In Arcadia

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by Ben Okri


  Soon Jute found herself a prisoner in the block of ice of her own being. She had become the block of ice. And the party and the music were her mother.

  Her mother was speaking to her from outside the ice but Jute could not hear because her ears were frozen.

  After a while her mother stopped speaking and stood in her own splendid sunlight.

  She looked at her daughter, silent in the encasement of ice.

  And all around spring was in the air, and there was music and dancing at the fair on the happy green.

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  And so it was that they, each with their dreams still unresolved within them, arrived at the Louvre on a blessed day in September. They were all quieter than normal and were subdued the way people are when enrapt within a puzzle.

  There was gaiety outside the Louvre. Lovers sat on the edge of the glass pyramid, and on the margin of the flowing waters, with the sunlight casting a lovely spell on the world.

  The charmed open spaces and the sunlight on the splendid palace ought to have lifted the spirits of the crew. But each was enfolded, in-turned, uncommunicative. They each did the work they were meant to do, but without inspiration.

  They were met by museum officials and led in through the back way, past the security checks. They were led down polished stone stairs and complicated corridors with Egyptian statues and sphinxes and walls with hieroglyphs; they passed through long rooms with prehistoric moulds and monoliths, with Iberian sculptings, African figures, ibexes in stone, idols in bronze.

  Through many corridors and crypts were they led, through what seemed like underground routes and tunnels, through darkened places, emerging again within halls, ascending in lifts.

  They journeyed through a universe of paintings, and were regarded by figures on walls in open-eyed dreams, who stared at them the way people do in a room when a stranger enters and disrupts a conversation.

  For the first time Lao became conscious that paintings are living things. He became aware that figures within great paintings live and breathe and bustle and carry on their normal busy comic or tragic transactions away from human gaze. But when humans appear they stop and freeze, as if in a game, trying to behave as though they weren’t real.

  Lao and Mistletoe exchanged a glance. They knew at once that paintings can be intruded upon. That paintings have a secret life. That they have a secret world of dramas. That paintings contemplate themselves and that the crew was interrupting their contemplation, their activities, and their dreams.

  Mistletoe could sense the figures in the paintings waiting for the crew to pass on, to leave them alone. And as the crew entered each room they could feel this unbroken breathing, this sudden stopping of all activity, like children who are up to some mischief ceasing their suspicious play when their parents suddenly appear in the doorway.

  It was Tuesday, and the museum was closed to the public, and the air was pristine and fresh with the breathing of paintings, with the breathing of angels and villains, of heroes and gods, of beautiful women and goddesses.

  The sunlight of fresher worlds, distant worlds, was present and alive and shining forth its radiance into the stillness of the rooms, filling the spaces with other times, sending the passing film crew into other time zones, making other time realms present, removing them from a day in September to a timeless space where dreams are more real than things.

  And they journeyed forth, led by the museum guide, into the great labyrinth of the Louvre. They wandered through dreams materialised in the air, troubled by the gaze of horses, or a murder witnessed, or a suicide enacted, in silence, alone. They were perturbed by glimpses of ravished women, amazed by an intense Napoleon on his wild horse, and astonished by the serenity of a betrayed Christ.

  On and on through the swirling spaces they went, tiptoeing so as not to disturb the tranquillity of paintings, silent so as not to alarm the settled dew of stillness.

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  Their complicated journey through the crypts and labyrinths of the Louvre was fitting. Their main reason for being in Paris was to see not only one of the most enigmatic paintings in the world, but also one of the most important icons of the Arcadian legend.

  15

  There is a mood in which all great things must be appreciated. This mood can be induced through surprise, through indirection, through the tangential, by accident, by serendipity. It can be induced through complete ignorance, or by strong contrast, or by long complicated routes that lead you into the mind’s openness to illumination. This mood can be brought on through the relentless pressure of reverential whispers hints rumours praise controversy negativity hostility or the unaccountable silence that surrounds an achievement that no one is as yet willing to face. Like the silence around a strange mountain that no one suspects is there.

  In what other ways can this mood be created? Through the elaborate journey of a great accomplishment in the byways and highways of thought and tradition, through its sheer unavoidability, through the ways in which an aspect of important thought is impossible without confronting or facing it. Or through the way it haunts you, or haunts others, haunts those you respect and revere, through its unfathomability, its unavailability, its unapproachability, its elusiveness, its overwhelming and mysterious fame, the persistence of its legend, or simply through the ways in which it confronts you at every turn, like a disturbing figure in a dream who appears at the end of every road you take to avoid a confrontation. Whatever you do they have already worked on you, and haven’t finished yet. But great achievements can not properly be approached ordinarily.

  There ought to be a ritual of encounter with all noble and amazing things. And so it proved to be with the crew as they entered the beautifully lit hall, after so many twists and turns through all kinds of spaces in the empty museum of one of the world’s greatest collections of art.

  Tuesday was the best day to film. The emptiness, the stillness, the silence of the place were spooky, and induced an air of mystery, of a ritual encounter.

  Without knowing it for a long time afterwards, how were the crew to realise that it wasn’t a painting they were about to encounter, but themselves and their unclear and enigmatic place in the universe, within the shining sphere of life?

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  And when they entered the hall and encountered the painting it was with a sense of anticlimax. Oh, the mystery of all deservedly famous achievements! How they always seem smaller than their fame suggests! How it is that they do not perform instant miracles on the first encounter! That they don’t make the senses jump, and don’t burst into song like the ancient oracles when the mood of Apollo had seized their hidden sibyls!

  Deservedly famous achievements are always smaller than their fame, and vaster. Upon greater study and immersion into their powers they always seem to be even more famous than they at first appeared. So it was when the crew first saw Poussin’s Les Bergers d’Arcadie.

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  This painting is the epitome and the finest realisation of the Arcadian notion in art. It contains its beauty and mystery, its simplicity and its complexity, its hope and its despair, its power and its humility.

  But above all, it is an open painting, impossible to decipher completely, a true enigma of the illuminati, a visual koan, a perpetual question, and a perpetual quest.

  It gives no answers. But it gives the code for continual development in living, and in thinking. It is a nightmare to those who seek, and a preparatory school for those who find.

  It fills you with peace. But within that peace it plants the seeds of restlessness, of unease, of subtle disturbance, like a meaningful dream not fully understood, filling your waking hours with question marks.

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  What is this painting? Is it a monster, a sphinx, a riddle, a mental labyrinth, the resting point of an idea that has travelled thousands of years in the mind of humanity, or a secret guide to the future?

  Is it in fact a painting, or is it one of those things that transcend art, transcend their form, a question that immo
rtality poses to mortality?

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  The painting appears simple. Three shepherds and a shepherdess in front of a tomb. The tomb is in a rocky landscape with a few trees. The four figures are reading the inscription on the tomb, and they appear to be trying to decipher it. The shepherdess stands slightly aloof from their puzzlement.

  It is a beautiful painting, but the beauty does not reside in the landscape, which is rocky and mostly bare. The beauty is in the structure, the colours, the harmony of the lines of force in the painting, and in its mood.

  At the centre of the painting is the tomb. And at the centre of the tomb is the inscription: Et in Arcadia Ego. Those four words are among the most debated in the history of art, the most enigmatic, puzzling, mysterious, and endless.

  ‘I too have lived in Arcadia’, the inscription reads. Who is the ‘I’? Is it Death? Is it the one who died? There is no name on the tomb. So it can’t be the one who is buried in it. The tomb itself seems to be the ‘I’; or the unnamed dead within it. This unnaming makes it all of us, therefore it might be anyone who has died. They too have been in Arcadia. They too have lived. And now they are dead. We who look upon the painting are implicated. We stand with the shepherds. We too are in Arcadia. We are alive. We too will…

  But if the tomb itself is the one that speaks its own inscription then it is saying that Death too has been in Arcadia, and is still there, in the form of the monumental tomb.

  Like a silent explosion, a quiet inner revolution, a provocation to enlightenment, a ticking time bomb of illumination planted right in the midst of life’s splendours, it is impossible for an intelligent human being to see this painting, to think about it, and to live the same way they lived before.

  20

  Many things in the painting have puzzled commentators since the seventeenth century. The kneeling shepherd points at the word ‘Arcadia’ in the inscription – which is like pointing out the name on a map of the place in which you are looking at the map. Which is to say here, or ‘Here’; or ‘Now’.

  So the inscription says: ‘I too have been here’, or ‘I too have been in now’. Death too is here. Death too is now. Death lives concurrent with life; the two streams flow side by side, and sometimes intersect. Or Death is in life, not separate from it, but part of it, the way a capital city is part of a country, but is not the country.

  The other puzzling thing is that the shepherd who points forms the shape of a man with a scythe in his shadow. The symbol of death. And so Arcadia and death are inextricably intertwined. Immortality and death are conjoined. Beauty and death are linked, happiness and death are coupled.

  21

  This is the painting that the crew gathered round as they awaited the arrival of the museum director. And as they stared at it, seeing it and not seeing it, as they thought about what they thought they saw, as they discussed it, they were all changed by it, each in their own unique way.

  But it was Lao who was most affected by the painting, because of his earlier confrontation, and because of what he had been told about the inscription. The message that had been sleeping within him since the beginning of the journey now awoke and sprang into life.

  He wondered what warnings, what omens, the inscription was meant to signify to him personally. What did he have to beware of in those harmless lethal words? But he had hardly begun to think through the strange stirrings of his thoughts and his unease, when the director of the museum made his appearance, and filming began.

  22

  And as the crew set up their equipment, took sound levels and light measurements, Lao found himself thinking not of the inscription as such, but of the journey of an idea through time. He was thinking about the journey of an idea from a real place to a poem; from the real Arkadia in the Peloponnese to the idyllic and pastoral poems of the Greek poet Theocritus, and from Theocritus to Virgil.

  Virgil refined the pastoral form, and raised the potent beauty and ambiguity of the Arcadian notion till it became, in his Eclogues, a landscape of shepherds, a refuge for exiles, a place of disordered passions, a place of dispossession, a realm of love poetry, of singing matches, of an encounter with the tomb of the famous and beautiful Daphnis. It also became a setting for one of the most mysterious and messianic poems in literature, a terrain for the celebration of a god, a territory for the praise of the powerful, and a place of departure.

  In short, Virgil transformed Arcadia into a landscape of the human spirit, where love, history, politics, religion, work, poetry, and power converge and live. With Virgil, Arcadia became the seed of an ideal, a dream, and a lyric meditation on the mystery of creation and creativity.

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  Afterwards, Arcadia travelled through the spirit of poets and composers. Landscapes were idealised in its image. It journeyed through the late Renaissance into the painting of Guercino. He was the first to use the famous inscription, along with a skull, and shepherds surprised in their confrontation with death in Arcadia. But in Guercino the inscription is not central. The emphasis is on the nature of their surprise.

  And the Arcadian ideal finds its perfect resting or haunting place in Poussin, who executed the painting twice before he found its most perfect form.

  The idea of the inscription in Poussin’s painting had its true origins in Virgil, in the fifth eclogue, called Daphnis at Heaven’s Gate, in which two shepherds come upon the tomb of Daphnis and sing of his deification. For Daphnis existed in the Theocritus original, but was raised even higher by Virgil. In the Eclogues, Daphnis is a great and original poet, and Virgil is lamenting the death of a beloved contemporary. Daphnis was famous, gifted, and beautiful and he died young. In the poem Virgil lifts him up to Heaven, to become a minor star, a little deity.

  And so in literary terms it was Daphnis, the poet, who was saying: ‘I too have lived in Arcadia’. It is the inscription you might find on the tomb of a famous poet, a genius, which seems to say: ‘I, with consciousness heightened to life’s innumerable beauties, sufferings, and marvels; I, a celebrant of life’s mysteries; I, in whom the wonder of all things was richly alive in love and in art; I too was once like you, happy, unhappy, alive, and in love. I too was wild and young and loved. And now I’m dead. But remember: I too lived the happiness of Arcadia.’

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  But in the alchemy of Poussin’s painting, something even more mysterious and haunting takes place.

  The inscription stands alone.

  The removal of a name makes it ambiguous.

  The tomb could be Everyman, could be any one of us.

  Or it could be no one.

  It could just be the house of Death, the fact of Death, the reality of Death.

  But it hints also that it is only here, in Arcadia, in mortality, in life, on earth, that Death has its home, its dominion.

  In Virgil the dead poet transcends death by being lifted up to Heaven’s Gate. In Virgil, therefore, we can all be received at Heaven’s Gate.

  There is transcendence in Virgil, the poet.

  There is no hint of transcendence in Poussin.

  There is just the bare statement of fact, an impenetrable fact: ‘I too lived in Arcadia’.

  This fact is a labyrinth without any exit. It is closed.

  The mind either learns to live within the closed labyrinth of the conjoining of death and life;

  Or the mind develops wings, and soars.

  Before the interview began, Lao made a pact with his spirit, with his mind.

  That he would be among those who learn to live within the labyrinth, that he would join those who develop wings and soar.

  25

  Dialogue in a Labyrinth

  The director of the museum wore a red scarf over his shoulder and a dark suit. The red scarf seemed to energise him. He spoke with great enthusiasm and feeling. Like all experts, he was not interested in dialogue, only in communicating what he had contemplated for many years. At first this absence of dialogue was irritating to Lao, who saw the film as a quest, not as a lecture, as
dance, not as monument. But Lao made concessions, and much that was fruitful emerged from the clanking of their armour.

  Lao: It is a pleasure to meet you, Director, and a pleasure to be here at the Louvre, in the presence of the genius of Poussin. Our film is about Arcadia and its incarnation in art, music, literature, and the human spirit. You are an expert on the work of Nicolas Poussin. Can you tell us something about this painting and Arcadia and what it whispers to us about human life?

  Director: Absolutely. It is a very famous picture. It is an icon of classicism. And it tells us a sad story, in a way. The story is simple: there are four people, they are walking into a landscape, and they discover a tomb. On this tomb is written Et in Arcadia Ego. They are looking at this inscription. They are in various stages of understanding. One of them is showing the inscription to a girl, a beautiful girl. But what does the inscription mean? It means that even in Arcadia, even in earthly paradise, even where everyone is happy, death is present. These four are discovering the existence of death. Two of them are looking very happy together, but now they know that this happiness will end…

  Lao: How do you account for its fame?

  Director: It’s hard to say. It was originally commissioned by a cardinal and he wanted a quality of moral poetry in the painting.

  Lao: A beautiful phrase – moral poetry.

  Director. The painting is a meditation, and something more. That is always Poussin’s greatness. He is not only a man of events. He is also a man of thinking, of thought.

  Lao: In Guercino’s painting there is a skull.

  Director: Yes, and also in the first version of Poussin’s painting. But in this second version the skull has disappeared. It has now become not even a dead man, but Death.

 

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