Authors: Ben Okri
Mistletoe never failed to be amazed at how Lao used disharmony as a weapon for harmony. If she loved him less this weapon would long ago have destroyed their relationship. He was doing it now, she felt. He was wielding disharmony, threatening the ruination of their cultivated Arcadia. And for what? Because she had not responded to his dream? She knew that was not the reason. The real reason he had gone off was her coldness. Of all the negative qualities, the one he disliked most was coldness. To him coldness was an active disengagement of self, a minus zero emotional condition, an utter absence of love. It was for him the real negation, and she knew this.
If that was the case it would take a while to bring him round. It would take an inspired gesture, a sustained warming of the heart, a re-engaging of the imagination. She secretly enjoyed the challenge of creating harmony between them again, working her way round the perversity of wanting and yet resisting a rapprochement.
While she stood there, in the midst of a dancing crowd, a young man approached her. He was good-looking, in his twenties, and seemed at first glance very sure of himself.
He wore jeans and a T-shirt with a musical logo. His dark hair was long and his eyes blue. On his right arm there was the tattoo of a Tarot card.
He smiled.
‘I’ve been watching you,’ he said. ‘You’re very interesting. Such interesting eyes too…’
Oh dear, thought Mistletoe, just what I need. Some good-looking guy talking to me when Lao is in a huff.
Then she mentally closed off the space around her. To the young man she said:
‘I’m not on my own, and really I’m not that interesting, but thank you.’
‘No, no, no, I’m an expert on interesting people,’ he said.
Mistletoe scrutinised him coolly. Round his neck hung a pendant of the ankh, an Egyptian symbol, along with a copper skull, a crooked cross, and a five-pointed star. When she looked closer she saw that the Tarot card on his forearm was that of The Fool. Then she noticed his sad eyes.
‘I’m with the band,’ he said. ‘Do you like our music?’
Mistletoe said nothing and kept her gaze neutral.
‘If you like our music, we will be successful. If you don’t, we will start again. I trust your eyes.’
‘Start again,’ said Mistletoe.
‘From the beginning?’
‘From scratch.’
‘What is scratch?’
Mistletoe stared at him. She could not think of the word in German, French, or Italian. A little helplessly, and with more emphasis, she said, ‘From scratch.’
‘Scratch?’
‘From the beginning. Go back to ABC. Dig deep. Start all over. Trust heart, not eyes.’
She began to move away but the young man blocked her path.
‘Help me!’ he said. ‘Help me. I need you. You have something special. I knew it at once. Help me!’
Mistletoe felt her face getting hot. She was bewildered.
‘This town is being forgotten,’ the young man cried. ‘We are vanishing. What can I do? Are we dying? My life is fading every day. I need to be famous. Help me! Teach me what you know…’
It occurred to Mistletoe that the young man was under a profound misapprehension, that he thought her someone she wasn’t. He was so passionate and full of despair that she didn’t know how to disillusion him.
While she was backing off, Mistletoe had a sudden vision. It resolved into an image, and then it was gone. She turned and pushed her way through the crowd. She needed to breathe. She struggled through the jostling dancers. She could not find Lao. She could not breathe.
‘Help me!’
Mistletoe was perplexed. She had noticed in the past that when she and Lao had a little break-up, men seemed to find her unusually attractive. It was as if his leaving made her magnetic. It seemed to be happening again.
She couldn’t breathe.
The vision she had needed to be shared.
‘Help me!’
The tone of the young man’s voice, insistent and pleading, finally got to Mistletoe. She turned to him and stared with icy ferocity into the eyes that were seeking something he feared he might never find. Then she pointed to the ground at his feet. She pointed three times, with great authority. The young man fell to his knees and looked up at her expectantly.
‘Don’t get up,’ she said.
‘Till when?’
‘Till you can save yourself,’ she said, turning and pushing through the dancers.
She needed to breathe. She tried to track Lao in the crowd but had lost his vectors. He wasn’t there. Where could he be? She found herself next to the bandstand. She felt the music in her solar plexus. The people around her were dancing as if their bodies were alien to them.
She fled from the stage and went to a nearby drinking tent. But he hadn’t been there, she could tell. Where was he? He must be quite angry to have made himself so hard to find. The music got worse. Outside, the crowd thickened. She struggled through, and found herself pressed against the stage again. I shouldn’t have been so cold to him, she thought, as the music pounded around her. Why did I have to be cold to him anyway? I couldn’t help it. I can’t breathe. It just came over me. One moment’s coldness and he loves me no more. I need to breathe.
Then she blacked out beside the stage.
‘
Only among the dead can the treasure be found. Tell him to go there
,’ someone whispered into her ear.
She breathed suddenly and woke up with a start. Everything cleared. The music was gentler. The crowd had thinned. Lao stood a short distance away, staring at her with a shy smile on his face.
‘Here’s what I found out…’ he began.
‘You hid from me.’
‘This town used to be incredibly famous…’
‘You’re cruel.’
‘We’ve been invited to a party later tonight…’
‘Where did you go?’
‘I went discovering.’
‘You left me.’
‘You shut me out.’
‘I can’t seem to stop it when it comes over me.’
‘You can – it’s your mind, you know.’
‘Is it? Sometimes others have access.’
‘Only if you let them.’
‘I’ve heard whisperings.’
‘What about?’
‘Nothing.’ She smiled. ‘Tell me what you found out.’
‘This town used to be really famous. Everyone used to come here. Now it has chosen to be a secret.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of what success did to it.’
‘Is this a good idea?’
‘The young don’t think so. They think the town is fading away. It bothers them. Should we go to the party tonight?’
‘Yes. I could do with a dance.’
‘So could I.’
They watched as the festival wound down, the musicians began unplugging their instruments and the crowds dispersed. The grounds were strewn with chicken bones, paper napkins, half-eaten hot-dogs, empty cigarette packets, beer cans.
As the crowd cleared Mistletoe caught a glimpse of the young man still kneeling. Lao saw him too. He was causing a bit of a stir. Lao said quietly, ‘Let’s get out of here. I smell obsession.’
They went through the woods, over the hill, and passed beneath the flyover. They walked towards the town in silence.
They sat on a bench, near the pier, and stared at the mountains. The moving clouds made the mountains move. The sky made the world unreal.
Boats and steamers and gilded yachts glided past on the lake.
Lao wondered if the world wasn’t an analogy for a world not seen.
This is what the mountains and the lake did to him. They made him want to change his life, to become more, to be more alive.
The mountains gave him a sense of things greater than history. They didn’t make him feel humble; they made him feel imperfectly developed. They made him ache for an unrealised grandeur.
The power of the mountains encompassed Mistletoe. She surrendered herself to it and shone like the lake.
Lao woke up screaming. He had been muttering incoherent words in his sleep, kicking and clutching at the air.
Mistletoe was already awake. She had been sketching the mountain. When he woke from his nightmare, she regarded him coolly. He got up and looked around the room as though to reassure himself of his surroundings. He gazed at the lake. Then he picked up his copy of Goethe’s
Faust Part Two
, and began reading.
Now that he was up, Mistletoe went to the balcony to get a fuller view of the mountain. Breathing evenly, she disappeared into the mountain she was sketching. She vanished into its monumental form and the ravishing beauty of the view. She became pure being lost in pure beauty.
Lao meanwhile was making a complicated journey into the book. They were now at the Imperial Palace, in Germany. Economic problems threatened the state; and Mephistopheles had invented paper money, anticipating future reality. The Emperor expressed the desire to see Helen of Troy; and Faust charged Mephistopheles to make this come true.
While reading, Lao travelled back to the ancient world. Faust was now in a coma, and they travel in his consciousness to the great underworld, a combination of Egypt and Greece where sirens dwell side by side with the Sphinx, griffins with wise centaurs and Nereids, and ants speaking in splendid verse. All beings that have had an imaginative existence live here in this underworld, deep in the consciousness of the human race. The gods are real. It is to this world they go to find Helen of Troy, the great beauty of legend.
As their guide on this quest, they have a homunculus. Made in a test tube, a creature of science, the homunculus wants above all things to be a man. He needs the magic stuff of humanity. It is his very incompleteness that makes him a perfect guide into the depths of the human psyche.
Lao struggled with the book, in just the same way he struggled in his dream. And the book was a strange dream indeed, one of the strangest ever composed. Lao was confused by it, but determined to understand.
He knew he wasn’t alone in his confusion. Many have thought Goethe’s
Faust Part Two
incomprehensible. He knew that even the great French poet Gérard de Nerval, its first French translator, deplored its obscurity. But Lao was fascinated by its boldness and wildness, and how it belonged constantly to the future.
To read the book is to journey into the mind of Faust, the representative mind. It was in the underworld of that mind that they sought the ideal that is Helen of Troy.
Why was Lao making this journey? Because he suspected that on the journey might be found the keys to the treasure house of Arcadia.
So far they had been travelling in the world, by train. But to find the essence of Arcadia he would have to travel in a different way, into a text, into himself, to its original and lasting place. He would enter Arcadia through the collective unconscious. This Arcadia would not be found on the map. Helen of Troy is the key to that realm.
Lao lost himself in Goethe’s verse, the peculiar characters, the complex philosophies. His mind cleared only when he looked up and saw Mistletoe’s outline against the mountain. She sat still, lost in the rugged mountain of her ancestry.
All things are ideas, he thought. Solid things are condensations of primal energy. That is why mountains near lakes enchant us. They suggest different stages of the creative process. Things we touch and feel reassure us. That’s why material things are comforting. They make the body feel at home. But something in the body must also feel at home in the body. It is that something inside us that responds to beauty.
The mountains move me because they touch something in me older than time. It is to the beauty in me that the beauty of the lake and sky speaks. The body, alive, breathes air. The spirit breathes light.
Inspired, he went into a deeper meditation. Arcadia, he thought, is an idea. It began inside us. But abstractions defeat us. We need real and visible things. Even miracles must be concrete. To believe in the existence of God we need God to put in an appearance, to be visible, which would make us believe less. We lose our way because we can only believe in evidence. We lose our way with the very senses we use to verify.
Seeing is believing, they say. But what is seeing? Do we see with the eyes only? Do we not only see the effects of light? The eyes are imprecise instruments of complete vision, he thought. We need higher instruments. The instrument of poetry, the organ of intuition, which could supply to consciousness the highest data.
While he was reflecting, he attempted a definition of Arcadia.
A resting place between journeys.
Flowers in a garden.
Trees among rocks.
A beautiful little town along a highway.
An oasis.
A weekend among week days.
Poetry in the midst of prose.
A drawing among words.
A song on a journey.
Music in the silence.
Silence in the music.
An act of love in the midst of hatred.
A dialectical pause.
Holidays.
He let his mind soar. He remembered that Novalis somewhere had written that philosophy is homesickness. So is beauty, he thought. But homesickness for where, or what? For a home that no home on earth can satisfy, a home of which Arcadia is a symbol. A balm for that perennial homesickness. The promise of complete happiness, deferred.
That evening they had a muted dinner with the rest of the crew. Everyone seemed different somehow, and a little preoccupied. Jute, strangely on edge, kept looking at the door, as if expecting someone to walk in. She was wearing a velvet evening dress and looked pretty in her make-up. Riley kept twitching in her seat. Propr hummed a tune to himself through most of dinner. They all drank rather a lot and talked at length about the day’s shoot. Sam had achieved his wish. Hanging from the helicopter door with a winch, he had managed splendid and difficult shots of the mountain.