In this post are lines
I loved reading, lines
I loved reading, lines
written by Ben Okri
in his wonderful book
The Famished Road
To be born is to come into the world weighed down with strange gifts of the soul, with enigmas and an inextinguishable sense of exile. So it was with me.
It may simply have been that I have grown tired of going and coming. It is terrible to forever remain in between. It may also have been that I wanted the taste of this world. To feel it, suffer it, to know it, to love it, to make a valuable contribution to it, and to have that sublime mood of eternity in me as I live the life to come.
But I sometimes think it was a face that made me want to stay. I wanted to make happy the sad and the bruised face of my mother.
I was born not just because I had conceived a notion to stay, but because in between my coming and going the great cycles of time had finally tightened around my neck. I prayed for laughter, a life without hunger, I was answered with paradoxes. It remains an enigma how it came to be that I was born smiling.
Being born was a shock from which I never recovered.
I learnt afterwards that I had lingered between not dying and not living for two weeks.
One world contains glimpses of others.
Realized with a shock later that it was the strangeness that was familiar.
Everything felt the same. The only difference was that I wasn’t used to the sameness.
This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
His cigarette burned angrily as he dredged up a fresh variation.
The spirit child is an unwilling adventurer into the chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead. Things that are not ready, not willing to be born or to become, things for which adequate preparations have not been made to sustain their momentous births, things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure and with fear of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in themselves partake of the spirit child’s condition. They keep coming and going till their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of the condition of the spirit child.
There are many who are of this condition and do not know it. There are many nations, civilizations, ideas, half-discoveries, revolutions, loves, art forms, experiments, and historical events that are of this condition and do not know it. There are many people too. They do not all have the marks of their recurrence. Often they seem normal. Often they are perceived of as new. Often they are serene with the familiarity of death’s embrace. They all carry strange gifts in their souls. They are all part time dwellers in their own secret moonlight. They all yearn to make of themselves a beautiful sacrifice, a difficult sacrifice, to bring transformation, an to die shedding light within this life, setting the matter ready for their true beginnings to cry into being, scorched by the strange ecstasy of the will ascending to say yes to destiny and illumination.
I was a spirit child rebelling against spirits, wanting to live the earth’s life and contradictions. Ade wanted to leave, to become a spirit again, and face the captivity of freedom. I wanted the liberty of limitations, to have to find or create new roads from this one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be. I was not necessarily the stronger one; it may be easier to love with the earths boundaries than to be free in infinity.
Given the fact of the immortality of spirits, could these be the reason that I wanted to be born- these paradoxes of things, the eternal changes, the riddle of living while one is alive, the mystery of being, of births within births, death within births, births within dying, the challenge of giving birth to ones true self. To ones new spirit, till the conditions are right for the new immutable star within ones universe to come into existence, the challenge to grow and learn and love, to master ones self, the possibilities of a new pact with ones spirit; the probability that no injustice lasts forever, no love ever dies, that no light is ever really extinguished, that no true road is ever complete, that no way is ever definitive, no truth ever final, and that there are never really beginnings or endings. It may be that in the land of origins, when many of us were birds, even all these reasons had nothing to do with why I wanted to live.
Anything is possible one way or the other. There are many riddles amongst us that neither the living nor the dead can answer.
A dream can be the highest point of life.
And because the road was a river it was always hungry.
There wasn’t one amongst us who looked forward to being born. We disliked the rigors of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.
It may simply have been that I have grown tired of going and coming. It is terrible to forever remain in between. It may also have been that I wanted the taste of this world. To feel it, suffer it, to know it, to love it, to make a valuable contribution to it, and to have that sublime mood of eternity in me as I live the life to come.
But I sometimes think it was a face that made me want to stay. I wanted to make happy the sad and the bruised face of my mother.
I was born not just because I had conceived a notion to stay, but because in between my coming and going the great cycles of time had finally tightened around my neck. I prayed for laughter, a life without hunger, I was answered with paradoxes. It remains an enigma how it came to be that I was born smiling.
Being born was a shock from which I never recovered.
I learnt afterwards that I had lingered between not dying and not living for two weeks.
One world contains glimpses of others.
Realized with a shock later that it was the strangeness that was familiar.
Everything felt the same. The only difference was that I wasn’t used to the sameness.
This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
His cigarette burned angrily as he dredged up a fresh variation.
The spirit child is an unwilling adventurer into the chaos and sunlight, into the dreams of the living and the dead. Things that are not ready, not willing to be born or to become, things for which adequate preparations have not been made to sustain their momentous births, things that are not resolved, things bound up with failure and with fear of being, they all keep recurring, keep coming back, and in themselves partake of the spirit child’s condition. They keep coming and going till their time is right. History itself fully demonstrates how things of the world partake of the condition of the spirit child.
There are many who are of this condition and do not know it. There are many nations, civilizations, ideas, half-discoveries, revolutions, loves, art forms, experiments, and historical events that are of this condition and do not know it. There are many people too. They do not all have the marks of their recurrence. Often they seem normal. Often they are perceived of as new. Often they are serene with the familiarity of death’s embrace. They all carry strange gifts in their souls. They are all part time dwellers in their own secret moonlight. They all yearn to make of themselves a beautiful sacrifice, a difficult sacrifice, to bring transformation, an to die shedding light within this life, setting the matter ready for their true beginnings to cry into being, scorched by the strange ecstasy of the will ascending to say yes to destiny and illumination.
I was a spirit child rebelling against spirits, wanting to live the earth’s life and contradictions. Ade wanted to leave, to become a spirit again, and face the captivity of freedom. I wanted the liberty of limitations, to have to find or create new roads from this one which is so hungry, this road of our refusal to be. I was not necessarily the stronger one; it may be easier to love with the earths boundaries than to be free in infinity.
Given the fact of the immortality of spirits, could these be the reason that I wanted to be born- these paradoxes of things, the eternal changes, the riddle of living while one is alive, the mystery of being, of births within births, death within births, births within dying, the challenge of giving birth to ones true self. To ones new spirit, till the conditions are right for the new immutable star within ones universe to come into existence, the challenge to grow and learn and love, to master ones self, the possibilities of a new pact with ones spirit; the probability that no injustice lasts forever, no love ever dies, that no light is ever really extinguished, that no true road is ever complete, that no way is ever definitive, no truth ever final, and that there are never really beginnings or endings. It may be that in the land of origins, when many of us were birds, even all these reasons had nothing to do with why I wanted to live.
Anything is possible one way or the other. There are many riddles amongst us that neither the living nor the dead can answer.
A dream can be the highest point of life.
And because the road was a river it was always hungry.
There wasn’t one amongst us who looked forward to being born. We disliked the rigors of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.
No comments:
Post a Comment