Introduction

Writing and painting come from the same place. But they have different axes. They come from the same dream and are soaked in the same atmosphere. Every line that wanders on a page, every word and colour, is saturated in the undercurrents of the world.

In this book the paintings came first. The stories came after each painting had been lived with for a long time. The stories do not illustrate the paintings. They reach to the world from which the paintings came, the under stream of our lives. There one dream shades into another in a vast sea of being that we all unknowingly share.

Paintings, like life, are a rich source of inspiration. But only those that give us access to aspects of ourselves that might not emerge otherwise. These are parallel glimpses into the underlying currents of our times.

The artist is a canvas through which the true colours of an age seep out. The writer is a page on which the secret history of the times is written. Sometimes this history is oblique. Sometimes it is like a fable. And sometimes a colour or a form reveals that which we would rather not name. But artist and writer alike are prisms of the eternal and the contingent, the infinite and the political, myth as it is interpreted and history as it is lived.

Out of the same tube, we are squeezed; with the same pen, we are written. We think we write but the universe writes through us the veiled allegories of our age. Everything here reveals everything else that was in the air and that becomes more visible everyday. It becomes more visible and sometimes more alarming. Other times it is rich with the ongoing potentialities of liberation.

It is not against the blank canvas that the painter paints; it is not against the empty page that the writer writes. The canvas is peopled with infinite forms, but the painter chooses the true tangent between their own inner drama and the times in which they find themselves. The blank page is peopled with infinite stories, but the writer unconsciously chooses the best angle between their own inner conundrums and the invisible pressure of the times. That is all we can do. We geometricize our individual worlds and the atmospheric conditions that some call politics, others call history, but which are really the constantly changing faces of an enigmatic reality.

Just as no one knows what the period of time they are living through will ultimately mean, so we have no way of telling what the paintings and narratives in this book will eventually reveal.

Time is a riddle which the writer and artist interpret in their dreams. And their dreams are coded versions of all our dreams, given the tinge and temper of our mood and our spirit.

The spirit reads time through art. The spirit drinks the timeless through art. In that sense, writing is painting in the spirit, and painting is writing in colours and forms. They both point to the same mysterious allegory that is our lives. Seen as a prism, one face of it is politics, another face might be poetry, a third face might be war, a fourth face might be love, a fifth face might be art. But essentially the prism is refracting the same single unknowable reality in which we have our being.

Wander round this book as through the world laid out in the prism of words and colours, secret forms and hidden narratives. If we are going to change the world, we need to understand how it is made, and what dreams find concrete form in the forms of our times. It is with dreams that realities are made. We ought to work on the world as it is and on the dreams that daily become concrete in the hard stone and flowers of our times.

These stories and paintings were created in a spirit of playfulness. They were also made in a spirit of dream. Sometimes we had no other intention than to listen. Other times we had no other intention than to dream.

The spirit of playfulness yields lovely inspirations and hillsides of red and yellow flowers. Playfulness is the dreamtime of the spirit. Light forms appear and dance across the stage. But behind them, sometimes faintly heard, mostly not heard at all, a somber music plays. It may be the music of mortality. It may be the music of transcendence.

Sometimes we are best when we play. Sometimes when we play mysterious things speak through us, like genies from a magic lamp.

Ben Okri