Remember the first time you watched Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire?”
Damiel finally embraces his acrobat. Cassiel continues to contemplate his fall from angel to human. And the old man walks toward the Berlin Wall, and presumably his death. Perhaps, the old man will break through his boundary before Cassiel but we won’t know. Fade to a eery drone track… what happens next?
Name me the men, women, and children...
who will look for me...
me, their storyteller...
their spokesman...
for they need me...
more than anything in the world.
We have embarked!
Remember that moment when you were not sure if you just finished a film, a book or if you just awoke from a dream. Either way, you felt the urge to sit with it, before re-entering whatever reality you thought you were occupying. That grey zone between sleep and awake, or the hypnopompic state. Perhaps it is a borderland to navigate. But the more you reach for it, the more it slips away. As your rational brain tries to make sense of it, it fades and all you are left with, if you’re lucky, are some left-over emotions, feelings.
What about those moments of synchronicity and other messages from the universe? One too many coincidences, the right song at the right time, light and wind through the leaves talking to you. Acknowledgement of a shift.
I doubt many people can explain this shit without sounding saccharine. I certainly can’t. Ben Okri can. He walks the line, but he can.
I say it often but in a perfect world there would be no need for art. Our natural state required very few symbols, very few words, if any. Life was art, could be art. But we have over-complicated things. So much to untangle. Stories are told to make sense of it all but most fall short, trapped by the limitations of their form. I think Okri might be one of the few who can take you into the borderlands, the hypnopompic state, and beyond the borders and confines or our limited understanding of ‘reality.’
“The Last Gift of the Master Artists” is according to Okri a book about “a world on the brink of catastrophe” (Africa, just before the Atlantic slave trade). In this light, is it any wonder that he went 30 years without being published in the US? But what timing. And what a time to wake up. Maybe, Okri the master artist can guide some of us through this dream, this nightmare, these borderlands. Look for him in the trees.
