Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
My eye stable in the perception of the coming and going of everything from Nothing.
My emotions, the still, potent depths beneath the ocean surface.
The dynamism of being and becoming
the crescents of transformation
the circles of totality.
In the cave of mind, at the vortex of today and tomorrow, of being and aspiration, I was presented with an edan ogboni, to make as my own.
Not in the arcane consecration of the ancient ones, in which, through an exacting ritual, the brass form with iron stem, female and male powers in unity, is incarnated by a spirit bound to the initiate.
Brass: luster and permanence, Osun, the river goddess: health, wealth, beauty, and fertility; Iron: Ogun, god who clears the way: valor, creative energy, industry, hunting, and warfare, strength for hammering, cutting, securing, bracing, vigor, and "cutting edge" vital for success and longevity : Babatunde Lawal: "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni".
I was invited to make the edan my own, in my own way, ensouled by a spirit invoked by my aspiration, that spirit that comes and goes as it will, everywhere present, nowhere confined, the power that enables the galaxies, the lifting of my hand and the firing of neurons in my brain.
Day by day, I kept vigil in my mind, through physical gaze and mental recollection, with the Master of Equanimity, what the edan had become to me, embodying the mediation between my mind and my emotions, between awareness of myself and all facets of that awareness, between myself and the world, between my minisculity and its ability to contemplate the All.
Slowly, It rose within me, the Shadow, the Living Darkness, the Nothing from which All comes, experienced but beyond description.
O brethren, do not desert me!
We meet at last in conclave, in the no-time and no-place.
The mission entrusted ripens to fulfillment.
The other shore is in sight.
Interpretation
Elegant yet powerful, arcane yet recognizable in its imaging of the human, the example of edan ogboni, classical Ogboni symbolic and spirit vessel, shown above, inspired the poetic lines below the image.
Inspired by my relationship with the Tibetan Buddhist image of the Adhi Buddha Vajra Dara, an overarching deity guide of the Kargyutpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, as depicted in Evans Wentz edited Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa, of similar visual presence and of similar symbolic value to me as this edan, and on account of the traditional ritual techniques for relating with the edan being unavailable in the texts I have read, I approach this image, my favorite edan ogboni picture, as a contemplative form, rather than as the subject of invocations of a spirit meant to inhabit the edan and work with the initiate to which it is consecrated, a companion till the departure of that initiate from the world, as described by L. E. Roache in "Psychophysical Attributes of the Ogboni Edan", African Arts, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1971, 48-53+80, in Denis Williams' "The Iconology of the Yoruba 'Edan Ogboni' ", Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 34, No. 2, 1964, 139-166 and the particularly impressive account in Evelyn Roache Selke's From the Womb of Earth: An Appreciation of Yoruba Bronze Art.
Instead, I imagine the possibility of a similar ensoulment of form enabled by contemplation of the image of the edan ogboni, at the intersection of mind and image, the "cave of the mind", rather than, as in the older tradition, in terms of the physical being of the edan, an intimacy of relationship all the more potent in this instance for being purely mental, inviting the transformation of the perceived and the imagined through the energizing power of the conjunction between the concept of cosmic force as unifying classical African thought as described by John Mbiti in African Religions and Philosophy and other conceptions of such a force, here evoked in terms of an adaptation of Jesus' words along similar lines in the Biblical Book of John, about the mobility of spirit.
The concept of "Nothing" in the meditation is inspired by the conjunction between the idea of "Nothing" in scientific cosmology, described by Tian Yu Cao in "Ontology and Scientific Explanation" as the "Quantum Nothing", the unknown possibility that represents the zone before the emergence of the cosmos, and similar ideas in various religious cosmologies , such as the Great Unmanifest of Kabala, the ultimate fecundity at the source of existence but which exists as a potential rather than an actualization and so is beyond even the most exalted encounter by any entity, the Void of Buddhism, so described because it transcends all categories through which the mind apprehends phenomena, and the Tao of Taoism, that which has no name yet is the mother of the myriad things, as described in Lao Tzu's Tao te Ching.
These ideas from scientific and religious cosmology are complemented by "the Living Darkness", evocative of the biological darkness of the womb, fundamental to the conception and gestation of human life, the darkness of night and the darkness experienced on closing one's eyes, both crucial for human regeneration in sleep and for recreative thought in contemplation, imagination and introspection, gestative possibilities at the human and terrestrial scales, resonating with the cosmic frames represented by the cosmological "Nothing", the equivalent of darkness, in scientific and religious cosmology.
These values constellating in relation to ideas of absence of light enabling gestative capacity are represented for me by the symbolism of black in Akan Kente cloth.
The "Shadow", complementing the concept of "Nothing", comes from Ayi Kwei Armah's adaptation of Akan thought, as he describes it in a personal communication, in the chapter "The Inspirers" from his novel The Healers: "Those who learn to read the signs around them and to hear the language of the universe reach a kind of knowledge healers call the shadow. The shadow, because that kind of knowledge follows you everywhere. When you find it, it is not difficult at all. It says there are two forces, unity and division. The first creates, the second destroys".
The meditator on the edan is also depicted as encountering, in the numinous space enabled by the arcane presence of the edan, brethren in relation to whom he was entrusted with the task of projecting a broader understanding of Ogboni, assuring them, in the language of Buddhist evocation of reaching a zone of ultimate achievement, that the shore of accomplishment of his task is opening to increasing fulfillment.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
No comments:
Post a Comment