Tiger Work, page 7
This baffles science. It confounds those who see only with the eyes.
But we are in an age of catastrophes. We initiated the catastrophes. We will receive what we deserve, receive it with lamentation and self-judgement.
Dear Earth, you inspire our dreams and our art. You feed our bodies and souls. You house our bones when we are gone. You are one of the terrestrial planets, made of the matter and magic of countless stars that have loaned you their magnificence that you may gift it to us.
Dear Earth, look kindly upon the folly that is the human race. Teach us with your silent wisdom how to live again, how to be simple again, and how to rise to the greatness and sense of universal justice that is our divine inheritance.
Yours lovingly,
Ben Okri
KERZE
It’s out it’s out
When it was lit
Light is out
Just freshly out
Out of time
Out of here
Gone up in smoke
Just gone out
Missed the moment
Missed the
When it’s out it’s out
When it’s gone it’s gone
Who can bring back
The missing light
Turn smoke back
Into fire
Turn back time
And the hour
Make it all light again
Kerze kerze kerze
Against the changing times.
First there was light
And it was good
In ritual or in the dark
Something to come home to
Something to see on a hill
In the night
When the sun is gone
And the moon’s not out.
But now maybe the gods
Have done it
Or we are the gods
That did it to ourselves
Just did it within the motions
Of the clock
Where there are no shadows
Just the kerzesmoke
Where once there was flame
Or the absent flame
In the ghostly presence
Flame is concentrated
Smoke wavers and drifts
Sometimes the fire wavers
But throws its light
Into the far corners.
All the smoke can do is be
A ghost, a wisp, a regret,
Nostalgia, a wish undone,
Sometimes even an arch
Of floating spirits
Where the flames die together
In empty rooms.
Just thinking of those
Places
Where the shadows
Creep closer
And the darkness
Is given courage
And the spaces that
Had presences
Shrink and retreat
With the formless
Dark advancing
Not only in rooms
But in squares
In hearts
In dreams
In parks at noon
In parliaments
And the stock exchange
In school rooms
Where teachers are not free
In the bedrooms
Where the dark
Comes between
The warm bodies
Turning cold
In the streets
That used to lead
To the hill
But lead now
To the crossroads
Where lamps have gone
Out and the rats
Grow brave
In the undergrowth.
Can the smoke
Bring back the flame?
Does the flame survive
In the twisting form
Without a name?
Can that which is out
Be not out?
Can the dark
Extinguish itself
By itself?
Can the candle
Light itself?
Can the heart
Feel its own beat?
Can the feet
Smell the socks?
Are moths
Drawn to candlesmoke?
Can the light
Put out
Shine still
From that hill
Or among the flowers
On the windowsill?
Can we return
To the source?
Can the source return to us?
Can spilt sauce
Be unspilt?
Can spooled words
Be unspooled?
Can the candlesmoke
Illuminate
The cobwebs?
Can the darkness brighten
The walls
Where children
Read in silence
While the clock
Marks the time
In the dark?
Tick tock tick tock
It’s out it’s out
Keep your voice down
Don’t shout
No one can hear you
When it’s out
When the moon looms
And shadows
Advance across
The land
Tick tock tick tock
Listen to the clock
Ticking in the silent
Candle
On the mantelpiece
But look,
If you can see,
There’s history
Expiring slowly
Slowly dancing
Writhing
Casting elegant
Shapes
In the fading
Dancing
Candlesmoke
But the end
Of things
Can be so beautiful
If anyone can see them
That sullen
Wisp
Of charm…
Keep it lit
While the song
Lasts…
Missed the moment
Missed the
AFTER THE END
1
It was a long night after the end. Many of us lived in the night and did not emerge. We knew nothing of what had happened except that one day everything went off. Everything shut down. The electricity was out and the internet no longer worked and none of the communication lines that ran the world existed anymore.
We learned to live in the dark, in houses under the ground, and in caves on the edges of the city. We had books and some of us read, for short periods of the day, with the light of improvised candles. No one went out into the air.
We were a community that lived now beneath the ground. We had forgotten what sunlight was. The air we breathed came through the tunnels in the earth, filtered by the earth itself. For many years we lived like this, pale and quiet, like human moles, unaware of what had been happening in the world above.
Over that time, beneath the ground, many of our families died. People can’t endure being away from sunlight for long. Many perished of sun deprivation. Many simply wilted and surrendered themselves to the earth. Some of us tried to die but couldn’t. I tried several times. I couldn’t seem to find a way to die. After a while I came to accept the curse of life. Every day was an entombment. Every day the dream of light faded from our spirits. I would sleep at night but was unable to distinguish the night from the day. My dreams would be of nothing but sunlight. Sometimes I dreamt of fields of green. The green in my dreams was unnaturally alive. It made me weep to think of such a green. Sometimes I dreamt of rivers and streams, of running water. There was nothing as magical as the sun on my face in those dreams or the feeling of water splashed on my body.
It was down there that we began to reconstruct the world for ourselves. Having lost it, we tried to reconstruct it anew, from our nostalgia and our memories and our incomplete knowledge of the world. It was down there that I realised how little we knew of the world we had lived in before the night came down upon us. I regretted not having asked questions about the world, about how things worked, about the different peoples and their histories. We all realised down there that we had taken too much for granted about the world we had loved. Did we really love it, then, if we didn’t know it? Can you love something you are quite ignorant about?
When we tried to recreate the world, we found that we could only recreate what we had known. We realised quickly that we were reconstructing our narrowness and our limitations. It was less than what we knew before. Therefore, we could not really begin again. And so we had to begin from nothing.
This was the hardest part. The more vocal among us wanted to rebuild what we had known. One said:
‘The custom from my land is better. We once ruled the world. It stands to reason that our traditions must be the best.’
‘Your people ruled the world once? Well, my people ruled it last. We were more powerful than your people. It stands to reason that our ways are better than yours,’ said another.
Those of us who came from countries that hadn’t ruled the world had the perfect answer for them.
‘When you come to think about it,’ we said, ‘you people who ruled the world are in fact the ones who ruined it. Therefore, it stands to reason that your traditions and your ways are terrible models for the future. Your way led us here. Your way is not going to build a better future. It will just bring us back to this very same place, or worse.’
‘What could be worse than a living death?’ said another, who came from people who had not ruled the world.
The women among us were not having any of it at all.
‘None of you are in a position to speak. It was the masculine way that brought us to this darkness. The masculine way is not going to build any kind of future that we want.’
As can be seen, we carried our past with us into the dark. At first, for a long time, that past held. People clung on to what they had been before as they would to a life raft. People talked about their homes and where they grew up with a nostalgia laced with tears. Those who had lost the most talked the most about what they had lost. Some of us didn’t talk at all, but merely listened and watched.
In the beginning it did not seem as if being in the dark was going to be our fate. We thought we would be there for a short time and would eventually get a sign telling us that it was all clear in the world above and that we could return. But the sign never came. Some people, impatient to know what was going on in the world above, crept out through the tunnel into the light. Those who went to reconnoitre never came back. Not one of them. After the third party went and never returned, we began to fear that what was going on above was worse than we had imagined. No one went out there for a long time after that.
Up to that point everyone had treated their condition in the tunnel as provisional. They were sure that what had happened in the world would soon be over and that they could emerge and resume their old lives. Because of this thought, people held back and did not reveal much about themselves. But as soon as it became clear that they were stuck in the tunnel for the foreseeable future, people behaved differently and their will to dominate became apparent. Those who did not try to dominate at least tried to impose their ways on others. Groups formed and people clustered around those whose interests and backgrounds were similar to their own. What should have been a situation where everyone looked after each other soon became one in which groups looked after themselves. Then groups became antagonistic towards one another and before long were fighting over the little food that was available. The fights became vicious. It was not only the men who were fighting. The women too became wild and tough and sometimes were more frightening than the men.
It was because I found all this alarming, because I couldn’t belong to any group – never having fitted in anywhere in my life – that I left the community and wandered deeper into the tunnel. Finding nothing there, I ventured out alone into what was left of the world.
As I was leaving, one of the women of the so-called alpha group saw me and gave a terrifying shriek. They were a group that had been the children of the heads of companies and high-powered organisations when the world was still functional. I was surprised that they got on with one another and that they didn’t seek out weaker groups to dominate. But then perhaps they kept together because they were planning a kind of world domination for when the long night of terror was over. Anyway, the woman shrieked. Some men came after me, attempting to bring me back to the fold. But I ran with more urgency. I felt I would rather take my chances with a hostile world than with these intolerable egotists.
With these thoughts I ran beyond the walled territory that was the limit of the world of the tunnel. The men who had been sent to bring me back stopped there and watched me disappear. They didn’t have the courage or the madness to transgress the line that marked the end of their territory. I had had enough. I would rather have died than stayed any longer with them. I ran into the old world that we all thought no longer existed.
I should have said that we had been living in the tunnels now for over seventy-five years. I was of the second generation. I had been raised on tales of how the world used to be, and how with greed and selfishness it was destroyed by some unspecified climate disaster, and was no longer fit for human habitation.
2
What I found outside the tunnels was a world renewed by our absence. I found a world that looked more like my parents’ descriptions of a wild garden. There were patches of a curious white film over the earth. The trees grew in untamed profusion over the rough lands. Roads were no longer visible. Houses had been washed away. The landscape seemed to have been altered and rearranged in some extreme manner. I recognised nothing of the world I had been taught to know. There were birds in the air, but they bore no resemblance to any birds I had seen in books before. The woods rustled with strange small animals, but apart from that the world seemed uninhabited. I walked for a long time until I came to a place where tall structures could be seen in the distance. But when I got there, I saw that the structures were empty. They reached up to the sky, but they appeared to have no function. The doors that led into them were of steel and were bolted and rusted over, and this curious white film ran halfway up the structures.
Not far away were things that resembled houses. Some of the walls were still standing. In many of the houses, trees were growing, their branches sticking out of the side windows. I saw chimneys sprouting vines. What had once been gardens were now outposts of forests. The roads were broken up. Everything was derelict, but it seemed an inhuman dereliction. Ceiling after ceiling had collapsed. Chimneys were broken. A church was tilted sideways, as though beneath the earth its foundation had been rendered askew. Houses were sunk in wild tangles of vines and creepers.
I walked the roads and streets, and could see that somehow civilisation had kept up its skeletal structures beneath the disorder wrought by time and the unknown devastation. Over most of this – the churches, the walls, the houses – was this white film.
I had been wandering round the city for most of the day when it occurred to me that the air was good. I forgot that I was breathing. I failed to notice that I had been in the world a whole day and that nothing had happened to me. That was when it occurred to me for the first time that life could begin anew.
My initial urge was to go back to the tunnel and tell those who were holed up there. Then I remembered all their attempts at bringing back an old domination, bringing back the old hierarchies, and I had my doubts. We don’t need the way it was ruining how it could be, I thought. The old ways must die with the old world. To begin anew we must really begin anew. I decided to leave the others in the tunnel and never go back. It crossed my mind that this was perhaps why the others who had gone out before had not returned. But however far I travelled, I saw no evidence of any successful attempts to start life anew. I saw no signs of any previous survival. Still, I would keep alert.
I chose a house with a field next to it as the place to begin life anew. It was a sturdy house, completely empty, except for the furniture and some books and old sheaves of paper. It had a pantry devoid of food, a nice kitchen, a shed with all manner of tools, and bedrooms upstairs, some beds with ancient mattresses and some without. There was also a well-preserved library. The windows were shut, and most of the doors inside were open. I liked the house because from its first-floor windows you could see all around. It was built on a slight rise. From the south-facing windows you could see the field running all the way to the copse and beyond it to the woods. Something about the landscape made me feel there was a stream in those woods.
The mood in the house was old and mouldy and subdued. The doors were all still working, but there was mould in the downstairs rooms, and the basement door was jammed. There was no electricity. There was no water. There were taps, but I didn’t know how to work them. The garden had become a lush little patch of wildness at the back of the house. The smell of mice was everywhere.
3
When I left the world of the tunnel, I brought nothing with me. What could I have brought? How do you prepare for a world which you don’t even know is there? The house seemed to have everything I would need, but I simply didn’t know how most things worked. The world outside the tunnel had been nothing but a rumour to me all my life. I had read books and listened to the older ones, who had listened to their parents, who remembered something of what it was like. I had learned one thing from them: never to follow the route they had taken. They talked with affection about gardening, about travel, about large parties, about schools, universities, careers, adventures, money, success, music festivals, falling in love. I asked one of the oldest ones what she missed most about the world outside the tunnel, and she said:
‘Being young in the spring.’
I had no idea what she meant, and she didn’t elaborate. But she went on to say something else:
‘Our biggest mistake,’ she said, ‘is that we were in too much of a hurry. We evolved more in a hundred years than we had in the one hundred thousand years before that. We ate up everything so fast we even started devouring our own entrails. If we ever have the chance to do it over again, we should slow down. We should learn to enjoy one thing for a long time. But first we should get rid of the spirit of competition.’
