Three Stone Columns

A short story by Ben Okri

One day I went down to the beach and saw a man building pillars with small stones. They were like dolmen. He built three pillars. He erected them to amuse his children. He constructed them on the edge of the sea where the beach sloped up towards the walls of the nearest houses.

I watched the Greek man as he carefully put a rough stone on a smooth one, an angled stone fitting onto a hollowed one. He had put about ten stones on top of each other. His children had helped him fetch stones. Patiently he had built this little stone structure like something you might see at Stonehenge, except his were very small. When he had finished, the three pillars stood solid. Not the waves pounding the beach, nor the strong winds blowing from over the Mediterranean could topple them.

By the evening the Greek man, his wife, and kids were gone. Only the mystery of the perfect stone pillars was left behind on the beach.

People going past, on their way back to their homes or their hotels, saw the three pillars and marvelled. Many of them crouched to have a good look at the dexterity of their construction. Many took pictures of the stone pillars. Children were especially fascinated by them. They would crouch and look hard and try to work out the trick that made the pillars stand. When they asked their parents about them they couldn't explain the architecture of the stone pillars either. They all marvelled and went on. Even dogs came by, sniffed the stone pillars, and ran on without toppling them.

I had first noticed the man building the pillars by the concentration of the children round his activity. I paused in my reading to watch the stones being balanced one on the other. Then I went into the sea to swim.

Late in the afternoon a family of five came to the beach. With them was a boy on crutches. He wore a yellow shirt and blue swim trunks. He hopped on one leg down the beach. I watched the family and stared at the boy on crutches, half wondering what had caused his limp.

There is a certain point in the evening when collectively people feel it is time to leave. They roll up their mats, shake off their towels, fold up their umbrellas, and change from their beach wear into their trousers or skirts, and slowly make their way across the sand. They always look seaward as they leave. When that hour strikes the beach empties almost at once.

I watched people leaving. I saw a family go past the column of stones. They stopped to admire it. The children lay down low to see how it was done.

'Don't touch it,' one of them said.

'I won't.'

'It's amazing. How is it standing?'

'I don't know.'

The little boy peered close. Then he touched it and suddenly one of the columns crumbled. The boy drew back.

'Look what you've done. It was really nice before,’ said the older boy.

'I'm sorry.'

He tried to fix it, to put one stone on top of another. But they kept falling. The girl tried, but couldn't. The father tried. He really tried hard, but he couldn't make the column stand. Then they gave up. They took pictures of the other two columns and kept well away from them with new respect. As they left they kept looking back at the column of stones they had destroyed.

I went into the sea one last time.

I stayed on the beach an hour longer. The shadows lengthened on the sand and the breeze got cooler. I watched the last ones on the beach who were leaving. It was the family with the boy in the yellow shirt and crutches. They all paused to look at the stone columns. Mutely, they admired its construction and moved on.

They were soon over the high shelf of sand along the walls of the houses. The boy with the crutches hopped far behind them. He hopped slowly. When he saw the stone columns he went and stood over them. He looked at them a long time.

Then with his crutch, in a single motion, he knocked over the two remaining columns of stone.

‘What did you do that for?’ I shouted.

But he merely looked at me with pale eyes and hobbled homeward over the rising slope of sand.

****

Margins I

I have been thinking about Claude Lorrain, the 17^th-century French artist who painted these vast landscapes in a corner of which something significant, often mythological, is happening. When one looks at his paintings it is the landscape which one sees, the rich vegetation, the luxuriant trees, the dramatic skies, depicted with great attention to detail. Unless it is pointed out to one, it is easy to miss the significance of the event taking place in a part of the painting. Sometimes it a scene from Greek mythology, or from the Bible. But mostly one can hardly make out what is taking place.

When you first look at his paintings you may think that they are landscape paintings, but when you are aware of what is taken place in a corner the nature of the painting changes. That corner now becomes the centre. And because of this curious technique of his, most people are not sure what his paintings are really about. For that reason, he remains admired but still misunderstood.

Take for example ‘Landscape with Hagar and the Angel.’ Is it about the encounter between the angel and Hagar or is it about myth taking place in the real world? The aqueduct in the distance has the intriguing appearance of a portal between here and there. Or take ‘The Enchanted Castle.’ Who is that woman sitting on a rock contemplating the castle or the sunset? What is the painting really about?

I have been thinking about Claude because I have become aware of the tendency for people to expect a work of art to be clear about what it is. They find ambiguity intolerable. They believe that art should tell us whether the event in the corner is its centre. And if the event is its centre then the event itself should be more explicit and the artist should take a stand as to the meaning of that event.

But perhaps Claude wants us to be attentive to the margins. He wants to show us that in the big sweep of life the most significant things take place barely noticed in a corner. It is close to a point that the poet Auden made in his famous poem ‘Musée Des Beaux Arts’. The only difference is the thing taking place in the corner is the point of the poem. In the painting you have to discover it. For what you see is the landscape of the world.

I wonder sometimes if Claude is telling us that it isn't so much what we see in the world or in a work of art, but what we interrogate, what escapes the perception, what we interpret, the measure of our capacity to make sense of what is obscure to us, such as the hidden motives of people's actions.
...

Margins II

More than two decades ago soldiers of a religious sect destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. Around the same time the twin towers were brought down. Nearly three decades ago my mother died alone in a room in Lagos. These facts have nothing in common except that they were events in the world for which I have been unable to find a form or a response. They are wounds on the world soul. When Mozart's mother died in Paris he did not compose a requiem or any piece of music for her. But when shortly afterwards his pet canary died he composed for it a beautiful elegy. The tears for his mother came out in the music for the bird.

(Copyright: Ben Okri. October, 2024. All Rights Reserved)

Ben Okri’s new book Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted will be published next month by Bloomsbury