring and thinking of journeys to faraway places, of adventures. (Or just what a menace trains are to their lives.) When the train speeds past, and disappears, a little of the light of dreaming goes out in your eyes. Perhaps that is why all over the world people wave at trains, wave at the people on trains. Perhaps they are waving at dreams of escape, of a better life, of freedom. We, voyagers on trains, carry their aspirations with us. We have become glamorised, touched with grace. We become instant metaphors of life’s journey, arcing from past to present to future. When they wave they are saying: take a little of me with you wherever you are going, on your adventures, and don’t forget those of us at home, tending the gardens, guarding the home fires…

  Golden sunshine all around. Shadows solid in fast glimpses. Arcadia is a place of strong sunlight and strong shadow. Where there is illumination there must also be solid shadows, patches of mystic darkness.

  The train meandered through open countryside that received the golden light gratefully. Such gold is rare in lands that know long winters. And with wondrous radiance, it makes the land swim in something akin to worship. The gold in the sky is like the appearance of a benign god, spreading benedictions all through the land, deep into its next harvest. On days like this happiness becomes visible.

  4

  Intuitions in the Dark (1)

  Imagine the shimmer of sunlight on bright things and the approaching tunnels. Consider the swift movement from light to darkness. All tunnels have strange effects on the minds of people. The vistas of the world disappear, and the world surrenders to an omnipotent darkness. Such a tight space, such vast implications of darkness. The mind contracts. The spirit folds inwards. An open sky gives way to a closed world. And for a moment a hush descends on the travellers. Night has come upon everyone. A brief night of the m
ind as of the eyes. A frisson of incomprehension. A hint that the world is not all we see, that the world is an invention of our senses. A flash of the mind unmoored, afloat, in a dark space. When the light of the world goes out, the mind, briefly, goes out too. And then there is a swift return to a primeval condition, when darkness was a god, a god as revered and as strong as the god of light. But light can be manufactured. Darkness, technologically, has not been manufactured. In society, the opposite is true: it is easier to make darkness than it is to create light.

  5

  Intuitions in the Dark (2)

  Tunnels give way to open spaces. The spirit widens, experiences sudden liberation. The spirit contracts again when we enter another tunnel. The dark becomes less terrifying, the open spaces less liberating. But when we emerge through darkness into open countryside, and see people walking, or playing in fields, or sauntering along with their restless dogs, we look at them more warmly, more intensely; we fix our eyes on them, and stare without judgement or opinion any more. For a moment, we see purely, and let the world speak to us in a language deeper than words, a language of the sea-bed of humanity, from the place where the gods used to whisper to us about our essential nature. Then, for a moment, the inscriptions are everywhere, and all reality becomes pure inscriptions without words.

  And then comes another tunnel, and an inward seeing. The shock of being thrown on that inward darkness which reveals an inward light. Memories, faces, scraps of thought, fractions of intuitions, hints of the future, race past in the mind’s inward space. The tunnel makes us see inward, against our will. An open-eyed dreaming ensues. Thoughts become stiller; thoughts experienced in no language, but in the material of consciousness, sweeter for being in this prima materia of the spirit, the original currency of the mind, the elastic, intangible language of air. Tunnels make you think things. If you were asked to define them, you simply would. There would be no ‘abouts’, no subjects. Just pure thinking in the light of the inward dark.

  6

  Intuitions in the Dark (3)

  Then another exposure to the world. Fields and factories and trees and flowers and the distant vistas and churchyards and graveyards all crooked and children playing football. And a smile raised to the face as the mind bubbles up from deep down to the open sky of consciousness. A gentle soaring, a changed gear of thought, from solitude to the communality of the eyes, from a private world to a shared world, from solitude to sunniness. The feeling of sunlight warming the eyeballs. The gaze resting on the daisies and the oak trees. When the announcement sounds, crackling over the loudspeakers, telling us of our approach to the grand tunnel that takes us under water, where we will travel at great speed for twenty minutes, the spirit changes, the smile freezes, the mind prepares for immersion, for dislocation, for paradox. The mind goes into one of its finer acts of denial. It pretends not to think of death when in fact that is precisely, indirectly, what, deep down, it is thinking about and preparing for, even when it is aware that it is perfectly safe…

  7

  Intuitions in the Dark (4)

  Unreality dislocates the body, sends the mind into contortions. A tunnel is a mental event; a technological creation of a primal condition. A tunnel is a dark spiritual event, a manageable crisis, a reinvention of the caves which nature creates in mountains, under water, beneath rocks. Civilisations go through tunnels. Eras go through them. Cultures go though them. The darkness unfurls questions about reality. Outer and inner become blurred. And philosophy is born.

  In tunnels the mind undergoes a little initiation. All initiations into the mysteries of life take place in dark spaces. The Orphic rituals were enacted in caves. The ancient Egyptians held their rites and rituals of rebirth in dark tombs in pyramids. Self undertakes its rituals of differentiation, of individuation, in darkness, in crisis. In tunnels we rehearse dying. Tunnels are a little death, a death with the senses wide awake, an open-eyed borderline between dying and living. In this state first principles spring on to the stage of the spirit, certainties dissolve, fears surface, anxieties multiply, and questions float everywhere like sinister fishes in the calm under water of the mind. How much more so when the tunnel is under water, when disaster can strike at the slightest breach of technology’s great walls?

  8

  Intuitions in the Dark (5)

  Going underground, in a tunnel, through darkness, is different to being in the air, above the ground. In the latter, you are above the world, rehearsing death in its soaring phase, freedom aflight, surveying the kingdom of things, of the terrestrial realm, among the clouds. Above, the mind drifts with notions of angels, of the heavens, of weightlessness. But in the former, you are in the earth, below the surface, encompassed by matter, floating through the womb of beginnings, for birth begins in darkness, the first and most momentous journey of them all, or the last. Or the place of destiny.

  For the womb is as much destiny as chamber. The womb contains it all, inner light, first formations, rehearsal of all the future stages. The womb is the microcosm of the world. It is the primal stage, the first drama, the original theatre. We are delivered from the inner womb to the outer womb. The world is a giant womb too, in which, maybe, we rehearse being born, rehearse our futures, prepare our ends.

  The world is as much a destiny as the womb is, surrounded by sky and air, water and fire and matter. And all of humanity is but one being, one multiple child, one cell, one idea, one thought, one drama, enclosed within a stage.

  And the ether beyond the sun, the universe at large, has its greater darkness, encompassing, much as the womb does.

  And speeding in a train, within a tunnel, is much like a movable pod or womb, a journey through death as towards light. But it is the death aspect that is the most enlightening. For how we are in that movable dying tells us how we will be in the light of the life to come. The tunnel gives meaning and value to the light, if we get there…

  And it was in the tunnel, in the dark stage of an unscripted initiation, that the unfolding drama of the muddling crew revealed its next act.

  9

  Darkness loves mischief, and forces out revelation. And as filming was temporarily halted because of the tunnel, and as the crew hung around, performing their time-filling acts, the darkness pounced on Jute and loosened her fear. Suddenly, she began to scream. And what she was screaming about seemed to have something to do with the peculiar message she had received at the beginning of the journey.

  ‘My death is so unimportant,’ she cried. ‘Who cares about anybody’s death anyway?’

  Jim hurried over to her. She was chewing her handkerchief. Her cheekbones were accentuated by the alternating darkness and light of the tunnel.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Jim asked.

  ‘I just saw Malasso, and he was trying to kill me.’

  ‘Have you seen him before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then how do you know it was him?’

  ‘Just a feeling I had. A creepy, evil feeling.’

  ‘But it could have been anybody.’

  ‘It was him all right.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘I am. It was him. He looked evil, and he was trying to kill me.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because I’ve got the map.’

  ‘What map?’

  ‘You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, what map?’

  ‘Can’t tell you, or he’ll try and kill you too.’

  ‘You’re making this up, Jute.’

  ‘Believe what you like, my death is so unimportant anyway.’

  ‘Stop saying that.’

  ‘It’s true though.’

  ‘No, it’s not, and you know it.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Jute, softening.

  ‘Where did you see him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man you said was trying to kill you.’

  ‘Here, right in front of me, in the darkness.’

  ‘And how did he try t
o kill you?’

  ‘With a knife.’

  ‘A knife?’

  ‘Yes, a short knife.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘Only what he’d said before.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘In the message.’

  ‘What message?’

  ‘The message I got, the red one.’

  ‘Oh, that one. What did it say? You never told us.’

  ‘Can’t tell you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘All I can say is that it’s not terribly important if I die. Or you. Or you,’ she said, pointing at each one of us in turn with her long crooked vengeful finger.

  Then she fell silent, as we thundered through the darkness of the tunnel…

  10

  When Jim got back to his seat he was surprised to find an envelope on the table, with his name neatly typed on it. He looked all around him in the dim light of the carriage. All the other crew members were either busy at one thing or another, or snatching a brief sleep before the frenzy of filming was resumed.

  The envelope was white, his name typed in black. When he opened it, looking about him all the time, he found nothing inside but a set of instructions concerning the next stage of the journey. He breathed a deep sigh of relief. He had been beginning to believe that there was truth in the hysterical cries of two of his crew members claiming that they had received messages hinting at dreadful things, messages seemingly delivered from thin air.