The Age of Magic (18 page)
Authors: Ben Okri
‘A Quylph has been following us,’ said Lao.
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is a Quylph?’
The answer dropped into Lao’s mind a moment before he spoke. Later he would wonder where it came from
‘It’s a nature spirit, a guardian of treasures.’
‘Are you making this up?’
‘No.’
‘And it followed us?’
‘It followed us all the way down the street.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I tried.’
‘Is it bad to see it?’
‘You’re not supposed to see it.’
‘Why not?’
The answer was whispered to him again.
‘They’re supposed to stay invisible.’
‘And if you see one?’
‘You’re supposed to receive a message.’
‘From who?’
‘From the gods.’
They walked on in silence.
‘How do you know about Quylphs?’
‘They’re a legend of this area.’
‘And you saw one?’
‘I wasn’t trying to.’
‘I’d have liked to have seen it,’ said Mistletoe.
‘I’d have liked that too.’
‘Maybe everyone has their own Quylph that only they can see.’
‘Maybe.’
Lao looked back wistfully. He missed the Quylph. He was glad to have seen it, and he missed the way he had to be in order to see it.
‘You really did see a Quylph, didn’t you?’ Mistletoe asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I did.’
1
As they approached the lake, notions drifted through them like clouds over the mountains. The notions were sweeter in retrospect. Mistletoe was thinking how all sensations were filtered through the prism of feeling. Lao was thinking that humans are stained-glass beings, giving off the colours of their true selves in everything they do.
Mistletoe was studying the light refracted through the clouds. Streams of colour. All is conversion, and conversion is all, she thought. Light into colour, air into life, thought into substance. Conversion is all we do. We convert our birth into living, our living into dying, our being into love.
The day had given the best that it could. They knew it, and they knew also that their interlude was over, their Arcadian days within their Arcadian journey. They now sought to bend the rest of the day to a lasting beauty.
They lingered on the shore of the lake, no longer looking at the mountains, the lake, the clouds. They let the mountains, sky, and lake act on them. They let go. They surrendered themselves, and vanished into the eternal present.
It’s impossible to say how long they were gone. Mystics say a moment in eternity is a lifetime in history. It’s possible that in the margins of their immersion is inscribed the history and future of the human race.
Such moments have no name. They leave no recollections in the mind. It’s a moment’s freedom made real and then forgotten: an angel’s kiss that alters nothing except the total shape of one’s destiny. Altered but not known.
Standing on the shore, they sensed a syllable streaming through all things. They heard the sustaining hum which seemed to originate in the depths of their hearts and in the farthest reaches of space. The hum washed through them and sweetened the taste of life.
Then they found themselves walking along the rim of the lake as if they finally understood it. They were walking and talking as if nothing had happened, but a moment of beauty had stolen into them to remind their hearts of their living rights.
They were light-headed with an unknown happiness. They felt the need to drink deep of that moment for all the unpredictable times to come.
Did they know it was one of those moments which endure longer than life itself? Did they dream of using these moments as a sword against despair? Did they sense that these moments were elixirs, life renewed in the laboratory of Arcadia?
They talked about dinner. Mistletoe fantasised about her favourite dessert, a rich chocolate cake, with cream; and Lao looked forward to a glass of Château Margaux. Then in that light-headed state they reminisced about funny moments on other shared journeys.
‘Do you remember that train to Rome that we missed?’ said Mistletoe.
‘Do you remember that plane in Greece that had
Icarus
written on its side?’
‘Do you remember that hotel in Biarritz where the owner wept all night?’
‘Do you remember that train journey to Spain where the ticket-collector…’
‘Stood frozen in the doorway, like the courtier in Velázquez’s
Las Meninas
…? I do, I remember them all.’
‘So do I.’
Notions dim and strange danced around them in the air. Notions whispered to them from the grass, speaking to the soles of their feet. Things were whispered in their ears, leaving only the silence of the wind. Notions played within them like reflections on the lake.
At that moment Lao glimpsed a waterfall of clouds on a mountain peak; the light dying on the surface of the lake pierced Mistletoe’s heart. It was such a rare moment that they couldn’t help thinking how they could borrow its power against the darkness, or coax from it the art of living.
A pensive wind blew them back to the hotel. In their room time lengthened itself as day faded.
The clouds were wooing the mountain peaks. Mistletoe resumed her drawing. Lao began to write.
Lake of transformation
Living water burning with light
And living still it shines at night.
While Mistletoe drew, she noticed a yellow boat on the lake. The light was perfect all around and brought out the richness of the yellow. Colour, at that moment, seemed to her a magical revelation of the garment of form.
She went on drawing. She made the mountain into a cake. She ate of the cake, and declared it good with a smile.
Lao wrote another poem.
The Quylph
Came from
Aleph.
Beautiful days are all too short – pure music between the hammer beats of life.
The day darkened. It was time for dinner. They were all in a pensive mood, aware that their journey must continue and that many ideas they had about themselves must be surrendered. No one felt much like talking. They ate mostly in silence, and trooped up to bed.
Around midnight, unable to sleep, Lao and Mistletoe went downstairs to the lake’s edge. The lake was dark and mysterious. They took their clothes off and stood naked. Then they slipped into the water. Lao could not swim, so he kept to the shallows. But under Mistletoe’s coaxing he let himself submerge. The water was cold and dark and alive. With any luck, thought Lao as he rose to the surface, like fishes we will be hooked out and eaten by the universe, as holy food.
In that state, he was astounded to note that the earth was blue.
Little Venice
London
September 2013
I wish to express my gratitude to the following people. To the Marsh Agency for all the charming years working together. To all the staff at Head of Zeus for all the excellent work. To that genius of publishing, Anthony Cheetham. And to my editor, the inimitable Maggie McKernan.
We hope you enjoyed this book.
Head of Zeus are proud to be reissuing a collection of Ben Okri’s best works:
Ben talks about the collection
here
.
For an exclusive preview of the bestselling
Dangerous Love,
read on or click
here
.
~
An invitation from the publisher
It is for me a conjunction no less than magical that these five books are coming out together. The four reissues were first published in the nineties and in the early years of this century. They were all published within a few years, in one house, under the aegis of Anthony Cheetham, and are being re-published now, in a cluster, in another house, under Anthony’s aegis. There is a kind of synchronous harmony to this, a kind of perfect circularity that is both satisfying and auspicious.
As a body of work, the four books link with each another in an unusual way. Each explores, from a different angle, the themes that are central to my writing. They are about the nature of reality, storytelling, enchantment, history, art and love. In each of these books I attempt something different.
Astonishing The Gods
is a short novel, written in a mode of enchantment, a kind of fable about visibility and invisibility, about ideals and ideas, and about the poetry of being. It was a major departure in my writing at the time it was written and remains one of my favourites.
A Way of Being Free
is a favourite with many of my readers, a book of semi-poetic essays on art, politics, storytelling, and creativity. I had been writing these private and public meditations since the eighties. They have been widely referenced and still remain much quoted online.
In 1996,
The Landscapes Within
, a novel written when I was in my twenties, was transfigured into
Dangerous Love
. This is a story about love and art, but also about the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War – corruption, a lost generation, and a search for an artistic language with which to express the true nature of reality. It is a kind of twin to The Famished Road and many readers think it more accessible.
And then in 2002 came
In Arcadia
, a novel unlike any I had written till then, exploring the anomie of our times, travel, the quest for a salve for the anxious spirit of our age. It is also about television and the shadow of power.
Four different books radiating from an unmistakeable core. Readers who only think of me as the author of
The Famished Road
have a pleasant surprise coming. The four books look at poverty and the quest for happiness. They look at beauty and ugliness. They deal with the world of the real and the world of the fabulous. They look at Africa and they look at Europe.
What unites them all is an abiding sense of the mystery of life and the magical nature of storytelling. My writings are enchantments, even when they deal with difficult realities; because for me it is not the realities that define us, but the consciousness with which we experience and face them.
The Age of Magic
is the novel leading the procession into the world. For more than twelve years these four books have dwelt tenderly in the underworld. That their reincarnation is heralded by the birth of a new novel is entirely fitting.
The Age of Magic
is my first novel in seven years. That these five books are published by Head of Zeus is cause for celebration, cause for contemplating, with a sense of wonder, the nature of fate, and what charming bounties it promises.
Ben Okri
July 2014
Read on for a preview of
An epic of daily life,
Dangerous Love
is a story of doomed love, of star-crossed lovers, separated not by their families, but by the very circumstances of their lives.
Omovo, a Nigerian office-worker and artist who lives at home with his father and his father’s second wife. In the world of the compound in which he lives, Omovo has many friends and some enemies, but most important of all there is Ifeyiwa, a beautiful young married woman whom he loves with an almost hopeless passion - not because she doesn’t return his love, but because they can never be together.
Shouldn’t these ancient sufferings of ours finally start to bear fruit?
Rainer Maria Rilke
EXTRACT FROM A NOTEBOOK
I was walking through a dark forest when it happened. The trees turned into mist. And when I looked back I saw the dead girl. She walked steadily towards me. She didn’t have a nose or a mouth. Only a bright pair of eyes. She followed me everywhere I went. I saw a light at the end of the forest and I made for it. I didn’t get there.