by Ben Okri
Mistletoe drank her coffee, thinking much the same things, but in relation to art, to painting. She was thinking how reality is one vast complex painting, a living painting, full of riddles and meaning, of enigmas and hinted fates. She was thinking that there was as much chiaroscuro in life as in painting, and as much depth, concealed interiors, as much sfumato, as much smokiness around key significations that don’t necessarily announce themselves as such. There was as much mystery hidden right on the surface of things, difficult to see like all deep things that dwell transparently on the outside, extending their realms of meaning and ambiguity in the deepest places of the person who looks. And there was as much simplicity in the depth of things, the utter simplicity of an absolute truth, dwelling in the greatest depths. So that to one who knows how to make and how to see, the truth of things is both right there in front of you on the surface, transparent and clear, as well as deep down where only the bravest and the wisest can go. All true seeing is a testament to the person who sees. You see what you are. You create what you are. You read into a painting, into the world, what you are.
These two creatures ate their breakfasts, and drank their tea and coffee, in absolute silence, staring at the world, at passers-by, at the café owner, at the prints on the walls, at the chairs and tables, at the people hurrying past outside the large glass windows of the café as if they were in a different reality, a separate space.
These two creatures stared at the things going on outside as if they were flowing inscriptions, living hieroglyphics, motions in a vast living painting, pregnant with mystery.
They stared at everything like children. In that Parisian dawn all the world seemed an infinite text which the spirit reads, but the brain doesn’t.
One can be ignorant while still inwardly growing.
They stared silently as they woke with the waking of the city.
22
The other crew members had their various tasks. Jim went buying gifts for all the people they were going to interview on the journey. It was something he loved doing, finding imaginative and relatively cheap gifts for people. It was based on his understanding that if he didn’t have much money to pay people, instead of insulting them with paltry sums, he would honour them not only with gifts but also with the care and love that had gone into choosing each one, so that the gift matched the recipient.
Jim went up and down Paris, to the different markets. He went with Husk, who gave him advice on gifts for the women. When Husk wasn’t shopping with Jim, she was working with Sam. She sorted out the schedule, phoning up people, making contacts for future encounters on the journey, helping with the accounts, arranging all the logistics of the long trip ahead. Husk threw herself into her work with an intense and bitter severity to escape the fiery pangs of her broken heart. She spoke to no one about the nature of her anguish, nor did she give hints or details of what ailed her. Often she had to stop what she was doing and hold onto something solid. As if to prevent herself falling because of the sheer weight of emptiness in the pit of her stomach. She worked like a stoic, but without the stoic’s philosophical serenity.
For the rest, their tasks were specific. Sam had his cameras to look after. Riley followed whatever instructions Sam gave her. And Propr, not having much to do except keep his sound equipment clean, decided to make a day of it. Along with Sam and Riley, he disappeared into the lures of Paris. They were not seen again till the evening. And when they materialised they were somewhat red-faced and drunken and merry. The crew ate separately that night, and in the morning the Arcadian journey was resumed.
Book 5
1
The rich and powerful always think that they can create Arcadia. They think that they can impose it on the world. They think that they can re-create paradise within their terrestrial realms. It was one such attempt that the crew were visiting that day. And as if to underline the ambiguous impossibility of such ventures, a strange thing happened to them before they set out in the vans waiting to take them to the famed acres of Versailles.
They had met as arranged at the front of the hotel, and all were there except for Jim and Husk. A crowd of people streamed through the crew. Some confusion ensued. The crowd, tourists and city-dwellers, had surged at the crew from a direction no one could ascertain. And when the crowd passed, one of the crew members began shouting. It turned out to be Riley. She was hollering something in a mixture of Danish and bad French. She seemed quite unlike herself. The serenity that had embalmed her troubled nature had evaporated, and revealed strange torments within. The other crew members converged on her protectively. It wasn’t long before the name Malasso was heard again, this time from Jute. The inscrutable Malasso had delivered another message.
In the midst of the confusion caused by the crowd, someone had slipped something into Riley’s hand. At first, when she saw it, she thought she had been slashed with something fine and sharp like a razor. She felt the slicing of her palm, and it seemed that blood dripped down from her hand onto the pavement. That was why she screamed. But on further examination it turned out to be another red message, a message soaked in blood, or red ink. And as soon as she read the message, and crushed it in her palm, the blood or ink ran down her arm, red against her pale white flesh, causing everyone to gasp, as at a suicide.
She kept the message and its contents to herself, ran to the hotel, disappeared into the women’s lavatory, stayed there a long time, and when she emerged her eyes were red, but her face was calm. The serenity that had taken quiet residence in her when she had vanished on the train and reappeared, was now quite gone. In its place was a nervous and twitching visage. She said nothing, averted her eyes, and got into the van.
In complete silence they travelled on to the earthly delights of a famous king.
2
There is something about a sinister message received, a private sign, a personal future-reading, which when not shared awakens in others either a sense of doom or of awe. It was in this mixed mood that they travelled. When they arrived at Versailles they were struck by the grandeur of the place, by the balance and might of the architecture, by the great sprawling fields, by the tranquil spaces, and by the sheer scale and enormity of the buildings. There were tourists everywhere. They formed long queues all over the crowded courtyards.
Husk went all over, straining her poor French to the limit, trying to find their guide. It was a hot day. Children played in the great forecourt that enhanced the brilliance of the king’s palace.
The rich and powerful always think that they can create Arcadia, and for the kings of France, Versailles was a terrestrial paradise. Its vast acreage, its fountains, its wonderful staircases, its grandeur and tranquillity, the openness of its grounds, with abundant space to ride horses, to play, to be free, to hold masques, outdoor dramas, massive festivities – all of it ought to have set the scene for great human happiness and contentment. It ought to have provided the background for noble productions of genius for the enrichment of the human race. It ought to have become one of those places out of which flow fountains of universal munificence. This was what the crew members sensed without knowing. As they toured the grounds with their guide they were each one of them struck by how beautiful it was and by how locked into itself its great beauty was. Jute found much to complain about in this, and was heard muttering about how useless great beauty can be.
At first Lao himself was puzzled. His feelings were too complex to be reduced to a single reaction. As they were taken through the little kingdom of the Sun King, Lao experienced an odd, incomplete intuition. He was overwhelmed with a reminder that at some moments the earth seemed like a fabulous stage set for an immortal drama, or initiation. The trees, the arbours, the orchards, the sweeping fields, the abundant heavens, all the astonishing colours of nature, the flowers, the hills, the lakes – it all seemed the most extraordinary setting for wonderful events, for the most fabulous adventures in living, for marvellous festivities of the human spirit. The perfect setting for humanity to perfor
m the most amazing feats of history making, of self-overcoming, of transcending, of momentous ‘becoming’. We have the setting, Lao was thinking, we have the consciousness, but the grand event, the luminous initiation, is missing. It seems we are not up to it. Here we have a world of legends, of pyramids, of oceans, of mountains, deserts, valleys, meadows, volcanoes, waterfalls, colours that bring tears to the eyes, we have trees and flowers and animals of unbelievable variety, we have civilisations vanished and civilisations that are here, we have a world shining with mysteries and terrors. The stage couldn’t be better – and yet it seems we are not up to it. Our imagination is not commensurate with the splendour and potential of the stage provided. Our love is not commensurate with the possibilities of the world. It seems we are not up to the grandeur of the tremendous stage of nature, of the earth, of the universe. We are overwhelmed by the power, the vastness, and the unknowability of it all. Humanity suffers from a profound stage fright. Faced with the awesomeness of it all, before the marvellous setting fit for gods and monarchs of the mind, humanity is frigid. The most dramatic thing we’ve been able to do, it seems, with this setting fit for masters of the spirit, is wage war. There ought to be a creative equivalent of waging wars, something worthy of this masterpiece of creation, thought Lao, in a flash of incomplete illumination.
But Mistletoe merely gazed and stored away the sublimity of what she saw. She stored it in her soul, stored it away deep in her aesthetic spirit so she could draw upon it often in the difficult days that will inevitably come. Like gathering treasures within. Replenishing a place deep in the secret foundations of inspiration.
Jim, however, was so focused that he saw not much else but filming possibilities. Sam looked only for the most oblique and difficult shots to make all that beauty more human. Riley did her job, silently, with an odd quality of resignation on her face. And Husk busied herself everywhere, connecting strands, preparing the way, organising transport, losing herself utterly in work. It seemed she didn’t dare allow herself to see the beauty all around for fear that it might make her weep for love’s tender whispers and strolls, a love that was gone, devoured by just about everything. Never did beauty so threaten to make her so miserable.
Jim made Lao get on a tiny train in which sightseers journeyed round the extensive grounds of the palace. Lao was struck by the irony of having travelled to France on a train that sped on at two hundred miles an hour, when now he was on a little train that crawled at two miles an hour.
Filming was complicated. Sam was in his element. He went through much fine suffering to get to some private sense of artistic authenticity. Many trains were taken and gotten off and taken again before the shots were satisfactorily engrained with the mysterious existential quality that satisfied Sam.
‘Suffering for art can become another kind of sentimentality,’ Lao muttered now and again.
Sam, in fine form, was impervious.
And through it all Riley brooded on the message that had flowed like blood down her pale arm.
3
All great spaces and mighty buildings hint at the possibility of happiness. They even inspire, for a moment, for the space of a lovely afternoon, the notion of happiness in visitors. Would that the perfection of palaces helped to inspire the perfection of human beings. Would that the cultivated acres created the conditions for the greatest cultivation of the human genius in all those that reside in them. Would that great architecture were the external sign of the greatness of those that dwell within.
But art is a dream of perfection. And the dream is always many realms away from the reality. Art is an indication of how balanced, how serene, how great, how beautiful we can be – an impossible indication. Civilisations are therefore measured by their dreams, by their aspirations in stone, in words, or paint, or marble. It is the artistic ideals of civilisations that signal where those civilisations hope the human spirit can go, how high it can ascend, into what deeds of astonishment it can flow. Art is the best selves of a people made manifest, one way or another. It is not their reality.
Arcadia can only come out of reality, not an ideal: that is the wonderful contradiction of it. Arcadia can only come out of deeds, not dreams, out of living, not dreaming: that is the strength of its enchantment. Arcadia is not a promise, nor a hope, nor an ideal embodied, nor cultivated acres. It is not in what is seen, but in what is created, evoked, found within.
Versailles is the dream, the reality of kings. It is terrestrial grandeur, a great space shaped and possessed under the stars. It is the embodiment of power, but not power itself. The embodiment of beauty, but not beauty itself. It is a mystery how much happiness it evokes in the ordinary visitors that throng its lakes and fields, and how little happiness it created in many of its inhabitants.
These were floating intuitions among the crew as they surveyed the landed dream of kings.
4
After the first phases of filming the crew took a lunch break near the lake. All were struck by how fabulous the grounds were, how endless. The place seemed like a realm unto itself. Lao and Mistletoe listened to the rest of the crew as they expressed their delight or their dismay. Then, after a while, they decided to go for a turn together round the lake.
Mistletoe bought ice-creams and gave Lao his. Together they walked into the tender beauty of the golden sunlight. A clear wonderful happiness rose up in Mistletoe that afternoon. She was revisiting the scene of a childhood journey. And the child in her that delighted many years back at the splendour of the palace was still in delight now. The child that was happy, that played by the lake, and ate ice-cream under the loving supervision of her mother was awake and alive now. And her smile was a beautiful benediction to all who saw her. And her happiness made Lao happy.
They climbed one charming set of stone stairs and walked the length of the shimmering waters. They looked up towards another set of rising stairs of solid stone, and gazed on the geometric symmetry of the palace in the distance. And they marvelled at how architecture, if beautiful and balanced, is a sort of embodied happiness in space. It is joy made visible, a homeland of the dreaming self given concrete shape. It raises the spirits up towards its own noble dreaming and ideals. It seems to say to the viewer: ‘I live in you. My genius rests in you because you have seen me thus. My proportions are in you because you feel them. My nobility is in you because you respond to it. There is nothing that you see in me, that you respond to in me, that isn’t in you, slumbering. If I am great then I am a greatness that is sleeping in you. If I have something of the eternal then it is the eternal that lives and hides in you. Therefore when you look upon me and marvel, look upon yourself, and arise, and rise.’
Mistletoe heard the buildings and the spaces speaking thus, filling the air with silent hymns, and paeans, and poems of sensual and spiritual delight. The air was clear and warm, and gold was in all the spheres. Joy resided in every breath that was drawn in those happy moments above the lake. All around the green glowed, trees caught the light and became dark and ruby rich in their playful hidden green. How the colours played and danced on that radiant day. Beauty was in the air. The skin of the girls shone with delight and freshness. The spaces, cleansed and enriched with summer’s ripening sensuality, made the women more amazing, and compacted into their future dreams some sort of enchantment without a name, or a place, or a land, detached from its origins, connected to the gentle breeze of eternity that makes all good dreams a glimpse of a forgotten Eden.
And when Lao and Mistletoe turned to face the lake, joy swooped down on them and linked their spirits to the hidden stars of heaven. And so gently did the light on the waters, stretching out in space, mirroring the wavy clouds and the broken heavens, so gently did the light on the waters steal away their hidden troubles that they were left weightless in wonder, afloat in delight.
The sense of wonder lasted long enough to be changed into something else. For Lao had heard much about the vanities of the Sun King, and about the mathematical symbolism of infinity that permeated
the carousel.
5
But it was only later, when Lao and Mistletoe decided to take separate journeys round the lake, to meet at the place where they had parted, that something monstrous began to speak through the vast project to conquer space and remake nature after a king’s self image.