Scholarship as Concealed Autobiography : Reflections on Writing "Adapting Yoruba Epistemology in Educational Theory and Practice”

Cover image:

"Good Morning, Sunrise (detail)
Victor Ekpuk, b. 1964, Nigeria
2001
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of the artist

Victor Ekpuk's art is dedicated to manipulating scripts and graphic symbols. His drawings, paintings and digital images are abuzz with language. The artist employs invented script as well as signs from Nigeria's ideographic system nsibidi to create richly textured works. In this painting, the spiral is an nsibidi sign meaning journey, but it also suggests the sun and eternity. Ekpuk's strong palette of warm reds, deep blacks, cool blues and whites contributes to the overall sense of animation".

Image and verbal text from “Nsibidi”  in Inscribing Meaning Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.

                                                   Abstract

Reflecting on the roots of my cognitive journey in a view of education as a quest for ultimate meaning.

There are times  one writes a piece about an intellectual subject that is not presented as having a direct relationship with one's intimate personal history, but which, really, is a distillation from that history, an exemplar of Christopher Okigbo's summations on his poetic sequence Labyrinths, "the progression through 'Heavensgate' through 'Limits' through 'Distances' is like the telling of the beads on a rosary; except that the beads are neither stone nor agate but globules of anguish strung together on memory". 

In writing "Adapting Yoruba Epistemology in Educational Theory and Practice" with particular reference to Nigeria,  ​on the invitation of  Adeshina Afolayan, to be published in the Yoruba Studies Review, I have been able, for the first time in decades, to articulate in a manner that begins to do justice to the inspirational essence of my educational aspirations, a vision burning in me since my mid to late teenage years, leading me then to forswear university education to the dismay of my family, in the name of educating myself.

 I saw  the educational system, in not being oriented towards assisting people  address what I understood and still perceive  as the fundamental questions of existence, "why do I exist?", "why am I here on earth ? ", "where am I coming from and where am I going?" and "how should I live, particularly in the light of these perplexities?", as therefore built on a flawed foundation inimical to the central logic of my existence as a human being, a view I still hold having eventually spent most of my life in the context of this  educational system in undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Nigeria and England and working as an academic in Nigeria and as an Independent Scholar in relation to universities in England. 

A person on a journey who does not know why he is on the journey, where he is coming from and what his destination is, has no idea of the time of the termination of this journey or the ultimate rationale for this timing but only knows that the journey will end at a time unanticipated, and yet, aware of all these fundamental disenablements, proceeds to concentrate purely on the process of the journey, a journey  the purpose of which he does not know,  is how I have come to sum up what I see as the foundational metaphysical limitation of this educational structure, a structure representing a retreat from the religious dogmatism of the European Middle Ages into an unrealistic flight from the quest for ultimate meaning, this system having originated in Europe from where it spread globally.

My sister, much later, described my efforts to articulate my views in my teenage years as sounding "intelligent but meaningless", not surprising for a person three years younger than me, while I wonder what my conceptual range and expressive powers were then, having just completed secondary school and gone on to read books in my family's library that transformed my horizon forever, leading to contemplative practices that brought me into contact with a compelling force within  myself that oriented me away from the path expected of me as a middle class Nigerian, a child of teachers, values central to the society I was in, directing me towards questions of ultimate meaning, questions that seemed bizarre to people around me, questions unaccommodated by the educational system while the hunger for personal experiential engagement with the metaphysical issues those questions represented  was unaddressable by the managers of the religious cultures  in my immediate environment in Benin-City, Nigeria.

"Is he on drugs?", " Is there a woman involved?", "Are you sure your son is well mentally?", "Does he not need the attention of a psychiatrist?", "He might need to be seen by a spiritual specialist because it could be a spiritual problem, perhaps a spiritual attack", various people whom my mother took her perplexities about my inexplicable behaviour to would ask or recommend. I eventually consented to go to the university, and having immersed myself in extensive reading inspired by my philosophical and spiritual hunger, I had gained significant study skills enabling me  get high grades in the university entrance exams, but having got into the institution, I could not correlate the purpose and culture of the system with what burned within me as the goal of my life. 

Why spend time studying subjects that have little or no relationship with the question of my purpose on earth, using methods that have little connection with my individuality as a unique cognitive creature as all humans are unique, yet being forced, like everyone else, to squeeze oneself into a mould prepared by a few to accommodate everyone? I withdrew from the university on three occasions over a period of years, persuaded to return after each withdrawal but finding the place made little meaning, I left again, returning for the final time through the influence of a combination of force and persuasion. I eventually gained a lot from the system but at the price of a lot of pain and confusion arising from trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

What I needed was an individualised learning system that focused on my philosophical and spiritual quest as the central logic of my existence, the primary pursuit that made my life meaningful, and built, in relation to it,  other areas of study, such as the cultivation of skills in critical and imaginative  thinking and verbal and visual expression,  a system I am now developing.

 Responding to the breadth of my hungrily growing cognitive interests, such a system would explore as broad a range of subjects as possible,  examining various aspects of existence in their interrelationships as dynamisms crying out for understanding in terms of their role in relation to an overarching purpose, a purpose that might not necessarily be seen in the same way by everyone, the cosmos being too complex to be encapsulated in any definitive form by the human mind, as Jorge Luis Borges suggests in "Inferno, 1,32"​, the parable of the tiger and the writer to whom God revealed in dreams the meaning of their individual but correlative  existences within the tapestry of being, only  for them to wake up and forget the dreams, being left with nothing but a vague but potent sense of gaining and losing something of infinite value.

 "I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's", declared the English social and philosophical rebel, the artist, poet and philosopher William Blake. I have tried variously to create my own systems of learning, as anyone who aspires to creativity would need to do,  surviving and partly thriving within the dominant educational system but constantly challenged by bottlenecks arising from the contradictions between social expectations and my daimon- a spirit that drives one but is not fully coextensive with one's mind, seeming to pursue its own orientations and goals through the vehicle constituted by one's existence, one's mind, body, and activities.

Gradually, however, light begins to shine into the tunnel of the long, often perplexing and painful journey as voices of solidarity sharing similar ideas and convictions randomly emerge, as one's struggles are validated, as one is able to express one's understanding of the struggle in a manner that speaks to the depths of the faith and vision one bears as constituting one's own essence, "the  orientation of a person's life and work in terms of their ultimate sense of mission", as the concept of vocation is described by Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language.

Even more satisfying is that this formulation is being composed by building on a platform of ideas constructed by my immediate ethnic ancestors, my fellow Africans, people whose conceptions are in great need of study and sharing with the world.

Vincent Folorunso Adepoju : From Eternity to Eternity

Vincent, you deserve a memorial, not in stone, but in words.

Why do you deserve this memorial?

You deserve it because your influence radiates beyond the time and spaces you occupied.

You were not there the day I took down Charles Connell's  World Famous Rebels from the library you had installed in the living room.

On reading that book, I was no more the same.

I became that person even I do not understand, propelled by forces operating in a zone not human, not aligned to the daily world of coming and going, outside the universe where people go to school, get jobs, earn a living, and conduct the business of living as it is understood among us as we walk the surface of this ball, rotating in space.

You were not there as I became what I now am. When you saw what I had become you did not understand. It made no sense to most.

Someone stops to ask 'why' as others rush to and fro, going nowhere while they think they are going somewhere.

Between all the people asking 'why' there is no answer that satisfies everyone. Confusion reigns.

Le us immerse ourselves in now while looking to tomorrow.

You will bear fruit among people you will never see. That is why you deserve a memorial.

23 September 2012

9: 08 pm

Compcros

First Landing

What is the point of doing a PhD when my house is burning?

Daddy, where are you? Can you be of any help to me in the present debacle, transforming it into what it might be, a transformation rather than a disaster? How should I cope with the sad coincidences between my life and yours against which I have to struggle? In spite of your virtual disappearance in my sixteenth year, the fruits planted by my relationship with you live on and I struggle, with the help of my mother and sisters, my companions whom you left to fend for ourselves, to harvest those fruits.

Ironically, the consummate opportunity to actualise those fruits has meant that I have had to almost mimic what you did in virtually leaving us to fend for ourselves and escaping to England. Mimicking, since having learnt from your lesson I struggle to make sure I don’t go the full route, but the appearance seems like that. Are we cursed to enter into such domestic disintegrations, leaving those we have nurtured to that point to care for themselves at the point when the time to harvest the years of joint struggle emerges? Or is it simply that the shock waves of your own actions are still impacting on my life, leading to developments in my life that are similar to those in yours? How can the cycle be broken? By an effort to break it literally by refusing to do anything that resembles what you did or or would that be a trap to lead me to debilitating outcomes where one is caught in the web of those possibilities one had tried to escape from?
So much to say but I am not in the mood to say it all. But I expect that you, who are now one of the ancestors, can see what I do not say, can see it all? That could be one way of explaining those dreams where you demonstrate a solicitude you did not show when we walked the earth together, in which you seem to try to alert me to the challenges posed by the breaches ,the tears in the wall of flesh formed by our line, as you revealed to me the humbled feet incongruous beneath your outer dignity.

Paterfamilias. Perhaps you reach beyond the wall of time to demonstrate honesty about the feet of clay which we do not reveal to our offspring, pretending instead to a confidence and certainty we have no right to assume.

How do I realize the economic potential of the knowledge and abilities I have and those I am developing?

I need to integrate the totality of that knowledge and skills and focus them in specific projects.
In doing this, I need to allow the natural orientation of my soul to fulfil itself.

What does that mean?

I would need to explain what I mean by "soul”, as well as "orientation"
By soul, I refer to a centre of my self that is enigmatic, little understood but very potent. It is the focus of my most exalted drives. Drives that relate to what Rilke describes as the justification of my existence, an effort to validate the fundamental significance of my life, above and beyond the values assimilated from society on the significance of live and how it should be lived. It is fed by external sources such as ideas and experiences that emerge from outside me. In fact it was through such external influence that I began to develop a personality commensurate with what I describe as a soul.

By orientation of my soul, I refer to the deep lying drives that are almost instinctive to me but do emerge from the instinctual biological drives, such as the need for food, clothing and shelter. They have been evoked through encounters with powerfully stirring ideas in books, reinforced through further intercourse with such ideas in interactions with people, refined and consolidated, ground into me through decades of exploring and living by these ideas as well as the experiences on encounter with enigmatic potencies within my self and in nature that emerge from mediation looking within myself as well as in natural spaces.

What would you describe then, as the natural orientation of your soul?

First, let me explain what I mean when I speak of a natural orientation in relation to the soul on account of the apparent contradiction between the notion of the natural, suggesting something innate, and my statement that the development of the aspect of my personality I call my soul emerges through the stimulus of ideas from external sources.
I describe those drives as "natural" because of the their depth and integration into the nature of my personality. They have become so integral to my personality that they can be spoken of not simply in terms of the intimacy of the creeper and the vine but of the roots of the tree itself, which are vital to its nourishment.

Can one trace the se roots to their fundamental destination?

Or perhaps its true that my experiences with external stimuli represent a catalyst to awaken something that was already present in me. It was certainly present a potential or do we say that the potential was created through that stimuli? No. I would expect that my human potential for response was largely defined in terms of its ultimate range but that aspects of that potential were evoked by those encounters?

15/08/06

Three blind mice.
See how they run,
They run after the farmer’s wife,
She cut off their tails with a carving knife,
Have you ever seen such a thing in your life,
As three blind mice?

"As long as space abides and as long as the world abides,so long may I abide, destroying the sufferings of the world".
Santideva-The Bodhicaryavatara. Chapter 10.v.55
"Whatever suffering is in store for the world, may it all ripen in me".
Ib.v.56
"The Boddhistava is a being who has vowed to enter into ultimate enlightnement or Buddhahood, so as to help all other beings reach this state".
"The Boddhistava is a being who has vowed not to enter into ultimate enlightnement or Buddhahood, until all other beings have reached this state"
"...a vivid state of metal quiescsence, accompanied by energy, and a keen power of analysis, by a clear and inquisitive intellect, are indispensable requirements; like the lowest rungs of ladder, they are absolutely necessary to enable one to ascend. But in the process of meditating on this state of mental quiescence...by mental concentration, either on forms and shapes, or on shapeless and formless things, the first effort must be made in a compassionate mood, with the aim of dedicating the merit of one’s aspirations to the Universal Good. Secondly, the goal of one’s aspiration must be well defined and clear, soaring into the regions transcending thought. Finally, there is the need of mentally praying and wishing for blessings on others so earnestly that ones mind-process also transcends thought. These, I understand, to be the highest of all Paths.
Then again, as the mere name of food does not satisfy the appetite of a hungry person, but he must eat food, so, also, a [person]who would learn about the Voidness[of Thought]must meditate so as to realize it, and not merely learn its definition. Moreover, to obtain the knowledge of the state of super consciousness...one must practices and accustom oneself to the mechanical attainment of the recurrence of the above practice without intermission. In short, habituation to the contemplation of Voidness, of Equilibrium, of the Indescribable, and of the Incognizable, forms the four different stages of the Four Degrees of Initiation-graduated steps ib the ultimate goal of the mystic Vajra-Yana[or Immutable Path].

What relationships are there between Mila in his cave in 12thcentury Tibet [the draga taso cave,among others] and I in my room in London's East Finchley in September 2006?
The image of my mother and sister flagging down reluctant vehicles when their car broke down on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway on their way to their temporary accommodation? The resonances of previous domestic disharmonies, involving both the head of the nuclear family and the members of his complementary family [a more suitable term than “extended family”] which are related, indirectly to this situation as Mila’s mother and sister suffered when their father died and conflicts arose with in- laws. Mila’s eventual apprenticeship to the magical and mystical arts which eventually took him far from home as mine has also taken me far from home.

MR TOYIN ADEPOJU

BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE

MR TOYIN ADEPOJU IS A MAN WHO IS LOST.

HE SEEMS TO THINK THAT HE SHOULD BE SOMEWHERE ELSE,OR SHOULD BE SOMEBODY OTHER THAN HE UNDERSTANDS HIMSELF TO BE,BE DOING SOMETHING ELSE OR BE OTHER THAN HE IS .
PLEASE HELP HIM FIND HIMSELF.
HIS PHD RESEARCH IS AN ASPECT OF THAT SEARCH.HE HAS SPENT MORE THAN 20 YEARS IN THAT SEARCH AND THE BEST HE HAS GOT ARE THE SPLINTERS OF RECOLLECTION OF A MAN WHO HAS LOST MUCH OF HIS MEMORY,DOES NOT REMEMBER WHO HE IS,HAS TO ACCEPT OTHER PEOPLE'S ACCOUNTS OF WHO IS ,OF WHERE IS GOING,BUT ALWAYS CAN NOT SHAKE OFF THE PAINFULLY DISTURBING FEELING THAT ALL ACOUNTS GIVEN BY ALL THE PROPER AUTHORITIES ARE NOT QUITE RIGHT AND THAT SOMETHING VITAL IS MISSING,SOMETHING VITAL THAT IS LOST FROM THE PICTURE THAT MAKES UP HIS LIFE IS TERRIBLY OUT OF PLACE,MISINTERPRETED OR JUST PLAIN LOST,LIKE A LANDSCAPE THAT IS PERCEIVED ONLY IN BLACK AND WHITE,WITH EVERYONE INSISTING THAT THAT IS ALL THERE IS TO IT BUT ONE SEEMS TO REMEMBER VAGUELY THAT ONE HAS KNOWN THAT LANDSCAPE IN COLOUR.
OTHERS SAY NO,CAN'T YOU SEE THAT THE WHOLE WORLD IS BUILT ON THE UNDERSTANDING THAT BLACK AND WHITE ARE THE ONLY COLOURS?WHY DO YOU THINK YOUR VIEW ALONE CAN BE RIGHT,YOUR ABERRANT VIEW AGAINST THE UNDERSTANDING OF COUNTLESS GENERATIONS ALL OVER THE WORLD?
MR ADEPOJU IS DEEPLY PERPLEXED BY THESE QUESTIONS.HE HOLD A BA AND AN MA IN ENGLISH AND LITERATURE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF BENIN IN NIGERIA.THESE DEGREES WERE ACQUIRED UNDER THE UNDERSTANDING THAT IF HE IS TO SEARCH FOR THE WAY TO WHERE HE SUSPECTS HE IS ACTUALLY GOING,AS DIFFERENT FROM WHERE HE IS TOLD HE SHOULD BE GOING,WHAT HE SHOULD ACTUALLY BE DOING AS DIFFERENT FROM WHAT ALMOST EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING,HE MUST MAKE HIMSELF FIT IN.HE MUST BELONG TO THE WORLD AS IT IS CONSTITUTED,OF PEOPLE WHO HOLD THAT BLACK AND WHITE ARE THE ONLY COLOURS,HE MUST MASTER THEIR TOOLS AND USE THEM IN HIS SEARCH BECEAUSE THOSE ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT TOOLS EXTANT.ONLY THEN ,AFTER ONE HAS ACQUIRED THE TOOLS OF THE WORLD,AFTER ONE HAS SHOWN THAT ONE CAN BELONG IN IT AS OTHERS ARE DOING,AFTER ONE HAS ASSUMED THE CLOAK THEY WEAR EVEN IF ONE IS DIFFERENT UNDERNEATH,HAVING GAINED THEIR WEAPONS BUT WITH A PURPOSE DIFFERENT FROM THEIR OWN,ONLY THEN CAN ONE SEARCH FOR THE WAY THAT ONE HAS LOST;THE MEMORY THAT HAS NOT BEEN RECOVERED BUT WILL NOT GO AWAY.

THAT APPROACH HAS NOT WORKED.IT IS A LIE.A LIE THAT SUCKS ONE ALMOST INEXORABLY INTO THE WHEEL THAT IS CALLED SOCIAL LIFE,SOCIAL RESPONSIBILTY.THE PERSON BECOMES A RESPONSIBLE,FULLY ACCEPTED MEMBER OF SOCIETY,BUT IS STILL LOST.

MR ADEPOJU IS LOST.

THERE SEEMS TO BE A COMMUNITY OF PEOPLE,SCATTERED ACROOS TIME AND SPACE,WHO ARE IN AGREEMENT THAT THEY ARE LOST AND ARE IN DEAD EARNEST ABOUT FINDING THE WAY TO THEIR ACTUAL DESTINATIONS,WHICH THEY HAVE FORGOTTEN BUT THE MEMORY OF WHICH THEY ARE DETERMINED TO RECOVER.THEY ARE LIKE THE MAN WHO,AFTER LOSING HIS MEMORY AFTER AN ACCIDENT, USED THE WEBSITE OF FRIENDS REUNITED TO REGAIN CONTACT WITH OLD ACQUAINTANCES WHO HELPED HIM REGAIN HIS MEMORY.THESE PEOPLE HELP EACH OTHER PIECE TOGETHER WHO THEY ACTUALLY ARE AND WHERE THEY WERE GOING BEFORE THEY LOST THEIR MEMORIES,LOST THEIR SENSE OF DIRECTION AND BEGAN TO WANDER.

IT WOULD SEEM THAT KATHERINE MALTWOOD AND SUSANNE WENGER ARE TWO SUCH PEOPLE.THEIR SEARCH IN THE TEXTS OF VAROUS TRADITIONS,THEIR TRAVELS IN VARIOUS COUNTRIES, ATTESTED TO THAT.AT TIMES AS WANDERERS WHO DID NOT KNOW THAT WAS WHAT THEY WERE,AT OTHER TIMES AS SEMISENTIENT WANDERERS,WHO SEARCHED WITHOUT KNOWING THEY WERE SEARCHING OR WHAT EXACTLY THEY WERE SEARCHING FOR, PEOPLE WHO WERE LOOKING FOR MARKS OF SOMETHING THEY COULD NOT FULLY GIVE SHAPE TO BUT WHICH RESONATED WITH THEIR QUEST.THEY DID NOT KNOW EACH OTHER.THEY LIVED IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES,GREW UP IN DIFFERENT PLACES.MALTWOOD IS DEAD BUT WENGER IS STILL ALIVE,IN THE SMALL NIGERIAN TOWN WHERE HER WANDERING AND SEARCHING TOOK HER, FORTY FIVE YEARS AGO,FAR AWAY FROM HER NATIVE AUSTRIA.YOU CAN SEE THE PULL OF THE SEARCH.MALTWOOD TRAVELLED WIDELY IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE WORLD,AND EVENTUALLY MOVED FROM HER NATIVE ENGLAND TO CANADA WHERE SHE PUT DOWN ROOTS.AGAIN,THE IRRESTIBLE INFLUENCE OF THE PULL.THE SENSE OF LOSTNESS.THE NEED TO SEARCH FOR THE WAY HOME WHEREVER IT CAN BE FOUND, SINCE WITHOUT IT,NOWHERE IS HOME.
PERHAPS AT THE MUSEUM TO WHICH SHE BEQUESTHED HER ESTATE WE SHALL SMELL THE AIR SHE ACQUIRED IN HER JOURNEYINGS,IN HER SEARCHES.THAT AIR COULD HELP US REORIENT OURSELVES.ONE SEARCHER IGNITING ANOTHER WITH THE MEMORIES SHE HAS BEEN ABLE TO REKINDLE IN HER OWN SELF.PERHAPS THEN,MR.ADEPOJU WILL COME CLOSER TO FINDING HIS WAY HOME.

On disjunction between psycholgical development and dominant social values,particularly in terms of a conflict between individual and group Weltansschaung-world view- as represented by one's society, see the work of Kazimierz Dąbrowski, Colin Wilson and Abraham Maslow.Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration,in particular, could be understood to embody much of my experience in the tension between aspects of my domestic crisis and its metaphysical collerate that is central to this blog.

Along with a site dedicated to his work,Kaminski Battaglia's PhD dissertation does a scholarly overview and analysis of his work in relation to Dąbrowski's biographical and social context.

Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy as described in perhaps his most famous book,Man's Search for Meaning, will also be useful.The Viktor Frankl Institute of Vienna site contains a complete biblilography and references to the growth of the discpline.

my life and roots of my academic interests in exchange with ade

Oshodi Oshodi: Babalawo!
toyin adepoju: good morning. I hope you a good weekend?
toyin adepoju: weekend
Oshodi Oshodi: worked and spent time with family, immediate and extended. It was pleasurable
Oshodi Oshodi: and you?
toyin adepoju: forgive my tormenting me. look at your mate on this page. she finished BA same year as me http://www.chem.ucl.ac.uk/people/fielding/biog.html
Oshodi Oshodi: she is even attractive...doesnt look academic like you
toyin adepoju: type this into your browser
toyin adepoju: ucl.ac.uk/news/news helen fielding
toyin adepoju: copy and paste just like dat
Oshodi Oshodi: ok
Oshodi Oshodi: wow!
Oshodi Oshodi: a trail blazer!toyin adepoju: de evidence speaks for itself
toyin adepoju: her biography at
toyin adepoju: shge finished BA in 1989 de same year as me
Oshodi Oshodi: that does not matter to me, she had certain advantages you did not have
toyin adepoju: lets not dwell too much on that
Oshodi Oshodi: support of a stable family (probably), support of the educational system and living in a stable predictable society
toyin adepoju: did i not have support of a stable family? I was already employed in an academic job before she was according to her CV
Oshodi Oshodi: not exactly
Oshodi Oshodi: your parents were separated
toyin adepoju: YOUR LAST TWO POINTS MIGHT BE CLOSER TO THE MARK
Oshodi Oshodi: the NGR system did not make things easy for you in ALL regards
toyin adepoju: another point is dat it has taken me more than 20 yrs to get the opportunity i have now
toyin adepoju: i tell you i don go psychiatric hospital before?
Oshodi Oshodi: for wetin?
toyin adepoju: its too much to go into the details now but de bottom line was my mum was advised to send me there on account of my radical attitudes to education which were widely believed to the expressions of disturbed mind
toyin adepoju: a disturbed mind
Oshodi Oshodi: are you serious?
Oshodi Oshodi: you see, that could be as a result of family issues...
Oshodi Oshodi: in fact I am sure it is
toyin adepoju: explain please
Oshodi Oshodi: your parents were not together then, and may have been rebelling (with out realising the cause).
toyin adepoju: i will tell you de details in a few minutes. it had nothing to do with rebelling although a number of people could not help thinking it had to do with my family
Oshodi Oshodi: ok, I am waiting...
toyin adepoju: She struggled with her own incomprehension of my radical attitudes which she could not relate to anything in her experience, my father was in England with his new wife and largely, if not completely out of touch, she was struggling with all kinds of challenges, economic, spiritual and psychological-a part of the psychological is that I am convinced she subconsciously viewed me as representing the man who had so brutally hurt her and so was often antagonistic towards me. that did not mean that she did not love me but the love was entwined with contradictory emotions which I suspect were at times fanned by advisers.She tried hard to understand accommodate my attitudes to education, took me to an Indian guidance counsellor who tested my IQ since the counsellor believed I was making claims ttoyin adepoju: claims that suggested I saw myself as having a high IQ and she also took me to professor of psychiatry at Uniben who was convinced I was not well and wrote in his report that I had some weird ideas about spiritual contacts.Even when my father came back to Nigeria and I visited him, the whole thing was bizarre to him but he made some proposals which suggested that if he had been part of our family de issue might have been handled differently even if my family did not poses the cultural background or social help to understand the situation but he could not follow up on his ideas.Oshodi Oshodi: this all relates to my point
toyin adepoju: indirectly.you spoke of a rebellion
toyin adepoju: yet you don’t know what toyin was doing that was thought crazy
Oshodi Oshodi: a rebellion it is, it doesn’t have to be a physical expression
toyin adepoju: you say you admire creativity, do you think it always comes in ways that people are comfortable with?
toyin adepoju: i continue
toyin adepoju: eventually it was at the psychiatric hospital that i made friends who convinced me to do what everyone wanted me to do.i think it was because i had been able to make some progress in my initiatives before then, thereby giving me the confidence to continue with conventional, the emotional support i got from my friends dere which was free of de complications in my domestic setup, as well as the compulsion of the experience of being taken to the hospital by force alont the nurses abducted me in the midst of a magical ritual which in itself convinced dem i was not okay.
toyin adepoju: now what was the issue, why was i thought to be unwell?
toyin adepoju: i had resolved, after one year of A Levels that I was not going to go the university. I stated that i was going to educate myself
toyin adepoju: it made little sense
Oshodi Oshodi: it must have been agonizing what you were going throughtoyin adepoju: my mum struggled to understand and was convinced de key was my going to school to pursue my dreams
toyin adepoju: but i was convinced dat school was not de answer and with timnee i realise how right i was
toyin adepoju: later, we could continue. its really a face to face discussion
toyin adepoju: i was convinced dat my educational vision could not be realised in a school
toyin adepoju: i later concluded that i was not ready for the university
toyin adepoju: my mum filled and submitted my jamb form
toyin adepoju: and i was persuaded to do jamb
Oshodi Oshodi: you mother never gave up
Oshodi Oshodi: you owe her a lot
toyin adepoju: yes. even though she did not really know what was going on. I had very high grade and was admitted to uniben but i twice dropped out since i found the place claustrophobic intellectually
toyin adepoju: now,to,lead to the case i am making
toyin adepoju: how come that I, who was an indifferent student in secondary school which i left at 16 in 1978 was able to get 311 out of 400 when i did jamb in 1979-80,even though since i was persuaded late to do jamb,studied for it in only two weeks?
Oshodi Oshodi: 311 in JAMB!!!!! That is fantastic
toyin adepoju: .thanks for the frank appreciation.de questions is how was i able to do it with two weeks study having spent the time before then with bad A level 1 result since i was not really keen, doing extracurricular reading rather than my studies was an average secondary school student. I did not have any A1 in my WAEC.i have not always been this motivated about schooling as you see me today
Oshodi Oshodi: na your mama prayer they carry you
Oshodi Oshodi: hold on...
toyin adepoju: we thank God for her but there are also OTHER FACTORS. I went through a transformative experience after my secondary school that, as well as making the JAMB feat possible, was what inspired me with the idea that i needed time to get my cognitive bearing before going to the university.
Oshodi Oshodi: I dey come...toyin adepoju: i had read widely in my family's library, been fired by ideas about people i had come to admire, had become convinced through reading the Grail message that the current pedagogical regime represented by Western education represented a truncation of human potential ,had had practiced some yoga under the influence of Buddhism and the Grail message and had revelatory experiences that sealed the transformation in my thinking.i resolved to work out and apply an educational program of my own as an alternative to Western education. I later resolved that i could go to the university later after addressing that burning issue which had become more than an obsession. it defined my existence.
toyin adepoju: Even though I had to postpone those goals in order to succeed academically in terms of the linear progression expected by society, I have come back to them again and again and they are at the heart of the motivation, research design and gaols of my current academic research. my experiences in the UK have emboldened my efforts to address these ideas from within academia but i needed some time off from academia to pursue what Arnold Toynbee, writing about monasticism, described as the periodic need to take time off from the business and please and pleasure of the moment and "measure human potential against the human condition"toyin adepoju: tanks for de opportunity to take stock. I know i can count on you to listen. i need to go and bath now and go out briefly.
on family and success and single parent families see Barack Obama

Kether

At times, I marvel at the fact that I exist.
What a great difference, a great void, there is between this dancing flame of life and the utter silence of nothingness and not protesting against one's non-existence, because if you are not, can you cry out to be?

Ernest Boyer held his first child minutes after he had emerged and wondered to himself:

Here, out of nowhere, was a life. Where had it been in all those tens of thousands of years while other human beings were born, lived and died and civilisations grew, flourished and declined? Where had this life been then? And where was it going? What lay ahead for him in childhood, youth, and adulthood? And what was beyond? Where would he be in the eternal sequence of centuries that were still ahead? In a great wave of wonderment these questions washed over me, slowly to be replaced with something else, a feeling calmer, still.

Michael, in Young People’s Parables, remarks that it was the day he saw a caged tiger, frustrated by captivity in spite of its magnificent strength, that he grasped the meaning of the freedom embodied in his life.

The river flows but the boatman must determine in what direction he will steer his boat.

In the Kabbalah,Kether is understood as the first manifest.It is the first point of existence that constitutes the universe as can be known by human beings.The zone out of which it emerged,Ain Soph,is described as the Great Unmanifest,and as such is conceived as being beyond thought and knowledge.Since even thought and imagination represent abstract forms of manifestation,the nature of Ain Soph,which can not be conceived in thought or imagination, is not within the range of human perception.It corresponds to a Buddhist conception of Nirvana as neither being nor non-being.

These conceptions enable Ain Soph,beyond being and yet the ultimate source of being,to be perceived in relation to the unknown origins of the human person.Ain Soph's relationship with Kether,in which the unmanifest becomes manifest, may also be correlated with transformative processes through which forms of being come into existence and undergo change.

A Fulani creation story runs thus:

At the beginning, there was a huge drop of milk.
Then Doondari came and he created the stone.
Then the stone created iron;
And iron created fire;
And fire created water;
And water created air.

Then Doondari descended the second time.
And he took the five elements
And he shaped them into man.
But man was proud,
Then Doondari created blindness and blindness defeated man.
But when blindness became too proud,
Doondari created sleep, and sleep defeated blindness;
But when sleep became too proud,
Doondari created worry, and worry defeated sleep;
But when worry became too proud,
Doondari created death, and death defeated worry.

But when death became too proud,
Doondari descended for the third time,
And he came as Gueno, the eternal one
And Gueno defeated death.

At the beginning there was a huge drop of milk

I reflected on these words this morning, surrounded by my books, the embodiment of my hopes, as well as the expression of what I want to grow beyond, a life where books and ideas are the most intimate companions. My bed is huddled in a corner and almost fenced in by piles of books. I gaze at them and they remind me about the sacrifices I am undergoing in being here in England, sacrifices occasioned by the opportunity to study here, but which has led to an upheaval in my life of such magnitude that its is clear that the distortions of reality represented by the description of the master of paradox of whom it is said that “He is so tall that only the tufts of his hair can be seen” are clearly at play
But within the arena circumscribed by these books, by this reversion to bachelorhood, I hope to realize dreams that till now have been aborted by untoward factors.

That is where the drop of milk comes in.

Milk, that nourishes us as we come to life, becomes suggestive of the potentiality for nourishment, for new growth, that resides in our circumstances, in ourselves. As the symbol of the primal sustaining power that enabled the universe to be, it becomes the expression, the symbol, of the generative possibilities that empower us.

The bottleneck into which I have been forced by the circumstances of this entry into the human world squeeze me so hard;the pain is so excruciating,even more gut squeezing for roiling itself in the inner chambers of the self where self doubt and the quest for a way to right perceived injustice against the self are entangled like self replicating snakes.Shall we expire into the unknown that waits beyond the abyss of knowledge at the end of the tunnel of this life?No.We shall live.An African poet declares "The firewood-a central pretechnological form of fuel-of this world is not for the weak."

My children's eyes look out at me from the pictures which I have been compelled by the courage born out of pain to place on my table.They look at me with the same power,the same call with which they looked at me when, in the makeshitft theatre of desire, as I was entwined in the frenzy of bodies,their images imprinted themselves behind my eyelids and diluted my entry into the steaming pot,as I entwined with that girl in the uncompleted building.

Yesod

Zilantrope adjusts the view screen for clearer focus as the ship approaches the third planet from the dwarf star. Beyond the atmospheric haze,into the settlements seen from the darkness of space,what was he seeing?

The magnifier is tuned higher till the figures come into focus.

What are those that resemble the forms on the aberrant planet Zigtarrch which reproduces ad infintum forms that resemble themselves? Such identical replication has always been seen as a great absurdity on Iamos, where Zilanthrope comes from.On Iamos, no two forms of life resemble each other. The Iamoans,influenced by their world’s biological characteristics, see beauty as consisting in diversity and never in sameness. They even have sayings to the efffect that “Diversity is the essence of beauty”,“The greater the beauty the greater the diversity”.

But here on this planet,on this agglomeration of life, the creatures he sees moving about in massive numbers,either through their own power or through powered devices, are all shaped so as to resemble each other in their general structure.

Are those light refractors encased in the domed structure that surmounts their forms?What are those objects protruding from their central frames,frames that resembles the casing of a star going ship,which they use in manipulating objects around them? The entire structure rests on two flexible columns which are used for movement.

Eeeh! Wonders will never end. The expanse of the cosmos breeds wonders that continually take one off guard,cause one to revise one’s anticipations of reality.

How do such creatures perceive beauty? Will they see it as inherent in similarity? Could they go beyond the nature of their own replicative system and conceive the possibility of the beautiful as consisting in difference? Or,something Zilanthrope had never thought before,something that suddenly revealed to him how much his thinking had been confined by the limitations of Iamos,limited too in spite of its great diversity.A thought that only now emerges under the inspiration of his sight of the creatures of a plnaet he had first thought of as aberrant. Could these creatures perhaps perceive beauty in relationships between difference and similarity?

Zilantrope's ship moves closer into the planet’s atmosphere. The pictures of the creatures becomes even clearer and he can now see that in the flood of similarity of form there are certain differences which can be discerned on careful observation. The shapes portray certain subtle differences which slowly emerge as one becomes accustomed to the strange forms. Who knows, these differences, subtle as they are, could be the creatures' means of identifying each other.

“In thee appears the cause of our continuation as human creatures; for thou art the reality our reproduction represents.” "While thy potent force prevails, we surely shall not perish from this planet”.Anon.

“Shaddai el Chaim, the Lord of Lives art thou in the Creative world beginning every birth, of thee do we emerge into embodiment and end our days on earth” .Anon.

Binah

The tree, standing tall with a crown of branches, covered by leaves, presented a stately, almost gracefully feminine beauty, like a naked queen.

As I gazed at the tree in admiration,a cloud began to form around the tree’s crown. A message reached me-or was it my mind telling me?- that I was about to enter into a realm of understandingthat went beyond anything I had ever encountered.

I walked away.

My friend who was walking ahead of me was not aware of what had transpired. It had taken only a moment.

Did a part of me cut me off from the vision, thinking I was not ready?




“Archangel Sandalphon art thou in the Creative World; thy feet are firmly on the floor of our far flying cosmic chariot”-Anon.

Chokmah


Wisdom is/like/ a diamond with many facets. On account of the limitations of human vision/ understanding, you cannot see all sides at once/can you/one see all sides at once?


At the highest point of reasoning, significant unites of information merge with universal concepts pulled together by a unique form of intellectual power…When the cosmic mind grinds its elements of experience into a totality of knowledge it acquires a discipline which by its “horrific” power erases the boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead, the physical and the non physical. The individual initiate acquires, like a chameleon’s all round vision, the power to conceptualise the totality of life at once,

The branches to the tree9the Ash of Yggdrasil) stretched over the universe, and its roots ran far and wide into the regions of the living and the dead, into the realms of gods, giants, dwarves, and elves, and of men.
…a deep well, the Well of Mimer, [is situated along the line of one of the gnarled roots of the Ash]in whose depths lay a wisdom so great that the gods had felt the loss of an eye or ear as nothing to obtain even a small measure of it.

Ultimate wisdom is represented by the sixteen branched palm tree at the foot of which sits the little man whom even the Almighty consulted at the time of creation.

Netzach

The diamond, reflecting the light from different angles, honed into shape to catch and throw back/refract/the light but somehow, she could never complete it/realize the ultimate symmetry she could see in her minds eye.

HOD


The crew of a spaceship reported encountering a sea of crystals leading towards a radiant point. The crystals were not only luminous, but the crew discovered that on looking at them, instead of looking through them, or into them, or at an opaque surface, they were looking into themselves. Through some strange inversion of vision, their physical sight was transposed into a psychological penetration through which they saw into themselves and understood themselves as they really were. Almost as if a different person, possessed of unusual perception, who had known them intimately all their lives, was assessing them, summing them up, weighing them, but with the sympathy and emotional identification that could only have come from their own selves, and not from any other person, no matter how intimate.

They were so intrigued that they overcame their wonder and fear and pressed on to see where this strange phenomenon led. When questioned later, however, they were unable, however, to describe their experience of the point to which the crystal sea led/in which the crystal sea/terminated. They would try to describe the sight or experience, which ever it was and would stop short after a few hesitant words. The look in their eyes at this pint suggested that they were trying to/straining to/hard/ desperately to communicate something but simply could not find the words. Their eyes seemed filled with stories or memory/the meaning of something glorious which they remembered but could not describe/were strangely unable to describe. They could only describe their journey home in which nothing unusual/spectacular happened



I once read Marvel comics science fiction story based on the encounter of a man with himself as he was in the past. The story was based on the premise that such an encounter would distort the space-time field of the earth, distorting the gravitational field of the earth in a manner that would lead to natural catastrophes. In a similar manner, at periods of personal/psychological and interpersonal upheaval, one self may be compelled to encounter itself at various points in time, the person who one thought one was up till now, and the person one sees oneself to be now as well as the person who one is becoming. Am I not the same person who had to acknowledge that I am a man like any other man and that those adulteries I committed in the course on my marriage represented not only a departure from what I would have expected of the high standards I had set myself when I was getting married but are expressive of needs which unfulfilled which I found an outlet/or which I allowed to find an outlet through the channels that were available to them? So I too committed betrayals as damaging as that which was inflicted on me by the person I had betrayed earlier. But the again, were those betrayals not representative of high points in my limited sexual life, which I can point to as the most significant of my experience with the hot blood that can course between desiring bodies? So in betrayal, I discovered/ recovered myself. But the betrayals, though now understood as acts of self discovery, implied that the home of my self understanding and a centre of my social self had either been shattered or been radically reconfigured. This reconfiguration is what I am trying to stake stock of, at this point of my life, where, with Dante, “I woke to find myself in a dark wood, with the right way wholly lost and gone”. I have become homeless, both in psychic space and in the domestic space I had so carefully built up over six years. Like Castaneda’s traveller to Ixtlan, I cannot return home even if I wanted to because the home as I understood it, either in psychic space or its domestic configuration, no longer exists. The homes I inhabit now are makeshift homes, constructed out of the bare materials with which I constructed my home before the enriching of marital life, but having been in that multipersoned state, the unanticipated return to the interpersonal and emotional minimalism of bachelorhood is like returning to an abandoned/old house, which has long been abandoned and fallen into disrepair which one is compelled/forced to inhabit but is unable to turn to its former quality of habitation/as a habitable state.

The city is bounded by gates of sublime artistry which no artist, even in the city, can reproduce.

No one knows how they came to be built. There are many fanciful stories about them but none is fully reliable. The greatest wonder about these doors is the scenes they reveal. Once opened, they expose sights of splendour even more striking than the gates themselves.


“…give us golden hints of higher meanings in the blackest of our basic matter”. Anon.



In Asimov’s “Nightfall” he builds upon Emerson’s idea that “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how men would believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God?” in a story in which the stars appear once every two thousand and fifty years, as observed in fascinated horror by one observer “Not Earths feeble thirty –six hundred Stars visible to the eye’” Lagas[earth’s sun]was in the centre of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendour that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference then the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world” The variegated splendour of the tree outside my window, my experience with the inner life of trees convinces me that the very beauty of being alive in world we never made, as someone describes it, the potential of awareness hidden/embodied by/in every moment, encapsulates a similar splendour of being. But it’s all so common. The jewels are strewn on the sand and in our eyes, have become one with the sand.

From time to time, I am assailed by a sense of homelessness-never having found anywhere to which I could really belong.

I am trying to get used to this place after more than thirty years


In the thirty of my age at the time I wrote these words, and the forty three years of this moment, I have not been able to consider myself fully at home in the world. I am not like a religious believer who holds that his world is only a passing phase, or in the Yoruba or Igbo saying that the world is a market place where we come to trade/buy and sell and return to our homes. The problem is that I don’t feel fully at home here and I can not hold onto any conviction of where hope is. What Korner would describe as an existential sense of awareness, where one’s concern is not with the particulars of being but with the act of being in itself. I revel in the strong pleasures of wrestling the mind around ideas, the sweet and strong blooded pleasures of the contact with glistening bodies where the senses are electrified in most memorable conjunction of self with self, my relationship with the woods and forests in which I like to walk rejuvenate me, the love of my family and others is vital to me, but at times the whose arena of human engagement in which I am an actor seems an escape from something profound which we avoid and refuse to acknowledge even though it stares us in the face. Where do we come from on our entry into this place of pain and fulfilment and where shall wee go when we have to quit the stage? The various answers given are inspiring but can any of them be proven? Can we in full volition go into whatever world id said to be entered by those who leave us behind and return to tell the story? Can we develop a method for achieving this which we can all learn? Which I can learn/Until that happens, I remain a citizen of this place/great place but an outsider within it, a person stranded on the earth, who seems to sense the presence of the stars but can not see them.

I have lost all memory of where I was-was I anywhere? - before I came here

I woke from a dreamless sleep to find myself in a magnificent city

This sleep could be described as the sate of unknowing that represents our knowledge of our pre-birth state or our state of ignorance in relation to aspects of our personal or social being, as the state of my ignorance of deep seated domestic rifts that existed in my marriage and which insinuated themselves with explosive force into my life in my 40th year. So like Dante “mid way this way of life we are bound upon I woke to find myself in a dark wood with the right way wholly lost and gone.” (Sayers). The sense of agony at discovering that I had been betrayed, when in fact I too had engaged in a betrayals earlier of a similar psychologically incapacitating nature-a fact it took me years to acknowledge to myself, was so intense, so convoluted with doubt, accusations and counter accusations, my mind a battle field of accusations of other and examination of self, that with Dante, the wood of confusion “that dark and rough and stubborn forest” was so dense, that “the very thought of it does not “stir the old fear in the blood” as with Dante but it remained an experience that I would wish should not be suffered by anyone. Without this experience, however, how could I confront what I am compelled to acknowledge as the self and mutual deceit that has been central to the foundations of that union whose collapse now tortures me? How could I reclaim myself as I am without any apology for what constitutes the integrity of myself? So, as the Florentine came to acknowledge, such good did I gain from that wood, that I would tell of it.

I am free, in my early 40s to recreate myself. The sense of power and near boundlessness, like a horizon of opportunity receding into the distance coupled with the realisation of the wisdom gained in 40 years, a sense of freshness as if one is starting ones life afresh with the lessons learnt in an earlier incarnation intact in one’s memory. We may speak therefore, of the city of magnificent opportunity. But in the background of this groundswell of realisation and open opportunity, is the ominous note sounded by the writer of Coming out at 48: http://www.comingoutat48.blogspot.com/ that suggests that the emotional and social worlds developed through years of coming to various levels of adulthood are so fundamental to the self that reshaping them completely is virtually impossible. So the writer of the blog finds himself as the man in the image that characterizes his experience, a man falling from space. “Life stops in its tracks and then begins again. He still goes to sleep in the evening, and he still rises in the morning, but everything has changed”.

Malkuth

In Kabalistic cosmography, Malkuth is the material universe.

see okris use of pot image in anatsui essay-relate the broken pot motif thos this context of your work in line with your correlation of sundering with lurinianic kabala on shevirat ha lekim andthe exile of the shekimah and kiefers breaking of the vessels

At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall

Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink” A bounty of academic opportunities in England, but half of my heart is back in Nigeria with the home I nurtured with my spirit for six years and which has been altered in such a way that I can no longer identify it/ with it/it as my home. The capsule of disappointed longing inhabits the place of fulfilment.

I have drank.

I have not given an eye for a drink from the pool as Ela did, but I now know why he did it. I have found the source for which I have searched. I have returned home.


Returned home, in what sense? Returned to as destroyed homestead, where the values and loyalties that united the homemakers have been razed to the ground by their intrapersonal conflict? Certainly whatever conception/from of home that survives this struggle between male and female, between those who are both former lovers parents cannot be the same as before the death of the innocence that initiated the death/destruction of the old home and the struggle over the remains. Is it really possible to drink of the wisdom of this pool without sacrificing an eye, sacrificing something of yourself, something precious and vital, something indispensable/invaluable invested in the old, now savaged dream? But then again, I hope to constitute a new home on the ruins of the old one, scavenging through the remains for what is of value, not least of which will be the understanding gained. So, then, the dreams and values that animated the first adventure could be reincarnated, in a hardier form, reconfigured through the scars of first defeat, exemplifying, in Eliot’s words, a return to where I started, but seeing the place for the first time.
I hope the entire experience will play a role in the psychic equilibration understood in metaphysical terms as homecoming, a homecoming to a harmonious humanity which only existed previously as dream. Without the experience of distortion, of dis-equilibrium, of divergence between ideals and actuality, of the difference between ones conception of oneself and of what one demonstrates oneself to be under the press of circumstances, how shall the reality of our dis-equilibration and the need for its healing be realised? Home as psychological equilibrium, psychological equilibrium as metaphysical actualization, home as physical space, as psychological cohesion/harmony of disparate elements constituted by the harmony of people from different backgrounds and historical/biographical trajectories, as acceptance of oneself-being at home with oneself, home as integration into a metaphysical centre, a mariner returning to the point beyond worlds on consummating his part in the primordial quest of his race, fulfilling the yearning represented by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who, stranded at sea, “In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival”.

I see it.
The outlines of a massive tree

sunlight striking a pool at its roots.


The tree, both like me as a form of life/life-form and unlike me in being a different life form, yet in its stillness and serenity majestic aura, embodying a destination I envisage. Its roots recall the roots of my present domestic problems/challenges prompting the question “where have I gone wrong in this marriage/domestic situation/ostensible partnership which has suddenly taken on the dimensions of my worst fears, my deepest, unarticulated nightmare scenarios assuming an independent and dreaded life?”
I have gone wrong not only in the physical violence initiated by me but from the very beginning, in agreeing to terms at the beginning of the marriage that were denigration of my free will, of my rationale for being, because I did not understand the value of these primordial prerogatives. I thought they could be exchanged for marriage but a home based on denial of oneself is built on fraudulent foundations ands is already imperilled from the onset. The roots resented by my values, roots that fed my reason for being, were thought by me to be extendable from the limited ground of my own cultural life/psychological space into the ground represented by this relationships but this crisis demonstrates that that was not possible. The roots have met only partially nourishing soil. What of the roots in my pre-marriage history?
The roots in the history brought by Kemi to this relationship, what soil have they grown in? what soil do they represent? are they capable of spreading outward to fundamentally new soil different from the kind in which they have grown? I doubt it in this instance, yet, the strain of what might be my culpability, not of what I might self righteously be describing as a failure of judgment about culpability of values, but of acts not ennobling of the dignity of your erstwhile not in name only partner, strain absent the envelope of my mind. The roots of the “massive tree” do not only reflect the roots of my favourite symbol, the cosmic tree, which evokes the vitality of the cosmos as a living form, but the roots of my own self betrayal. The pool at the roots, a recollection of the pool at the roots of the Norwegian cosmic tree Yggdrasil, the well of Mimer, where Odin drank to gain his deep wisdom, after hanging from the tree for days in agonising vigil, is the pool I must drink from to work a way out of this crisis where three human beings have been brought into the world into an already compromised relationship, and its distortions have burst upon their lives in ways which I wonder how and whether they will ever understand but even the perpetrators do not fully understand, since each of the perpetrators claims its own innocence in the carnage of dreams. The pain of this crisis means that I must hang on the tree of pain and perplexity and agonised thought, till, I can drink of the lessons to be learnt from this experience, lessons that might not vouchsafed through contemplation, through thought alone but also through action based upon limited certainty, on faith in the validity of eventual outcomes in a fluid, volatile and little understood situation. So may the sunlight that glints of the pool /may/possibly re-enter this crisis/situation/debacle

The path gradually enters into dense vegetation. I am worn out and need rest. Will I not find the place till I am almost dead?


I am at times frustrated by the need to live/At times I become frustrated by the /with the need to live/There are times I get fed up with the business of living. Would it not be less stressful to just end it all? The temptation that emerged when I found myself almost wandering onto rail tracks one agonised night. Or at the London Underground, the subtle call of the tracks to throw myself onto them, inviting them to snap the agony of life. Then all the agonies of decision/making/ of matching/of arbitrating between competing demands will be put to rest. Within the limbo/the in-between space of the beyond, whatever its content, I/one would not need to contend with the struggles of conscience, with the tearing at my/one’s mind of the tension between my/one’s ideals and the sorry state of the eventually revealed reality. I/One/the representative of homo sapiens, whose intelligence, whose capacity for self reflexive thought/thinking and being able to look back upon ones thoughts/so that he is hardly completely satisfied with any options he is able to conceive, which is/a power/capacity/ability/ his strength as well as his burden/curse, would be at rest.
But I flinch from the precipice of inflicting the anonymity of unconsciousness on the piercingly sweet agony of being. Odysseus hails the greatest of Homer’s Greek warriors Achilles, on meeting him in the world of the dead, as one who must surely be lauded as great among the shades, but Achilles replies “I would rather be the lowliest servant of a masterless man, living on iron rations, than be king among the dead”. Steiner writes that if that sentiment had prevailed before the ten year Trojan war of Homers Iliad, /which /Homer wrote about in and which Schliemann, in /discovered archaeological evidence for evidence for in ,then writes/comments Steiner, there would have been peace before Troy.
The notion of the superiority of the bittersweet power of life over the dubious/unknown /attractions/lure of the otherworldliness or oblivion of death is summed up by Azaro’s father in Okri’s Famished Road whose child, having resolved to will himself to death, nears death, struggles to lure him back to the world by describing the glory of this painful life: “We are the miracles that God made to taste the bitter fruits of time” “We did not make this strange bed that we have to sleep on. But this world is real” “We have sorrow, but it is the sister of love, and the mother of music”.
We move on then, inspired by oases of hope, and perhaps one day, we shall experience with the Akan poet, the convergence of the path embodied by the struggle of our lives with a source of meaning:

The river crosses the path,
The path crosses the river.
Which is the elder?
We made the path and found the river.
The river is from long ago,
The river is from the creator of the universe.

The intertwining patterns of the architectural ornamentation I can see through the window represent to me the intertwining patterns of my own life. Patterns marked by constant irony. Forms of Eshu, who embodies the ironic potential of experience.


My entire life has been a study in irony-from the frail form of the premature baby to the emergence of the eventually energetic child, from the child who learnt to read late to the eventual bibliophiliac, from the rebel against formal education to the acquisitor of three MA degrees,[the person who is]unaffiliated[not affiliated] to no[any] particular religion and yet is deeply religious, the Christian who is as also an animist,a member of a species for whom purposeless activity is an aberration but whose peregrinations between the twin unknowns constituted by before birth and after death do not have any evident sense of purpose, except the accounts of visionaries, the validity of which are disputed.

Each bit of my sundered self is an aspect of the meaning of my life.

The habitué of pornographic films, the man searching for a woman with whom to share his life, the mystic and philosopher, are all the same person. Each of them embodies an aspect of the value, the significance of my life. Each of them encapsulates a spectrum of my history. The pornographic films go back to my first encounter with organised nakedness in my fathers naturist magazines, the interest in which for which I was punished for being a transgressive child, but the fascination engendered by it has never left me. It developed with the man who was a virgin until his 30s and whose conception of relationships with women is essentially romantic

I am trying to reassemble myself and return home




What is home?

That is a central question in the effort to return to a “home”.

In the metaphysical sense, is it knowledge of the ultimate meaning in my life that will justify the struggle that constitutes life on earth? Should or will this meaning be self constructed or exist irrespective of my conception of it or something related to both positions? In the domestic sense, I have concluded that the home I once had as married man in Benin has ceased to exist. What is a home if not the united presence of those with whom you share common understanding, common values on why you are together? It is not simply the fact of being bound in marriage. This core value has been destroyed by a woman who has reinterpreted the history of my marriage in a manner that is meaningless to me. My children and I still identify with each other but to have a home with them I will have to reconstitute the physical structure of our relationship. Even the physical home, a house belonging to my family, where Kemi lives with the children, she has made clear through her characteristic doublespeak, that I am not welcome there. So I will have to find a space where I can relate to my children without the presence of that creature who has metamorphosed from what I thought was partner into a decided adversary, but an adversary who considers her strategies to be more effective if she pretends to remain a partner.

Top:Dogon couple

from "The Art of the Dogon" by Kate Ezra at JSTOR African Arts Vol_ 21, No_ 4, p_ 30.Image courtesy of the Metroplitan Museum of Art;Gift of Leister Wunderman

Barakat Gallery describes the significance of this motif in Dogon art:

"This sculpture of a Dogon couple is highly symbolic in its nature of design and use. The Dogon people are known to create works of art that embody religious beliefs, spiritual entities and the overall values and emotions of the people. The symbolic nature of the stool and placing a couple upon it makes this work highly important. They are the ancestors of the tribesmen. They are the spiritual companions for their children and their children's children. Sculptures like this one were placed in an altar and used for guidance, reassurance and peace of mind.

The special feature of this artifact is the stool. The base of the stool represents the earth while the upper surface symbolizes the sky. This gives the impression that they are ever-present in the lives of the people. This piece shows the unity of a couple and therefore the connection the tribe has with each other. This unity is achieved by linking the couple’s arms. Looking at the back of the seated woman, you will find the man’s arm resting upon her shoulder. The overall importance and the beautiful image of this couple bring us closer to the truth of ever-lasting love and togetherness. The everyday life for the Dogon people was to try and achieve this goal. Today, this ancestral couple empowers everyone who wishes to achieve such a goal".

and :

"This sculpture represents one of the more mysterious subject matters in Dogon art. A couple sits upon a chief stool, replete with caryatid figures, thus represented as dignitaries. They are depicted as equals on the same level, the male resting his arm just above the woman’s shoulders. Although such equality between the sexes was absent from daily life, symbolically, it suggests procreation and the continuity of the lineage, an essential aspect of Dogon society.

While the basic subject of this sculpture is easily understood, the meaning of the work is open to scholarly debate. Although once referred to as a “primordial couple,” this attribution seems unlikely since this concept does not exist in Dogon religion. Some Dogon tribesmen have suggested, instead, that it represents mythical twins of opposite sex, symbolic of the perfect union spawned from the world egg of the creator god Amma. In this legend, the male of the twins, named Nommo, left the egg prematurely and wandered the heavens and earth in solitude, searching for his female counterpart.

Thus, this sculpture might depict the reunification of Nommo and his twin sister. According to other tribesmen, this sculpture might be a depiction of the ideal marriage of ancient times, that between a uterine uncle and his niece. According to Dogon mythology, again relating to the Nommo myth, marriages were originally between twins, and all births resulted in twins. When Nommo abandoned the womb prematurely, he carried with him a bit of placenta that rotted away and became the earth. When searching for his sister, he traversed the bowels of the earth, viewed as an act of incest between a son and his mother. Thus, incest became forbidden and strictly taboo. Perhaps then, this sculpture represents the incest taboo.

Although the meaning of this sculpture can be endlessly debated, its beauty and delicate refinement cannot be denied. Scarifications, delicately engraved onto the surface of the wood, cover their faces, stomachs and shoulders. Their elaborate coiffures have been carefully depicted with crested braids and engraved lines suggesting the texture of the individual strands of hair. Although a stunning work of art that we appreciate for its beauty, this sculpture no doubt had a more important mythological meaning to the Dogon tribe who created it that has unfortunately been lost to us over time".

I have been shattered


This shattering involves both my sense of incompleteness as to the meaning of my life, as expressed in my sense of being a traveller on earth who, has lost his way in a journey of which birth and death are but stages as well as my present conundrum of crisis in my marriage in which the certainties by which I had played my role in the marriage have been destroyed and I have found nothing to replace them. It also involves my separation from my children who are all the way in Nigeria while I am in London.

This separation is made all the more acute by the fact that it has been initiated by their mother who has schemed to gain control of them while isolating me in London, thereby creating the impression that I do not care for the children when I badly wanted us all to come to London and share in the quality of life I have always wanted but which my father was not able to give my sisters and I since he came to England and isolated my sisters and my mum from his life. The role of absentee father, a role I dread since I have suffered from it as a child, has been thrust on me by my children’s mother. But I will prevail against it.

Top:Nommo figure from the Dogon of Mali.

Displayed and described by the Barakat Gallery:

"Inhabiting the barren cliffsides of the Bandiagara Escarpment, near the great bend of the Niger River, the Dogon people led lives of physical austerity and spiritual wealth. They often performed religious ceremonies in which the arts played a crucial role. Ceremonies known as "rites of passage" mark the major life cycles, such as initiation or celebrations. Used in such rituals, the Dogon art form is always laden with rich symbolism, expressing their beliefs.

This majestic yet puzzling work depicts a man riding an animal, arms stretched upwards as though in the motion of bowing forward in prayer or pulling dramatically on reigns. The animal's identity remains ambiguous as it no longer has its legs and fails to resemble a horse. Further, the manner in which the man kneels upon rather than straddles the animal is another convention implemented by the Dogon and Tellem peoples along with the characteristic under-defined features and body forms. Similar representations are attributed to the Dogon of the 20th century, however exact dating of this piece is unknown. They seem to have been employed in a religious fashion by a "Hogon" or political and spiritual advisor to the village or region as protector figures."

elaborated upon by Fayez Barakat in relation to a similar figure at artnet:

"The Dogon of Mali have maintained their tribal culture with great tenacity in their rocky fortress above the Bandiagara escarpment. In sculpture, they are among the outstanding tribes of Africa, producing marvelous wooden sculptures. Although wood is the material most often used by the artists of Africa, no African undertaking is entirely free and gratuitous--wood sculptures carry special significance. Since wood is a living material, it is felt that the sculptures derive their magical power from the earth and whose leaves received water from the sky. The process of sculpting the wood, thus, is the transmutation of power through modification of form. this magnificent sculpture is a representation of Nommo, a spirit who plays an essential role in the Dogon cosmogony.

The Dogon mythology describes Nommo as the spirit sacrificed to heaven, his body hacked into five parts which are thrown, respectively, to the four cardinal points and to the center of the quadrangle. as shown by this wooden sculpture, Nommo are sometimes represented as a figure with uplifted arms, imploring rain, evoking ideas of fertility and birth, of purification of primeval realm, and of the life-force. Sculpted in a graceful manner, the Nommo rides a mythical animal, leaning back with his arms raised up straight. Such fine juxtaposition of the shapes creates physical and spatial harmony. Beautiful in form and fascinating in history, this wonderful sculpture certainly is to bring the magic for times to come, as noted in the ancient Dogon mythology".

The tension realized through the backward leaning posture of the ruder,in contrast to the forward movement of the mount,evokes the sense of tension between polarities that characterises traditional Dogonconceptions of human growth.
The human being is understood as a composite of a male and a female soul,sundered at the beginnig of time in the Nommo,the archtypal beings.The task of human life is to grow into wholeness which invoves the integration of these two aspects of self.
This growth is described in terms of becoming the Nommo,the archeptypal person.As a child,one is expressive of a partail aspct of Nommo,ass one grows,one becomes expressive of more inclusive aspects of Nommo,till one has become expressive of the complete Nommo,of Nommo in their entirety.
This blog is an account of the writer's development.
It could be understood, therefore, in terms of an effort to interpret his exprience in relation to such models that recognise the human sense of psychological disruption and the need for integration as the myth of the Nommo and that of the divine sparks in Kabbalah.

The Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo describes his poetic sequence Labyrinths in the following way:


Labyrinths is … a fable of man’s perennial quest for fulfilment….a personage [ is assumed] much larger than Orpheus; one with a load of destiny on his head, rather like Gilgamesh, like Aeneas, like the hero of Melville’s Moby Dick, like the Fisher King of Eliot’s Waste Land; a personage for whom the progression through “Heavensgate” through “Distances” through Limits” is like telling the beads of a rosary; except that the beads are neither stone nor agate but globules of anguish strung together on memory.

The poem, stories and essays in this collection play a similar role. The poetry and stories were written between 1997 and 1998 but the essays, which are commentaries on the literary works, are being written in 2006. The poetry and stories operate as a springboard for autobiographical meditations, taking their inspiration from the distance travelled by the writer in the time spanned by the writing of both sections of the work.

A central theme that emerges from these contemplations is the question of home, understood in terms of the relationships between its domestic, psychological and metaphysical senses.The “beads” here through which the contemplation is carried out are represented by poetry and stories inspired by the Nigerian Yoruba Orisa tradition and the cosmography of the Jewish-Hermetic Kabbalah. The poem is informed by the Yoruba story of the journey of the deity Orisanla to visit his friend, the Orisa Sango at Oyo. He is warned by the Ifa oracle that he will encounter obstructions on his way but if he is to succeed in his journey, he is not to retaliate to any provocation he would encounter. He eventually arrives at Oyo and meets his friend, but after much tribulation.

The stories represent meditations on the cosmography of the Kabbalah, developed in Judaism and adapted by Western Hermeticism. The Kabbalah describes the cosmos in terms of ten interrelated centres and each story is a meditation on the characteristics ascribed to one of these centres. This work is particularly indebted to what is, as far as I know, an anonymous work of Kabbalistic poetry.The structure of the work is developed in terms of commentaries on the poetry and the stories. These commentaries are autobiographical. They use the associations evoked by the stories in exploring questions that emerge from the autobiographical itinerary of the writer, as this is understood in terms of its social, psychological and metaphysical possibilities.The commentaries, therefore, develop possibilities of interpreting the literary works that expand their cognitive range in directions not explicit in the texts. This interpretive mode could be related to the poetry and commentary of the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross which form a unified whole, and where the commentary develops the poetry in terms of realms of meaning significantly removed from the world ostensibly realized by the poems.

The parabolic fictions of Jorge Luis Borges and of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities have also been influential.In the background to this range of influences is the example of the Italian Dante Alighieri’s Commedia where the poet-protagonist undergoes a cognitive journey, taking stock of his life at mid-point against the background of a cosmic tapestry, a reassessment dramatised in the form of a passage through the cosmos.

Top: The cover of Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah.Maine:Weiser,1997 by Patricia Waldygo. It represents the Qabalistic notion of the cosmos as constituting the body of the cosmic man, Adam Kadmon. This visualisation of the cosmos is suggestive of the Qabalistic understanding of the universe as living entity that is given life and ultimate direction by the being of Ain Soph, the unmanifest zone beyond knowledge but which sustains all being. The mutuality of human and cosmic being is resented not only by the anthropomorphic character of this metaphor but by the understanding of the human being as a microcosm of the cosmos whose actions affect the sustenance or disruption of cosmic harmony. Adam Kadmon is understood as the cosmic exemplar of what the human being embodies in his own microcosmic level.

In relation to the autobiographical character of this text. the image of Adam Kadmon could be understood as representing both the potential and aspirations of myself and the distance between this aspiration, this potential and present reality.

The notion of distance between the ideal and the actuality of the moment arises in relation to the Kabbalitisc notion of disjunction in the being of Adam Kadmon, in which the most exalted levels of being, those represented by the channels of divine force symbolized by the head, are disjointed from those below on account of a rupture that occurred at creation. The vessels through which the divine light that streamed forth from the Unmanifest to configure existence proved too intense for the lower vessels to sustain and so they shattered into fragments. These fragments still contain, trapped within themselves, shards of the divine light the intensity of which led to their shattering. This coexistence in a confused conjunction of the divine sparks and their concrete envelopes represents the coexistence of positive and negative qualities that constitute our material universe. It is the duty of the Kabblalist to separate the sparks from their material sheets so they may ascend to their transcendental realm.

al-Fatiha The Opening