Authors: Ben Okri
And she danced, and ate, and was fed rich food with the new women. And she learnt proverbs, silence, legends of the land, the histories of the tribes, the sagas of families, the ways of woman that overcome and dissolve the often stubborn and short-sighted ways of men. And she was taught to see men as allies in the universe created by God for them both to make noble the future of the race and the earth. And she was taught the art of indirection, the science of herbs, the marvels of decoration, the place of agreement and disagreement and the ways to accomplish things. And she was taught that wisdom is better than force, grace greater than power, love greater than hate, that bitterness and food do not mix, that a pure heart is more beautiful than a pure sky, that discord is the enemy of prosperity, and she was taught a thousand other things which will be forgotten and then remembered and passed on from generation to generation, longer than the hills ...
She danced, grew, learnt, unlearnt, changed and didn't change, with the other new women. She had no idea what her initiation had made her become. Her face in the mirror of the lakes in the hills looked strange to her. She had acquired a new face, with a new look in her eyes. She feared her new self, feared its new secret power and knowledge, and kept it hidden for a long time.
She went to the hills a girl, and emerged from the cave profound, and yet sweeter, more innocent, and more mysterious than ever. She was also more odd. Initiations only make you more and deeply what you truly are. There are, in truth, no changes. And even the greatest experiences or revelations do not change a life. They only reveal what was deeply and truly there, in the depths of the personality. They only unveil the true self. They only make people become what they really were all along. When people say 'This or that experience changed my life' they only mean that 'this or that' pushed forward their true selves, brought forth their true nature. We never change. From youth to adulthood, from frivolity to seriousness, under the impact of significant experiences we only become what we really are, for good or ill. That is why when people say they have changed it does not, as they think, mean that they have necessarily changed for the better.
But initiations are different: if they are noble, they change you into the becoming of your true self, that you may better see yourself as you are in the mirror, and thereby begin further unveiling. For all initiation is unveiling, self-revealing.
The maiden descended from the hills in her new mystery.
The world she left was not the same.
She saw it differently.
She saw things she had not seen before. She heard things she had not heard before. She did things she would never have done before.
And yet had she changed?
In accordance with tradition the tribe welcomed the maiden back from her initiation with songs and dances reserved for heroes and heroines. They embraced her back into its heart. They treated her as a special being, creating an arch of palm fronds for her to walk under, as if she were a priestess returning from the shrine of prophecies with good omens for the world.
A
nd it was when she returned from her initiation that, under a trance, a sudden inspiration, she created an inexplicable sculpture of a dying prince. She had not long returned when she began haunting her father's workshop, wandering amongst the sleeping wood and the unsummoned spirits. Soon she was seen frequenting the forests, searching for something which she claimed could not be sought, but only received. One day, in her obsession and her wandering open-minded state, she encountered an old man who sat on air, his eyes piercing, his face young. He had a gentle smile on his face. She said nothing to him and he merely stared through her and she wandered past him, seeking that which can only be received. Then in the silence she heard someone say:
'What you seek is the foundation.'
She was not puzzled by this voice, but went straight home, and the next day found the perfect piece of wood near the shrine, as if it had been placed there for her. The wood shone with the light and mystery of dawn. And she took it home and slept near it and then one day, in the middle of her duties, unaware of all things, she saw the dream of love in the wood and surrendered to it completely. She asked no questions, brought no answers, forgot all techniques, discarded all craft, abandoned her heart, left behind her mind, ceased to be a maiden, a woman, or even human, became blind and refused speech and, in complete emptiness, like one without beginning or end, she received what emerged from her dreaming in wood.
And when it was finished she displayed the sculpture of a dying prince in front of the shrine.
No one understood it. The work, beautiful and rough, rich in pathos and yet touched with humour, caused consternation in the tribe. But it caused more problems in her. The work bothered her. She had no idea where it came from, or what had made her create it. The work perplexed her, and she pondered it often, and stared at it whenever she could without being noticed, and she peered into it as into a prophetic mirror. Baffled by the mystery of her own creation, she began to fall in love with it. She fell in love, not with the art, or the beauty, or the work; she fell in love with the hint of the prince she had created. She fell in love with the mysterious possibility of the figure lying languidly in the charmed wood of her inspiration.
She fell in love with the image, the tranquil sadness of the dying youth; and she became secretly obsessed with it. Her secret obsession began to affect her sanity; the mystery of the work began to unhinge her. And she began to seek one who was like the sculpture, and she found no one to rival the intriguing beauty of the work she had made. She searched for such a one in all the faces that she met. Then she entertained the hope, which was awoken in a dream she had, that the figure in wood might wake from his death-slumber in wood and stand before her fresh as a flower nearly touched with dew.
It was an odd dream, extremely vivid and rich in colour, in which the dying prince slowly stretched his limbs as blood returned to his pale cheeks, and sat up, and then turned to her, and spoke with a silent voice so familiar that it made her shiver with a precious delight. The dying prince stared at her a long time with his doe-like eyes of liquid sadness. His lips were gently red and hinted at the softness of rose petals. And his nose was gentle too, but his jaws had a quiet strength. He stared at her and didn't speak. He was silent and he stared and he wasn't thinking, just staring, not even moving, but his eyes seemed the centre of the universe, and his breathing the centre of an intolerable tenderness that was like an ache which she could not locate, and from which she could not escape. He made her want to weep for some unstated tragic condition about the world, some great universal injustice, some unbearable crime committed against a complete innocent. Not one thought emerged from his stillness, or his presence. Just the tranquil stare that looked upon her as at a profound mystery. The tender intensity of his gaze touched her very deeply, to her core, where she was not just a girl or a woman but a living being of pure love. And then suddenly, but slowly, the dying prince lay down again and assumed his dying repose, and returned to his condition of a work of art in wood.
She had this dream several times and every time she awoke she was disconsolate. Not a word had he ever uttered to her. And till he spoke, she felt she could not speak; his awakening from his imprisonment in wood was the miracle that could free her voice in her dreams. But as he could not speak, neither could she.
The maiden carried a strange secret around with her in her waking hours: she wanted the prince to waken from wood into flesh, and for him to speak, so that she could learn to love.
Her work held her prisoner too. She could not be free till the prince could
be.
And so her return from the hills, and the creation of the work of art which should have healed her and made her stronger in spirit, made her more ill, more susceptible to impossible fancies and fantasies.
She fell ill from an inability of life to be as fascinating or as mysterious as art.
The tribe was troubled by her artistic offering. They had expected from her a healing image. They had expected an image of beauty. They had expected a work potent with the greatness of her inheritance, her distinguished lineage, her freedom, her unique personality, and the myth from which her oddness gained resonance. They had hoped from her that which will be as an oracle from a new generation, a mirror into the broken rhythms of the times, some kind of work that would disentangle the enigmas that seemed to so imprison the tribe. They hoped, as the first daughter of the new generation, that with her new and uncontaminated eyes she would show them that which they could not see, the fate pressing on them, invisible but palpable as a tragic premonition.
The tribe sensed that the sculpture found in front of the shrine one morning was her work; centuries of artistic tradition had made them sensitive to the links between the work and its creator. And the tribe, collectively, could generally tell who had created what work, could read correlations between the work and its creator as those who could, intuitively, read the personality from the handwriting. To the deep mind of the tribe, the face of the creator was in the work they had created. And so when the sculpture of a dying prince was found in front of the shrine, first there was puzzlement, then a sense of mystery, then fascination, much discussion and many rumours, and then intuitive links were made. The hidden signature of a personality was deciphered in aspects of the work. Then a visible creator was slowly deduced. Then there was consternation.
It amounted almost to an outrage, an insult. It seemed such a wilful diversion, a distraction, an irrelevance, a conceit, a private, unnecessary indulgence in imagery and aesthetics. The work seemed without direction, without prophecy, without vision. It did not speak. It did not address the need of the times. It did not reflect the mood of the tribe. It did not relate to anything that anyone could care about. It seemed beautiful and sad and well-wrought just for the sake of it. The sculpture seemed an exercise in displaying personal artistic accomplishment, a display of genius unfolding, a dream of beauty and piety in wood. It did nothing for the people. It did not soothe. It did not guide. It was not deemed the voice of a new generation speaking with the authority of youth that can see with clear eyes that which the elders can no longer see or cannot see for all the cataracts of experience and knowledge, too much time accumulated in the eyes and in the heart.
The tribe felt that the work was not a new vision. It was not startling. It brought no new techniques that hinted even at the necessity of an altered way of seeing. It provoked deep outrage because it so disappointed the great hopes the tribe had placed in an image or work from the daughter of a new generation, an image or work that would begin their liberation from a destiny they could all feel but could not name.
Or maybe it was an outrage caused by the unknown fact that it had indeed shown an image of liberation but they knew it without knowing they did, and they wished to know what they felt more directly in their feelings, which the work bypassed, working as it did on their souls, the very foundation and bedrock of who and what they were, as a tribe and as individuals. But the outrage of the tribe was very real, and almost became violent.
At first they were enraged; then they took to mocking the work, and many other smaller and hastily executed sculptures were displayed which ridiculed the sculpture of a dying prince. Songs surfaced in drinking places, at the farms, in workshops, marketplaces and communal kitchens – songs mocking the irrelevant and inadequate sculpture. The ridicule was unprecedented and inexplicable. The numbers of those who sent in works mocking the sculpture was astonishing. Wise heads wondered if the tribe, encompassed by invisible tragic fears and paranoia, did not feel it necessary to find something to laugh at, to relieve itself of that weight of foreboding which it could not understand. Ridicule was therefore its way of dealing with incomprehension and bewilderment about a fate which seemed to oppress them, and from which they could see no escape. Like the hysterical laughter of one who knows they are doomed.
The ridicule passed, but the consternation remained. Till a work of art has been absorbed or understood in some way, consternation and some hostility towards it abides. The truth is that the tribe had expected from the maiden a clear healing image, one that would earth the tremors sounding in the land, or an image that would free them from the underlying paralysis creeping upon them from the universe. On to the maiden they had placed great hopes. On to her mystery they had projected great expectations. And because of the legend that was her birth they had awaited a great sign, a new direction, and nourished the belief that where the people are blind one of its blessed children will see, and be its eyes, till sight returns to all. Instead she had given them an ambiguous image of a dying prince. There were no princes in the tribe. What had this to do with them? they asked, infuriated.
The maiden was startled by the fury, the incomprehension, the ridicule, the destructive obsession, and the sudden need to tear down the reputation of her family that the work inspired and called forth from the tribe. She was terrified by their outrage, their threats of violence, their abuse. She was amazed at how quickly she became an outcast, shunned, denounced, her talent pronounced as worthless, her father's reputation seen as fraudulent. She was perplexed at the sudden desire to demonise her and her family, and at the same time she was aware of how much more fascinated and curious the tribe were about the mystery of her family. And all this had been touched off by the simple image of a dying prince, an image that she too had fallen prey to, and been seduced by; so she now was in a state of double distraction, caught between two absurdities, one public, the other private.