Starbook (20 page)

She knew at once that she had lived and yet had not glimpsed what life was, and she gave a cry, and the enchantment tightened tenderly about her mind, and her mother appeared at her side and began speaking.

'My child, my child, be still, and be comforted in your heart,' her mother said. 'This is what a woman's life is like. Constant change. No here, and now. What is stable in this world? Nothing. Everything is changing, running away. One day a girl, proud as a goddess, confused as a millipede counting its legs, and the next day a woman, a mother, too busy, a little mad, and quite helpless, and yet powerful. Changes in the body. Changes in the world. Every day the earth has been taken away from under your feet. The man who loved you yesterday, is he the same man today? One day you are loved, the next day love is a stranger. One day your mother is here, the next day she is dead, gone to join the ancestors. Who knows anything? All is like the wind, changing like water. Things disappear. And so a woman must learn to be still, to make things stay, to make things remain, to inspire things to come back, even when they go. A woman must learn to charm life to keep returning that which has gone. The woman learns the art of making time be still. Of stretching time out. Making time wait, linger. You make time live in your house, while history is being made. You keep time under your pillow, with your dreams. You make time a great power. And how do you do this? That you must learn yourself. But I tell you why. Because everything goes, beauty, earthly power, fortune, happiness, clans, tribes, empires, everything goes away, disappears. But you can make them disappear slower; you can make them wait longer; you can charm them to stay for one more day; and if you do this day after day, then you can manage a modest eternity. And even things that go, you can charm their presence here, their fragrance, their spirit. If their spirit is here then they are here too, and soon their form will return in another way. These are women's things, these are women's ways; but not all women know them, my daughter, only those in whom the ancient wisdom of women is alive, who have been taught, who have been initiated into the mysteries of the great mother ...'

These words were meant to distract the maiden. They were meant to prepare her. The ancient ones believed, as I do now, that a person has to hear a thing three times in order to hear it once. The words her mother spoke to her between hills, under the changing brilliance of the sky, with the jagged rocks underfoot that snagged them as they walked, the words were a ploy, a bridge between distances, between home and the unknown.

Did the maiden hear a single word her mother said? No, not a word. Not with her normal ears. Did her mother think that her daughter had heard a word she had said? No, not a word. But she knew that her daughter's spirit had heard the spirit of her words. That she knew. The spirit of the words had gone into her daughter through unusual channels, and will wait in her like an unsuspected pregnancy; and one day it 'will give birth to unexpected understanding. The maiden's mother had long mastered the art of planting the spirit of words in people. She knew that people resist words themselves, because they hear them. But the spirit of words can't be resisted because it is not heard, or is heard by deeper, invisible ears. Not many people knew the art of the spirit of words; and to know this art one ought first to know the art of the spirit of things; indeed, the art of the spirit. This art was one of those that the maiden's mother specialised in, as she wove in and out of her daughter's consciousness, and as she travelled the feet-tearing distances over the rough hills and across streams to the unfathomed place of initiations.

The maiden did not hear anything, as she staggered along in her semi-sleepwalking way over rocks and on brutal stones. When her mind was not blank, or full of foreboding, or bedazzled and bewitched by the merciless sunlight, she was thinking only of the tragic loss of not keeping her promise with the divine voice at the river. And she was certain that she would suffer and be punished for her failure to keep the appointed hour with her destiny. It was only much later she would learn that there are many destinies. And that we fail to keep our appointed hour with one destiny in order to fulfil another. There are many alternative destinies waiting in the wings of our failures.

These future notions would not have consoled the maiden. As she stumbled along the harsh paths in the ascending hills, crushed by the sun, obliterated by the sky, made raw by the earth, her mind worn down by an intolerable exhaustion that shaded into hallucination, she thought mainly of the voice and the river that she had left behind for ever.

Meanwhile the Mamba, not knowing the effects that his plans had wrought, not knowing of the disappearance of the maiden, kept up his malicious campaign. He began to speak out about unknown foreigners invading their lives. He went about this with such an obsessed state of mind that he forgot how open the tribe was to outsiders. In fact the tribe relied on the continual flow of outsiders into its life. They brought trade, and goods, and they brought artworks and artefacts from distant kingdoms and principalities. Without them the tribe would have no idea what the rest of the world was doing artistically. It would be isolated from the visible currents of art and dreams.

The tribe thrived on its sense of wonder. And there were few things it found to wonder at more than a new bronze sculpture from an unknown race, or a carving, or a new form, or shape, or way of representing what was familiar or unfamiliar. They loved nothing more than to be amazed by that which they did not understand.

It was essential to their pleasure and appreciation that they did not (at first) understand the art that came their way from the mysterious trade routes of the world. For the tribe, to understand was not to see. To understand too quickly was a failure. It was a blinding. Understanding stopped them from seeing, and looking. Even when they understood, they sought that within a significant work which they did not and could not understand: this they held up as its central and most secret feature. And when this point of mystery moved, or changed, as it does through time and under the new light of unexpected events, they also changed the centrality of the work's mystery.

Like women admiring new clothes in the marketplace, or like women admiring the fruits of a rich season, so the tribe clustered round like children and admired the new works which traders brought from the wider world. Knives with uniquely designed handles, figurines made of fired clay, reliquary figures of unknown ancestors, items sculpted from rocks, drawings on scrolls, handwritten manuscripts from prosperous kingdoms, paintings on parchment, vivid colours on absorbent wood, seeds of strange fruits, skulls of strange animals, objects that were magical because they were strange and beautiful in themselves, in their forms, in the ideas that spoke out from their shapes: these created a great and lasting excitement in the tribe. And they were part of the vital life of its continued creativity.

So freely did they adapt, absorb, transform and combine the ideas and possibilities in these artworks and objects that they encountered. They absorbed them, and acknowledged them; for, to the tribe, acknowledging was a high expression of gratitude that made higher creativity possible. The gods of creativity, they believed, frowned greatly on unacknowledged absorptions; and the punishment for this was future barrenness in art.

It was against all this that the Mamba, in his blind obsession, found himself pitted. Not only that; but also against the great commerce done by the purchase of their works by traders, by outsiders. And not only that either; but against the presence of the other suitors for the hand of the maiden.

Soon the Mamba found himself isolated, and he didn't know it. He was outside the current of his people, and no one told him. In some tribes silence is the highest form of both condemnation and adoration. But the silences are different. A madman shouts out obscenities from dawn to dusk, and the tribe is silent. The madman becomes madder, and one day is heard from no more. There is a kind of silence that swallows up the personality and spirit of one who talks too much.

The maiden's father had picked up the rumours and the whispers not from the mouths of people, not from friends and associates, not from relations, but from hints that the tribe was so expert at sending. Songs that he heard in the marketplace, with certain references and certain sly images, and he knew that his illustrious house was being referred to; indirectly, of course. Works of art seen, sculptures near the shrine noticed, certain words in conversations overheard, and an intolerable suggestiveness in certain glances, lingering too long, with an insolence previously unthinkable, and the speech unspoken wasn't hard to hear. The unsaid things thundered for being said in a hundred other ways except through speech. And so when he acted, when he had the maiden sent away, not in secrecy but in daylight, so that everyone could see and therefore not see, he acted in the highest spirit.

With his wife, at night, when they talked deep into the hours of the dwindling stars, they often said things like: One does not become a woman just by getting older. One does not become a human being just by being born. To become what one is takes a long time, and no time at all. Those who use only their brains cannot get to the mysterious depth of things. Now will not be like this for ever. Now is not what people think it is: there is a now that has gone, there is a now that is going, and there is a now that will be, but which is already here – and they are all in the same now. People see only that which has gone, and which is no more. They never see that which is already here, but invisible.

Man and wife; these manner of things they spoke to one another, into the hours of the dwindling stars and the gently brightening heavens. And they spoke these things incidentally, in relation to something else, something more concrete, like what to do about their daughter.

Her disappearance from the community increased her reputation and her stature amongst the suitors, and fuelled innumerable rumours about her. As rumour takes the place of fact, filling an absence, it allowed people to be creative in the monstrosities that they could imagine and invent. There was talk that the maiden was unwell, that she had gone mad, that she had contracted a fatal disease, that the gods had sent dreadful omens regarding her fate. They whispered that she had disappeared because she had been impregnated by the horned animal that had copulated with her. They speculated about the nature of the man-beast that she would give birth to, and wondered if it would ever be allowed to roam about the shrine in broad daylight. They surmised that the pressure and expectation of having to create a new work to fulfil her healing had perhaps cracked her sanity. Or wondered whether she had crumbled under the strain of the relentless wooing by the suitors. Some said that she had gone away to be fortified. And as there is always an element of chance in the accumulation of rumours, so there is an element of truth in something that is collectively whispered for long enough, even if that truth is allegorical, or even symbolic. For there were those who suggested that she might have gone away to be spiritually strengthened, to be magnified.

In fact, she had been taken to the cave of awakening, in the hills of the gods. In that cave her real life began. She was buried alive, left for days, allowed to die, and was then raised ...

It was in the cave that she began to dream of a dying prince.

A
bout initiations we ought to be silent. They are often sacred and private events. What rituals are wrought there belong to the initiated and should not be bared to the irrelevant scrutiny of a curious and sensation-seeking world. People destroy the power of initiations when they reveal them to outsiders and to those who are not undergoing such rites. Noble initiations ought to have great silence and a ring of fire around them, so that the initiated may undergo the rites of their transformations in the power of that intense space. Initiations within are silent and unseen; so it should be for those who make the ritual changes from darkness to light, from boys to men, from girls to women, from chrysalis to butterfly. Wisdom ought to guide these processes of the liberating being.

About the maiden's initiation, though I saw it in the book of life, I shall be silent, in my revealing kind of way. I shall conceal by revealing. She passed through it with great pain, difficulty and suffering. She dwelt alone for seven days in the cave of transformations. She was buried alive for many nights. She gave birth to herself in her death and emerged from the earth in a disordered, disorientated state. She ate nothing but herbs and water. She dwelt among the rocks and awaited the goddess. She recited the prayers of light that had been given her till she broke down and wept a whole day. Then she felt like dying and lay down on a white rock to die in the blazing sun, with her lips all broken and her mind quite cracked. And a blaze of light encompassed her and in the light there was a bird and she followed the bird into the heavens and wandered in halls of pure white glory. Then she saw a prince waiting for her at the door of golden splendour, and he reached out his hand and she held it, and together they entered the chamber of angels. And they were silent there among the angels and they were both one and happy and perfect in their bliss beyond the wildest dreams of mortals. And they dwelt there in perfect love and harmony for an eternity; and then time tugged at her and she found herself alone, listening to the whispers of the goddess in the hall of the Holy. She listened a long time to whispers that were not words but beyond words; and then a flash of red light fell upon her and she awoke and found herself in the cave, alone, with girls who had changed into women singing outside, calling her to come out of the cave to be a woman now and give birth to a new world.

Eventually she emerged, and after much encouragement and coaxing she danced as a new woman and was taught the rituals of birth. Her blood broke then and ran down her legs and they celebrated her as a woman who with blood bears the weight and fire-wisdom of the world, 'who with blood sacrifices her life to make the world beautiful and rich with meaning, and who with blood continues the entry into the world of sleeping souls waiting to emerge into history and time, and who with blood bears legend and myths.