Starbook (31 page)

Silently there among the statues of an ancient mood, the new servant sat, while all the stars in the galaxy revolved, while the story of all things approached the ultimate secret of their ends and their beginnings, while death crept over the kingdom, and darkness stole into the name of that realm.

Drums broke their voices in the evenings and held the steady beat to the public festivities. The drums were charmed with sculpted figures of bards singing death back to its cave. Deep voices sang, dances thumped the face of the earth, libations poured into the cracks, and laughter rose among the flute melodies that imitated the enquiries of newborn babies about the fitness of the times for their arrival. The new servant sat in the silence of statues till the spiders wove their nets about his face, entangling his hair, imprisoning him in their fine web from which he did not stir. How quickly did the spiders work? He would be still a while, wandering in the delicious philosophy of the maiden's being, when he would come round and find himself enmeshed again in fine-spun threads of darkness. He would hear his father's laughter in the irony of it all, and he would smile.

And still he sought a way into the subtle notions of her sweet existence.

By the river he would linger with her in the errands she made as a daughter to a mother. He would learn in her the art of weaving stories in cloth, of dyeing tales on cloth, of painting symbols and signs, figures and forms, hints of dreams, shapes of prophecies on the bales of wrappers which the women and men wore on ceremonial occasions. The maiden and her mother dressed the tribe in prophecies. Shapes of fishes that mean many things, forms of beings with eyes of gold and moonstones, dancing with angels of blinding colours, were charmed on to the cloths. Cowries arranged in forms of changing divinations, images of stars in space in unique constellations, visions of men in space, among the stars, with arms embracing the universe, were patterned on to the materials that would become blouses, dresses, wrappers, coverlets. The tribe and the world would be draped in dreams, in visions, in cheeky myths, in divinations and inscriptions to the future. The maiden loved this working on cloth with her mother; and they laughed often and told stories and challenged one another in images and inspiration.

Then later, when evening fell, and the day's work was done, the maiden would go to the farms, with water and refreshments for the farmers as they prepared to come home; and often the new servant would sense her wandering among the golden sheaves of cornfields, leaning against a tree, lingering among the cassava plants, gazing at a remote constellation.

And then he would be surprised to see her burst into tears, as if she had lost a lover to the stars.

Then, just as suddenly, she would be re-composed and would be with the women, returning from the farm, carrying a basket of yams, or dandling a child on her back while its mother rested a moment in the shade.

The new servant sensed a profound restlessness in the maiden. One day she burst into her father's workshop and said:

'My father, something is supposed to be happening to me, but it isn't. What is it?'

'Are you ready to make your choice of husband now?'

'No.'

There was a pause.

'Then what do you mean?'

'I am supposed to be happy or sad, but I am not.'

'What are you then?'

'I don't know. Do you?'

Her father said nothing. The silence lengthened in the workshop. The new servant could hear the statues whispering. He could hear the spirits at work in enriching the forms of the statues, polishing them with the invisible wax of myth, and infusing into them moods of amber and of unfinished stories, breathing an odd quality of life into them, till they fairly bristled with a condition that partook both of something lifelike and something mineral, alive in a hidden, troubling, dreamy kind of way. The new servant listened as the spirit-servants performed their finishing touches on the statues and figurines, making them take on an ancient immemorial mood, under the father's precise instructions. They worked on the masks too, silently, the masks that would adorn the masquerade's faces, that would be the faces, on the day of the ancestors or on feast days when the select ones were possessed by the gods. These masks were carved with the mysterious art that made them take on their true personalities only when in motion, only when in the dance. Motionless, they acquired a kinetic stillness. This fusion of motion and stillness would transform the art of the future. The spirits infused into these masks the eternal longing to dance, in order to be free.

*

In this silence of statues changing from their recently created states into their enigmatic natures, the new servant listened to the maiden awaiting her father's reply. But her father didn't speak. So the maiden absent-mindedly wandered amongst the statues in the workshop, to see how they were coming along, and to see how much they had changed by just being there in that space, immersed in the radiance of the master and deepened by the atmosphere which enters the body of the statues and enriches them with dark and wonderful notions.

The maiden lingered at each statue and gazed at it dreamily. And then she came upon the new servant where he sat motionless under the wall in a sepia and amber mood of spiders' webs and the silence of old royal trees. And, suddenly, engulfed by an arboreal mood of unknown kings of the forest, she was amazed at the new perfection of her father's art. She drew in breath and cried out, half horrified and half enchanted at this statue of a frail-looking and beautiful young man that sat there like a visitor from an unknown world. Her heart couldn't stop beating so fast and a wild delusion flooded her head and for a moment she went quite blind and then a white light, like the brilliance of the sky, quite conquered the top of her head. Then everything suddenly cleared. Her mouth was dry. She saw nothing as she did before, and she drew back. Shaken by a nameless wonder, she was astonished at what she beheld. It seemed incredible to her that her father had now created a work so real that it had become virtually human. If there was any flaw it was that there seemed something altogether too kind about its face, and too adorable about its lips. But overcome by the sorcery of the accomplishment the maiden feared that her father had gone too far; and this time, in his terrifying perfection, he might have tempted the gods with the greatness of his art ...

The maiden retreated from this new art of sorcery and went and sat at the far end of the workshop. To her mind the darkness where the new sculpture sat was now a place faintly touched with dark magic. In her mind the new sculpture conjoined the weird and the enchanting. And so she set about forgetting that she had endured such an unsettling and yet such a beautiful experience. But what was beautiful about the experience she had felt only as bizarre. There was something unnatural about the beauty of that face that she didn't quite want to think about.

She had also forgotten the question she had asked her father. She sat in a mild confusion, feeling scared and miraculously changed, but not knowing why. Soon the mood of the workshop crept over her in its whispers and its fragrance of old wood and stone and spirits, and she drifted into a deep and wonderful sleep. When she was far away from the workshop, and played like a child among the beings of her secret homeland in a remote constellation, her father turned to her and rose. Then above her sleeping form he chanted potent vowel sounds, intoned certain reality-altering incantations, and spoke to the master-spirit that dwelt within her, saying:

'Forget that which wouldn't do you any good. Remember things in a manner that is best for you. Open your heart towards your marriage, and choose only he who would best help you fulfil your destiny, whatever your destiny may be, and he whose destiny you can best help fulfil, whatever that too may be.'

Then, intoning another complex sound, he went and sat down again, and worked in silence.

Shortly afterwards he summoned the spirits of the workshop and gave them fresh instructions about the new work he had slowly been gestating. The spirits set about their tasks. The new servant hadn't moved. Breathing gently, he felt the spirits working all around him, enriching the air with ideas, with open dimensions to other worlds and other ages. They worked on the air, the atmosphere. It seemed as if they impregnated the air with moods of ancestral wisdom and future realities, and that this charged atmosphere, seeping into the statues, into the carvings, the masks and sculptures, was what created the highest mystery in the works of art. It seemed as if the works when finished were not complete. They needed to absorb an atmosphere richly treated in enchantments and sorceries, in dark beautiful suggestiveness, and moods combined from remote eras in the infinite museums of universal history. This was the most important work, it seemed, that the spirits performed. They marinated the completed creations in enigmas. It wasn't long before the servant realised that he too was being treated and woven in enigmas ...

The maiden woke with a shock and sprang out of her chair and hurried to her mother and said:

'I'm in love, but I don't know who I am in love with. Why?'

Her mother was bewildered.

The maiden joined her mother in the creation of images on cloth; and in silence she made a beautiful collection of dye work of all the suitors, their forms, their traits, their gifts, and the works of art each had created. It was a loving group portrait of all the suitors who had honoured her with their intentions, their efforts, their patience and their ardour. She worked in silence with her mother. This was the way they talked about things too difficult to talk about. It was long laborious work and as the faces emerged, each one represented so beautifully, the maiden's mother wept at the wonderful gift her daughter had and didn't value at all.

'Mother, why are you weeping?' the maiden asked absent-mindedly, and with a simple smile.

'I just pray that you marry the right person. You are the strangest daughter that God could have given a mother. I just don't know what to do with you.'

And the maiden laughed and wept on her mother's shoulder, like a little girl.

Later on, when the dye was set, and the cloth was ready, the suitors delighted in the lovely gift the maiden had given them, the gift of fame. For their faces adorned the women's bodies in the season's festivities and were seen beyond the tribe, carried to distant lands by cloth merchants. And instead of pacifying the suitors, this act inflamed them more.

But in making the images on cloth, the maiden found herself perplexed: she made an astonishing discovery. She was not remotely in love with any of the suitors. And yet she knew, from all she had heard, from all the tales of the heart she had been told, and from the quickened happy and alive quality of her being, the delightful half-blinding half-clear-seeing malady, that she was in love. There could be no other explanation. Either she was in love, or she was possessed by a god, or she was being worked on by a master or a wizard, or she was going mad in her youth. Was she just simply more than normally excited by the miraculous joy of being alive? How could she love without an object for that love? These questions troubled her. And yet she could not sleep, she brooded around the outskirts of the village and hung around the shrine and lingered in her father's workshop staring at the statues that were slowly coming to life. She consulted, secretly, the priestesses of the shrine, and they told her riddles, prophecies and obscure words that confused her even more.

'When that which is not seen is seen,

When that which is dead comes to life again,

When stone turns to flesh,

When the yellow river bears

The prince and princess into distant lands,

When darkness has come and gone

Over the world,

And we understand the meaning of the sun,

And we realise what a human being

Is among the stars,

Then all your questions will be answered.

The whole world is a seed

And inside the seed we dream.

One day the seed will grow,

And what we will see will be

As great as heaven.

What you love is right in front

Of your eyes.

But you can only see it with

Your heart, your soul.'

This they told the maiden in songs, woven with choruses.

Meanwhile the new servant was being woven in cobwebs and in enigmas by the spirits of the master-maker's workshop. In order to serve, he became a statue, and was inducted into the mysteries without knowing it. For only the statues, in their purity, know the secrets of the land. They absorb them simply, and store them in their forms. The new servant absorbed the lessons he had to learn from the master without being told anything. He absorbed by being still. He almost never moved. And when he did move he did it silently, like a shadow or a ghost, not troubling the air, or shifting the mood. He moved with the grace and simplicity of the dead. And he returned to his place under the wall, in the dark, among the statues, as though he were occupying a space he had never left. He began to suspect that a part of him moved, but another part of him remained behind, unmoving, in the semi-darkness, among the spirits and the fragrance of wood. He thus acquired a delicate patina from the air of the master's dreams.

For a long time the father of the maiden did not require much of him, and asked him to do nothing. At first there were simple errands, but even these were forgotten, and abandoned. The master worked in silence at his new revelation, which demanded the utmost stillness and the most profound concentration which, for him, was really a form of great humility, an acute receptivity. The master too had to cease to be in order to see what needed to be. It was a new mode every time. Sometimes, in order to make a work happen, he had to turn into a wild lion and roam the forests hunting for a dream that dwelt among the spirits there, a dream that can be seen by beasts, but not men. Sometimes, in order to drag back form that would endure for more than two thousand years, he had to change into an eagle and fly to remote villages in faraway lands and spy on the rituals of the daughters of an ancient mother whose children, scattered about the world, didn't know one another any more. And sometimes, very rarely, when he felt an acute mood in the world that needed a cry of bafflement to help heal a giant wound which an entire race will suffer, he had to turn into a shape abhorrent to men, and journey to the realm of the dead and drag back the corpses of evil images, and change them into beautiful forms in the darkness before the light of the sun reaches them. And then he would have to learn, for many months, how to be human again. All this expended his life, shortened his life, converted his vitality. And it was only by regenerating himself in an invisible stream of light that flowed from the centre of the sun to the centre of the earth that he managed, in dreams and in meditation, in prayer and in rigorous ritual exercise, not to die, as many do who work such tough wonders, long before their time.

And now the father of the maiden was preparing himself again. Slowly, he was letting go of the world. Slowly, he was letting go of desire. Slowly, he was releasing himself of all need to create, or to command, or to will, or to dream, or to summon. The world must do without him. In prayer, within a magic circle, in his workshop, surrounded by an invisible light, protected by the seven spirits who ward off all intruders, the father of the maiden set himself adrift into a world where all forms, all notions, all unexplored dreams, all ideas dwell in a constellation bright as the light and fire of jewels and diamonds that sparkle in the sun. He released himself into this world, and surrendered himself to its currents, and then found the gates to unsuspected worlds, where he made new friends, and attended the convention of master artists from all the worlds. While in the workshop, he might as well have been dead.

Often the father of the maiden went off like this, without informing anyone. And so he forgot all things, and left the new servant without instructions. So the new servant sat under the wall and stared and dreamt and discovered new gaps and was silent. And then he found that he was learning and being taught in the silence. Things and beings and artworks were whispering to him. The masters of the tribe, who saw him in their meditations, whispered secrets into his being. Spirits of the workshop came and explained the workings of things to him, the secrets of bronze-casting, the golden art of harmony in wood-sculpting, the art of kinetic magic in mask-making, the history of the tribe, its public history and its secret sacred history too.

It was whispered to him, by beings he had no idea about, from realms inaccessible except to travellers in dreams, that the artworks of the tribe were prophecies of one kind or another. They were prophecies that the tribe itself didn't know about. Sometimes, in the silence, the new servant found himself elsewhere. Sometimes he found that he was in the square, or in the circle, where the shrine stood, and he was being shown statues and sculptures, masks and carvings and paintings of wars between tribes, invasions of continents by aliens, of wars being fought across the seas, of murders committed in distant lands which have never been solved, and secret intentions of governments far away given clear artistic form. And market traders on caravan routes who have visited the tribe to trade have been shocked to recognise, among the artworks that were visible, the face of one who had been crowned king of their land just as they were setting out on their journeys, or the face of a famous sage who never travelled, a thing the tribe of artists simply could not have known about.

The new servant gathered, in the hints and whispering in the air, that the tribe of artists were listeners at the universal world of facts and events. It was as though they had access to a place where all things that happened in the universe were registered. And so they seemed to know, in the works they created, without knowing that they knew, the invasions planned on sleeping lands, assassinations, the faces of generals who would lead monstrous battles, world wars that would not happen in their time but hundreds of years in the future. And the new servant learnt to see in the artworks prophecies of great events to come in the far distant future as well as those that happened in the remotest past. It was as though time was an indifferent stream in which past, present and future were all one. And the artists of that tribe bathed in that stream, and drew from it their inspiration without end.

Happenings and possibilities were coded there in the odd art of the tribe, in one form or another. The futures of the world and of many worlds were encoded there in one form or another. The tribe knew great and intimate secrets that they didn't know they knew.

But the new servant was astonished to learn, in a flash of intuition, that the artworks of the tribe were intended to be works of sublime indifference and beauty. They were not interested in prophecy. They had no idea of prophecy. It meant nothing to them. They were not interested in facts. Only in creating different kinds of beauty: beauty out of disharmony, beauty that lurks in chaos, beauty that hides in disorder, beauty that sings in destruction, beauty out of the least expected events or things or materials or elements, beauty in ugliness, beauty that becomes beauty in a horrible-looking work only when you have stopped looking at it; beauty that the work creates in the mind, a mental and spiritual beauty stimulated by the work but not residing in the work, or its design. Even beauty itself the tribe of artists were indifferent about. They were interested only in what exalted states the work could induce in you, for you to use as your intelligence or need best suggests to you. And so they had no word for beauty in their language. They had banished it centuries ago, because the word got in the way of infinite suggestibility and an inducement to higher states of consciousness.

The prophetic element was merely a covert accessory, a hidden incidental, accompanying the strange beauty that the art of the tribe embodied.