Bell in the wind.
The space full of grief
And music; wishes
On the ceiling;
And the silent drum.

We sit before
The white Buddha
On red cushions.
Four candles burn
Steadily, in the incense
Air. Outside, the row
Of white statues.
Buddhas and bodhisattvas
In myriad expressions.
And the house of the bells.

The monk places
A golden bell
On the low table
Where I sit in meditation.

Grief is here today.
Along with all that peace.
The grandmother speaks
To the portrait
Of her dead grand-daughter.
Such pain in her voice.
She barely able to speak.
I know grief, but this is bitter.

Even the blessing
Of the middle way,
Even the enchantment
Of the peace in the air unseen,
Can't still the broken heart
Of one who lost
A grand-daughter,
Who died so young.

I listen to the voices of monks
Through the walls, chanting.
Insects chatter in the yard.
Around the heart
The Buddhas whirl.

I remember grief
From the sighs
Of my mother.
How do we bear
The earth and its pains?
Only non-attachment
Or by attachment to what
The bells wake us up to,
The Buddha in the air,
Going all the way
To the remote suns.


Ben Okri

Seoul, 2011

Is it penance or an act
In a long journey
To enlightenment?
Sacrifice or a rite
Of purification?
Is it a symbolic act
Or a spiritual discipline?
Is it a lesson?
Is it maybe a koan
Of a noviciate?

These questions haunt me
In the temple
As I contemplate the woman
Who polishes
The wooden floor
Till it shines
Like the light
Of the Buddha.

Without pause,
And with thoroughness,
She polishes and cleans
Places already
Polished and clean,
With her cloth mop.

Wherever we tread on
She cleans.
Her act is perpetual.
The purpose is not
Merely to polish the floor,
Nor merely
To get rid of dirt.
Her purpose seems
More mysterious,
As though she wanted
To eliminate
Any speck of dust
From the serene presence
Of the golden Buddha.

The temple is a beautiful
Riot of colours.
Those greens, yellows,
And reds. Those dragons
That loom with tongues
Of fire from the high places.
And yet for all that colour,
Such calm.

The space is vaster
Than it seems:
Peace adds dimensions
To a room or temple.

We sit on prayer mats,
Surrounded by a thousand
Buddhas. A little Kama
For carrying women
In the past rests
In a corner.
The decorated drum
On a stand
Resonates
In silence.

And all around us
The woman polishes
Every inch of floor
Without emotion
As if cleansing
The universe
Of suffering
And sin.


Ben Okri

26-5-11

Seoul

浓雾弥漫之时，我走出了出租屋，在空虚混沌的城市里孑孓而行。我要去的地方名叫殡仪馆，这是它现在的名字，它过去的名字叫火葬场。我得到一个通知，让我早晨九点之前赶到殡仪馆，我的火化时间预约在九点半。
昨夜响了一宵倒塌的声音，轰然声连接着轰然声，仿佛一幢一幢房屋疲惫不堪之后躺下了。我在持续的轰然声里似睡非睡，天亮后打开屋门时轰然声突然消失，我开门的动作似乎是关上轰然声的开关。随后看到门上贴着这张通知我去殡仪馆火化的纸条，上面的字在雾中湿润模糊，还有两张纸条是十多天前贴上去的，通知我去缴纳电费和水费。
我出门时浓雾锁住了这个城市的容貌，这个城市失去了白昼和黑夜，失去了早晨和晚上。我走向公交车站，一些人影在我面前倏忽间出现，又倏忽间消失。我小心翼翼走了一段路程，一个像是站牌的东西挡住了我，仿佛是从地里突然生长出来。我想上面应该有一些数字，如果有203，就是我要坐的那一路公交车。我看不清楚上面的数字，举起右手去擦拭，仍然看不清楚。我揉擦起了自己的眼睛，好像看见上面的203，我知道这里就是公交车站。奇怪的感觉出现了，我的右眼还在原来的地方，左眼外移到顴骨的位置。接着我感到鼻子旁边好像挂着什么，下巴下面也好像挂着什么，我伸手去摸，发现鼻子旁边的就是鼻子，下巴下面的就是下巴，它们在我的脸上转移了。
浓雾里影影幢幢，我听到活生生的声音此起彼伏，犹如波动之水。我虚无缥缈地站在这里，等待203路公交车。听到很多汽车碰撞的声响接踵而来，浓雾湿透我的眼睛，我什么也没有看见，只听到连串车祸聚集起来的声响。一辆轿车从雾里冲出来，与我擦肩而去，冲向一堆活生生的声音，那些声音顷刻爆炸了，如同沸腾之水。
我继续站立，继续等待。过了一会儿，我心想这里发生大面积的车祸， 203路公交车不会来了，我应该走到下一个车站。
我向前走去，湿漉漉的眼睛看到了雪花，在浓雾里纷纷扬扬出来时恍若光芒出来了，飘落在脸上，脸庞有些温暖了。我站住脚，低头打量它们如何飘落在身上，衣服在雪花里逐渐清晰起来。
我意识到这是一个重要的日子：我死去的第一天。可是我没有净身，也没有穿上殓衣，只是穿着平常的衣服，还有外面这件陈旧臃肿的棉大衣，就走向殡仪馆。我为自己的冒失感到羞愧，于是转身往回走去。
飘落的雪花让这个城市有了一些光芒，浓雾似乎慢慢卸妆了，我在行走里隐约看见街上来往的行人和车辆。我走回到刚才的公交车站，一片狼藉的景象出现在眼前，二十多辆汽车横七竖八堵住了街道，还有警车和救护车；一些人躺在地上，另一些人被从变形的车厢里拖出来；有些人在呻吟，有些人在哭泣，有些人无声无息。这是刚才车祸发生的地点，我停留一下，这次确切看清了站牌上的203。我穿越了过去。
我回到出租屋，脱下身上不合时宜的衣服，光溜溜走到水槽旁边，拧开水龙头，用手掌接水给自己净身时看到身上有一些伤口。裂开的伤口涂满尘土，里面有碎石子和木头刺，我小心翼翼把它们剔除出去。
这时候放在床上枕头旁边的手机响了，我感到奇怪，因为欠费已被停机两个月，现在它突然响了。我拿起手机，摁了一下接听键，小声说：
“喂。”
电话那头传来一个声音：“你是杨飞吗？”
“是我。”
“我是殡仪馆的，你到哪里了？”
“我在家里。”
“在家里干什么？”
“我在净身。”
“都快九点钟了，还在净身？”
我不安地说：“我马上来。”
“快点来，带上你的预约号。”
“预约号在哪里？”
“贴在你的门上。”
对方挂断电话。我心里有些不快，这种事情还要催促？我放下电话，继续清洗身上的伤口。我找来一只碗，用碗接水后冲刷那些残留在伤口里的碎石子和木头刺，清洗速度加快了。
净身之后，我湿漉漉走到衣柜那里，打开柜门寻找我的殓衣。里面没有殓衣，只有一身绸缎的白色睡衣像是殓衣，上面有着隐隐约约的印花图案，胸口用红线绣上的“李青”两字已经褪色，这是那段短暂婚姻留下的痕迹。我当时的妻子李青在商店里精心挑选了两套中式对襟睡衣，她在自己的睡衣胸口绣上我的名字，在我的睡衣胸口绣上她的名字。那段婚姻结束之后，我没再穿过它，现在我穿上了，感到这白色的绸缎睡衣有着雪花一样温暖的颜色。
我打开屋门，仔细辨认贴在门上的殡仪馆通知，上面有一个“A3”，心想这就是预约号。我将通知摘下来，折叠后小心放入睡衣口袋。
我准备走去时觉得缺少了什么，站在飘扬的雪花里思忖片刻，想起来了，是黑纱。我孤苦伶仃，没有人会来悼念我，只能自己悼念自己。
我返回出租屋，在衣柜里寻找黑布。寻找了很久，没有黑布，只有一件黑色的衬衣，因为陈旧，黑色已经趋向灰黑色。我没有其他的选择，只能剪下它的一截袖管，套在左手的白色袖管上。虽然自我悼念的装束美中不足，我已经心满意足。
我的手机又响了。
“杨飞吗？”
“是我。”
“我是殡仪馆的，”声音问，“你想不想烧啊？”
我迟疑了一下说：“想烧。”
“都九点半了，你迟到啦。”
“这种事情也有迟到？”我小心问。
“想烧就快点来。”

You packed a pouch of earth into your baggage
as a bit of your homeland. You told your friend:
"I’ll come back in a few years, as a lion.
There isn’t another place I can call home
and wherever I go I'll carry our country in me.
I'll make sure my children speak our tongue,
remember our history, and follow our customs.
Rest assured, you will see this same man,
made up of loyalty, bring back gifts
and knowledge from other lands."

  You won't be able to go back.
See, the door has closed behind you.
Like others, you too are expendable
to a country that has never lacked citizens.
You will undergo many sleepless nights
weeping in silence, confused and homesick.
Indeed, loyalty is treacherous
if only one side intends to be loyal.
You will have no choice but to join the refugees
and change your passport.

  Eventually you will learn:
your country is where you raise your children,
your homeland is where you build your home.

I have supposed my past is a part of myself.
As my shadow appears whenever I'm in the sun
the past cannot be thrown off and its weight
must be borne, or I will become another man.

But I saw someone wall his past into a garden
whose produce is always in fashion.
If you enter his property without permission
he will welcome you with a watchdog or a gun.

I saw someone set up his past as a harbor.
Wherever it sails, his boat is safe--
if a storm comes, he can always head for home.
His voyage is the adventure of a kite.

I saw someone drop his past like trash.
He buried it and shed it altogether.
He has shown me that without the past
one can also move ahead and get somewhere.

Like a shroud my past surrounds me,
but I will cut it and stitch it,
to make good shoes with it,
shoes that fit my feet.

reflecting on the ways to improve society, I ran into this question:
is society, this society, worth saving? First step is to answer sincerely; then, if it is not worth saving, and this is more than a probable answer, then how to de-construct it? That one is simple: one of the constituent elements of this society, one that could be considered a protein vital to its sustenance and well-functioning, is hypocrisy. So, if one person stops interacting with this protein, a slow process of de-construction follows naturally, because who wants really to become a hypocrite, a false human being?
Some days, it will be difficult; one day you’ll find that all difficulties lie in our relation with sincerity, nakedness, the thing just as it is. The rest is just fear.

The slaveryness of men
the slaveryness of men
the slaveryness of men
is the great sorrow of the world.

The willingness of men
the unwillingness of men
the ungratefulness of men
is the great sorrow of the world.

The gratefulness of men
the juniorness of men
the seniorness of men
is the great sorrow of the world.

The righteousness of men
the slantedness of men
the exactfulness of men
is the great sorrow of the world.

The industriousness and undependableness the apatheticness and solidaritiness the egocentricness and collectivitiness here you are the slaveryness and the great sorrow of the world.

L’instant se dilate maintenant et je coïncide avec ce que je sens, pense, fais et dis. L’avant et l’après surgissent, saisis et incorporés dans ce flash écrit comme ils le sont dans l’entrelacs amoureux. Absorbé, résorbé, le cours du temps ne devient pourtant pas un point sur une ligne horizontale fuyant vers une cible.
Maintenant n’a ni durée ni arrêt. Mon présent dilaté n’est pas non plus la droite verticale qui emportait ma colocataire de dix ans, Thérèse d’Avila, vers l’Infini Amour de son Époux Aimé, tout en majuscules. Maintenant : l’instant en expansion rassemble des univers distincts aux temps épars. Il les tient ensemble. Ne s’enfuit ni ne passe, ne capture ni ne s’efface. Immobile, fugace, singulier, perméable, changeant, persistant. À tous ces traits de l’éclatement du temps je m’intéresse. Je les désire ou les déteste. Ils constituent localement, momentanément, des espaces que j’habite (Levallois, Versailles, Fier d’Ars, Lux, Shanghai) ou des histoires qui m’attirent (Louis XV, Claude-Siméon Passemant, les labos de Théo). Brusquement apparues et recomposées, ces versions du temps tiennent ensemble dans mon maintenant. Grâce à elles, je me pose et « me voyage », je m’allège, me recrée, disparais. Je suis leur vibration, leur coprésence.
Une fiction, ce maintenant ? Certainement, puisque j’y raconte mon Astro, Claude-Siméon, la Pompadour, Stan, et Marianne avec son nouveau PDG suédois. Le temps ne s’éclipse pas, il se cumule et se maintient. Maintenant n’est pas ce hors-temps de l’inconscient, selon Freud, dans lequel, comme en rêve, la suite des événements ne refait pas l’histoire ni ne prédit l’avenir, mais révèle le désir qui veille. Il n’est pas non plus ce temps de la déprime qui, à force de désir gelé, ne passe pas, et où la parole s’étiole en silence, le corps se noie en larmes, la vie s’annule en suicide.
Ni rêve ni dépression, et pourtant je m’y connais. Des temps émergents cohabitent et se distinguent dans mon maintenant, des espaces-temps s’y croisent sans s’abolir. Dans la rencontre entre Théo, Nivi et l’horloger du Roi, nous nous accordons corps à corps, coeur à coeur, autonomes et corrélés. Par le récit que j’en tire, je ne fais pas miennes des valeurs, j’ajuste des pulsions qui m’échappent et échappent au présent. À force de désirs voyageurs, maintenant n’est pas hors temps, ne fuit pas en flèche ni ne s’absente, il vrille. De son atemporalité plurielle émerge un temps extrême : le maintenant de la fiction. La folie à bride abattue mais strictement surveillée. Tout est possible et tout s’éclipse. Plénitude du hors-je. 

Julia Kristeva, L’Horloge enchantée, Fayard, 2015, p. 86-88.

You sit, in contemplative posture, your features agonized and your expressions pained; you sit for hours and hours and hours, sleepless, looking into darkness, hearing a small snore coming from the room next to yours. And you conjure a past: a past in which you see a horse drop its rider; a past in which you discern a bird breaking out of its shell so it will fly into the heavens of freedom. Out of the same past emerges a man wrapped in a mantle with unpatched holes, each hole large as a window — and each window large as the secret to which you cling as though it were the only soul you possessed. And you question, you challenge every thought which crosses your mind.
Yes. You are a question to yourself. It is true. You've become a question to all those who meet you, those who know you, those who have any dealings with you. You doubt, at times, if you exist outside your own thoughts, outside your own head, or Misra's. It appears as though you were a creature given birth to by notions formulated in heads, a creature brought into being by ideas; as though you were not a child born with the fortune or misfortune of its stars, a child bearing a name, breathing just like anybody else, a child whose activities were justifiably part of a people's past and present experience. You exist, you think, the way the heavenly bodies exist, for although one does extend one's finger and point at the heavens, one knows, yes that's the word, one knows that that is not the heavens. Unless...unless there are, in a sense, as many heavens as there are thinking beings; unless there are as many heavens as there are pointing fingers.
At times, when your uncle speaks about you, in your presence, referring to you in the third person and, on occasion, even taking the liberty of speaking on your behalf, you wonder if your existence is readily differentiable from creatures of fiction whom habit has taught one to talk of as if they were one's closest of friends — creatures of fiction with whose manner of speech; reactions to situations; conditions of being; and with whose likes and dislikes one's folk-tradition has made one familiar. From your limited knowledge of literature, you feel you are a blood relation of some of the names which come to mind, leap to the tongue at the thought of a young boy whose name is Askar and whose prodigious imagination is capable of wealthy signs of precocity — because you are this young boy!
As you sit contemplatively, your mind journeys to a region where there were solid and prominent shadows which lived on behalf of others who had years before ceased to exist as beings. As you sit, your eyes open into themselves, the way blind people's eyes tend to. Then you becomes numb of soul: in other words, you are not yourself — not quite yourself anyway. The journey takes you through numerous doorways and you are enabled to call back to memory events which occurred long before you were a being yourself. Your travel leads you through forests without any clearing, to stone steps too numerous to count, although when you reach the highest point, your exhaustion disappears the instant you see an old man, grey as his advance years, negotiate the steps too. You remember now, that in the wake of the old man there was a girl, barely seven, following the old man as a goat follows a butcher, knowing what knives of destiny awiat it.
And you...!
You! You who had lain in wait, unwashed, you had lain unattended to at birth. Yes, you lay in wait as though in ambush until a woman who wasn't expecting that you existed walked into the dark room in which you had been from the second you were born. You were a mess. You were a most terrible sight. The woman who found you described the chill of that dark room a tomb. To her, the air suggested the dampness of a mortuary. You cried at her approaching and wouldn't be calmed until she dipped you in the bathtub she had filled with warm water. Then she fed you on a draught of goat's milk. Did anyone ever tell you what you looked like when the woman discovered you that dusk some eighteen years or so ago? No?

Er hat das Gefühl, im Wasser zu treiben, wie ein Teil des Wracks. Wie das Teil, nach dem er sucht. Das fehlende Puzzlestück. Der letzte und einzige Stein in seinem Mosaik. Er hat begonnen, Ausschau danach zu halten. Auf Straßen. In Wäldern. In Fußgängerzonen. In Regalen, auf gedeckten Tischen. Auf Fußballfeldern. In Blumentöpfen. Aber er weiß, dass es im Wasser sein muss. Dort treibt es voran, immer weiter. Nichts ist gefunden worden. Keine Schwimmweste, kein Sitzkissen, noch nicht einmal ein kleines Stück der Außenhaut des Airbus. Kein Wrackteil, kein Heck, kein Flügel. Die Passagierliste wurde ihm von der Airline zugesendet. Mit geschwärzten Namen, nur die von Maria und Maja sind deutlich zu lesen, mit einem gelben Stift hervorgehoben. Er hat um diese Liste ringen müssen, hat einige Gespräche führen und beharrlich anzweifeln müssen, dass die beiden, seine Ehefrau Maria und seine Tochter Maja, an Bord gewesen sind. Schließlich hat er die Liste erhalten, der Post. Er hat den Brief geöffnet, er hat gelesen. Schwarz auf weiß. Aber es sind nur Namen, nur Worte. Er hat, Anfang des Jahres, die Tickets für die beiden gebucht, und er hat mit Maria telefoniert, einige Minuten vor dem Rückflug. Maria ist müde gewesen, aber guter Laune, sie hat gesagt, dass es sehr schön gewesen sei, die Verwandtschaft am anderen Ende der Welt endlich einmal wiederzusehen, und sie hat sich darauf gefreut, nach Hause zu kommen. Maja hat ein Computerspiel gespielt, auf dem Tablet vermutlich, im Hintergrund war Geklimper und Geklingel zu hören und ihr Fluchen, vermutlich hatte sie gerade eines ihrer sieben Leben verloren. Über die Umstände des Absturzes ist wenig bekannt. Letztlich ist selbst der Absturz nicht dokumentiert. Bei einem Treffen von Hinterbliebenen, vor einigen Monaten, haben Vertreter der Airline betont, dass die Suche nach dem vermissten Flugzeug im Ozean andauere und für die kommenden zwölf Monate aus verschiedenen Quellen ein Budget von 34 Millionen Dollar zur Verfügung stehe. Die Passagierliste hat er an die Wand des Kühlschranks gehängt. Im Kühlschrank sucht er manchmal nach dem Wrackteil, obwohl er weiß, dass es im Wasser treibt, in einer weiten blauen Fläche. Wenn er den Kühlschrank schließt, sieht er die Passagierliste und daneben ein kleines Bild, das Maja gemalt hat, in den Tagen vor der Abreise.

Das Bild zeigt, im Zentrum einer sternenklaren Nacht und auf Höhe
einer schmalen Mondsichel, ein Flugzeug am Himmmel.

The vision of a tall-masted ship, at sail on the ocean, came to Deeti on an otherwise ordinary day, but she knew instantly that the apparition was a sign of destiny for she had never seen such a vessel before, not even in a dream: how could she have, living as she did in northern Bihar, four hundred miles from the coast? Her village was so far inland that the sea seemed as distant as the netherworld: it was the chasm of darkness where the holy Ganga disappeared into the Kala-Pani, ‘the Black Water’.
It happened at the end of winter, in a year when the poppies were strangely slow to shed their petals: for mile after mile, from Benares onwards, the Ganga seemed to be flowing between twin glaciers, both its banks being blanketed by thick drifts of white-petalled flowers. It was as if the snows of the high Himalayas had descended on the plains to await the arrival of Holi and its springtime profusion of colour.
The village in which Deeti lived was on the outskirts of the town of Ghazipur, some fifty miles east of Benares. Like all her neighbours, Deeti was preoccupied with the lateness of her poppy crop: that day, she rose early and went through the motions of her daily routine, laying out a freshly-washed dhoti and kameez for Hukam Singh, her husband, and preparing the rotis and achar he would eat at midday. Once his meal had been wrapped and packed, she broke off to pay a quick visit to her shrine room: later, after she’d bathed and changed, Deeti would do a proper puja, with flowers and offerings; now, being clothed still in her night-time sari, she merely stopped at the door, to join her hands in a brief genuflection.
Soon a squeaking wheel announced the arrival of the ox-cart that would take Hukam Singh to the factory where he worked, in Ghazipur, three miles away. Although not far, the distance was too great for Hukam Singh to cover on foot, for he had been wounded in the leg while serving as a sepoy in a British regiment. The disability was not so severe as to require crutches, however, and Hukam Singh was able to make his way to the cart without assistance. Deeti followed a step behind, carrying his food and water, handing the cloth-wrapped package to him after he had climbed in.
Kalua, the driver of the ox-cart, was a giant of a man, but he made no move to help his passenger and was careful to keep his face hidden from him: he was of the leather-workers’ caste and Hukam Singh, as a high-caste Rajput, believed that the sight of his face would bode ill for the day ahead. Now, on climbing into the back of the cart, the former sepoy sat facing to the rear, with his bundle balanced on his lap, to prevent its coming into direct contact with any of the driver’s belongings. Thus they would sit, driver and passenger, as the cart creaked along the road to Ghazipur – conversing amicably enough, but never exchanging glances.
Deeti, too, was careful to keep her face covered in the driver’s presence: it was only when she went back inside, to wake Kabutri, her six-year-old daughter, that she allowed the ghungta of her sari to slip off her head. Kabutri was lying curled on her mat and Deeti knew, because of her quickly changing pouts and smiles, that she was deep in a dream: she was about to rouse her when she stopped her hand and stepped back. In her daughter’s sleeping face, she could see the lineaments of her own likeness – the same full lips, rounded nose and upturned chin – except that in the child the lines were still clean and sharply drawn, whereas in herself they had grown smudged and indistinct. After seven years of marriage, Deeti was not much more than a child herself, but a few tendrils of white had already appeared in her thick black hair. The skin of her face, parched and darkened by the sun, had begun to flake and crack around the corners of her mouth and her eyes. Yet, despite the careworn commonplaceness of her appearance, there was one respect in which she stood out from the ordinary: she had light grey eyes, a feature that was unusual in that part of the country. Such was the colour – or perhaps colourlessness – of her eyes that they made her seem at once blind and all-seeing. This had the effect of unnerving the young, and of reinforcing their prejudices and superstitions to the point where they would sometimes shout taunts at her – chudaliya, dainiya - as if she were a witch: but, Deeti had only to turn her eyes on them to make them scatter and run off. Although not above taking a little pleasure in her powers of discomfiture, Deeti was glad, for her daughter’s sake, that this was one aspect of her appearance that she had not passed on – she delighted in Kabutri’s dark eyes, which were as black as her shiny hair. Now, looking down on her daughter’s dreaming face, Deeti smiled and decided that she wouldn’t wake her after all: in three or four years the girl would be married and gone; there would be enough time for her to work when she was received into her husband’s house; in her few remaining years at home she might as well rest.