Woodpecker
07-12-2003, 08:45 AM
Two quotations from "Songs of Enchantment," a book by one of my (many) favorite authors, Ben Okri, a native of Nigeria living in England, and the 1991 winner of the Booker Prize for "The Famished Road."
Early in "Songs of Enchantment," the narrator, a young boy, relates a vision, excerpted here:
"Behind the second procession came the representatives of our spirit world, illustrious ancestors with caravans of wisdom, old souls who had been reborn many times in the magical depths of the continent, and who had lived the undiscovered secrets and mysteries of The African Way--The Way of compassion and fire and serenity: The Way of freedom and power and imaginative life; The Way that keeps the mind open to the existences beyond our earthly sphere, that keeps the spirit pure and primed to all the rich possibilities of living, that makes of their minds gateways through which all the thought-forms of primal creation can wander and take root and flower; The Way through which forgotten experiments in living can re-surface with fuller results even in insulated and innocent communities; The Way that makes it possible for them to understand the language of angels and gods, birds and trees, animals and spirits; The Way that makes them greet phenomena for ever as a brother and a sister in mysterious reality; The Way that develops and keeps its seccrets of transformations--hate into love, beast into man, man into illustrious ancestor, ancestor into god; The Way whose centre grows from divine love, whose roads are always open for messages from all the spheres to keep coming through; The Way that preaches attunement with all higher worlds, that believes in forgiveness and generosity of spirit, always listening, always kindling the understanding of signs, like the potencies hidden in snail tracks along forbidden paths; The Way that always, like a river, flows into and flows out of the myriad Ways of the world.
"These spirit-masters of the spirit universes brought The Way which had since been corrupted by succeeding generations, by greed and decadence, blindness and stupidity, by vulgar kings and dim-witted chiefs, corrupted and turned into sinister uses in the eternal battle of ascendencies. These invisible masters brought fragments of the Original Way in their silent procession, drawing back to its centre the valuable truths in our stolen heritage, our dispersed legacy, our myths coded with wonderful secrets of living, our splendid feats of memory and science and mysticism, art and learning, poetry and thriving in a universe of enigmas, our accomplishments denied by the dominant history of the short-sighted conquerors of the times."
Much later, the narrator's father, entranced, is renaming everything:
"And when he named the flies, the blue ones, the green ones, the big and small, when he named the mosquitoes, and praised them for helping to prevent the colonialists from entirely taking over our lands, when he named the ants and woodworms and applauded the service they rendered in the dissolution of old gods so new ones can be created, when he named the termites, the cockroaches, and all the rodents, all the busy occupants of the continent's undergrowth, all the curiously valuable lower forms that destroyedwood, carvings, statues, our paper, our histories, making it necessary for us to invent a science best suited for our continent, making it imperative that we be continually creative, constantly inventive, worshippers at shrines of beauty, self-inventors who have to re-dream the world anew because it is always passing away, workers in the vineyard of new life, a people who have to create paper which the termites won't eat, narratives that the ants somehow recreate in their devouring, histories that don't become fixed only into written or spoken words, stories that are re-invented in each new generation, myths that always live because they are always allowed to die, melodies that spring from the same unchanging source of the redemptive heart, philosophies hidden in rituals, hidden in stories, hidden in moods, concealed in places where time and change cannot get to them, when dad noticed the flies again and acclaimed their polyphonic existence, when he named the smells, the stenches, the debris, the gutters, and all the forms of our deaths--he had come full circle, he had travelled a sublime arc, made a parabolic journey, starting with his eyes, proceeding to the cosmos, and ending where he really began. And when he found himself naming the dead body, the dead carpenter, he instantly unravelled all his hallucinations, his dreams, his fevers, and all the messages that had been invading him in so many signs and riddles. As he named the dead carpenter, he saw the corpse, and speech and exultation deserted him."
Early in "Songs of Enchantment," the narrator, a young boy, relates a vision, excerpted here:
"Behind the second procession came the representatives of our spirit world, illustrious ancestors with caravans of wisdom, old souls who had been reborn many times in the magical depths of the continent, and who had lived the undiscovered secrets and mysteries of The African Way--The Way of compassion and fire and serenity: The Way of freedom and power and imaginative life; The Way that keeps the mind open to the existences beyond our earthly sphere, that keeps the spirit pure and primed to all the rich possibilities of living, that makes of their minds gateways through which all the thought-forms of primal creation can wander and take root and flower; The Way through which forgotten experiments in living can re-surface with fuller results even in insulated and innocent communities; The Way that makes it possible for them to understand the language of angels and gods, birds and trees, animals and spirits; The Way that makes them greet phenomena for ever as a brother and a sister in mysterious reality; The Way that develops and keeps its seccrets of transformations--hate into love, beast into man, man into illustrious ancestor, ancestor into god; The Way whose centre grows from divine love, whose roads are always open for messages from all the spheres to keep coming through; The Way that preaches attunement with all higher worlds, that believes in forgiveness and generosity of spirit, always listening, always kindling the understanding of signs, like the potencies hidden in snail tracks along forbidden paths; The Way that always, like a river, flows into and flows out of the myriad Ways of the world.
"These spirit-masters of the spirit universes brought The Way which had since been corrupted by succeeding generations, by greed and decadence, blindness and stupidity, by vulgar kings and dim-witted chiefs, corrupted and turned into sinister uses in the eternal battle of ascendencies. These invisible masters brought fragments of the Original Way in their silent procession, drawing back to its centre the valuable truths in our stolen heritage, our dispersed legacy, our myths coded with wonderful secrets of living, our splendid feats of memory and science and mysticism, art and learning, poetry and thriving in a universe of enigmas, our accomplishments denied by the dominant history of the short-sighted conquerors of the times."
Much later, the narrator's father, entranced, is renaming everything:
"And when he named the flies, the blue ones, the green ones, the big and small, when he named the mosquitoes, and praised them for helping to prevent the colonialists from entirely taking over our lands, when he named the ants and woodworms and applauded the service they rendered in the dissolution of old gods so new ones can be created, when he named the termites, the cockroaches, and all the rodents, all the busy occupants of the continent's undergrowth, all the curiously valuable lower forms that destroyedwood, carvings, statues, our paper, our histories, making it necessary for us to invent a science best suited for our continent, making it imperative that we be continually creative, constantly inventive, worshippers at shrines of beauty, self-inventors who have to re-dream the world anew because it is always passing away, workers in the vineyard of new life, a people who have to create paper which the termites won't eat, narratives that the ants somehow recreate in their devouring, histories that don't become fixed only into written or spoken words, stories that are re-invented in each new generation, myths that always live because they are always allowed to die, melodies that spring from the same unchanging source of the redemptive heart, philosophies hidden in rituals, hidden in stories, hidden in moods, concealed in places where time and change cannot get to them, when dad noticed the flies again and acclaimed their polyphonic existence, when he named the smells, the stenches, the debris, the gutters, and all the forms of our deaths--he had come full circle, he had travelled a sublime arc, made a parabolic journey, starting with his eyes, proceeding to the cosmos, and ending where he really began. And when he found himself naming the dead body, the dead carpenter, he instantly unravelled all his hallucinations, his dreams, his fevers, and all the messages that had been invading him in so many signs and riddles. As he named the dead carpenter, he saw the corpse, and speech and exultation deserted him."