(Some excerpts)
Recently read a few of his essays, notes, reflections. Also recently in April-May, started reading his Last Gift of Master Artist which began with the gentle instruction 'read slowly'. Poetic, beautiful, deals with such negative abject issues, yet full of strength. Perhaps wholeness is found in such places, which at better planes surmounts the issues which lesser planes in their weak power hungry protagonists try to capture. A lot of hallucinations in it, a lot of poetic truths. Was leaving for India, and to read slow, and in the right strong mood or receptive free mood, the incidences of our meetings were limited. So perhaps some other time. (Interesting note, the book is a rewrite of his earlier novel Starbook)
Meanwhile, found that spirit in his essays. A few lines to quote from here and there, will add here. Guess, read slow, let it be absorbed and become you.
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.
To say much, concisely, is a constant ideal.
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.
We can place many perspectives side-by-side, we can even inhabit them simultaneously.
seeking attunement to the source of inspiration.
Paradoxically, it flows into all things: 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
play and discipline,
An ideal creative genius would be one who knew how to consciously initiate great play, as well as how to harness great discipline, towards the most sublime endeavours.
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 best kinds of books, however, have a delightful mystery about them. They inexplicably create powerful feelings, images, moods, worlds, and parallel narratives the farther away in time you are from the reading. They grow in time. They keep re-creating themselves in your consciousness, they keep growing, keep becoming other books, till they become part of your experience, like something lived, or dreamed, or loved, or suffered. Further encounters with such books make them more. There is no final point of understanding with books that live. Their effects cannot be aspired to. And writers can never be altogether sure that they have indeed created this rare and living thing. For their mysterious effect can only be felt silently,
These books do not belong to their authors.
There is no need to panic. The intelligence that shaped the universe shaped you. There is an inner part of us, for ever obscured, for ever mysterious, which is most alive during the process of composition.
There is no genuine creative or human problem that cannot be solved if you are serene enough, humble enough, hardworking enough, and if you have learnt the gentle arts of concentration, visualisation, and meditation. For me, tranquillity is the sign of the invisible presence of grace.
And like all artists they should create beauty as best as they can, should serve truth, and remember humility,
Regardless of the ambiguous dark side, artists always feel the craftsman’s cool ecstasy and the dreamer’s serene joy when creating. And the reader always feels the joy in the dangers when immersing.
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. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.
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.
We should return to pure contemplation, to sweet meditation, to the peace of silent loving, the serenity of deep faith, to the stillness of deep waters. We should sit still in our deep selves and dream good new things for humanity. We should try and make those dreams real. We should keep trying to raise higher the conditions and possibilities of this world. Then maybe one day, after much striving, we might well begin to create a world justice and a new light on this earth that could inspire a ten-
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.
Those who forget death forget how to live. The African world, by opening life into death, by drawing death over the living spaces, gave life more space in which to live, to celebrate, to bear suffering, and to be joyful.
The colonisation of Africa, and its subsequent representation, apart from being the triumph of greed over humanity, was the triumph of rationalism over the subconscious, the victory of the head over the spirit. That triumph, as any psycho-analyst would confirm, is short-lived, and ultimately disastrous
Apart from the wounding of the souls of continents, colonialism also – paradoxically – achieved an accidental serendipity. It brought people together in a way that might not have happened for hundreds of years.
The fact is that in nature all organic things of single strain have short histories.
We are all of us mixtures, and our roots are fed from diverse and forgotten places
The world is neutral: it is we who give things value. We could change the value we place on ourselves. We should always remember that it takes a certain natural genius to survive the depredations of history. We should reconnect that genius, for if we do not place the highest value on ourselves we cannot achieve the highest good in the world.
It is not the size of the voice that is important: it is the power, the truth, and the beauty of the dream.
It seems to me that the age demands that each man and woman become a light, a fire, a responsible heir to all the veins of freedom and courage that have enabled us all to get here, in spite of the forces of darkness all around. It seems our age demands that we all be clearer about ourselves than ever,
love for the greater way,
regeneration
The transparency of excellent stories: words dissolve words, and only things stand in their place. 47 In bad stories words cancel themselves out, and nothing is left. The words return to their source; they
48 Story is paradox. 49 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.
The infinite interpretability of great stories – and their serenity. 69 To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line.
The greatest guide is the clearest spirit and mind. 71 That’s what the true storyteller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness. Dante chose Virgil. I would choose Jesus, or the Buddha, or Lao Tsu, or Homer.
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide. 81 The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. 82 The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. 83 The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.
A land beginning to define itself, to create beauty and order from its own
chaos, moves from having too many moods and stories in the air to having clear structures, silences, clear music, muted and measured celebrations, lucid breezes, freed breathing, tentative joys, the limpid freshness of new dawns over places sighted across the sea for the first time. If suffering breeds stories, then the transformation of suffering into a higher order and beauty and functionality breathes tranquillity.
Tranquillity is the resolution of the tensions and paradoxes of story into something beyond story: into stillness.
It is in the creation of story, the lifting of story into the realms of art, it is in this that the higher realms of creativity reside.
The true storyteller suffers the chaos and the madness, the nightmare – resolves it all, sees clearly, and guides you surely through the fragmentation and the shifting world.
there is something awesomely beautiful and history-making about those who have set out to climb the seven mountains of their predicaments, towards the new destinies that lie beyond, with the star of hope above their heads. For in their patience and in their egalitarian triumph they can teach us all how to live again and how to love again and could well make it possible for us all to create the beginnings of the first truly universal civilisation in the history of recorded and unrecorded time.
They have not as a people learnt how to snatch historical confidence from the most unlikely places, from the fact that they are still here on this planet, inhabiting some sort of space, that they often survived slavery and all manner of outrages, drought, famine, dictatorships, bad governments, bitter wars, mass imprisonments and other permutations of human viciousness. They many be dwindling but it is precisely because of all they have suffered and are still suffering that they have much to struggle for, to be alive for, beyond the mountains of their crisis.
but not necessarily on the sullied terms of the world dominators.
They have to regroup their powers and build again from the wedding of the best things the world has to offer and the best aspects of their own mythic, aesthetic, spiritual, and scientific frames.
With humility and with passion they could learn from the world and teach the world to learn from them.
The real quarrel of the oppressed is not with the oppressors. It is with themselves. The real truth they have to face is the truth about themselves. Hope and striving have magic in them. Those who have much to strive for, much to resolve and overcome and redream, may well be luckier than they think. Struggle is life.
All Excerpts From
Okri, Ben. “A Way of Being Free.”
This material may be protected by copyright.
No comments:
Post a Comment