Starbook (30 page)

For the first seven days the new servant did as he was told and if he was told nothing he did nothing. He barely spoke as a servant but only listened. He never knew there was so much to listen to, so much to hear, in the world, and in the universe.

At first listening was very alien to him, very difficult, and he experienced it as a kind of agony. Then, slowly, he noticed there was a pleasure in it, if he slowed down the workings of his mind and if he forgot himself. He began to hear things he would never have been told. He heard stories and rumours about the kingdom. He heard that the land had a king that no one had ever seen. He heard that in the king's court there were those plotting the removal of the king and the division of the kingdom. He heard that the prince had died and that a false prince had been put in his place to soothe the agitation of the people. He heard that on all sides the kingdom was being invaded by shadows and white spirits. He heard that the land was being devoured by darkness, and that an evil had come among the people and was snatching away the young men and women and stealing them away into a dark space beyond the great seas, from where there is no return. He heard the cry of the ancestors, he heard the wailing of the legion of unborn generations, and he heard the crashing down of the great pillars of the land, the collapsing houses, the crumbling palaces, the howling of the dead, and the poignant songs of angels singing of new ages to come out of such appalling destruction. He had no idea how he heard these things, but when he learnt to listen there seemed no end to the things it was essential for him to hear.

He learnt to listen without fretting, without the need to act. He learnt to listen, and to hear, the way statues do.

He realised that the more he listened, the more he heard.

Every evening the new servant went back to the forest and walked into the precise gap between the trees and found himself in the same forest, except it was different, and it led him home. He would rise from among the statues and bow silently to the father of the maiden, and would pick his way through the sculptures, the wooden busts, the gates of images, the statues of gods, the thronging artworks along the village main ways and paths, images in stone and wood and mixed materials of nails and feathers and blood and rope and patterned cowries, works that crowded the thoroughfare, changing shapes in the encroaching evening. And he would make his way past them all, listening to the murmur of voices like the choirs of the low rumbling river. And, without looking at any faces, or dwelling too long on any one sight, he would glide past the busy village, not drawing attention to himself, and would find his way to the dark thick forest. Often it was that the rich startling fragrance of the evening-breathing leaves would engulf him in deep memories and a feeling of a great freedom; and his heart would sing with a ruby-dark joy. Often he would feel so fortunate to have the kingdom of the forest all to himself, and he would linger or run among the trees and sing to the birds and recite lines of ancient verse to the forest flowers. Sometimes he would lie with his back against a tree and for a moment would allow himself to drift in a realm of elementals. And on one such occasion he had an extraordinary dream about a baby who, on the very same day it was born, became a man, married a wife, had three children, fought valiantly in a great war, travelled to all the continents, was initiated into the mighty secret brotherhood of universal masters, healed the sick, redirected the course of world history, cleansed half the earth of its great corruptions by diverting through it the wonderful river of Venus, yoked the oxen of the sun to the dry unfruitful earth, fought the seven-headed monster of the deep, and restored the neglected garden of the race to its pristine beauty, and then died at the midnight of its first and only day on earth. The dream of this wonderful child haunted the new servant for a long time, and he had no idea what it meant, but he drew great strength thinking about this baby avatar that accomplished so much on the first and only day of its life.

Every evening the new servant would do something new in the forest on his way back home. Sometimes he would learn the taste of fear as he walked in the dense shadows of the trees and listened to the weird birds call his secret names in distorted voices. Sometimes he would try to listen to the language of trees, to hear what they had to say about being immemorial, and about time. He sometimes heard whispers that death lived in the forest and that its house was all the trees and all the shade and all the darkness and all the earth and that in its womb was life too, if you could find it. These whispers made no sense to him.

Whatever he did, however much he lingered, he always made sure that whenever he was returning home to the palace he found the exact gap between the trees and that he passed through it quickly and in a firm spirit. And when he did he found that he had vanished in one place only to reappear in the same place that was somehow different. He couldn't understand it and didn't try.

But it was some time before he realised that this gap might be the reason why his emissaries had been unable to find the tribe of artists. And it occurred to him that the mysterious tribe was not on any map or in any territory, but in a separate realm. For the first time the prince was not even sure if they were of the land, or in the land, or in the kingdom.

And when he passed through that gap, which changed shape from day to day, never the same, sometimes like a moon, sometimes like a fire, sometimes like a clear mirror of water dazzling in the air, sometimes in the shape of a woman, but whenever he passed through the gap, he became the other side of what he was, different, but also the same. And on the journey home he became the prince, frail, tender, his head shimmering with a new clarity, as if with eyes shut he could see half the universe in a flash, and glimpse the immortal mirror of destiny.

For seven days he served thus. For days he lived thus. Then he asked his father, the king, for permission to stay longer on his mysterious mission. His father, with the hint of sublime mischief in his eyes, said:

'I consider it part of your duties as a prince to be first and foremost a human being, richly grounded and properly rounded. A season of humility would do you good. Another season of suffering would be quite excellent for you. A season of humiliation would put power in your veins and some ripening rage in your heart. To be all things is to be human. The ancestry of dust, the lash of destiny, exile in a hostile land, servitude, slavery, warfare, madness, folly, despair, grandeur – these are the food of human history. All will be tasted at the feast before you become king. But the greatest fruit of all, my son, is love; and if love is that with which you can learn, in the art of a human being, you will be a great prince and a joy to the mystery of the stars.'

The prince was taken aback by this strange speech from his father. The king had never spoken to him like that before. The prince was so amazed, and oddly touched, that when he recovered from the mild delirium of joy, his father was gone from his presence.

On the evenings of his return, however, driven by an inexplicable passion and a silent empowerment he sensed from the king, he summoned the elders and demanded answers from them about the multiplying gaps in the kingdom that were threatening, undermining, the foundation of things. This puzzled and enraged the elders more than ever, because they had no answers and could do nothing about the gaps that were spreading through the kingdom like a nameless disease.

The prince went and lived among the tribe of gate-makers, masquerade-shapers, bronze-casters, and dream-revealers. He lived among the tribe of artists in disguise, as an ordinary man, following one of his favourite principles of invisibility. He worked as a servant for the father of the maiden of his heart. He worked with him for seven seasons. Often, with permission, he stole back to his kingdom. He never spoke to the maiden in all that time. And she never spoke to him. She didn't see him. She didn't notice him. He never spoke to her, seldom looked at her directly, but he watched her in his spirit and listened to her in his soul. He studied her heart, and he followed her ways, and he absorbed the peculiar philosophy of her being.

She was one of the strange ones who did not know quite how strange she was. She was so strange to herself that she took it to be normal. The new servant learnt, for example, that she was not much interested in the reflection of things. Mirrors did not unduly fascinate her. She was more interested in being than in things. And yet she avoided people and hid among things. She was more interested in fruits than in roots. Others kept probing what lay behind things, where people came from, where they were in the hierarchy of things, who their ancestors were, but she was interested mainly in what people produced, their fruits, their art, their deeds. The new servant often noticed how with a glance at someone's art she took in all that she needed to know about them. With a glance at their production, her silence spoke. To her nothing was more revealing than the signature of a soul in the works of art they created. In this she was merciless. In this she was absolute. Everything lay bare to her, like a true secret confession, in every work she saw. She could read minds in their works. Courage, humour, patience, capacity to grow, freedom of spirit, meanness, a hidden greatness, cowardice, a mystical inclination, the state of their health, how long they would live, what kind of husbands or wives they might make, their trustworthiness, their capacity for love, all these and many more things that can only be intuited thus could this peculiar maiden read in every work of art she saw. This was a strange gift indeed. It was almost a curse. It weighed her down. It was almost like divination, like prophecy. It was a wonderful witchcraft of the eyes. Everyone in the tribe feared her eyes for this reason. And this power had grown more acute since her initiation. To look at the works of art around was to suffer. She saw only too clearly the inadequacies of the best. Very few works had ever affected her as being beyond. And these had affected her very powerfully indeed, like a wound, or like a mental breakdown, or like a revelation in which she was somehow destroyed. She craved this destruction. Only through such a destruction did she feel and get a great sense of the mystery and unspeakable truth of life that so haunted her in her daydreaming hours.

The new servant, in his stillness among the statues, never ceased to study her obscure heart, and her ways. Using the powers that death had given him, he strove to roam and listen to the philosophy of her being. It was his primary reason for dwelling there, in the shadows, under the wall, in the realm where he was a stranger, and where he was unknown, and unseen. All he wanted, whether he admitted it to himself or not, was to live in her being. And more often than he realised, he did.

He sensed that she saw straight to the heart of whoever she encountered, but she seldom believed that what she saw was what she had seen.

Often her mind would drift to another world, far away, where she would have long converse with beings of radiant beauty. They were beings of all colours and they were pure in form. To them all things had gods and philosophies. To them magic and miracles were primitive dungs. To them science and technology were the ancient arts of a prehistoric people who were not even legends in the annals of that realm. They did not believe in remembering anything. They did not believe in too much memory or history. They believed that it was important to forget for a civilisation to be quantumly creative. Their forgetfulness was an act of genius, because they knew that everything that ever was ever will be, and so to even strive to enshrine history was to commit a tautology and to clutter the path of the future. All things that were important, they believed, found their way to the present. They were masters of the present moment, in which all things, all worlds, all time and all possibilities exist. Their sense of humour and irony was inexhaustible. These beings showed the maiden many wonderful things and notions that filled her heart with delight – the past and future, they showed her, under the aspect of sublime irrelevance seen from the infinite perspective of the stars.

The maiden loved the hours she spent wandering the forest and half dreaming on the shores of the river, in converse with these beings of a remote place that was her true home. What sort of things did she talk about with them? Once they conversed about the art of misunderstanding.

'Misunderstanding is all that is possible between your people,' said one of the beautiful beings. 'It is simply not possible to understand one another, given the way you people are made. You do not hear what you hear, you do not say what you say, what is said is not what is intended, what is intended is not what is said. How can that which does not know itself know what it is saying, or wants to say? Nothing is as you see it or feel it or hear it. Your bodies are inefficient for the collecting of true information. All you can do is misunderstand. And so you may as well make an art of it.'

'How can you make an art of misunderstanding?'

'By assuming that you can't understand anything, and that nothing can be understood, because nothing is what it seems.'

'But where is the art?'

'The art is to communicate through misunderstanding. To make misunderstanding the very tool itself.'

'Like people who talk in different languages and yet do good business at the marketplace?'

'Yes.'

'Is that what art is?'

'Yes. Being misunderstood and yet speaking clearly to the spirit.'

'What else can I learn from this?'

'If you begin with the art of misunderstanding you will find your way to the gate of illumination.'

'Then what?'

'Then everything will be simple and clear and you will know what to do and what not to do and you will have no beginning and no end any more and you will be with us and wherever you want to be.'

The maiden often spent hours in the company of her true people so far away; and their conversations were so far removed from her life in the tribe of artists that they were useless to her except as refreshments to the spirit. Sometimes though they gave her hints and signs of things that were to burst into faint reality and which she caught in art and forgot that she did, thus adding, as if in sleepwalking mode, to the enigmas of the race.

Sometimes one or two figures from that distant realm would pay her a visit, in a form she didn't recognise, in that kingdom where artists are not seen ...