I admire many writers, but always feel a deep resonance in Ben Okri's writing.
I admire many writers, but always feel a deep resonance in Ben Okri's writing.
But in reading the Opinion that was written by Mr. Okri, published in The Guardian, UK, his words gave particular clarity to mining the 'undiscussed', stating that “We can only make a future from the depth of the truth we face now."
Mr Okri suggests that.. “faced with the sense that we are on a ship heading towards an abyss while the party on board gets louder and louder, I have found it necessary to develop an attitude and a mode of writing that I refer to as existential creativity. This is the creativity at the end of time.”
He may be collecting the sphere of dynamics with climate change as nucleus, but in his speaking to choices at “the end of things”, I found reasoning which seems to etch 'the untethered’, for journey, and in my own use of it for KEN..
Mr Okri continues, "Sometimes I think we must be able to imagine the end of things, so that we can imagine how we will come through that which we imagine. It is out of this I want to propose an existential creativity. ..It is the creativity wherein nothing should be wasted. …It means that the writing must have no frills. It should speak only truth. In it, the truth must be also beauty. It calls for the highest economy. It means that everything I do must have a singular purpose. So a new existentialism is called for. Not the existentialism of Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, negative and stoical in spirit, but a brave and visionary existentialism, where as artists we dedicate our lives to nothing short of re-dreaming society."
I have no pretension to being comparable to this eloquent, incredible artist, but his direct words resonate, with such permissions that allow me to interpret the endeavor, By Me, as scope of work which is fodder of now, shaping access to hard conversations that come in untethered journeying.
As Mr. Okri points out, "We have to be strong dreamers. We have to ask unthinkable questions. We have to go right to the roots of what makes us such a devouring species, overly competitive, conquest-driven, hierarchical."
In this point I find an unexpected correlation with a quote of my father, made when I was a teen:
..there are no rules about leaping into the new because no-one has been there before..
In the confluence of these facts, I feel the spine to my writing -as its search, cracks into its length of alignment..