Orki

A Way of Being Free - Ben Orki

“It is for me an axiom that words create a mysterious reality. That is why my approach to writing essays has always been a personal one. I always aim for uncluttered expression. It seems more courageous to express your thoughts clearly and simply. Nothing is more difficult than knowing what you really think. It is a curious thing to say, but it is easier to be complicated and complex than to say something truly and simply. Rigour and logic are perhaps not much appreciated, yet without logic, without rigour, writing fails. It took me many years to rid myself of needless complexities.

While the World Sleeps

“‘The poet is he who inspires far more than he who is inspired.’

Paul Eluard

Poets need to live where others don’t care to look, and they need to do this because if they don’t they can’t sing to us of all the secret and public domains of our lives. They need to be multiple witnesses around the central masquerades of reality in order to convey fully the unimaginable dimensions of the deity’s terrible and enchanting dance. The great tidal crowds of everyday events pour in one direction, sometimes the poet has to move in the other — often moving directly against them, at other times cutting tangentially across the morning waves of humanity. Poets seem to be set against the world because we need them to show us the falseness of our limitations, the true extent of our kingdom.

Laws do not bind our perceptions. There are as many worlds as there are lives. It is not those who have no imagination who are the problem, for we all possess imagination, few of us use it well. The problem is with those who are frightened of the rather limitless validity of the imagination, frightened of people who continually extend the boundaries of the possible, people who ceaselessly redream the world and reinvent existence; frontiers people of the unknown and the uncharted.

The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things. Politicians, heads of state, kings, religious leaders, soldiers, the rich, the powerful — they all fancy themselves the masters of this earthly kingdom. They speak to us of facts, policies, statistics, programmes, abstract and severe moralities. But the dreams of the people are beyond them, and would trouble them.

We must not force our poets to limit the world any further. That is a crime against life itself. If the poet begins to speak only of narrow things, of things that we can effortlessly digest

and recognise, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir, or annoy us, or make us restless for more, make us cry for greater justice, make us want to set sail and explore inklings murdered in our youths, if the poet sings only of our restricted angles and in restricted terms and in restricted language, then what hope is there for any of us in this world?

Those of us who want this are cowards, in flesh and in spirit. We fear heroic heights. We dread the recombining of the world, dread a greater harvest of being. We sit lazily and demand that our poets draw the horizon closer. We therefore become separated from our true selves. Then even beauty can seem repugnant. Then, we no longer recognise who we are, and we forget what we used to be, what states we sometimes inhabited, what extended moments of awareness.

It may be that what you could be haunts you. It is real. It is a weight you have to carry around. Each failure to become, to be, is a weight. Each state you could inhabit is a burden as heavy as any physical weight, but more so, because it weighs on your soul. It is the ghost of your possibilities hanging around your neck, an invisible albatross, potentials unknowingly murdered. The higher being you could be, if you could inhabit a higher state, also sits on you, increasing the tensions of your spirit, your moods, your irritations.

That is how in secret moments we repress and deny the poetic. That is how we murder our dreams. Then we carry the suppression of the poetic into our waking lives and wreak our vengeance on the world. Having avoided a self-confrontation, and being more pompous in our waking hours for the self-diminishment of our secret ones, that is how we become the antagonist of poets — enemies of the widening of the world towards a vaster, more wondrous reality. That is how we narrow the world’s sense of wonder. Antagonists of poets are among the life-haters, for whom Dante has a special place in a circle of the Inferno.

Follow Melville’s precept, which he had nailed to his writing desk: ‘Be true to the dreams of thy youth.

Newton’s Child

“Perhaps we should strive towards mythical resonances in our lives. Among many possible images, a human being can be seen as a tree: we should reach out for more light even as we reach deeper into reality for a more solid hold on the earth. We were not born with one eye, with only one thought in our heads, and with only one direction to travel. When we look out on the world with all its multiplicity of astonishing phenomena, do we see that only one philosophy can contain, explain, and absorb everything? I think not. The universe will always be greater than us. Our mind therefore should be like Keats’ thoroughfare, through which all thoughts can wander. It should also be a great cunning net that can catch the fishes of possibility.

Better a complex mind behind a seemingly simple thought, than a simple mind behind a seemingly complex thought. The mind should surround what it expresses.

The artist should never lose the spirit of play. It is curious how sometimes the biggest tasks are best approached tangentially, with a smile in the soul. Much has been written about the seriousness with which important work has to be undertaken. I believe that seriousness and rigour are invaluable, and hard work indispensable — but I want to speak a little for the mysterious and humble might of a playful creative spirit. Playfulness lightens all terrifying endeavours. It humanises them, and brings them within the realm of childhood. The

playfulness becomes absorbing, engrossing, all-consuming, serious even. The spirit warms. Memory burns brightly. The fires of intelligence blaze away, and self- consciousness evaporates. Then — wonderfully — the soul finds the sea; and the usually divided selves function, luminously, as one.

The play soon becomes its own sustenance. ‘I wonder how far I can take this?’ the smiling self asks. And the spirit of the encounter answers by taking leaps into the unknown, and creating terra firma for itself to land on. It answers by inventing roads where none exist, extending ones that do. In short, out of the place where playfulness and inspiration meet, come ideas and possibilities more astonishing, more solid, and more profound than can be pulled out of-a solemn and sententious disposition.

If nothing else, if that height is beyond us, then at least a joyful creative attitude to life can transform the chore and boredom of work into perpetual delight, and introduce the hint of a blessed smile into the challenges of our days.

The highest kind of writing — which must not be confused with the most ambitious kind — belongs to the realm of grace. Talent is part of it, certainly; a thorough understanding of the secret laws, absolutely. But finding the subject and theme which is in perfect harmony with your deepest nature, your forgotten selves, your hidden dreams, and the full unresonated essence of your life — now that cannot be reached through searching, nor can it be stumbled upon through ambition. That sort of serendipity comes upon you on a lucky day. It may emerge even out of misfortune or defeat. You may happen upon it without realising that this is the work through which your whole life will sing. We should always be ready. We should always be humble. Creativity should always be a form of prayer.

There is no need to panic. The intelligence that shaped the universe shaped you.

The Joys of Storytelling 1

“Certainty has always been the enemy of art and creativity; more than that it has been the enemy of humanity. In the name of certainties, under its illusory god, people have had an almost medieval belief in the rightness of the violence they have wreaked on others, in the destruction of other people’s ways and lives. In the name of certainties, nations and individuals had come to regard themselves as gods. This certainty, whether its name be religion, imperialism, ideology, class, caste, race, or sex, has been the great undoing of our measureless heritage, and has narrowed the vastness of human possibility and marvellous variety.

These old storytellers were the true magicians. They were humanity’s truest friends and most reliable guides. Their role was both simple and demanding. They had to go down deep into the seeds of time, into the dreams of their people, into the unconscious, into the uncharted fears, and bring shapes and moods back up into the light. They had to battle with monsters before they told us about them. They had to see clearly. They had to see even what they hadn’t seen, and make it more real to us than our most ordinary or most frightening experiences. They lived lives of intense sacrifice, placing their psyches, dreams, hungers, and their lives on the altar of listening, seeing, sensing, confronting. And then

they had to render all they had witnessed into comprehendable stories from the other side of the fire, in the deepest of nights.

They risked their sanity and consciousness in the service of dreaming better futures. They risked madness, or being unmoored in the wild realms of unknown interspaces, or being devoured by the unexpected demons of the communal imagination. When great storytellers die, a thousand years of unconfronted journeys, unguided journeys towards the deceptive lights of future civilisations also perish in their silence.

The old storytellers were the first real explorers and frontierspeople of the abyss. They brought the world within our souls. They made living within and living without as one.

And I think that now, in our age, in the mid-ocean of our days, with certainties collapsing about us, and with no beliefs by which to steer our ways through the dark descending nights ahead — I think that now we need those fictional old bards and fearless storytellers, those seers. We need their magic, their courage, their love, and their fire more than ever before. It is precisely in a fractured, broken age that we need mystery and a reawoken sense of wonder. We need them in order to begin to be whole again. We need to be reminded of the primeval terror again. We need to be humble again. We need to go down to the bottom, to the depths of the heart, and start to live again as we have never lived before. All the terrors are still there. It’s we who no longer see them. They are getting ready to pounce on us again. Maybe it has already happened.

The writer, functioning in a magical medium, an abstract medium, does one half of the work, but the reader does the other. The reader’s mind becomes the screen, the place, the era. To a large extent, readers create the world from words, they invent the reality they read. Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train, planets that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

Storytellers are a tiny representative of the greater creative forces. And like all artists they should create beauty as best as they can, should serve truth, and remember humility, and when their work is done and finely crafted, arrowed to the deepest points in the reader’s heart and mind, they should be silent, leave the stage, and let the imagination of the world give sanctuary.

In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted — knowingly or unknowingly — in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.

Storytellers ought not to be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys.

*The Human Race is Not Yet Free: for Salman Rushdie

“The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to redream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be redreamed. Each reality can have its alternative possibilities. Human beings are blessed with the necessity of transformation.

Writers are the dream mechanisms of the human race. Narrative affects us the ways dreams affect us. They share the same insubstantiality. They both have the hidden capacity to alter reality. Dreams may be freer because they are not composed of words, but when narrative fiction has entered us, it no longer exists as words either.

There are many ways to die, and not all of them have to do with extinction. A lot of them have to do with living. Living many lies. Living without asking questions. Living in the cave of your own prejudices. Living the life imposed on you, the dreams and codes of your ancestors.

There can be no absolutes: no absolute good or evil; no absolute way of living. No absolute truth. All truths are mediated and tempered by the fact of living. Being alive qualifies all things.

The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one’s place in the world — a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self-becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things.

In a world like ours, where death is increasingly drained of meaning, individual authenticity lies in what we can find that is worth living for. And the only thing worth living for is love. Love for one another. Love for ourselves. Love of our work. Love of our destiny, whatever it may be. Love for our difficulties. Love of life. The love that could free us from the mysterious cycles of suffering. The love that releases us from our self-imprisonment, from our bitterness, our greed, our madness-engendering competitiveness. The love that can make us breathe again. Love of a great and beautiful cause, a wonderful vision. A great love for another, or for the future. The love that reconciles us to ourselves, to our simple joys, and to our undiscovered repletion. A creative love. A love touched with the sublime.

Before we can create a new world we must first unearth and destroy the myths and realities, the lies and propaganda which have been used to oppress, enslave, incinerate, gas, torture and starve the human beings of this planet.

Facing the lies of history is a basic human responsibility. It is unpleasant to do, but liberating to accomplish. It liberates all of us.

It may be that in the dream of their orthodoxy some of the great religions lost touch with noble love that inspired and sustained their births in the first place. They lost touch with the suffering of the people, with hunger. They lost touch with the basic compassion

without which even the most beautifully inspired religion becomes an empty shell of dogma.

Writers have one great responsibility: to write beautifully, which is to say to write well. Within this responsibility is that of being truthful. To charm, to amuse, to enchant, to take us out of ourselves, these are all part of beauty. But there is a parallel responsibility: and that is to sing a little about the realities of the age, to leave some sort of magical record of what they saw and dreamt while they were alive (because they can’t really do it the same way when dead), and to bear witness in their unique manner to the beauties, the ordinariness, and the horrors of their times.

The Joys of Storytelling II

“Quietly, or dramatically, storytellers are reorganisers of accepted reality, dreamers of alternative histories, disturbers of deceitful sleep.

And while it lives, uncried out, it devours us, this unacceptable truth that we accept in silence.

The joy of transgressing beautifully, of taking readers to places they wouldn’t willingly go, this joy of seducing or dragging readers in spite of themselves to places deep in them where wonders lurk beside terrors, this delicate art of planting delayed repeat explosions and revelations in the reader’s mind, and doing this while enchanting them — this is one of the most mysterious joys of all. It suggests that, at bottom, and never wanting to admit it, we really want to face the hidden Minotaur within, we want the drains unblocked within, we want the frozen river of our blood and compassion to flow again, we want the pain so that we can be free. It is just that we want this unpleasant job of facing the dead and rotting thoughts, habits, desires, notions, and traditions to be done with our collusion, with our secret consent. And we would much prefer to be enchanted or to laugh or to be taken out of ourselves while the horrors are being faced, while the ghosts are being exorcised. And we hope afterwards that we will be lighter for it all, and that the gods of harmony will again, for a while, reside in us. With great books we are sometimes granted this grace.

There is the great suffering that is an intrinsic part of love, the love of one’s work, the love of the world, and of humanity. There is the unbargained-for cost of telling stories — the hounding by dictators, military leaders, spy networks, secret services, all those with their own agendas, all those who like or dislike only through the screen or filter of their ideologies or insecurities. There are other costs — the death-threats, the enmities incurred by the innocence of the word, the demons of rivalry, the degrading competition which leads the best practitioners, if they submit, away from their beautiful journey.

In the struggle to extend our song, we are all of us extending and participating in the ever unfolding story of humanity and literary tradition — but extending it, I hope, not only on to musty shelves where well-meaning scholars make smaller the worlds within words, but extending it, I pray, into the raw world, into the dreams of the living, into their struggles, their suffering, their joys.

*Leaping Out of Shakepeare’s Terror: Five Meditations on Othello

“Often, when people don’t really want to face something, they become pretentious. The whole business of Othello as an Arab was popularised by Samuel Coleridge and Charles Lamb.

Iago is a lonely and bitter man. He is the man who utterly refuses to transcend himself. He does not accept reality and he refuses to face history. And yet he is in his twisted way an intelligent man. He has not found the vocation in which to utilise his considerable imaginative gifts. He is so seemingly friendly, so seemingly on your side, he is all appearance. He is the supreme test for those who will not see clearly; who will not see deeply into people. He thinks more intensely than anyone else in the play. In fact, he has the mind of a playwright, manipulating people around his plots.

I think that the play is less about jealousy than about accepting the other, about opening the doors of consciousness to more of reality. Or having to become less. Rejecting is easy: all it takes is confusion and ignorance. But facing the complexity of others, their history, their raw humanity — that takes courage, and is rare.

When victims stop seeing themselves as victims and discover the power of transformation, forces are born on this planet. The possibilities of a new history depend on it. What is done with these possibilities depends on how wisely we love. And ultimately we are bound in

fate with whoever the other may be. We are bound in the fact that we have to deal with one another. There’s no way round it. Rilke seemed to be saying something of this when he wrote: “That’s what fate means:/ to be facing each other/ and nothing but each other/ and to

be doing it for ever.’ The way we see the other is connected to the way we see ourselves. The other is ourselves as the stranger.

*Beyond Words: for Robert Fraser

“We began before words, and we will end beyond them. It sometimes seems to me that our days are poisoned with too many words. Words said and not meant. Words said and meant. Words divorced from feeling. Wounding words. Words that conceal. Words that reduce. Dead words.

If only words were a kind of fluid that collects in the ears, if only they turned into the visible chemical equivalent of their true value, an acid, or something curative — then we might be more careful. Words do collect in us anyway. They collect in the blood, in the soul, and either transform or poison people’s lives. Bitter or thoughtless words poured into the ears of the young have blighted many lives in advance. We all know people whose unhappy lives twist on a set of words uttered to them on a certain unforgotten day at school, in childhood, or at university.

We seem to think that words aren’t things. A bump on the head may pass away, but a cutting remark grows with the mind. But then it is possible that we know all too well the awesome power of words — which is why we use them with such deadly and accurate cruelty. We are all wounded inside in some way or other. We all carry unhappiness within us for some reason or other. Which is why we need a little gentleness and healing from one another. Healing in words, and healing beyond words. Like gestures. Warm gestures. Like friendship, which will always be a mystery. Like a smile, which someone described as the shortest distance between two people.

Yes, the highest things are beyond words.

The ages have been inundated with vast oceans of words. We have been virtually drowned in them. Words pour at us from every angle or corner. They have not brought understanding, or peace, or healing, or a sense of self-mastery, nor has the ocean of words given us the feeling that, at least in terms of tranquillity, the human spirit is getting better.

At best our cry for meaning, for serenity, is answered by a greater silence, the silence that makes us seek higher reconciliation.

I think we need more of the wordless in our lives. We need more stillness, more of a sense of wonder, a feeling for the mystery of life. We need more love, more silence, more deep listening, more deep giving.

Amongst the Silent Stones

“The Surrealists delved into the subconscious, and swam on the surface of the oceanic possibilities of what was really the Shaman’s terrain. For Shamans and African image- makers know that we contain the universe inside us, that the sea is in the fish much as the fish is in the sea; that birds breathe their own flight; that forces in the human frame can interpenetrate matter, extend the bounds of time and space, enter the dreams of lions, and travel through the private histories of rivers and mountains.

It is a bewildering fact that while we launch out to distant planets, while we approach the wonder and dread of a new millennium (one that could see the human race bring about its own extinction, or enter the greatest stage of its development), as human beings we have not yet begun to see one another as people who are forced to be together must. Human history is hundreds of thousands of years old and still we look at one another with superficial eyes — as if we haven’t learnt in all these millennia of interacting that we are all merely human, that beneath our skins there are continents of similar desires and eruptive dreams, swirling universes of thoughts, pre-historic urges, lightning flashes, and an eternal bloom of flowers. It is bewildering because it seems that beneath the strife of our age, internecine warfare, tribal antagonisms, religious intolerance, racial violence, the disharmony of the sexes, beneath all these lurks the most ordinary discovery that we are human, and that life is

Holy.

The new theory of chaos asserts that the flutter of a butterfly’s wings can start, can herald, momentous storms. The same may be true of history. The dying star of a nation, the silent death of a language, the eclipse of a way of seeing, the definite cry of a silenced people, could herald something more momentous than a storm for human history. It is not the size of the voice that is important: it is the power, the truth, and the beauty of the dream.

*Fables are Made of This: For Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-96)

“If you want to know what is happening in an age or in a nation, find out what is happening to the writers, the town-criers; for they are the seismographs that calibrate impending earthquakes in the spirit of the times. Are the writers sleeping? Then the age is in a dream. Are the writers celebrating? Then the first flowers of a modest golden age are sending their fragrances across to the shores of future possibilities. Are the writers strangely silent? Then the era is brooding with undeciphered disturbances. But when you hear that writers have been inexplicably murdered, silenced, that their houses have mysteriously burnt down, that grotesque lies are told against them, that they have fled their countries, that they dwell restlessly in exile, but above all when you hear that writers have been sentenced to death by unjust tribunals, then you can be sure that perils and the demons of war and the angels of fragmentation have already begun their dreaded descent into the blood and the suffering of the millions of people who inhabit that land.

Then you know that the air of that land is already rich with corruption and terror, that the air is unbreathable, that the lives are insufferable, that the soil has already begun to deliver its harvest of dead bodies and the bizarre plants of disaster, that liberty is dead in the fields, and that the government itself is under the grim sentence of death.

The writer is the barometer of the age. Elections can be rigged, their results undemocratically annulled, and the rightful leaders installed in the presidential quarters

of prison houses.

For, essentially, it is love that we are talking about here; love for the better life that could be real for all the people; love for the greater possibilities of the future that are being murdered in the present by short-sighted leaders; love for the greater way, a higher justice that

sits in the land like a wise and invisible god; love for better breathing in the beggar and the basket-weaver; love for women who bear all the suffering and wend their ways to deserted marketplaces and who create such small miracles of survival out of the bitter dust of the dying age; love for the children who grow up under a generous sun and who do not know just how distorted and blood-ridden are the futures they will inherit, who play in the streets and at their games while poison and despair gather about them and hover over their heads like the angels of death; love for the regeneration of a people who deserve so much better and who never seem to get any justice or many good days or much hope on this round earth which glows like a miraculous dream in space to the astonished gaze of astronauts.

Either a nation faces its uncomfortable truths, or it is overwhelmed by them; for there is a prophetic consequence in the perpetuation of lies, just as there is an unavoidable fate for all those who refuse to see.

There are some things on earth that are stronger than death. One of these is the eternal human quest for justice; a people cannot live without it, and in due course they will be prepared to die to make it possible for their children.

Fables are made of this.

*The Joys of Storytelling III: Aphorisms and Fragments

“To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they could unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people.

Without fighting, stories have won over more people than all the great wars put together.

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals or nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

The superiority of one writer over another is not just in the quality of language; but also in the quality of the story and the storytelling; the quality of enchantment; and the timelessness of that enchantment. It is therefore futile to speak of superiorities. There is only that which lives, and which keeps on living.

Creating the smallest living thing, creating life, no matter how small, is greater than creating a vast dead planet. A thing that lives is a universe.

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell: subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

It is precisely in a broken age that we need mystery and a reawakened sense of wonder: need them in order to be whole again.

Philosophy is most powerful when it resolves into story. But story is amplified in power by the presence of philosophy.

*Redreaming the World: For Chinua Achebe

“It is possible that a sense of beauty, of justice, of the inter-connectedness of all things, may yet save the human species from self-annihilation. We are all still learning how to be free. Freedom is the beginning of the greatest possibilities of the human genius. It is not the goal.