NEW SPELLS FOR THE FUTURE
No. 24
Ben Okri
Illustration by: Steve Wallace. Photograph: The Hutchinson Library
I think the poet has to be braver with their humanity. The poet has to embrace the difficult questions that politicians are not prepared to ask anymore. I feel, and it is a risky thing I am about to suggest, that we have allowed the politician to usurp the central territory of the poet, which is dream speaking to dream, high truth to high truth. I think the poet has stepped back a bit too much, has left a certain territory of public discourse to people who abuse strangers. All of us are wanderers through the earth. We ought to awaken in one another both a sense of our temporality here and a sense of eternity in one another. But there is this way people have of dividing humanity, creating a sense of them and us, home and stranger. But our world has to co-mingle. Our fates are too linked. We have done enough poisoning of one another’s destiny. We need to bring something of the healer back. We need a poetics of healing. I am not only talking about bandages, but about the depths of language and the heart. Perhaps even a revolution in our idea of what it means to be human. Words in their highest configuration can re-align us in magical new ways. I have always dreamed of a new aesthetics that counteracts the poison of our times. An aesthetic that is also a high act of politics. Or a politics that is also a high act of aesthetics. Politics is too important to be left to politicians. We need to cast new spells for the future.
From a conversation with Robert Wood, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oct. 2019.
“And while the candles fluttered and burned brighter for the air that his sleep no longer deprived them of, Dad with his new deep sad voice began to speak to us. He spoke as if he hadn’t been away. He spoke as if he hadn’t made great journeys in spirit. And he spoke with the great enthusiastic innocence of a recuperating man.
‘My wife and my son, listen to me. In my sleep I saw many wonderful things. Our ancestors taught me many philosophies. My father, Priest of Roads, appeared to me and said I should keep my door open. My heart must be open. My life must be open. Our road must be open. A road that is open is never hungry. Strange times are coming.’
‘A single thought of ours could change the universe. We human beings are small things. Life is a great thing. As I am talking now they are holding elections in heaven and under the sea. We have entered a new age. We must be prepared. There are strange bombs in the world. Great powers in space are fighting to control our destiny. Machines and poisons and selfish dreams will eat us up. I entered a space ship and found myself on another planet. People who look like human beings are not human beings. Strange people are amongst us. We must be careful. Our lives are changing. Our gods are silent. Our ancestors are silent. A great something is going to come from the sky and change the face of the earth. We must take an interest in politics. We must become spies on behalf of justice. Human beings are dreaming of wiping out their fellow human beings from this earth. Rats and frogs understand their destiny. Why not man, eh? My wife, my son, where are we going? There is no rest for the soul. God is hungry for us to grow. When you look around and you see empty spaces, beware. In those spaces are cities, invisible civilisations, future histories, everything is HERE. We must look at the world with new eyes. We must look at ourselves differently. We are freer than we think. We haven’t begun to live yet. The man whose light has come on in his head, in his dormant sun, can never be kept down or defeated. We can redream this world and make the dream real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves. My son, our hunger can change the world, make it better, sweeter. People who use only their eyes do not SEE. People who use only their ears do not HEAR. It is more difficult to love than to die. It is not death that human beings are most afraid of, it is love. The heart is bigger than a mountain. One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us. The trees of the forest, the animals of the bushes, tortoises, birds, and flowers know our future. The world that we see and the world that is there are two different things. Wars are not fought on battlegrounds but in a space smaller than the head of a needle. We need a new language to talk to one another. Inside a cat there are many histories, many books. When you look into the eyes of dogs strange fishes swim in your mind. All roads lead to death, but some roads lead to things which can never be finished. Wonderful things. There are human beings who are small but if you can SEE you will notice that their spirits are ten thousand feet wide. In my dream I met a child sitting on a cloud and his spirit covered half the earth. Angels and demons are amongst us; they take many forms. They can enter us and dwell there for one second or half a lifetime. Sometimes both of them dwell in us together. Before everything was born there was first the spirit. It is the spirit which invites things in, good things, or bad. Invite only good things, my son. Listen to the spirit of things. To your own spirit. Follow it. Master it. So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use. There is a stillness which makes you travel faster. There is a silence which makes you fly. If your heart is a friend of Time nothing can destroy you. Death has taught me the religion of living - ’”
Excerpt from ‘The Famished Road’ (1991)