by Ben Okri
Lao: Tell me about this quality of contemplation.
Director: Well, there is also the fact that we find ourselves looking at the picture. We are enjoying it. But we know at the same time that one day we will no more enjoy the picture.
Lao: So the painting should induce a sense of humility, and also a sense of enjoying what is present because the present is the only thing that is real. This is why I am fascinated by the painting. It poses – or rather it brings together this complementary relationship between death and happiness. The inevitability of death and also the possibility of happiness. Is one to take from this painting the feeling that a wise sense of death should increase our capacity for happiness because we realise how transient life is? Or should it make us sober, humble, reflective, quieter, less ambitious?
Director: These are the questions that Poussin would have liked you to ask. In a way, Poussin doesn’t give answers to such questions. He prefers you to find yourself asking such questions in front of his pictures. But he leaves you free to choose what you like. Especially at this point in his career. He is still a young man.
Lao: How old would you say?
Director: Between thirty-eight and thirty-nine.
Lao: Why has this picture caught the imagination of the world?
Director: To my mind it is not the greatest picture of Poussin. But to answer your question I think that it was a very clear image of death for the succeeding centuries. Its artistry and iconography have been much studied and many have tried to explain this special painting.
Lao: But why does happiness, Arcadia, and a sense of tranquillity have to be opposed with death in order for us to feel them more strongly?
Director: For centuries many have discussed the meaning of the inscription. Some say that Poussin made a mistake in his interpretation of the Latin words. Perhaps chance has entered into its enigma.
(Lao laughed. The director continued.)
Director: But also painters use images, not words. They don’t need to be precise with words. Poussin makes us concerned and involved with what is going on in the painting. The cardinal told Poussin to paint ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’; and he had to transform this brief into an image. He seems to want it interpreted in different ways. You spoke about ambiguity. I think that in a way if you close the image, if you have all the answers to your question about a picture…
Lao: Oh, it dies, it dies…
Director: Yes, it dies. And being a diligent painter he knew that by not giving a clear answer to this question he would maintain the attention and the intentions of the centuries towards his works of art. He knew that death is there and that we all die; but he also knew that this picture tells us something about himself and that creating these images is his way of surviving.
Lao: I’d like to ask you a private question about the Arcadian theme. One cannot say with any certainty that everyone has an Arcadia. But one can say that everyone needs an Arcadia. Listening to you speak with such feeling about Poussin’s painting makes me wonder whether you too have some private place of enchantment. What is your Arcadia?
Director: Well, I think it is the Louvre on a Tuesday, a day when the museum is closed and the museum is all my own. I also think that in a certain way museums are the Arcadias of our age.
Lao: Tell me more about that.
Director: When you see the crowds in the museum on certain days you find yourself wondering about this, about Arcadia. But when the museum is nearly empty people come in here and I’m quite sure they find their Arcadia here.
Lao: What form does it take?
Director: Meditation. Walking round the museum. Enjoying an image. Singing to one’s self. Going backwards and forward. Being able to escape from everyday life, from the rumours of the city. I’m quite convinced that the great success of museums in our day, and not just the Louvre, is in part connected with Arcadia. Evasion might also be a good word.
Lao: There is in Arcadia the notion of escape, but also that of death.
Director: Yes.
Lao: Does the painting suggest that a sense of death and its inevitability might increase one’s sense of peace?
Director: Many people think that museums are the churches of our age. In churches you had to learn how to face death. Some pictures teach us how to face death with dignity and with greatness. Poussin was a stoic. There is beauty in facing things the right way.
Lao: What is this stoic attitude to beauty. Is it because Arcadia and beauty are linked?
Director: For Poussin the purpose of art was delectation. The moral lesson of the picture is crucial, but at the end the real point of his pictures was delectation and pleasure. He did not try to please the crowds. He was more inclined to do pictures for the happy few.
Lao: One final question. Could you elaborate on the idea that the museums of this world also constitute an Arcadia?
Director: People come here to forget the troubles of everyday life. They come here because they know that contact with great masterpieces improves them in a way. There is in museums a morality. There is a way of life. In our age one feels that those in charge of museums have to think deeply on such points and about the public’s continual coming here. The public do not only expect to see great works of art. They expect something more, and we have to try to find out what it is exactly. Arcadia is a good answer.
26
And then there was the swift departure from the labyrinth of the Arcadian painting. The swift departure from the centre. To catch the train to Switzerland. The city was boiling. Paris was nervy. People were whirling in and out of their daily problems. The crowded streets. The struggle to earn a living. The stress of maintaining a persona, a style, an identity, an inner structure. The cracks in the masks. The anxiety bleeding out in nervous glances. The persistence of poverty. The chaos undermining confidence in the future. Uncertainty stalking every individual. And underneath it all a strain, a refrain of something in the inscription. For the whole crew had been infected by it; and Lao now saw it everywhere.
On the way to the Gare de l’Est, Lao passed a beggar. At the station there was the crowding and the crush, and the insistent refrain. There were the faces. The sense of loss, of disorientation. Eyes trapped in the spell of distraction. Everyone trying to get somewhere, to continue their journeys. Where was everyone trying to go? What was the insistent refrain that had haunted the journey from the very beginning?
Then Lao saw it, briefly. He saw a man with thick glasses, struggling to make out the words on the giant console. Struggling to make out his destination, to see it clearly. He was adjusting his glasses, straining, sweating, and still he couldn’t see clearly.
27
Anxiety and stress. Bewilderment and stress. Is it death that secretly troubles us? Are we too, like the shepherds, trying to decipher the inscription?
Book 7
1
Is it that we don’t feel entirely at home in the world? Or is it that the world we have made doesn’t quite correspond to the dreams and hopes that somewhere dwell in us?
Lao looked out of the window of the train as it sped on to Switzerland. His thoughts troubled him. The world is not as we would have liked it. Lao surveyed the panorama of the earth, serene within his anxieties. He looked out on the fields and churches, the clusters of houses. And as the scenes shot past him so did his thoughts. He thought of the world as we have made it. Wars across nations. Refugees across borders. Walking without hope or food towards hostile destinations. With all their meagre possessions on their heads. In the tribal battles of the world. Families dying of starvation. Dying from famine. In camps. Dying under the sun. Devoured by flies. Breathing the poisoned air of corrupt and wicked governments. Dying under the filmed gaze of the world. Environmental disasters everywhere. Pollution everywhere. Wars of religion. Wars of race. Wars of creed. Wars of economics. Wars of fear. Wars of ideology. Wars all over the world.
The homeless all across the globe. Tribal peoples deprived of their land. Invisible imperialisms spreading th
eir cancer all over the earth. Diseases ravaging unloved millions. Poverty multiplying like bacilli. Oceans drained of their fishes. Animals rare and free perishing all across the plains. Toxic wastes in the water and air and food. Nuclear bombs hanging over our destinies. Human freedoms eroded by giant powers. Injustices and inequalities raging across the globe, but concentrated in the vast continents that are also the poorest and the most exploited. The people who live on minimal hope, in shanty towns, in squatter camps, living side by side with overspilling latrines.
Is this the world we dreamed of before birth? Is this the world that childhood promised in its golden glories of innocence?
2
Lao was troubled. Even in countries where there is no mass hunger, there is anomie. Mass silent despair. Even amidst plenitude and excess. Lives lived with no sense of purpose. From school to university then to the workplace. Working to earn a living, then to pay the mortgage, then to raise children. Then what? Where does it all lead? What is the purpose of all that energy, all that fire, all that effort, all that love, all that rage, all that chaos, all that dreaming?
Emptiness and absence of religion. Humiliation and no sense of redemption. Just work and television and sex and entertainment. Loves that fail. Marriages that die. Hopes that perish with the onset of adulthood. Knowledge that drives away the freshness of innocent dreaming. The joy of freedom that shrinks into the fear of being. Cynicism and despair. The fear of old age and the fear of dying. The perplexity of youth. The fear of losing one’s youth. The terror of accumulating wrinkles. The decaying of the teeth. The falling out of the hair. The inevitable decline. The thickening of the waistline, the bloating of the belly, the loss of youth’s vigour and freshness. The endless battles in the marketplace, the offices, the corporations, the rat race. The endless repetition of waking up in the morning, going to work, coming back, sleeping, waking up again, on and on, with no destination to make sense of it all, nothing that adds up to some redeeming whole, or goal.
A life is seldom a work of art. There is no sense of achievement in having made it, of having shaped it, or of it having a meaning and a value beyond itself, a value to others, something that shines beyond mortality.
Why go on living? How often does living seem like a finely drawn out ritual of humiliation and meaninglessness? All our intelligence, all our achievements, all our efforts, our schemes and plans, our designs, all that obeying of the laws and dictates of society, all that compromise between our secret selves and public selves, where does it all lead, what monument does it crystallise, into what light does it resolve? Why does there have to be emptiness after so much presence in the world? Why does it all have to end in a grave with an inscription which, more or less, says: ‘I too have loved, suffered, and been wretched, been successful and neurotic, been confused and despairing, in Arcadia’?
3
On all the faces Lao looked upon in the train, he saw traces of disaster, of mortality’s terrors, the ironies of time. Faces that were giving off quiet concealed despair. Faces cracking and leaking, lights that are dying. Faces that carried their secret troubles with them across the speeding landscape.
Lao was troubled by the troubles in people’s faces, in their souls. The train soon seemed to him to be a symbol of something mysterious, bearing people to unknown destinations that were not really destinations, places that were the antechambers of dying, not the beginning of living. He saw trains suddenly as capsules of despair mixed with dreams, escape pods in which the seeds of destiny travelled in the souls of the travellers. They carried their fates with them like flowers pollinated with dying and living, with good and evil, with disaster and illumination. What a mixed heritage is humanity on a train speeding to the spilling place where lives pour out towards their ambiguous destination.
Did we dream the world thus? Or do we project the wrong dreams upon the world, and thereby make it our nightmare? Is the nightmare of reality within or is it without? Where will the healing begin? Lao wondered. Can the world be remade from without? Can the cracked walls of reality be fixed from the outside? Can the starving people be fed only from without, and can feeding them solve the problems that brought them to the point of starvation in the first place?
Where is the world first made, within or without? And where must the world first be remade? Must we first remake the world within, remake our minds, our hearts, our thoughts? Or must we first, like builders without a design, without a plan, remake the world, improve the world, brick by brick, with no sense of the overall picture?
4
Where did the betrayal start? Lao thought. Where did the discrepancy begin? Was the world broken, its arches collapsed, its columns fallen, its bridges in ruins, before we were born, before we tumbled forth onto the wrecked stage of humanity?
Where must the healing begin – this question thundered in Lao’s mind to the relentless rhythm of the train as it ground its way over iron, sparking fire, towards its ceasing point in Switzerland.
Where must the healing begin? Have we lost faith in our capacity to dream things better, and make the world shape itself in accordance with this better and juster dreaming? Have we lost the will to live without the ringing humiliation that so encircles our lives in other people’s suffering? Can we still find a way to make the world correspond to our best dreams and hopes?
Where must the healing begin? Do we make the world we see? Do we project onto the world the despair that we feel, the terror that we sense, the hopelessness that sometimes overwhelms us? Lao thought hard about this.
There is no despair or terror or hopelessness in the sky, the flowers, the bees, the horses, the cats, the wind, the sea, or the mountains. If they perish it is because of time, or the atmospheric conditions we have helped create, or nature’s own upheavals. But despair does not cling to the air as a flea does to succulent living flesh. Terror does not reside in the sky. Hopelessness does not fall with the autumn leaves. These things are in our minds. They are in us. They dwell in us, and we have given them a habitation, a home. They stare out at the world from within the fabric of our own seeing.
So the cosmic illness, the anomie, the despair, the terror, the nausea, the emptiness, are all within. We are the sickness. We harbour our own malaise, and then we project it onto the world. And then we sink into apathy and hopelessness, into self-centredness, and self-protectiveness. We stop seeing. We no longer notice the signs that are sent us. We no longer notice the messages sent us, intended to wake us up, to remind us of who we are, to guide us to the moment of initiation into our true kingdom. We become the totality of our disease. We become the condition that we harbour, that we project, that we blame on the world.
And then we stop seeing the world. The world becomes an enemy. People become vague antagonists. Then the world mirrors what we have put into it in our diseased seeing. The disease is within. The world is more or less neutral, but the disease within makes it seem an enemy, corrupt, fallen from grace, hopelessly irredeemable, impossibly unhealable. Then, with these perceptions, it becomes possible to live as if living were dying, when living is really living, open-ended, till death. And maybe even beyond.
With these perceptions, we separate ourselves from nature and from others. We become double exiles from the universe and from humanity, from love and from life, from the past and the present, from history and from the future. We are not even at home in here, now, in our bodies, in time, in our dreams. We wander through time, with no destination in sight. And so, inadvertently, we make death our homecoming, with the grave as our home.
But the grave is home only to the bones. Not to the spirit. It is not a home to the spirit.
5
And as he looked at each member of the scattered crew, all concealing the brink of their nervous breakdowns, and as he pondered the ghosts of failures and fears that they all carried with them on the journey, Lao thought about the messages.
He thought about the signs, and the inscriptions everywhere that become clear only when we see them. An
d like a thread in a labyrinth, they lead out to the open universe, where intuitions sparkle in the night sky of the mind. Our redemption is always there, here, waiting, in the air we breathe, in our heartbeats, in our thoughts. We only have to want it and the healing, quietly, begins. Home is here, in time, and in timelessness. Exile ends when we sense that home is everywhere that the soul can sing from. The messages have no greater power than the terror to bring the news of our awakening.
Where must the healing begin, the train thundered at Lao as he stared at his fellow passengers as they sat reading their books, their newspapers, staring out of the windows not into the passing landscape but into passing memories fears hopes dreams regrets sadnesses and losses.
Maybe the healing must begin within, thought Lao.
6
Is it death that secretly troubles us?
Mistletoe paused in her drawing to contemplate the thought that had suddenly drifted into her mind from the swirling anxieties of her fellow passengers.
Where had the thought come from?
Mistletoe was one of nature’s non-worriers. She was blessed with the gift of travelling through time and life’s disasters with a serenity that astonished those who knew her. She had no philosophy as such. She had no worked-out ideology. And she had none of the overwhelming ambitions that drove people on frantically down life’s narrow roads. She viewed life as a journey, and harboured no thoughts about its end. The journey was all that ever concerned her.
She was born with a happy soul. She had made as many mistakes as most people make in an average life in any of the privileged nations of the earth. Her parents were both still alive and so, without knowing it, she was still dwelling in enchanted time, without the invisible and searing umbilical cord ever having been cut. She was in the blessed zone of her life, and didn’t know it. Still – she had, with tranquillity, been making experimental drawings of the merging scenes that fast travel makes of the world, when the question materialised in her mind. Her drawing was troubled by the question.