This Life
And after
Astonishing the Gods by Ben Okri
It’s dark and you know not what is happening and you have been moving in the dark for some time but you know that there is more to fear than merely the dark and so, although you are afraid, and you do fear, you keep moving in the dark nonetheless because worse is out there, worse is out there — and worse is very surely to come. It is dark but you remember light and sometimes you fear that you are forgetting light, forgetting the quality of it and you think about that, but you don’t think about much because you are forgetting so many things and you worry that if you think about something concrete and real you will forget it all the faster, the tape in your head running out and the image burning itself onto your old cathode ray tube TV screen of a head, the one you had, the one you have in your mind, where you might watch old images, old memories. If there was nothing burnt onto the screen for ever.
The magnetic tape of your memories is getting destroyed and tarnished. The film stock is decaying. It will need restoration! But the time to do this is not now — it will be another time — and meanwhile you have to keep moving on in the darkness, worrying but not openly about your memories that appear to be evaporating like dew on a warm summer’s day and you know that once gone they are gone for ever. Once gone, they are gone for ever.
You know that there is a fine place, a very fine place, before you and you have to get there. You know that there is something you must know for when you get there and the place is peopled by forms that are not human. They are beyond human. Are they memories or are they something else? And you know that your own memories are small and unimportant compared to the memories that these spectral shade-people might be or might have, and your own time is fleeting but theirs does not seem to be, and they have built golden statutes all around and great public works and buildings, and the place they live is a very fine place and every pleasure that is real and noble and just is there to be had, and you are an unwelcome guest in this place, this fine place, and the people who live there — if people they be — they do not like you and do not delight at your presence. All of this you know. You know it very well. And they say they are happy. They say they are happy.
On your way here, you passed through a point in the landscape where you could only advance by crossing a bridge, a narrow bridge. A narrow and dangerous bridge. And your guide — oh, yes, you had one — he told you that only those with no fear could cross the bridge, and your did not want to cross it but you did after being pushed, and you went across the bridge; but you did feel fear and you had concealed it from him that was your guide and from yourself; you did feel fear and you found the bridge dissolving beneath your shoes and you fell and fell and fell into a darkness without form and went on falling and falling and falling while you screamed and screamed.
And now you are in the darkness and your memories are going. Even memories of the spectral-shades and their great city. The great city you saw with your own eyes. But what use are eyes if you are in darkness? What use are eyes if you are in darkness, black so deep you feel it pressing on your skull as you move?
A traveller, you were once unsatisfied with what you had. Home life had begun to pall and so you got on a ship and let the currents take you. Believing as you did that there was better out there for one such as I, you went. And the ship you were on, it docked not far from here. And the captain said what this land was. You heard him. He said people could depart if they wished and others did not do it. But not you. And you leapt off a ship to get here, the ship passing near this land, and you swam through clear waters to land at this place. Waters so blue they cannot be described. You swam through crystal waters to arrive here. To begin this ordeal, this life. You accepted this long ago. It was always yours. It was always your fate.