Saturday, July 15, 2017

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Missing Abiola Irele

Where is Abiola Irele?

Now that the elephant towards whom one points with all one's fingers, as described by Odeniyi Apolebieji,  a single digit being inadequate to identify his multiplicitious  play of knowledge, now that the elephant no longer inhabits the spatio-temporal matrix that defines embodied existence, where can he be found?

Now that he can no longer be sought  at Harvard, Kwara State University or the University of Ibadan, among others where he was active, how may he be located?

Now that he of whom it may be stated that "he was eclectic as regards his sources but was unique in the crucible treatment with which he amalgamated them into new schemata of striking freshness and power", as is declared of St. Augustine of Hippo by the New Catholic Encyclopedia,  no longer weaves his verbal cathedrals in sequences of syntax, how do his cognitive transformations continue?  

He exists now at the interface between your mind and the cosmos,  creating a balancing action and reaction between the manifest and the unmanifest, as Dion Fortune depicts the Lords of Flame in The Cosmic Doctrine.

A centre of energy defined in terms of the distillation of the vision that actuated the person of flesh and blood, now existing in a state of equilibrium between all points of existence, at the intersections of those enthusiasms that moved him as he looked into the depths of being, the vaults of becoming, the abyss that is the night sky, the light reaching the earth  from stars that were born when the cosmos came into being.

You need seek him no more in the citadels of stone but in the temples of your minds, freed from the barriers of distance, the blocks of space and time that necessitated  journeying from here to there, from there to here.

Without space, without time, there is no vehicle but thought.

Poised in the sky of thought like a swarm of bees, an image of intense vibration and dynamic energy, as stated by Ulli Beier of the Obatala celebration, the deity visualization in the picture of a cloud of insects, that which was he can no longer be known as one of the the bidepal creatures resident on the third planet from the sun in a corner of the Milky Way, but has now become to humans a motive force among the constellations capable of raising the vibrations of living sparks by attuning them with their own higher vibrations, as Dion Fortune depicts the Lords of Mind, a nexus of possibility that may be visualized by each in their own way, so beyond grasp is the actual reality of this entity.

Do you wish to visualise him as the integration of numinous presence emerging from the womb of being and becoming,  Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle II, a distillation of the scholar in esoteric highways and byways of knowledge, the one who plumbs the depths of the intersection of the philosophical, the literary and the numinous in  "Tradition and the Yoruba Writer : D.O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola and Wole Soyinka", the Onobrakpeya image representing the conglomerations of diverse forms drawn into integration by the magnetic pull of the energy matrix constituting the mysterious identity evocative of the various thought worlds the "vagrant par excellence", as Apolebieji puts it , traversed in his vocation as cognitive ferry man, carrier of forms of knowledge across the demarcations of distinctive cognitive spaces, weaving a tapestry all his own yet universal in resonance?

                         

                                                   Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle II



Or perhaps you would prefer an image, like Onobrakpeya's Oracle I,  suggestive of the less obviously arcane but still magnificently  cosmographically intricate, metaphysically lofty flights of "What is Negritude?", ropes of light constructed of logical structures both luminous and concretely expressive, mantras of exposition creating a stairway leading to a palace poised above the mundanities of earth but illuminating the totality  as radiantly meaningful  when perceived from a vantage point at the nexus of being and becoming, the roots of the mountain where sits Mimer, the well for a sip of whose knowledge Odin sacrificed an eye after hanging in supplication for a time untold on mighty Yggdrasil, the cosmic tree?


                                                                             

                                                     Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle I

                                                                                 
​                      
​O enraptured one! Do not say I tax you overmuch by introducing you to these images strange yet  compelling, indicating that one who is no  more visible to the eye may be imagined in terms of forms both arcane and arresting. I but share what opened to my inward gaze one  day,  as, thinking of the master,  I lay myself to rest,  and there rose before my inner vision an intimation of  him as a coruscation of power, a network of energy evocative of  his own distillations from the quantum of meaning accessible to humanity, this terrestrial agglomeration constituting a framework for reaching one who is now distant in essence  from the reality in which he had once participated in trying to cognise with the broken logic that is the best humanity can muster.

In the light of this appreciation, would you prefer something simpler than what I have shown you, but dazzling in its own quiet way, the river of cowries of Oracle IX, embowelled in the circle of eternity, its transformation of expressive forms from their nativity to an individualistic and yet universally communicative universe as described of Ahmadou Hampate Ba's novel Wangrin by the scholar in question in his introduction to that fictional world?


                                                   

​                                                  Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle IX



Or perhaps you would prefer the esentialist richness of Oracle ​XVII, suggestive of the thinker in  "The African Scholar" , creating out of the dilemma of exile a baroque cathedral of knowledge concretised in a few passages of spell binding prose representing the passage from Nigeria to the US of the the old glorious days of Ibadan, reawakening that amazing patrimony in a new land, the fecundative capacity you seek to ignite in yourself by veneration at the shrine he now incarnates?



                                                                         

​                                                  Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle XVII


​Beyond those who argue that the veneration of lords of thought is a barrier to critical engagement and that trying to frame those who have gone ahead in terms indicative of the more than human is but idolatory, what exactly is done by those who repeatedly engage with long transitioned  masters, enshrining them in book after book, dialoguing with them in rivers and rivers of text,   ​venerationally approaching the physically withdrawn as they chew on their words in agreement or disagreement but never  obscuring their enduring significance?

May memory and hope, may conceptions of vitality beyond the three dimensional form not be given imaginative embodiment in ways that facilitate the encapsulation and contemplation of  examples of  what is among the best humanity has been able to actualize in thought and action?

Therefore, brethren, you may wish to gaze with me at that light that speeds from horizon to horizon, traversing cultural and cognitive geographies, the soothing and yet energizing elevations of the orange suffusion of Onobrakpeya's   Oracle XII, panel 2, where a head centred in a circle emblematises that other thinker's lifelong quest for enabling matrices encapsulating the foundations and reaching to the heights of the worlds of knowledge he pierced with his prismatic eye, an eye dividing into their constituents the colours constituting those cognitive universes and reintegrating them within new configurations actualized through his inimitable intelligence, master of the inward vision mediated by the outward eye, the mind's eye that grinds into a unique totality the variegated peregrinations of being and becoming, of time and space, the circumstantial and the axis mundi.

                                                                           

                                              Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle XII
                                                               panel 2


                                       
​Night and day , you are with us brother. The fires you ignited will never go out. The beacons alerting travelers of the bastions you erected and which we continually enlarge will always remain aflame. As you beckon from within the enchanted sequences where your voice resonates undying even as you transition eternal, as the little black man of  Ìgètì  hill removed himself from the world where skin touches skin but vouchsafes to those who seek him the fruits of the innumerable   branches of the tree immeasurable, our limited comprehension striving to pin this countlessness to multiples arising from the intersection of 1 and 1, unfolding to the limit sought by our finite minds, the abbreviation known as 256, so does your legacy, the precious stones visible at the bottom of the deliciously  flowing river to those who look carefully continue to awaken minds to the existence of that garden wondrous.





On 15 July 2017 at 16:06, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:
To the best of my knowledge, most artists do not critique even as some of the most exciting critics are artists. Some artists might even hold that, beyond a point, their holding forth on their own work   might compromise others' sensitivities to the multivalent significatory possibilities of the work.

There is no point in trying to compel anyone to do a critique. Chidi does not need that to affirm himself as an artist bcs the artistic and critical functions are intertwined but not identical.

In terms of whether or not Chidi has read Toyin, Chidi has on his website Toyin's critique of one of his poems "The Amebo Principle In Chidi Anthony Opara's 'I Dey Shake Head 3' "

thanks

toyin






On 15 July 2017 at 11:08, Ibukunolu. A. Babajide <ibk2005@gmail.com> wrote:
Chidi,

Any time you are challenged or cornered you hide behind unjustified angst.

You then threaten to withdraw into your shell or starve yourself of the oxygen of publicity or critical acclaim the foundation of success for your publishing business model.

Is it fair to make a claim without proof?  So why are you unwilling to provide proof to back what you claim?

I have told you this in the past but I will reiterate it now.  If we who read you because of your commission or omission stop interrogating your posts and you, you commence your slide into oblivion.

Cheers.


IBK

Sent from my iPhone

On 15 Jul 2017, at 1:20 AM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

The criticism of art is often left to the critic, not the artist.

So, Chidi should be free to be silent on his work.

As for commenting on Toyin's work, please lets allow Chidi to be. Not everyone likes engaging in criticism.

toyin

On 15 July 2017 at 01:43, Olayinka Agbetuyi <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
This is a similar escapist reply you gave a while ago when asked to comment in your own poetry.  You left that to the critics.

Toyin could have said that about Ireles work but he was forthright in writing some things even though Ireles work is equally in the publuc domain.

Something made you pass the comment you made on Toyins work.  We want you to elaborate as part of that public. Your individual take.



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Chidi Anthony Opara <chidi.opara@gmail.com>
Date: 14/07/2017 18:05 (GMT+00:00)
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Missing Abiola Irele

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Olayinka,
I can but I won't because Toyin's writings are in public domains, readers can judge for themselves.

CAO.

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