The Last Gift of the Master Artists, page 20
The prince didn’t linger a moment longer. He hurried home the way he had come. He was careful to go back through all the luminous holes in the air. That way he made sure he left nothing of himself behind. He didn’t want to get trapped in the forest, lost in a world of legends he did not know.
8
THE MORE THE elders tried to fill the gaps, the more gaps appeared. This precipitated a crisis among them and in the kingdom. The elders caused many evils because they feared that the gaps revealed by their paranoid scrutiny were actually real in the world and in the tradition. If there were gaps in tradition then the world was not as they saw it and their place in it was not as stable as they had always believed.
With each passing day doubts grew in them about the truth of everything. They were no longer sure when a certain innovation became a tradition, or whether that tradition had been there since the beginning of the world. Their earth became shaky.
With the prince’s recovery one of the things he liked doing was talking to the young. He wanted to talk to children and listen to what they had to say. He arranged for children of the servants and the market women to be brought to him so he could tell them stories and share food with them. On one of these visits a seven-year-old child asked the prince about the earth and the stars.
That was when the elders overheard the prince telling the children in the palace that the world stood on air and that nothing held up the earth in space. He told the children that in a dream he had seen the world as a shining blue bowl in a sea of nothing, surrounded by stars.
‘The earth is held up by nothing, by mystery,’ he said.
‘How come we don’t fall off then?’ one of the children asked.
‘Because it’s the same nothing that keeps us on the land. Some people walk upside down, and they don’t fall off into the big nothing. An invisible power keeps us here. It’s not our power.’
The children were silent.
‘The earth stands on air?’ one of them said.
‘On nothing,’ the prince replied, smiling.
This overheard conversation began another bout of fevered discussions among the elders. It awakened more fears. They met at night and gazed into the heavens. They could not see what held up the earth in space. They saw more gaps which had to be destroyed.
9
THE CHIEFS AND elders, unable to sleep, watched the gaps growing in the kingdom. The phenomenon paralysed them.
Chief Okadu was heard screaming in his sleep. His wives assured him there were no gaps in the world. But his raw red eyes could not unsee what he had seen.
The paranoia of the chiefs was made worse by the horror of the news that they stood on air, that their world was held up by nothing. This threatened the potent mythology by which they controlled the kingdom in the name of the king.
They thought of having the prince poisoned. They enlisted the support of the most disaffected of the king’s wives.
Three times they attempted to poison the prince but each time the food was eaten by an eagle or a dog or a monkey that appeared in the prince’s chamber before he was ready. Three times he saw empty plates on the table where his food should have been. Three times he saw a dead eagle, dog, and monkey near the palace. No one could explain how they had died. He took this as a sign to fast.
He fasted till he received another sign. He took the sign to mean that it was time to meet the family of the maiden; but in disguise at first, following the principle of the heron. The sign came in the form of a dream in which he was sitting at the foot of the master. The maiden was at the door, looking out at a group of dancers with a masquerade in the street.
The prince informed his father that he would be away for seven days and would return every night. His father nodded and asked no questions. He didn’t laugh, but there was a twinkle in his eyes.
10
THAT MORNING THE prince, in disguise, made his way through the forest and passed through the brilliant openings in the air. He went down the yellow valley and back into the blue shade of woods near the village of the artists. Then he went directly to the workshop of the maiden’s father. He sat outside its unremarkable door with the single eye. He sang a song that went like this:
If you cannot find it on earth
Seek for it in the sea
If you cannot find it in the sea
Seek for it in the sky
If you cannot find it in the sky
Seek for it in the fire
If you cannot find it in the fire
Seek for it in your dreams.
If it isn’t there
Then it is nowhere.
This is nowhere.
And I like it here.
The prince sang in a voice unused to singing. He had no particular talent for music. But the mood of the song soothed him and he sang himself to sleep. He still sang in his sleep, his head resting on a wooden pole in front of the workshop door.
When the maiden’s father arrived for work that morning he saw a strange and beautiful youth at the entrance to his workshop. The youth was singing in his sleep.
Before he woke up, before he spoke, the master knew that this young man was going to play an important part in his life. He knew, instantly, that this unknown youth had already altered his life, the life of his family, and the life of the tribe.
11
AS THE MASTER scrutinised him, the young man woke. The master saw the future in the frail form of the youth. He had eyes like one who has not decided whether to live or die.
‘What do you want?’ said the master gruffly.
The youth gave a shy smile.
‘Sir,’ he said, ‘your fame is great, but your art is greater.’
He paused. The master, serene, said nothing.
‘I have travelled a long way, sir, past the regions of death, to come and serve you. I ask nothing in return.’
He paused again. The master remained still.
‘I do not even ask to be taught. I dare not ask so great an honour from so great a master as you.’
He looked up with his soft intense eyes.
‘I desire only to serve you in any way you want. In the evenings I will return to my own land. I will do this till you no longer desire my service, sir.’
Something whispered to the master that he couldn’t refuse this modest request, even from a stranger. He sensed the youth was of unusual birth and might not be as he appeared.
Under the sway of a kindly power, the master said:
‘I don’t know why I’m saying this, but I accept.’
He paused.
‘You shall serve me as I instruct you to do. But you must only do what I ask of you.’
He paused again.
‘Nothing else in my household is your business.’
A severe pause followed.
‘You will learn nothing of my art and I will teach you nothing.’
The youth nodded.
‘You will sit and serve till I decide otherwise. I have no need of a servant and I don’t know why I am doing this.’
The youth nodded again.
‘At night you may do as you wish, only don’t disgrace me in any way. You must not reveal anything of what you see here. I demand of you silence and discretion.’
The master looked sternly at the youth.
‘You must not speak to my daughter.’
The young man bowed his head.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘This is the greatest honour of my life.’
12
THE MASTER WAS discomposed by the young man. He had not felt like this for a long time.
In some obscure way he felt that it was he who should be thanking the youth, that it was he who was being honoured.
His confusion annoyed him. Few things ever did. The master was encountering something that eluded his powers of intuition, that silenced his guiding spirit. For the first time in years, he knew a delicate kind of fear, a terror trembling with illumination.
‘Who are you anyway?’ the master asked. ‘And where do you come from?’
The young man gave a half-smile.
‘I am a poor lost person, sir. I was separated from my family during our journeys, and I found myself here.’
‘I thought you said you had come a long way because…’
‘A long way, sir, I have travelled because of your art and your fame, past the land of death even. The earth itself can bear witness to this. The wind will speak for me. The stars watched my journeys with keen eyes. You may ask them, sir, when I am not around, and they will bear me out.’
The master fell under the spell of a disquieting amazement.
‘Who is your father?’
‘One who laughs, sir.’
‘I see. And your mother?’
‘She is happy among the stars. She flew to heaven when I was young.’
There was a pause. Then the master said:
‘You begin today.’
‘May you be blessed, sir, for the greatness of your heart.’
The master stepped into his workshop with his new servant.
13
WHEN THE MAIDEN came to visit her father that afternoon she did not notice the new servant.
He sat in a corner, close to the wall, among statues and images. Light poured in from a chink in the wall above his head. He sat in absolute stillness, as he had been instructed.
The maiden’s father worked in silence, among stones, among blocks of wood, at a table. With quiet intensity he was dreaming new beings into form, as if he were praying.
His daughter sat at her favourite chair and spoke thoughts that came to her mind. She was partially aware that her voice had a nice effect on the mood of the workshop. In the dark the statues listened, as if to a loved one. She had been to the river that day, she said, and had found it barren.
‘There was nothing there, father, and I could not understand. The river was the same, or maybe it wasn’t. The shore was the same, though I am not sure. The sky hadn’t changed, and all my favourite flowers are in bloom, but it was all empty, as if the spirit of things had gone away from them.’
She looked up at her father. His back was listening to her.
‘When my companions sang, they didn’t please me. When they danced, they were clumsy. I did not feel like being with them. The wind wasn’t sweet and the river was like rock. I wandered into the forest alone. It was without colour. I couldn’t see the green of leaves. Everything was flat.’
She paused again, lost in thought. Her father turned and looked at her and smiled. He resumed his work.
‘Normally when I go into the forest nice things happen. Sometimes a butterfly lands on my shoulder. Sometimes I see a beetle on the path and we have something to say to one another. Sometimes, while I’m walking, I dream. Maybe some fairy has made me a princess and I’m smiling among the trees. Sometimes I see in front of me a perfect image that I can make in wood or bronze. When the vision goes away it reappears in my dreams. Sometimes I hear a suitor singing on the edge of a dream while I am coming home.’
She sighed.
‘But these days, today especially, nothing happened. The world is flat. The stars don’t shine, and even my heart beats as if everything is normal. Has something changed in the world that I haven’t noticed?’
Her father was silent. He worked quietly. Now and then he moved wood on the table or drew symbolic designs on stone. He breathed as wooden statues do, gently, as if not wanting to disturb the air.
The maiden stared at the statues in the workshop. She stared without seeing. In that semi-abstracted dreaming state she made out the shapes of spirits going about their tasks of bringing new forms into being, under the precise instructions of the master.
She watched the dimly visible forms of the spirits out of the corner of her eyes. For a moment she noticed a new one among them. But when she looked to ascertain, it was gone. It had faded into the half-light of the workshop, in the shadows, where the most important things happened.
14
THE MAIDEN DIDN’T notice the new servant, even when she dozed in the workshop and dreamt that one of the statues was alive.
Sometimes she would be awake, listening to her father carving. Sometimes he carved shapes in the air. She listened as he spoke to his spirit-helpers, describing a form he wanted in the wood he had prepared for its new life as art. Sometimes he talked to the wood itself, as he planed it.
The new servant would stir under the wall and cough gently. Breathing in wood-dust irritated his throat. But even when he coughed the maiden didn’t notice him.
Once while the maiden dozed with eyes half open the new servant crept across her field of vision. He received his instructions from the master, went out, returned, and whispered in the master’s ear. He passed her form in the chair again. Then he sat among the statues in the dark, his back pressed to the wall. Still she did not notice him.
The master may have cast a spell of invisibility over the new servant so that he could not be seen by his daughter. He may also have cast a spell of incomprehension over his daughter so that she could not see the new servant. But then the new servant may have cast a spell on himself, that he would not be noticed by her, raising the principle of the heron to the pitch of an enchantment.
15
WHEN HE SAT there in the dark, his back to the wall, many things came in to the mind of the new servant.
He once fell into a dreaming state and passed through a golden opening in his sleep and found himself in a place where he was a slave. He had no idea what had brought him to this condition in a faraway land. The people of the land were the colour of the sky just before evening comes. He was a slave working in a cotton field from dawn to dusk, along with many others. Some of them were from his kingdom but he did not know them. While they worked they sang lamentations for a life that was gone.
Another time he was half-naked in a marketplace, being sold for less than the price of a dog.
Then he dreamt he had three children that were not his colour and his wife’s eyes were cold like the eyes of a dead fish. In the dream it was hard to find the golden opening back to the workshop. When he did return, he was puzzled.
Fragments of lives, fantastical and real, descended on him as he sat there among the statues.
16
THE NEW SERVANT sat quietly. He learnt the art of statues, their stillness, their repose. He learnt to absorb energies and moods into his being. He learnt to radiate moods in silence.
He learnt the absorbency and radiation of statues. Learnt, like them, to be present. Like them he learnt never to insist. Not moving, yet seeming to move. Never changing, yet seeming to change. He changed with the light, or with the angle.
He learnt the simplicity of statues. He learnt how simplicity makes them monumental in the mind. He learnt the immobility of statues, and how this helps them enter minds who have never seen them. He learnt the humour of statues, their indwelling mystery, their inward smile. They keep their best secrets to themselves.
He learnt like statues to dwell in mystery, to live in its secret light. To listen to truths whispered inside the form of things.
He learnt the openness of statues, gazed on without being understood, and not minding; offered to all eyes, all souls.
He learnt the tranquillity of statues, content simply to be, wasting no energy, unconcerned.
He learnt the power of statues, occupying and not occupying space.
He learnt from them the art of experiencing every part of his being, aware of all that is, in the universe.
17
FROM THE STATUES he learnt that all things participate in all things. No one thing is really isolated from another.
He learnt indestructability. He learnt that forms persist in the memory of space.
He learnt the oblique art of happiness, and that statues reveal their inner art in the dark, among themselves, when no one else is around, when they can be most true. Happiness was a by-product of all the statues knew, their inner certainties.
It took some time before they admitted the new servant into their exalted ranks. He had to be tested and then initiated into their mysteries.
Many things the new servant learnt from them without knowing it.
His time among statues was one of the greatest adventures of his life.
To serve, the prince became a statue in the master’s workshop. He seldom moved.
18
MEANWHILE THE CLAMOUR of the suitors grew worse. Their competitiveness intensified. Many of them stayed in the village and put forward their suits through influential intermediaries.
Herbalists had been recruited into their ranks. On the payroll of one of the suitors, the herbalists would insinuate their way into the maiden’s household and whisper hints about the evil things that might befall the family if so-and-so were not chosen as the bridegroom. If there was an illness in the family, and a herbalist was consulted, it would often be suggested that such and such a suitor was responsible, or that if a favourable decision were made in the direction of so-and-so then the epidemic, of which the illness was a forerunner, might be spared the family, if not the tribe.
On all sides the family was pestered and hounded by the frustrated suitors. Their frustration began to have an unwholesome effect on the people, on their good will.
People found themselves being drawn into one camp or another, into supporting one influential suitor or another. Those who sold fish or meat or trinkets or vegetables or bales of dyed cloth in the market would whisper to anyone the name of a suitor they favoured. This name would make its way, circuitously, to the mother, and then eventually to the maiden herself.
But she wouldn’t consider any names. Nor would she hear the word ‘suitor’. She had developed a deafness to the whole subject. She acquired a trenchant absent-mindedness.
She preferred to sing, or dream, by the river.
