by Ben Okri
‘The lady you are looking for is outside. I think maybe she is crying.’
The group hurried out and found Husk in the middle of the street, fighting back her tears.
12
They trudged off to dinner, with Husk in their middle, resolutely silent. Her thin lips had never been pressed tighter, her eyes had never seemed meaner, an evil mood emanated from her; and no one dared address a word to her or look into her Medusa face.
They sat around two joined tables outside an Italian restaurant. Jim had been there before and knew the food to be excellent. He was in good spirits. He was perfectly typical that way: once the main problem is solved, nothing under the sun interferes with the pure pleasure he takes in his dinner. He ordered wine. The group was grim round the table. Everyone was worrying about Husk. A family tragedy was suspected.
The evening was lovely as they sat out in the open, on the pavement, with a busker playing Mozartian notes on a flute nearby. Not far from them, at another restaurant, a magician was going through his turns. On the other side, on the left of the lively street, a harlequin was singing and clowning and performing somersaults. A troupe of gypsy musicians charmed the night with their pipes, ventilating an Andalusian air. The film crew ought to have been happy. To be alive, to be healthy, to be away from home, under a star-scented sky, in the middle of enchanted Paris, on a warm evening with a gentle breeze, on a filming trip, with the theme of charming a sense of paradise from the endless difficulties of an average life – these things ought to be able to tease out happiness from all but the most cussed of people. But the crew, locked in their habitual mode of being, seemed impregnable to such joie de vivre.
Lao was suddenly touched by this feeling from an angel’s wing. He was touched with the romance of the city, and all its rich associations with literature, art, and freedom. He was touched with the spirit of eternal youth, and the love of beauty, and the ideal of excellence, and a feeling for the classical virtues. And, wishing to surround Husk’s unstated sorrow with warm conversation, he proposed that everyone present reveal what their private Arcadia would be, whether a book, a person, a piece of music, a season of the year, a state of spirit, a country, a dream, an idea, or a vanished moment.
13
At first silence greeted Lao’s proposal. No one moved. Mistletoe went on drawing. She was becoming her own ideal.
Then to everyone’s astonishment, Husk suddenly spoke.
‘If it’s on my account you’re all keeping quiet, then speak. Your silence only amplifies what I’m going through.’
Then all at once, and all in a rush, as if stones had obeyed an injunction to babble, as if brooks had all broken into so many soliloquies, as if vacant heads had become occupied by vying oracles, the group began to pour forth words, dissent, disagreement, collisions, agreements, in every direction, all unheard by the others, till Lao said:
‘For God’s sake, no one can hear anyone else. Can we be orderly about this?’
Then Propr took up the mantle, and spoke first. He said:
‘Left to me, I don’t understand this Arcadian business. I tend sheep. I am a plain man. I don’t even think of myself as a shepherd. I don’t understand things that I can’t see. I don’t understand things that I can’t hear. I’m a practical man. Anything that doesn’t turn into bread doesn’t really interest me. I have children to feed. I’m getting on a bit in years and hate to admit it. The miracles of Jesus only make sense to me when he turns water into wine. I can always do with wine. The human race understands wine. Multiplying loaves and fishes is wonderful as well. A lot of starving people in the world could do with loaves and fishes. But the miracle of multiplying things is not a regular activity, and no one does it nowadays. So that bit is best left to intelligent human governments and enlightened politicians that care for the feeding of the world’s starving masses. Personally, I’m only interested in money and contentment. I don’t believe in going to far off places searching for ideals and ideal places and paradises that don’t exist. I prefer to find what can be found here, where I find myself, in my backyard, in my home. I’m not keen on seekers. They are too restless and confused. Worse, they are lazy. They don’t want to work. They don’t respect the work ethic on which society is founded, and sustained. They want easy cures and easy miracles. They want complete instant solutions to all their problems. They don’t want to work, or to think things through. And they tend towards fanaticism. They join cults, and abandon them. They are quitters. Always quitting their jobs, their relationships, their homes. Always quitting the latest idea they’ve just enthusiastically converted to. Always quitting their support for the latest band that offered them instant nirvana or an immediate oasis in music designed to make them part with their money and make the moronic musicians uselessly rich. These seekers are always joining, but never staying; always looking, but never seeing; always travelling, but never learning. They are always collecting interesting new bits of new-age information, but never integrating what they collect into a practical life. Seekers are actually very arrogant people, thinking that they know more than their fathers and mothers, always judging the previous generation, always thinking that they know better, that all previous knowledge is useless, that the system is useless because it doesn’t give them the easy things they want. Seekers are usually very insecure and judgmental people who haven’t grown up, haven’t accepted the fact that they have to settle down and earn a crust like everyone else. They are always reading their tarot cards, burrowing into the I Ching; mispractising tantric sex, visiting fortune tellers, fiddling with astrological charts, delving cross-eyed into hermetic texts, wearing exotic clothes from Japan, Africa, India, Thailand, dabbling with Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, American Indian rituals, and the Kabbala, gulping down the latest sensational nonsense about Aztec temple prophecies, Mayan contact with aliens, hidden revelations of history coded in the Bible, messing about with tea-leaves, African sorcery and herbalism, the Kamasutra, and a thousand other such things that they never study deeply, always passing through, mixing the whole confusing mess, till they are a confusing mess themselves. They are always running from one guru to another, from one fraud to another. They listen, but never hear. They have plenty of information, but no understanding. They are thoroughly insubstantial and unreliable people. They have no philosophy, no backbone. They are easily duped, and they dupe others. They are selfish and egotistical. I know of some who spend their time chanting mantras for their own glorification and for selfish needs, chanting for success, without working for it, chanting for a lover without being able to inspire or sustain love. Seekers mostly have deep character problems: they have no character. They never stay in one place, always dropping out, always looking for fringe causes to justify their laziness, when all they really want is personal success by the back-door. These seekers speak of seeking for wisdom, but they have no humility. When they should listen, they talk. When they should be silent, they spout other people’s ideas. They have no patience, or tolerance, really, and the wise words they quote are merely quotations, never lived through with consistency, and so they yield no tangible fruitful results in the real world. Nothing they touch endures. Nothing they plant grows. Because they never stick around to nurture anything. They are always flying off in meditation and talking about peace and freedom, when in fact they have no freedom, because they don’t understand the place of money in the world. They think they are independent, but in fact they are the most dependent of all because they depend on all that they reject: society, tradition, civilisation. And seekers have no peace, because they are escapists, and sooner or later reality comes into the picture and exposes all their catch-phrases as hollow nonsense. No, my friends, I am a practical man. The world must be faced. Reality must be faced. Life must be addressed squarely. At some point a man or woman gets married and has children, and has to raise them. And even if they don’t get married, or are single, and never have children, they still need to survive. They will grow old. They need money. They need solid
values. Ideals alone can’t do the job. And if they insist on feeding themselves on ideals alone, then they eventually get into a lot of trouble. And the worst is when seekers, facing the chilling years of failure, stop seeking. The worse is when they stop believing. They become the worst cynics in the world, and the bitterest people. God save us from them. I tell you this. Society has many faults, but the way it is is the way it is. And one must accommodate oneself to society, even if one is a genius. And so while you’re all off searching for Arcadia or paradise, I’m coming with you purely as the sound man, sound in terms of film, and sound in terms of having my feet solidly planted on the ground. I therefore don’t have a private Arcadia, only a life that I’m trying to live, and not all that successfully. But at least I’m not escaping my responsibilities by chasing dreams. Now I’d like some wine, Jim, if you don’t mind. This Arcadia business has made me very thirsty.’
14
After his extraordinary speech, Propr turned towards the approaching waitress. A pungent silence hung over the table. The speech had produced a strong effect, a sobering effect. It seemed to have dampened the lively Parisian evening. The acrobats suddenly seemed listless. The applause they drew was desultory. A stale wind, bearing the odours of the warm gutters and faded perfume, wafted over from the Seine. The Mozartian busker’s vitality appeared to peter out, giving the lovely flute melody a slowed-down depressing quality of jaded hopes and feeble yearnings. The gypsies were the only ones who retained their unique mercurial air, indomitable, with their bright colours still charming the evening with a magic undimmed by world-weariness.
Jim summoned the waiter and ordered four bottles of white wine and rosé. Nervously the gathered crew consulted the menu. Those who could read French did so loudly, sharing their understanding of the menu with those who didn’t, much to the irritation of the latter. Lao couldn’t read French, and peered at the menu with a studious air, his mind vacant, a condition which produced interesting results, for he found to his quiet pleasure that he could make out what was beef and what was chicken, what was potato and what lamb, without trying. He concluded that being in a fine mood sometimes compensated for ignorance.
Mistletoe, being able to read French, confirmed his intuitions. Jute glared at the menu reproachfully, clearly resenting the obscurity of the French language and its unwillingness to yield to the common sense of English. One could see her eyes trying to find the English words hidden within the French words, without much success, and she was obliged, as a proud Northerner, to order blind, as it were, on pure speculation.
Soon the waiter came round, and orders were laboriously taken. Drinks were poured, a toast was proposed to the success of the film expedition, to the Arcadian notion, and to a happy outcome. Then the wine was drunk. Another silence ensued. Then, clearing his throat, Sam, the cameraman, spoke next:
‘There must be a personal reason why Propr talked so passionately about the suspect nature of seekers. And he speaks well and largely truthfully about many of them. Maybe deep down Propr is a secret seeker, or an ex-seeker.’
There was some laughter round the table at this. Propr’s only response was an enigmatic twitching of his moustache. Sam continued.
‘I know a lot of seekers. They are always back-packing their way round the world. They are always hurrying to see things. They go to exotic places, take part in some ritual or other, meet others, hook up, carry on their journey to the next place, and they only have what they saw and what little they did as their experience. They are always travelling through. They never travel into. They insult the cultures and philosophies and religions of others without knowing it. And they do so in complete earnestness, naїveté, and innocence. But they are one kind of seeker. There are other kinds, just as intolerable. They are seekers that stay at home, seeking for things in books, in history, in the past, and they too are just as lost, just as confused as the seekers that Propr describes. These other seekers don’t look at the world. They don’t look at nature. They don’t look at their fellow human beings. They think that books are more important than people. They think that books are more important than life. They take little interest in politics, in fashion, in the young, in outsiders. They are blinkered and blinded by too much knowledge that isn’t really wisdom. And what they know, what they call knowledge is not much use to them and not very practical. I don’t claim to be as practical as Propr. I don’t have a farm, I don’t tend sheep, and I’m not a shepherd. I believe in the senses, in sensual things. I suppose I’m a sort of romantic. I like impossible things. Things that are easy to do bore me. Things that are easy to get bore me. Maybe that’s why my life is not so great. But that’s the only way I can be happy: seeking for impossible things, and never finding them. I am restless. Something deep is missing in my life. I don’t know what it is. I used to think it was beautiful women, but when I get them, and have them, the thing I’m looking for, that’s missing in my life, seems even more acute. As I get older a terrible longing for something that I can’t give a name to takes greater possession of me. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in great panic because of it. I can’t stay still because of it, and may well die looking for it. That’s my nature. I don’t know what it is. It isn’t money, career, family, success, or achievement. Everything seems hollow in relation to it, this thing that’s missing in my life. Sometimes I have a dream and I’m in a room as immense as the universe and I can’t move because of the terrible weight of my body and yet there’s something in me that wants to be free in that immense space but that’s trapped in my body and it’s absolute agony, that unfreedom, that imprisonment in the body. I wake up in a great sweat, and in a sort of immortal terror. One can’t escape the truth one must face in one’s dreams. At the end of the day there’s nowhere to hide. One either lives or dies. If one dies, one dies in such ignorance, without having tried to penetrate the wonderful mysteries of life. Wasted time in the university of experience. But if one lives, then sooner or later one has to deal with the ache and the problem of that thing missing deep in one’s life, that deep longing. And so I’m sort of sympathetic to this Arcadia thing. I’ve never heard of it before, and that’s enough to make it interesting and fascinating to me. It seems to me that most people, if they look deep enough within themselves, have an elusive something that they are looking for, an elusive peace, an elusive happiness, a crucial bit of the jigsaw of life. A need for meaning. A greater sense of purpose. I don’t know how one can be human without this longing, this yearning. To be without it smacks to me of a singular lack of imagination, of sensitivity, of humanity. I too like bread and wine and things you can touch and feel and see and measure. I’m not averse to money, and like everyone else, I too dream of fame. But fame is not it. I should know. I make films with the famous, and there’s not much to them apart from being famous. It’s we who confer this condition on them. It is not something they have. Fame is a sort of perfume that some people have sprayed on them. The fragrance is nice and mysterious enough while it lasts, but it soon wears off and they have to live with their own natural ordinary smells. And one can only hope for their sake that their natural smell is good. But it usually isn’t so they keep needing more fame to cover up the bad smell of what they really are. I think it is better to smell good naturally. Call it natural fame if you like, natural charisma, natural shine. There are people who have that natural fame, that shine, and when you encounter them it’s like meeting one of life’s true stars. These are developed souls, I think, quietly astonishing people. And it’s got nothing to do with looks. The camera loves that natural shine, and I trust the camera. There are things that the camera picks up that aren’t visible to the ordinary eye; it picks up people’s auras, their true nature, their true light. It’s hard to explain, and it doesn’t take the form most people think. Only a few can pick up on this mysterious radiance. And so while I’m on this journey I’m prepared to be open to the notions that inspire us because I sense that life is empty without some sort of dream, some enchanted purpos
e, without some sort of intangible something. And in my time as a cameraman I’ve experienced some pretty strange things to do with light that tells me that there’s more to life than we think there is. The fact is that, in spite of my ponytail and my air of being a sensualist, I’m just as lost and confused as anybody else.’
15
Sam had finished, and emptied his glass of wine, and lit a cigarette, and smoked with an air of romantic intensity. He fitted his surroundings well. There was something about that Parisian evening, with its muted lights, its air of festivity, its sensual hum, which Sam found conducive to wine, smoking, and an honest declaration of his improvisatory view of life. He was aware that he had begun his speech in reaction to Propr’s speech, but he had not reached a conclusion that came from deep within him. He still felt that what he wanted to express was deep inside him; and this made him a little frustrated.
Lao, with a playful touch of malice, had developed this idea of Sam as fabulously talkative. It was based on their first meeting, on a shoot in Cornwall, when Sam had buttonholed Lao for two hours, outlining his theory of the place of suffering in art, the idea that suffering conferred authenticity. It was Sam’s big philosophy then. Time passed, and life happened to Sam, and he became less talkative. Now he doesn’t talk so much, but the air of talkativeness still surrounds him. Maybe he talks much in his mind. And now Lao shapes their conversations so as to encourage the shortest possible replies. Even Lao noticed how much Sam had changed.
Sam wasn’t much given to talking any more, and had spent most of his professional life displacing speech into what can be caught in camera angles and oblique shots. He had deliberately made himself less literate in order that the camera should do all his philosophising for him, all his poetry for him. He was a victim of his own dedication to an aesthetic, to a doctrine of professional life. And so he drank some more, and got a little drunk. And while others made their contributions, saying things here and there that he would have liked to have said, he got resentful, grumpy, and insular. And it was only the wine and the mood of the city that prevented him from being wholly locked in himself. And so he listened with interest while the food was served and other crew members spoke of their private Arcadias.