PS - To my chargrin or is it annoyance - I notice that African Mathematicians were not included in the general list of mathematicians ! Well, here are some of them : A ( partial) List of African Matematicians
On Tuesday, 21 April 2015 17:52:49 UTC+2, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:
-- On Tuesday, 21 April 2015 17:52:49 UTC+2, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:
...Philistinism and all things synonymous including dilettante are just words and we ought not fault a person for merely trying, although when some pint-pot starts putting on airs, beating his chest and pontificating about e.g. " We mathematicians" (another word), I get irritated by such pretentiousness ( especially about esoteric matters) - I don't know why - and pray that the Almighty save me from the sometimes strong feelings of contempt, that erupt , not knowing where such feelings come from - but certainly not for the Baal Shem Tov ( the Master of the Good Name) or messrs Dante, Basho, Rumi, Ibn Arabi with all of whom I am acquainted in equal measure .
More humbly, Wordsworth:
"We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness."
I didn't like Dr. Toyin Adepoju characterizing the great Nigerian event as "Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria's Boko Haram President Elect" – and such an un-sophistic perception is a different matter altogether, here's another:
Now, duty calls and I must humbly confess to being moved by these three thrilling paragraphs from Toyin Adepoju and I thank him for them because they are inspiring:
"Other examples of contemplative and ritual activity that may be adapted from Soyinka's works are the meditations in his poetry collection A Shuttle in the Crypt, depicting the contemplative and ritual activity through which he sustained himself while in prison during the Nigerian Civil War.
These include the opening poem "O Roots" in which he imagines himself drawing power from the earth as he encounters inspiring brethren of similar aspiration through a contemplative plunge described as an immersion in "pools of silence", a conflation of aquatic imagery and contemplative action which may be adapted in meditation employing Soyinka's imagery of roots drawing sustaining energy from the earth, and his imagery of empowering flows of water.
Soyinka's visualization of himself as withdrawing within the flames of his heart as he invokes helpers on beams of light while he chants an incantation of resolve to vanquish his destructive circumstances is another poem is rich in visual imagery and verbal action within a contemplative ritual context which may be profitably adapted for use particularly in trying situations."
Cornelius
On Monday, 20 April 2015 21:53:05 UTC+2, Chidi Anthony Opara wrote:IBK,
I wonder how you guys make it pass moderation. What have supporting Jonathan got to do with this? You have already assessed him and returned a negative verdict, why advise him again to "go to a proper school and be assessed by your peers and win their respect". Haba!
I hope this gets pass moderation.
CAO.
On Monday, 20 April 2015 13:06:10 UTC+1, ibk wrote:Toyin,
Stop your fake Internet academic pursuits. Go to a proper school and be assessed by your peers and win their respect.
You supported a corrupt Jonathan and you think you can easily morph into the background and spread your failure in academics?
I suspected you from the beginning when your appreciation of Ifa Olokun asorodayo was so warped and wrong. Over time you proved that you have no intellectual depth and you lacked moral fibre. You bear Yoruba names but hate everything Yoruba. You are conceited and conflicted.
Go to a proper school and stop peddling half baked pseudo academic nonsense on the Internet.
A word is enough for the wise but you are not wise.
Cheers.
IBK
On 20 Apr 2015 12:02, "Oluwatoyin Adepoju" <toyind...@gmail.com> wrote:Even in a world where mechanized locomotion is ubiquitous, Basho's signature poetry and prose collection,Oku no Hosomichi (late 17th century) , translated as The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, his account of a long and difficult journey made on foot, continues to inspire people with its image of life as a journey, and the moments and progression of the journey as points of intersection with the infinite, as gloriously summed up in Donald Keene's translation of its famous opening lines :Matsuo Basho's poetry is a quintessential expression of the confluence of the temporal and the timeless, space and infinity that characterizes Zen Buddhism as a style of attention to relationships between inner and outer worlds enabling insight into points of intersection of self and cosmos.Dante's epic poem the Divine Comedy (1308-1320) is the greatest known demonstration of the convergence of Christianity, philosophy, politics, literature and the other arts within the context of observations of everyday human experience.
Wole Soyinka's Art as a Psychological, Spiritual and Philosophical Resource
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Some of the greatest contributors to spirituality and religion from Africa or in relation to African cultures are artists.A Multi-Cultural ContextualizationThe contributions of these creative people to spirituality and philosophy outside conventionally recognized channels also emerges in other cultures, two of the most striking examples of this being the Italian poet Dante Alighieri and the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho.
Dante Alighieri and Matsuo Basho
Dante Alighieri
It represents Western civilisation's integration of these pillars of its cultural identity, a value that continues to resonate centuries after the creation of this work in medieval Europe.
The greatness of the poem is demonstrated by the fact that the limitations attendant upon the work's temporal emergence are superseded by its imaginative and ideational range, as demonstrated by the variety of Dante interpretations and recastings that continue till the present day.
The expanding scope of these interpretations and representations of Dante are actualised, for example, by Allison Milbank's description of Christian Moev's The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy (2005) as a "contemporary interpretation of [Dante's] poetics that goes so far as to seek analogies with the understanding of space-time in modern quantum-physics" in his review of the book in Religion and Literature, Vol.38. No.2. 2006.117-119.
Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders' translate the Comedy ( 2004) in colloquial modern English, with illustrations setting the work in the contemporary Western context.
The exhibition and accompanying book "The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists"(2014-2015), is described as going beyond the inspiration of "Dante's literary works and metaphorical language for [Western visual visual artists having inspired] European masterpieces by Sandro Botticelli, Eugène Delacroix, William Blake and Auguste Rodin, among many others [ to demonstrating through a variety of media] how concepts visited in Dante's poem transcend Western traditions and resonate with diverse contemporary cultures, belief systems and political issues [ providing] a probing examination of life, death and the continued power of art to express the unspoken and intangible".
Matsuo Basho
"The months and days are the travellers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. Those who float away their lives on ships or who grow old leading horses are forever journeying, and their homes are wherever their travels take them. Many of the men of old died on the road, and I too for years past have been stirred by the sight of a solitary cloud drifting with the wind to ceaseless thoughts of roaming."
Complementing this famous work are Basho's other writings exemplified by his famous haiku, a poetic form from Japan which may be described as minimalist poetry capturing an eternal value in a fleeting moment, of a frog breaking the silence of an ancient pond by jumping into the water, a supreme evocation of the principle of immersion in the moment in order to reach the eternal that is central to Zen Buddhism and its effect on such Japanese arts as gardening, the tea ceremony, archery, and within and beyond Japan, the martial arts.Ibn Arabi, Jalal ud-din Rumi, the Baal Shem Tov and the Africanist AchievementWriters like Dante and Basho bring alive the creative potential of particular philosophical and spiritual values and traditions in ways outside the context of their official expression.
They thereby demonstrate the vitality of these cultures as ways of responding to the challenge of being human that transcend while taking advantage of those larger bodies of expression from which they draw inspiration.Some other writers are able to demonstrate both individuality of transposition of the official world view represented by a spirituality while gaining acceptance as part of the broader canon outside the scriptures of those traditions, such as Ibn Arabi and Jalal ud-din Rumi in Islam, Rumi's poetry collection the Mathnawi being described as "the Koran in Persian" and Ibn Arabi's poetry and prose long established as cornerstones of Islamic theology, philosophy and mysticism, and the Baal Shem Tov, whose stories are canonical in the Hasidic school of Judaism.A number of writers and visual artists whose inspiration derives from classical African spiritualities and philosophies as well as writers, from and beyond Africa whose work relates to but challenges or problematises established philosophical and spiritual cultures need to be better appreciated as central to the cultures to which their work relates as strategies of thought and action others may take advantage of, not simply as sources of enjoyment, appreciation and study but as methods of engaging with questions of ultimate meaning and the reshaping of the human mind through contemplation, ritual and larger forms of action.Africanist Writers and ArtistsOne of such Africanist artists is the writer Wole Soyinka.Others are the writers Christopher Okigbo, Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Mazisi Kunene, Bessie Head and Susanne Wenger and the visual artists Victor Ekpuk, Bruce Onabrakpeya, Ayoola Gbolahan, Nyornuwofia Agorsor, Belkis Alyon, Joseph Eze, Owusu-Ankomah, and the sculptural and architectural school of Susanne Wenger, these being those I am informed about.Each of these creators or schools, is saying something unique, developing novel philosophical or/and spiritual possibilities.By "philosophical", in this context, I refer to rationalistic explorations of meaning, like Ayi Kwei Armah's depiction of a philosophy of nature inspired by Akan thought in the conversation between Damfo and Densu in his novel The Healers.
By "spiritual", I refer to ideas and practices centred in non-rationalistic explorations of meaning, such as Christopher Okigbo's mystical sequence, built on Igbo spirituality, in his poetic cycle Labyrinths.
Wole SoyinkaMeditation on Emptiness : The Credo of Being and NothingnessWole Soyinka, for example, creates marvelous contemplative and ritual scenarios that may be adapted for use beyond identification with any belief system.A key expression of this is the meditation he describes in the beginning of The Credo of Being and Nothingness, which involves imagining oneself at the state before the emergence of existence.This meditation is rich as a means of reaching the foundations of the mind in detachment from the complex of ideas, emotions, attitudes and impressions that constitute one's personality, the aggregate of one's encounter with the world across time and space.One thereby engages with oneself as an identity distinct from but related to this existential complex, suggesting the possibility of reshaping one's attitudes from this centre of direction.This meditation is also useful as a means of reflection on ideas about the origin of existence, particular those ideas centred in the idea of emptiness as a primary state before the emergence of being, such as the Judaeo-Christian conception of the "darkness upon the face of the waters" when "the earth [was] without form and void", the Buddhist idea of sunyata, the Void, the possibility beyond conception that enables being, the Jewish Kabbalistic idea of Ain Soph, the Umanifest so called becauase it is not expressed even in terms of the most abstract concepts yet is the source of existence, and the scientific cosmological notion of the cosmos emerging from Nothing, as presented with particularly beauty of logic in Tian Yu Cao's "Ontology and Scientific Explanation" in Explanation, edited by John Conwell.Soyinka describe his meditation on emptiness as a childhood pursuit carried out without knowledge of its relationship to philosophy and spirituality.
His use of the same or similar ideas in other contexts expands its possibilities of understanding and adaptation by others.
It is central to some of the most powerful passages in his prison autobiography The Man Died as he describes himself as exploring primordial voidness through contemplation and through its metaphorical expression even in such seemingly mundane forms as a blank sheet of paper the emptiness of its surface potent with limitless possibilities of expression its empty surface enables.
It demonstrates an associative relationship with one of his central concepts, the Abyss of Transition, which may be understood as the process of moving between life, death and rebirth, distilled from classical Yoruba philosophy of the human life cycle in a cosmic context.
It may be related to the Abyss of Transition as dramatised in the magnificent ritual core of his play Death and the King's Horseman, in the play's dramatization of a process of moving from life into the realm of death, enabling communion with the ancestors, in relation to the birth of new biological life.
One may see in these parallels a possible distillation from Soyinka's personal childhood orientation, in relation to his immersion in classical Yoruba spirituality and philosophy, of an idea that may be enriched by Yoruba thought and practice but which goes beyond it and may be adapted as contemplative and ritual practice even outside identification with related ideas from that culture.Death Ritual : Death and the King's HorsemanThis adaptive possibility may be demonstrated with reference to the ritual at the centre of Death and the King's Horseman.The ritual is a dance, accompanied by poetry expressed by the dancer, Elesin Alafin and the drummer and ceremonial poet, Oluhun Iyo, meant to enable the Elesin detach his mind from his body and pass voluntarily into death.The ritual is a great expression of a classic motif in religious and secular literature- the visualization of a journey into the world of the dead which constitutes central aspects of some of the world's greatest literature, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy, and the remarkable underworld sequence in Darke by Angie Sage, among others.Some of these works, particularly those operating within an explicitly religious context, such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Dead,may be understood as contemplative maps enabling dissociation from life as it is known in order to explore ideas about existence beyond life, and perhaps, even the possibility of engaging with such existence.The rhythm of imagery and verbal music in the ritual centre of Death and the King's Horseman enables a superb contemplative motion from the grounding of one's mind in one's awareness of one's body as part of the physical world to another centre of awareness, removed from a focus on one's one physical embodiment.
This withdrawal from physically centred consciousness may be combined with a gradual reversal of the contemplative ritual in terms of a return to one's awareness of one's embodied self.What could be the value of such an exercise?It could facilitate appreciation of the scope of consciousness, of its elasticity, and perhaps lead to states of consciousness from which knowledge could be gained that might not be readily accessible otherwise or even accessible except through such means.Nature Centred and Abstract Meditations and Invocations : A Shuttle in the Crypt
Other examples of contemplative and ritual activity that may be adapted from Soyinka's works are the meditations in his poetry collection A Shuttle in the Crypt, depicting the contemplative and ritual activity through which he sustained himself while in prison during the Nigerian Civil War.These include the opening poem "O Roots" in which he imagines himself drawing power from the earth as he encounters inspiring brethren of similar aspiration through a contemplative plunge described as an immersion in "pools of silence", a conflation of aquatic imagery and contemplative action which may be a
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