In Arcadia

by Ben Okri

  It is better to endure the nakedness of despair than the emptiness of a fake Arcadia.

  But the charm of the false Arcadia lingers, and deepens the ache for the real.

  The crew’s sadness was that ache for the real, for the authentic enchantment.

  Part 3

  Book 6

  1

  Intuitions before Dreaming (1)

  If music was born out of grief, painting was born out of transience within an immortal universe. Painting is the charmed presence of what will no longer be there. An enchanted absence, a visible dream, a parallel universe, defying death, underlining life’s brevity.

  Painting is the meaning of humanity in a visible moment. It is the parable without text, the mystery without ritual. Painting is a hint of the intuition of the gods. It is spying on an immortal pageant. It is seeing the compressed history of humanity through the camera obscura of heaven. It is the frozen music of time’s justice and injustice. It is a vision of life from Hades enchanted. It is the secret history of light, the psychodrama of colour, the moment in a mind, the moment in a song.

  Painting is what those in the Underworld remember. It is how the dead dream. It is how the enigma of time manifests itself on the cyclorama of matter. Painting is the magic riddle of mortality. It is the longing for the eternal, the happiness of the transient, the enigma of creation, the home of the heart, the fountain where loss is soothed. It is the eternal future, for painting is never in the past tense, only in the ever flowing present tense, an eternal now, a never-ending summer, a life always living, a moment never ceasing.

  Painting is water, air, fire, earth, dream, but it is never death. Painting is life, life smiling at death with light as its secret.

  Painting is Narcissus surprised. Painting is secret structures, harmonies, balance, chaos, force-fields, philosophy, patience, rhythm, wit, sadness, delight, tragedy. Painting is the invisible made visible, the allegory of unseen things, the resting place of a visual thought, eternal youth. Painting even when it decays is like a dream vanishing.

  Painting is the Turin shroud, the manifestation of the hidden avatar on white cloth.

  When paintings die, they go back to God’s mind.

  2

  Intuitions before Dreaming (2)

  Painting is an inscription on the flesh of time. An invocation of colours. Painting is a raising from the dead, a resurrection, a transmogrification, a transmutation. Painting is the triumph of plants and minerals and animal hair. It is soul dancing to soul.

  Painting is the still life of God’s mind. It is the heaven of remembered things, the hell of forgotten things. It is the destiny of legend, the dream of a faun and all legendary beings. It is legend frozen, memory’s homeland.

  Painting is the nightmare of the devil. Codes in colours and shapes. It is the yearning of all things to live and persist in memory. Painting is the only mortal space where angels dwell in stillness. It is meditation with eyes wide open, contemplation with the mind’s eyes focused on enigmas. It is visualisation materialised. The mind’s strength and grace trembling in space. The unending lesson of the ascending spirit.

  Painting is the tentative deciphering of destiny, the visual haiku of human history, musings of life in deep dimensions. Painting is illusion impacting on the real, becoming the real, insisting on its ability to be more real than that which has vanished. Painting is human love transcending human forgetfulness. It is mortality staring at itself in the evanescent mirror of immortality. It is spaces dancing, dimensions interacting, realms interpenetrating, time zones colliding, eliding, harmonising.

  Painting is the shaman’s mirror, the warrior’s truest shield, the healer’s armour against fate and tragedy. The celebration of light.

  Painting is the weapon the wise use against vicissitude. It will one day heal profound sicknesses of body, mind, and spirit. It is the technology of the wise primitive, the science and medicine of the forgotten ancients.

  3

  Intuitions before Dreaming (3)

  Painting is the magic charm that nature herself has invented in all things that breathe and move and that don’t breathe and don’t move. There is healing in it. There is wisdom in it. There is hope in it. And there is unfathomed power in its undiscovered potentials.

  Painting is one of the earliest tools of survival. You painted a thing first then you made it manifest later, you made it happen, you made it real. There is painting of the mind, where you first create the complete form of a thing or dream or desire and feed it deep into the spirit’s factory for the production of reality. Painting is the mirror of healing, the base of creativity, the spring-board of materialisation.

  Those who can’t paint in the mind can never create useful power in the world. Those who can’t paint in the spirit can never create happiness or overcome obstacles in life. Painting is the mathematics of making things possible. It is planting notions in the subconscious through the allure or disturbance of the eyes.

  Great paintings transcend the eyes and, through other agencies, can be transmitted from soul to soul. All dreamers are spirit painters. All dreams are paintings. All spirit painters are world remakers. Painting is the refresher of love, the aider of love, the incarnation of loving.

  Painting is time multiplied by light. It is the sweet sister of beauty, the ambiguous sister of history, the still life of humanity. Painting is where the dead sleep, is where the labyrinth is decoded. It is the secret film of the gods, the ecstasy of dyes, the paradigm of better ways of being.

  Painting is the illuminated record book of invisible realms seen in glimpses. Intimations of reincarnation. Akashic still-points. Painting is indeed one of the places where Hades is averted. It is the hint of a sort of immortality within. It comes from the same place inside us where gods are born.

  Painting is one of the most mysterious metaphors of Arcadia.

  4

  That night, after the crew had returned to Paris, they had an early dinner and, too tired to discuss anything, went to bed early.

  Each in their own way had been enchanted and disturbed by the day’s events.

  Each was troubled and fascinated by what they would discover the next day.

  They were all due to film in the Louvre.

  They were all acquainted with the mysterious painting that was at the centre of their visit to Paris, at the centre, even, of their ambiguous journey.

  They had all postponed thinking about the painting, for they had other things to trouble them, to engage their minds.

  No more messages had been received from the insidious manifestations of Malasso.

  Everything was still more or less on schedule.

  Jim worried most when everything was going well; he always felt it was fate’s way of seducing him into unwatchfulness and then pouncing on him with unsuspected disasters.

  He slept badly.

  They all slept badly.

  The pressure of future enigmas weighed on their sleeping forms.

  5

  Mistletoe’s Dream

  She was a daughter of Pan and had been wandering in a landscape of trees and flowers. The air was sweetened with amaranth. There were acorns on the grass. A chain of ochre mountains ranged all around her, bare and stark and oddly beautiful. She knew that the mountains were the forms of sleeping gods, the ancient forgotten gods.

  It was a brilliant day. The sun was benevolent in its universal golden splendour. There were a few lovely clouds, and within one of the clouds was the exact form of an angel in flight.

  She was in the homeland of human happiness. She was happy, and had been eternally happy, like a fortunate child. She had known no suffering and had always been surrounded with love.

  But as she wandered in this realm of happiness she came upon three men who stood puzzled before a gigantic tomb.

  The men were shepherds.

  She had never seen them before.

  They were grizzled, but seemed harmless.

  On the enormous tomb there was an inscri
ption, which read: ET IN ARCADIA EGO.

  She was one of the daughters of Pan, and yet the inscription troubled her. The men fretted over the inscription and kept pointing at it, while their shadows took on sinister shapes.

  She noticed that the man who pointed most ardently at the word ARCADIA had formed the shadow of a man with a scythe. This troubled her more.

  They asked her about the tomb.

  But she had never seen a tomb before. They explained what it was. She turned pale.

  They contemplated the inscription and the mystery of the tomb till the shadows grew shorter and stranger on the wind-quivering grass. The world had darkened into tones of a deep bright sombre beauty.

  Sadness seemed to be leaking into the happy kingdom of the earth.

  And when she left the men, who remained discussing the inscription for what seemed like the rest of their lives, she was never quite so happy again.

  And her life now seemed as a bright golden dream of ambiguities when she woke up in the dark.

  6

  Jim’s Nightmare

  He was in a gigantic tomb in which existed all the happiness of the world. He tried to tell travellers on earth of this happiness but all he ended doing was becoming an inscription which no one could decode, which no one cared about – an inscription in a place of immortal bliss, in a land that used to be called Eden, but which was renamed Arcadia, and it was all the lands of the earth.

  7

  The Mystery of the Invisible Third Man

  And the secret of the treasure they were unknowingly seeking was in the painting. Jim couldn’t find it. But they filmed it, and they all saw it without recognising what they saw.

  Three men stood at a distance while they filmed. Two of the men were museum workers. But the third man came to them and, addressing Lao, said:

  ‘The Treasure map is there, in that painting. Follow the map carefully. Follow it truthfully, for the map is in you. Eat the inscription. Eat it over and over again when you are hungry. But don’t eat the acorns. The Oak Tree is sacred, and is your secret symbol. Avoid the evil shade. Don’t forget that the landscape is greater than the tomb. Death is merely Time’s inscription, a beautiful absence. Don’t dwell too long in Arcadia. This is fatal. For if you dwell too long there, you become the tomb, and your life its inscription. Arcadia looks backward. There is a great and mysterious beauty in this, a haunting wisdom. But look forward. Go forward. Come down from the mountain. Return to the Valley. And begin again. There you will find the Treasure, not at the end, but at the beginning.’

  And then the eloquent third man turned and left the great hall of the museum. And when Lao asked everyone who he was, nobody could say, nobody knew, because nobody had seen him.

  And Lao puzzled over this third man even when he awoke.

  8

  As You Don’t Like It

  and Propr found himself in the forest of Arden, among exiled kings and their courtiers, among lovers and melancholy scholars. And among them he was a farmer.

  The women were beautiful and scented the air with wit. The men were exiled but mostly happy. They were all happy except him. And one of the exiled kings came up to him and said:

  ‘My dear Propr, you do not like happiness, you are suspicious of pleasures, you think leisure a waste of time, and you frown on us kings who are exiled and ought to be miserable and yet we seem to be happier than we ever were in our carefree youth. But being a king is not everything. Being human is. The days on this earth are but the shortening shadow of the elm when night dissolves it into darkness, wherein no man can see without aid of light. Those who walk their days on the earth but never sing, never laugh, never caper, are but those who have lived with their feet only, but not their hearts. For life is part walking, part singing. It is a walking part, a walk-on role. And remember that the great poet Virgil said: ‘Singing makes the going easier’. We are happy here in the forest of Arden, living under the branches and the stars, rediscovering the pleasures of comradeship and wine, learning how to be free again without grandeur. And when we recover our kingdom again, which we will, we might be better kings for having been happier, and the land will be better too. You are like us. You are a king disguised as a farmer. But when you frown you make your animals nervous. Free your moustache, and laugh a little. They say that laughter makes death wait for another day. You see, my dear grim Propr, Arden is the school where nature teaches us simplicity. Join us in our revels, for we will not be here long, and then the walking continues all the way to the famous tomb that speaks in Latin.’

  And Propr lowered his moustache and smiled and danced through the night with the exiled kings in his beloved forest of Arden.

  9

  Love’s Labour Redeemed

  and a man came to Husk in a rocky region where she was waiting under a beech tree and said:

  ‘What does it matter that love is lost? Love is a song that trembles in the air and is caught by another. Love is a sweet melody that haunts those that like your singing. Let it go, and it will come again in another form. If you don’t let it go, it can never return, for a vessel that is full cannot be filled. But a vessel that is empty can be filled with rich new wine that you have never tasted before. And the new wine doesn’t destroy the memory of the old, but enriches your palate and your sense of having lived much. Unused palates don’t know good wine from bad. So, my weeping dear, come with me on the adventures across these mountains and let us both sing of our lovely loves lost that will come again from our singing. If you have emptied yourself in rich loving you will be ready for richer loving still. For loving is one of the most beautiful labours that ever the heart invented. But what does the labour create, what does it do? Does it make you rich, does it farm your lands, does it make a painting, does it make you famous, does it make you beautiful? It does all these things, but it does something better still – it makes a life, it sweetens a road travelled, it charms time, and gives us much to think about when the journey is ended. Yes, my dear, loving makes a life, it makes a melody of a life, which the soul goes on singing long after the sun has set. So let us go, singing of our love, and not be afraid that we have lost it, but glad that we once were loved, and once were happy. For, what with living and dying, our happiness will prove to be the brightest place in the painting. Let’s leave this shade, and set out for the festivities, where we are young again.’

  And Husk followed the stranger into the landscapes, away from the rocky regions where she had been wailing.

  10

  Riley’s Regret

  and Riley found herself among circus folk, wandering on a long road between cities, with Harlequin at her side.

  She had no idea where she was going.

  It was a beautiful day, and the sunlight seemed to radiate not from the sky, but upwards out of the earth, from the plants, from the hills, and from the lakes along the great road.

  Harlequin was thin and handsome, quirky and prankish, and silent. He spoke to her in silence, with his expressive face.

  She travelled with the circus folk and before they got to the city where they were due to be performing, she met a young man by the roadside, fell into a conversation, and together they went off to explore the villages. Before she knew it she had lost contact with her friends, the mute circus folk.

  The dream jumped forward, and she was on the road again, another road, with the circus folk, and with Harlequin silent at her side.

  Soon a pattern emerged in the dream which frustrated her. She seemed to be with her circus friends only between cities. And she always got distracted by some exciting thing or other before they arrived at the city where they were due to perform. And so she always lost contact with them and never got to join them in their fabulous performances to huge crowds.

  She only ever met her circus friends again between cities, on the long road, with Harlequin telling of their wonderful adventures and passions in his expressive silence.

  11

  Journey with Camels

  and Sa
m always found himself journeying through a desert with camels that wouldn’t let him ride on them.

  And throughout the long trek, and the great thirst, and the sun beating down like a blacksmith’s hammer on anvils, all he could think of was how to film the world from the back of a camel.

  He spent the journey filming the sameness of the desert dunes and the expanse of sand and the storms and the unchanging bronze dream of the horizon.

  And there was no one else in the whole world but the camels.

  And after a long time walking on the shifting sands, he spied a distant oasis, and his heart leapt with joy. But the camels were not interested in the oasis and they travelled away from it. Sam was torn between the camels and the oasis, and couldn’t decide between them.

  Eventually he chose to follow the camels, and then he turned back again and went towards the oasis, and then turned again towards the departing camels, till the sandstorms came and obliterated the world at dawn.

  12

  The Silence of Mothers

  and Jute was in winter, with ice all around, under a darkening sky. Mozartian flute music sounded from far away in the distant festivities.

  Jute was in winter. Her heart was cold. Her hands were freezing. But she sensed that there was a wonderful party going on all over the world. Only she could not get to the party because she was looking for her mother.

  She was looking for her mother in the winter of her being and could not find her. And the winter grew worse while the beautiful music grew more haunting from the increasing distance.