Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Pondering My Life in the Darkness: Between Deprivation and Effort

i learned it as the conference of birds.

dear toyin....and toyin...and nimi,

i woke up this morning to nimi's response and incredible image of lacan and de sade. i think of jouissance as more than pleasure, as in fact transcendence, like the look on the saintly woman's face he liked to evoke, teresa, coming in her divine ecstasy, but certainly  not through the words.

well sufism and desade, two opposites, coming together, punning together, outside the law. the first was the law of the muslim clerics who thought you earned your way to heaven; the latter who wanted the law so as to be able to violate it.

i did write a book on trash, to discover that it lay at the foundation for all value, all value systems. one of the images for that value came, no doubt via deconstructionists but certainly bataille, in the form of the void. i discovered that everything that is organized has to have the void around which to formulate organization.  adepoju, that is your ocean, indeed, as the great sufi poet put it, as the ocean breathes in and out, and we align ourselves with that incessant motion.

without the current ceasing, how could you have come to that thought? you love your newton, oh, well...classical physics is fine, but leaves you with the dead end of ether, which einstein finally dispelled. when he did so, he opened us up to the greatest of thought, which comes with relativity and finally quantum mechanics. it is that time and space, and with it energy, matter, and force, are all the effects of that great initial explosion. time wasn't there before; space wasn't there before. this is rovelli's argument, that only in the event in which particles interact, waves interact, or shall we say, strings interact, does time occur, does space occur.

i am writing to you, toyin adepoju because of your love for what these discoveries bring, an astonishingly new view of the world we are in. there is another top physicist and writer i'll cite, karen barad. she says, we are part of the world we observe. we are part of it, not separate from it. we participate in the very thing, in our very being. so when you ask, who am i, you can't separate that question from the same question, what am i part of, not as an outside observer like newton or kant who thought time and space had independent objective existence we could observe and measure, but actually part of it.

you stand on your platform, and watch me running, and measure the time i experience as over against yours, and each is different. newton could not reach to that point. it took einstein in 1905, anno miribilis, to get us there. it took bohr and lemaitre and heisenberg and schroedinger to get us to the point where we realize that where a particle is can't be ascertained without it being affected by our observation.

your universe is not surrounded by darkness; you are the very substance of your ocean and universe. ana al haq, as the sufis say. now the quantum physicists are saying it too.

thank you toyin, and wini and toyin, for beginning yet another day with this wonder. it gives real meaning to life, and its own jouissance.

ken

kenneth harrow

professor emeritus

dept of english

michigan state university

517 803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 9, 2021 8:32 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Pondering My Life in the Darkness: Between Deprivation and Effort

 

Edited

Great thanks for that magnificent response, master of imagistic thought fed by literary networks suffusing philosophical thought.

That Achebe reference comes to my mind from time to time.Youve used it superbly.

 Your evocation of creativity in relation to eros in the figure of copulating with Lady Creativity resonates intriguingly with multi-cultural understandings of creativity in terms of eros, from the Greek Sophia, who gives her name to philosophia, the love of wisdom abbreviated as "philosophy" to the Yoruba Osun, seductive sorceress behind the Ifa multiplicity of wisdoms to the Hindu Tripurasundari, erotic force and wisdom cayalyzer.

I very much like your play on the implications of darkness as both a negative and a positive potential,. particularly as it suggests to me the idea of  correlating  the spiritual implications of this idea with it's social possibilities.

In writing this and my first response to power outages in Nigeria, I feel the darkness sensitive with creative potential, although ideally the darkness should be a matter of choice, not compulsion

Thanks for your  analysis of much of the attitudes of Nigerian govts to those they are supposed to lead 

Great thanks

Toyin

On Thu, Dec 9, 2021, 14:29 Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Great thanks for that magnificent response, master of imagistic thought fed by literary networks suffusing philosophical thought.

That Achebe reference comes to my mind from time to time.Youve used it superbly.

 Your evocation of creativity in relation to eros in the figure of copulating with Lady Creativity resonates intriguingly with multi-cultural understandings of creativity in terms of eros, from the Greek Sophia, who gives her name to philosophia, the love of wisdom abbreviated as "philosophy" to the Yoruba Osun, seductive sorceress behind the Ifa multiplicity of wisdoms to the Hindu Tripurasundari, erotic force and wisdom cayalyzer.

I very much like your play on the implications of darkness as both a negative and a positive potential,. particularly as it suggests to me the idea of  correlating  the spiritual implications of this idea with it's social possibilities.

In writing this and my first response to power outages in Nigeria, I feel the darkness sensitive with creative potential, although ideally the darkness should be a matter of choice, not compulsion

Thanks for your two line analysis of much of the attitudes of Nigerian govts to those they are supposed to lead 

Great thanks

Toyin

On Thu, Dec 9, 2021, 13:36 Nimi Wariboko <nimiwari@msn.com> wrote:

This is beautiful, simply beautiful. But ultimately sad; sad, indeed. Alas, it is the sadistic truth about Nigeria. Oh no, "Kant avec Nigeria," to play on Jacques Lacan's "Kant avec Sade." Kant expected us to obey the law, do our duty, without any regard to any consequence. Nigerian leaders do their duty of governance without regard to any consequence. Theirs is pure "I-don't-care attitude." Punish Nigerians without any regard for consequences on their well-being. Governance is no longer dependent on the Good, but the Good itself is made dependent on (poor, primitive) governance. 

Lacan demonstrated that Sade's characters pursued sexual pleasure for its sake, to pursue jouissance irrespective of incentive, the idea of pleasure arising from pleasure is also the incentive to action. The point is that just as Kant expected the citizen to obey the law for its own sake, Sade's characters pursued sexual pleasures with the same rigorous logic. If Kant's command is "Just obey," then Sade's "Just Enjoy." And Nigeria's? "Just punish." 

As Sade's characters pursue sadistic pleasure Nigerian leaders pursue perverse pleasure (punishment) for its own sake. The idea of bad governance arising from bad governance is also the incentive to action called more bad governance. Bad governance is a "pure means," pure mediality. 

This is the deep structure of Adepoju's thought in the piece, the ocean of truth before him as he played with the pebbles on the shores. He talked about darkness; can we interpret the darkness as the creative void from which a new Nigeria can emerge? Let us find the edge of the cloth of Lady Creativity in the dark and copulate with her and release new seeds for a new Nigeria as Achebe's Okonkwo managed to find the edge of the cloth of his lover in the night and did his thing. Darkness is never an insurmountable obstacle to creativity. Let us arise in the darkness to usher in the light for our children and grandchildren. 

Thanks to Toyin.

Nimi Wariboko 

Boston University. 

On Dec 9, 2021, at 3:45 AM, Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com> wrote:



It's 4:35 am. Around me is the cocoon of night. Darkness everywhere.

But it is not a fully welcome darkness. It is partly the darkness of deprivation. 

A dim roar in the distance echoes in my mind the sound of the expensive generator I have just put off, in guilt at wasting precious fuel in breaks from work when I am resting.

That distant roar indicates that someone with the necessary economic resources is powering their own home throughout the night using a generator, as I too had tried to do by leaving on my family's generator from before midnight to after 4 am, in the name of completing an urgent  job, having planned to run the generator throughout the night even though I hate noise, particularly when working, the roar of the mechanical beast penetrating even the closed windows of my study. 

Who am I?

I am a person who glimpses that ocean spoken of by an inventor of calculus, the discover of why the planets orbit the sun, of why humans don't fall off the face of the Earth  as the sphere revolves in the cosmic void, held aloft by unseen forces which his work enables us calculate precisely.

 Isaac Newton.

"I do not know what I may seem to others, but to myself I am nothing but a child playing with pebbles by the seashore, and from time to time discovering one shinier than the others, while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me."

The greatest scientist of all time, as his biographer Richard Westfall describes him, was not being modest. 

Newton was convinced that human knowledge is limited to the appearances of phenomena, not their essential natures. Space and time are made possible by a cosmic intelligence beyond human grasp, claims he makes in the conclusion to his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.

Before time, the creator of the cosmos created knowledge, understanding and wisdom, and hurled them to Earth where they torment human beings with their incessant demands, evoking possibilities continously unfolding in an endless horizon, as Rowland Abiodun's account of a Yoruba creation myth in his Yoruba Art and Language may be rendered.

Knowledge implies a grasp of the particulars of existence, while wisdom represents knowing why things are the way they are, an understanding gained beyond silence, beyond noise, beyond the machinery of intellect, knowing dropping like a ponderous object hitting the ground, like dew descending at daybreak, making the heart miss a beat as the nakedness of being is exposed in brief insight, if I may adapt images from Abiodun's account, his verbal explanation of that story in a conversation and another majestic Yoruba creation story, "Ayajo Asuwada" translated by Akinsola Akiwowo in "Contributions to the Sociology of Knowledge from an African Oral Poetry."

The ocean of truth referenced by Netwon is  the  understanding of why things are the way they are.

Newton's disciple Immanuel  Kant was dismayed that in spite of all human efforts, no individual and no body of knowledge could claim knowledge of the details and structure of the world and the relationship of this complex to  an originating intelligence, as he states in A Critique of Pure Reason.

That is the ocean of truth glimpsed by Newton that convinced him he was no more than a child at play with toys as reality remains unpenetrated.

The quest for that reality is my life's work but the merchants of darkness whose misssion is  to dissolve the creativity of Nigerians in their acidic deprivations are conspiring against me.

How may one best weave together complex chains of thought, creating a matrix that the Infinite may shine through, like a diamond mounted in a ring, if one cannot shape those ideas in visible forms in these days where recording has replaced recollection? 

How does one record if you can't see what you are recording or hear it beceause there is no electricity to power the devices that enable  such information capture?

That is why the darkness in which I write this is comforting, as the low sounds of crickets animate the darkness, a symphony of fraternity between all creatures on Earth, but is also a problematic darkness beceause I cannot, at this moment, move from the pre-electrical age of civilisation to the electrical age by switching on a light, a journey of centuries traversed every time one flips a light switch.

I am compelled to remain, for now, in  the pre-electrical age of centuries ago beceause the people who have run this country, Nigeria, for decades, are convinced that Nigeria does not belong fully in.the 21st century, so primitive conditions, such as regular power outages, remain a part of most Nigerian's experience.

Like a camel smelling water from a vast distance in the desert's expanse, I can smell the salt of the great ocean, hear snatches of it's awesome roar as being and becoming clash, form and reform in the life and death of galaxies and  fireflies, ceaseless permutations emerging from that which is Nothing beacuse it is uitimately unknowable, as one cannot empty the waters of the ocean into a hole on the sea shore, as a child trying to achieve that was so told in a story by Augustine of Hippo.

In darkness or in light, in deprivation and enablement, the journey continues, the moth fascinated by the candle flame even as she seeks to plunge herself into it, so as to feel that utter heat in a union of body and flame even as one vanishes, consumed by the transformative fire.

 We salute Farid ud din Attar for this marvellous image from his Parable of the Birds.

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