Unfathomable depths : deep into sacred terrain in Sir Ben Okri's the secret source from tiger work (2023)

Abstract

Tiger Work is a search for new horizons: at once a cri de coeur for Planet Earth and a call for existential creativity that equates to Ben Okri’s third millennium “Imaginatio creatix.” Premised on the urgency to address contemporary man-made disasters, this collection of stokus (an amalgam of short story and haiku), poems, and essays is underpinned by the mystical celebration of the wonderment of Nature that we also encounter in “The Tyger” from William Blake’s Songs of Experience. This article focuses on the core story at the end of this collection entitled “The Secret Source,” embedded in the pure vision, the pure song of the “immortal hand and eye” that “dare[d] frame thy perfect symmetry” in Blake’s poem. This is the framework that informs Okri’s new poetic aesthetic that obliges writers to confront the truth of Western civilisation’s dung heap proactively. The approach attempts to map the inherent literary mysticism of the medieval symbolism of the Holy Grail as detailed in Rudolf Steiner’s Christ and the Spiritual World and the Quest for the Holy Grail, where pure, uncontaminated water functions as simulacrum for that which sustains Life as we know it. The crucial message that informs the entire collection is one of hope: the onus is on humankind to take responsibility for our destabilised ecological equilibrium; to find the way forward; to go “deep into sacred terrain,” plunging unfathomable depths. Evincing a transcendent post-colonial rather than reactionary decolonial thrust, the stoku advocates for a claiming of agency as it seeks the fresh horizons necessary for all human beings, if we are to persist at all.