In Arcadia

by Ben Okri

  There was indeed something of the demiurge in the vanity of it all. The statues, the one hundred thousand and two hundred trees, the chariot rising from the lake, the unused fields, the buildings more amazing than functional, the complex mathematical computation of it all – the carousel devoured the nation’s strength and finance. It had something of the mad divine fantasies of empire builders, mausoleum builders, constructors of gigantic monuments to the power of kings and emperors. Monuments that spoke of the ego, but not of the people.

  As Lao walked alone and anticlockwise round the lake, and saw the rigidity of shaping nature to a fixed design, he found himself thinking of the secret meaning of things. Maybe, he thought, the grandiose designs of kings are meant to avert death, to temporise it, to delay it, to contain it, to defy it in their own deification. But in the strangest way he felt how much death spoke here through the great beauty of the place. Death spoke not through decay, but through the absence of freedom; and the happiness that he felt here had more to do with the sunlight on water, on the trees, on the grass, and on the wide open spaces. But death spoke from the design, from the attempt to create Arcadia according to one’s image and command. Death spoke through the geometry of it. Death spoke through the excess of symbolism. Death spoke through the labyrinths. Death spoke through the mathematics. And death sang through the sublime vanity of it all. And yet there was a strange breath of immortality in the air, a curious whiff of the stars…

  6

  Lao had made his turn round the lake. It had taken an hour. But when he returned to where they had parted, Mistletoe wasn’t there. He waited a while longer, and slowly a feeling of dread grew in him. Then, seeing the crew making signs to him that lunch break was over, and that filming was due to begin, he hurried off in the direction Mistletoe had taken, and went searching for her.

  He looked for her through the labyrinths of the Sun King’s fantasy. The light was so blinding that at one point he felt he was walking through mirrors. Near the fountain of Apollo he passed a theatrical troupe, dressed as cavaliers. They shouted words at him, and made signs which he couldn’t understand. They ran in the opposite direction.

  He rested near one of the gates of Hercules, and stared both ways, and his vision warped in the strange disappearing space of the water seeming to rise into the air like a lifting illusion of a road in a shimmering desert oasis. He shut his eyes. Then he went among the trees. There, a group of harlequins, singing German drinking songs, danced past him, and laughed at his bewilderment. Then he heard voices singing beautifully all around him, with no one in sight. Feeling that the heat and the cold mystery of the place were beginning to overwhelm him, he hurried back in the direction of the café where the crew would be waiting. But he got lost, and couldn’t find his way.

  He lay near the pool of Latona and fell into an oblique mathematical reverie, in which Mistletoe stood over him, with the sun framing her head. She led him into a chariot and they rode over the points of perspectives on a road that was composed entirely of sun rays. And as they rode, Mistletoe began reciting Virgil’s famous fourth eclogue over his sleeping form while the constellations whirled above him, and while the abyss swirled below. And then, suddenly, he found himself in a realm, alone with Mistletoe, where they wandered in a glass labyrinth. They came to a room, a vast room, where beings dwelt who were old men and young men, old women and young women. They all had branches of trees growing out of their human heads, and they were dying. The youngest of them came to Lao and Mistletoe, and said:

  ‘We are the sons and daughters of the great god Pan, and we are dying. We are the last of the great god’s offspring. There used to be millions of us all over the earth. We were worshipped and loved. We were treated with reverence and we blessed the earth with munificence and fruits and food and happy things. But now we are dying. The world has lost the meaning of the infinite, and the finite is without sustenance. What you see is held up by what you do not see. The visible is sustained by the invisible. You depend on us, and we on you. Therefore, if you can, you must help us, or there will be no future left for you all to enjoy.’

  And Lao said:

  ‘How can we help?’

  And one of the beautiful daughters of Pan came forward and said:

  ‘Restore us to our place. Lead us out of this dying space. Turn your prayers into deeds. Do things that are possible. Don’t get lost in your search for ideals. Listen to the inscription. Follow the guide of your heart. Link hands and bring nature back to the centre. Let the infinite speak in your smallest deeds of love. Life has no greater meaning than to turn into the flowers of love. That way death gives off light, and even hell is averted.’

  Then Mistletoe spoke.

  ‘We must do something,’ she said. ‘We must begin now. We must lead them out of their dying place. We must pass on the word. We must organise and prepare for a new earth. The old earth is dying.’

  7

  And together, they began to act, to organise. And the sons and daughters of Pan followed them into the wider spaces of the world where they could bloom again, and freshen humanity. And they did this while listening to one of the daughters of Pan singing magic lines from Virgil’s fourth eclogue under the sunlight of the last years of the old earth. And when the new earth dawned, with the sweetest spring in the air, after the darkest winter, the world began to thrive again, and to shine with a new radiance.

  And Lao woke up suddenly under the beech tree where he had lain. He found Mistletoe standing over him, singing a French song from her childhood. In a flash he remembered something from his dream which he wasn’t aware of at the time, and which troubled him. During the great time of change, as they passed from the dark place into the intermediate place of the long years, they crossed a place called the mirrors of eternity. And Lao had gasped in surprise when he saw in his dream that Mistletoe had branches coming out of her head. Then he realised what it was he had always found so mysterious about her, what he found so unfathomable. And he understood why it seemed so natural that she was with him on this quest for the Arcadian dream. As he awoke now and saw her head framed by the branches of distant trees, he said:

  ‘Ah, my dear sweet Mistletoe, I should have guessed that you are one of the daughters of Pan.’

  And he told her of his dream. And she crouched next to him, and said:

  ‘That was my dream. That was a dream I told you about, six months ago.’

  After thinking a while, he said:

  ‘That is true. But I only understand it now that I have had the dream myself. I understand your serenity and your anxiety better now. Let’s be getting back. The crew must be going crazy worrying about us.’

  She helped him up. And hurrying without haste, they walked alongside the great lake, towards the palace. They barely glanced at the statue of Enceladus in the clear mirror of the water.

  And as they walked alongside the lake – the length of water that stretched to a very human termination – Lao had the feeling that the smooth surface of the water was a parallel road on which invisible beings played, on which magic notions wandered off into a flawed human infinity.

  8

  Jim was upset with Lao when he finally got to the café. The crew had been waiting impatiently. Lao felt like a child that had done something both delightful and naughty. He’d been away so long that the crew had started to worry about him and Jim in particular feared that something unthinkable had happened. Jim was more upset because he was more concerned. Lao was very touched by this and felt it necessary to elaborate a genuine apology which, coming from him, surprised everyone and earned him instant forgiveness.

  As the crew got into the van that was to take them to the next point of their filming, commotion was stirring in the great lake. A young anarchist had scrambled in and, with seven balloons in one hand, was shouting:

  ‘Beware! Beware! Beware of this false paradise!’

  Crowds gathered. Tourists, thinking it part of the attraction, a piece of French drama, began taking pictur
es. Someone sent for the police. The young man went on:

  ‘Beware! Hell hides in all this beauty! Death grows in this sublimity! Don’t let grandeur fool you! The blood of the people boils under all this perfection. This place is built with corpses, and this lake shines with tears! Rip it all down! And make the small places beautiful! Beware! Don’t be seduced by all this purity, this glamour! Make your lives your special places, and leave these lies to fools…’

  And as the van pulled away, Lao saw the attendants storm the lake and try to drag the young anarchist back onto land. They soon grabbed hold of him. At that very moment he released his seven balloons. And all seven balloons, red and gold on that golden day, drifted over the terrestrial paradise of kings, and disappeared into the surrounding worlds.

  Soon the bus had turned a corner, and the scene had vanished. Something in their journey was underlined. No one spoke till they got to their next destination.

  9

  The rich and powerful try to create Arcadia and only end up constructing a labyrinth. They try to shape a paradise and end up as prisoners. To those with a metaphysical take on history, the Sun King was a prisoner of infinity. To others a prisoner of unreality.

  As they drove in silence deeper into the grounds of Versailles, Lao read the notes that Husk had prepared for their next encounter.

  ‘The court of Versailles was not everyone’s idea of paradise. Marie Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI, preferred a constructed village, with goats and sheep, at the far corner of the rolling acres of the palace. How much like the traditional condition of things: behold the man’s possessions, his 100,200 trees, his 160 million flowers, his 43 kilometres of streets, his canal, his lakes, his châteaux, fountains, servants, his innumerable houses and their numberless rooms and lavatories everywhere. And the woman, the queen, has only a little patch, far away, to call her own. She had only a constructed little village, to call her own. It is just over a mile away from the palace. A little hamlet with its own farm, pond, and mill.’

  The crew spilled out of the bus and gazed upon the charming hamlet which a queen had created for her own pleasure. It could have been a quaint fairy-tale village, and had much of the air of little Swiss towns, or the little villages that girls have in their picture books. A doll’s village, with a lake, a chateau, a mill and pond, shepherds’ huts, and an abundance of plants and flowers and its own woods. There was a garden house and a house for the policeman. There was a beautiful little tower, and a theatre where comedies were staged. There was also a house for the poor, beautifully thatched with grass.

  The curator of the preserved hamlet, a Monsieur Torraban, led the crew round the infamous extravagance of the Petit Trianon. He showed them the paddock where the cows and sheep were kept. He was generally enthusiastic when speaking in French. And he seemed to have a charming effect on Husk. She coloured often and perked up in his company. She seemed, for a while, to have forgotten that she was heartbroken. And when she announced to Jim an amusing forthcoming problem to do with the interview, she was almost girlish.

  Monsieur Torraban, it seemed, had spoken perfectly acceptable English in their previous discussions, but when it came to the moment of the interview he panicked. He refused to speak anything but French and was as intractable as a mule. Monsieur Torraban kept disappearing during the linguistic negotiations and each time he returned he seemed more stressed and more drunken than before. By the time of the interview itself, he was positively refractory.

  At this point Lao came forward, told Sam to start filming, and the whole interview was plunged into a strange transaction of languages. In the end Lao forced the poor distraught fellow to speak in his pretty ropy English as it was marginally better than Lao’s threadbare French.

  Their conversation, which lasted hours, and needed many disappearances on Monsieur Torraban’s part, reduced the entire crew to stitches of laughter. But what emerged was something charming and sad.

  10

  While there was famine and misery in the land, while the poor stewed in diseases and hunger, while the spirit of revolution grew fat, Marie Antoinette instigated the creation of the hamlet and went there to escape the rigidity of court life and to indulge her fantasies. She went there to be free. It was her Arcadia. She had read Rousseau, had been influenced by his ideal of going back to nature, and attempted to put it into practice. Also she longed for the simplicity of her childhood in Austria. Away from the splendid artificiality of court life in Versailles, she created an artificial oasis.

  And when she came here, with her chosen ones and attendants, it wasn’t to be a queen, but a shepherdess. She wanted the place to be as authentic as possible. When she arrived she would change into the costume of a shepherdess and play at living the simple life. Her sheep were beribboned with silk, her cows were aristocratic, the trees and rocks were tricked with hand-laid moss, and her shepherds and milkmaids wore fake peasant outfits. She fished sea bass from the lake, and acted in plays with her friends, composed operettas and sang in the little theatre. Some say she even milked the cows herself, though this is doubted. The hamlet was her dream of freedom.

  One fascinating thing was that though there was a twin château in the hamlet for the king, he never went there at all. And, most telling of all, the splendid mill was nothing but a beautiful façade, a stage effect. The mill was pure decoration, there only for the effect of beauty. The mill-house had tiny rooms that had never been used for anything, and never could be, like rooms in a doll’s house. Inside the mill-house, there was nothing.

  The queen came to the hamlet on horseback, played and picked flowers in her Arcadia, and left. She never spent the night there. By day it was enchanting, by night deserted.

  Meanwhile, there was famine in the land. Meanwhile, she was infuriating the French with scandals, ignoring the courtiers, and contemptuous of the poor. Meanwhile, her Arcadia concealed from her the guillotine that would chop off her head.

  11

  Hours passed. The afternoon’s blaze settled gently into the cool breeze of early evening. After filming was finished, all the crew members wandered around the pleasant conceit of the queen’s private playground. Beyond, where the shadows of the trees were lengthening on the grass, was the terrain that some would have thought an earthly paradise, a place where anyone could be happy, could create, could think noble thoughts and plant them in the world.

  And as they wandered about the hamlet they each had different incomplete intuitions about the Arcadias of the rich and powerful, intuitions that drifted in the breeze with the fragrance of roses.

  12

  Jim’s Intuition

  Immensity of the land

  And spaces of the sun.

  They slept too long in paradise

  And ended up in prison.

  13

  Propr’s Intuition

  and then because she so ignored the cries of the people, lost as she was in her Arcadia, she was eventually guillotined.

  Arcadia can become a hiding place from reality. It can become a deafness and a cruelty and an indifference to suffering.

  They create their Arcadia and hide from the evils of the world and Arcadia becomes a kind of evil too. And then it feeds the monster that will eventually devour them.

  Arcadia cannot be a denial of reality, for reality cannot be denied.

  It is not a place or dream to hide in. It cannot protect you from truth, or injustice, or poverty.

  It can only delay your death by the truth you don’t face.

  Arcadia ought to help us be more candid.

  14

  Mistletoe’s Intuition

  Hades dwells in false Arcadias. Their effect is a cold delightful decoration. Lifeless, false Arcadias don’t have the power of death.

  Arcadia charms death. And death makes Arcadia enchanting, eternally haunting. Death makes Arcadia immortal.

  And so, wherever there is a true Arcadia, there is the breath of immortality, sweetened by the flowers of mortal things.

  Arca
dia is the chiaroscuro of the mortal and the immortal, of happiness and death, of eternity and transience, beauty and the grave.

  15

  Jute’s Intuition

  tyrants and dictators all had their Arcadias to cleanse their souls of the brutalities they had unleashed.

  The makers of the Holocaust wanted to create vast shining Arcadias that masked the incredible evils that they had wrought in daylight.

  Such vast visible Arcadias hint at vast hidden evils and injustices.

  They are an affront to a world reeking with suffering and starvation, the poor, the imprisoned, the refugees, the oppressed.

  The immense Arcadias of the powerful are suspect; they have an ambivalent astonishment.

  16

  And as the film crew climbed into their van, and got lost several times trying to get out of the vast grounds of Versailles, they were silent, and a little depressed.

  They had lived through a wonderful day. The weather had been perfect, the sunlight blessed. The sign of the great stairs, the dreaming lake, and the rich fountains was still shimmering in their minds. They had been touched by the lovely space of l’Hameau, but there was still this sadness. It fell with the sense of the journeys still to be undertaken before Arcadia can be glimpsed. But it fell more with the subliminal realisation that with all the money in the world, all the power in the world, all the land, the fame, the will, the dream, the desire and the genius, Arcadia could not be created by human will or hand on earth. It can only be revealed, found, stumbled upon, discovered.

  But their sadness came more from the fact that they had just passed into and emerged from one of the saddest things of all: a false Arcadia amidst splendour and glory.