The Metaphysics of a Beard
Dele Jegede
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
A magnificent picture- Edumare who covered his beard with camwood chalk....Why is the top black and the bottom white?
Aaaahhhhh.....that is the question....ever ancient and ever new....
What do those dense tendrils of white have to tell us?
They must be telling a story among themselves, to us and with us, a story in which we partake, as we partake of the moisture in the air though we are unaware of it, the moisture of the air that passes through the dense mass of white, keeping it cool.
If only we knew their language.
How does one learn their language?
Take one of them-must be done with permission of the owner and only after a seven day purification fast-or what I am about to describe will not work- take one, just one, boil it in water seasoned with pepper and a leaf known as oganyin, whose botanical name is lefretuprade isimus, add salt and any seasoning of your taste and drink the entire broil over a seven day period, doing this only at the depth of night, as the night is sunk deep into itself and the new day is beginning to roll into re-emergence.
Be advised. Simple, even simplistic though it seems, this process is not to be undertaken lightly.
Each strand of that hair is what is known as a diostrogenous nucleic spiral, a celluar form that acts as a concentration of experience and knowledge.
The cooking process tends to restructure its components, enabling them to be easily assimilated into the blood stream.
The leaf contains a powerful solvent that greatly accelerates the process.
The preparation through fasting is to cleanse the body of any elements that could obstruct its entry into the blood stream and its regeneration of the body's cognitive mechanisms.
Drinking the broil at night enables assimilation when the body's internal system is responding to the rhythms of the earth and is likely to be at rest on account of the onset of might.
The seven day process of ingestion is to enable control of the entry of this potent substance into the body and control its regeneration of the system into which it enters.
Taking permission from the owner begins the process of unlocking the bonds that bind the nucleic strands that constitute the cells.
These nucleic structures are keyed to the mental patterns of the human being who has grown the hair, the entire human body actually being a unified cognitive unit.
"Sensitivity to the signals of the body/mind is the magical power of the mature person", a translation of the Yoruba proverb or wisdom nugget "ifunra loogun agba"-using what is likely to be inadequate writing of the Yoruba proverb, suggests this understanding of the body/mind as a unified cognitive system.
Be advised that even the possessor of the hair may not undertake this ritual process lightly.
Who can sustain the concentrated force of all their memories and all their knowledge at once?
If the scope of these memories and the range, depth and power of this knowledge are of a particular caliber, have reached or even more significant, have crossed a particular threshold, a stage suggested by the Yoruba proverb quoted above by Oluwaole Oguntokun "Irin Ajo Eda Po" which he translates as "Many earth lives within one", the effect could be even more difficult to imagine.
The beauty of it is that after seven agonizing days of neural bombardment, as the fluid amplifies neural power and multiplies neural connections at an exponential pace, this cognitive flood begins to organize itself into patterns, a carpet of awesomely intricate design that reflects the cosmos, as a still lake mirrors the sky.
Many will not believe this summation. Through unbelief is sacred knowledge protected.
Consummatum est!
The picture is so powerful.
The wonderful character of the shot, looking up at the face almost from below, highlights the beard while emphasizing the map of becoming the face may be described as assuming over the years.
The picture says so much about the self perception of the owner of the beard, a person who is clearly proud of the distance travelled, and of the good fortune to have been able to travel that distance, a person psychologically embedded in a cultural understanding in which being able to navigate through such a distance implies a distillation of awareness unavailable otherwise.
Dion Fortune, the Western occult theorist, depicts human life as an experiential process, the meaning of which is distilled into the higher, immortal self and thereafter assimilated by the Ultimate One, who grows through assimilating the experience of those that Ultimacy enables to exist in the first place.
Perhaps such a glistening white forest on the chin mature enough to carry it might just be a veritable network of distillations, a complex of nerves carrying knowledge in a manner not yet discerned by science, after all aren't the scientists learning new things every day?
May such an idea not be suggested by the ese ifa, an Ifa story, that depicts Olodumare, the Supreme Fount of Being and Knowing, to adapt Wole Soyinka, rubbing his beard with chalk in order to assume both age and immortality, as described by Bolaji Idowu in Olodumare : God in Yoruba Belief?
A symbolic expression of the idea of that One sharing with us our concerns for both ageing and immortality?
Bessie Head states in A Question of Power that humans too often look for the divine beyond the human being, thereby creating a platform that paradoxically enables the freedom to treat others humans negatively, since the holy is seen as above, not within the human self.
If we were to seek, however, human evocations of the numinous as evoked by Bruce Onabrakpeya's installations, paintings and prints, for example, his distillations of Urhobo shrine aesthetics into a concentration of visual power that boggles the mind with a sense of spatial extension where forms of being converge beyond the visible plane, beyond the seen but mediated through the three dimensional correlates visible to us, what better template than such a visage as this?
I would place beside the Dele Jegede image above, the Onabrakpeya divination circle/shrine structure, the okpon iku, shown below, the okpon iku photograph being described as taken by Dele Jegede himself, a seeming coincidence that links image of self and image of the other through threads of unanticipated possibility, evoking a divinatory nexus of the kind the okpon iku is suggestive of addressing under the attentions of a diviner.
Why juxtapose the picture of the face of Dele Jede and that of the okpon iku?
Both forms, the work of art that is the human being, and the imaginative creation that is the shrine installation, both evoke something enigmatic, almost numinous.
"Numinous" is one of my favourite words. What do I mean by it in this context?
Both forms are composed by a constellation of symbols, symbols whose meaning no information is provided on.
How is the face of Dele Jegede a symbol in this instance?
The human face is always symbolic because it suggests possibilities of awareness that are not always readily discernible by looking at it, but which shape the appearance of the face nevertheless.
This factor of the symbolic is amplified by the expressive character of a face, and even more so when the expression is difficult to read.
Clearly, Dele Jegede's face here is profoundly expressive of something.
The forthright gaze of the eyes, both externally directed and inwardly sensitive, drawing from pools of experience in the tension between the reality encountered with time and the appearances that would have greeted the child he was when he first emerged from his journey from the unknown to earth through his mother's womb, evokes a sense of something very, very meaningful, a sense amplified by the majestic cloud of white hair crowning his chin, suggesting that he has truly been on another long journey since that primal emergence as the little limbed child smooth with innocence of growth of body and of mind, but what is this value, what coruscation of meaning composed of emotion and thought is projected by this most evocative face?
I dont know.
I can only speculate.
The okpon iku is visually rich, dramatic in its ordering, enigmatic in its signification, all qualities projected, in a different way, by Dele Jegede's face in the picture.
Both forms, the shrine/divination circle and the human face, share the structural relationships that amplify the possibility of their being seen as mutually resonant, the conceptual form represented by the okpon iku enabled as an abstract dramatization of the more directly concrete form represented by the human face.
They both operate in terms of a balance between a vertical and a horizontal axis, the verticality in the face being the structure of the face in terms of a balance between forehead, nose and lips, in a vertical alignment.
The horizontal configuration is the organization of the face in terms of spatial relationships between the left and right sides of the face in bilateral symmetry, a symmetry highlighted by the left and right positioning of the eyes.
The horizontal axis in the divination circle/shrine is implicit in the relationship between the vertical structure of beads in the centre and the circumference of the circle.
The inscriptionary stations, a sequence that travels round the circle, suggests an effort to communicate something that could be eloquent to those who understand the significatory codes, but the visual form itself does not tell us what this message is.
We are left with the mystery of abstraction in colour and shape, compelling to eye and mind, but assimilable only as enigmatic but potent presence.
What may we get when we blend face and shrine?
Perhaps we get a balance of the abstract and the concrete, image and idea, as the image of Dele Jegede's face is fused with that of the okpon iku.
What may be the implications of that?
I wish I could state precisely what those implications are.
I have reflected on that for days, realizing I have arrived at a critical point in this essay, which was begun spontaneously, and in fun, on seeing the picture of Dele Jegede's most evocative face.
Dele Jegede's name became resonant for me through his cartoons in a Nigerian newspaper, most likely the Daily Times, in the 1970s or 80s.
His name evokes for me the combination of the irreverent fun of his cartoons, a general impression that persist in vague memories of their expressive lines, even though I have no memory of the specific subjects of the cartoons and the rollicking rhythm of his name, that goes so well in my mind with the spirit of play the cartoons represent. The rhythm of his name sounds to me like a musical instrument being played in spirit of fun.
My encounter years later to with his contribution to the wonder inspiring book on Bruce Onabrakpeya, Spirit in Ascent, where I first encountered the amazing power of Onabrakpeya, became fused with my growing imaginative and emotional synthesis of what his name conjures.
I later encountered him in very pleasant circumstances on Facebook in the 200s when he referred appreciatively to my postings on the USAAfrica Dialogues series Google group, a scholarly zone.
I was struck that such an illustrious personality, now a professor of art history, would have taken note of my efforts to use the relatively new medium of the listserve as a scholarly platform for original scholarship and creative writing and remark to me on his admiration of my efforts.
The growing cluster of cognitive connections around him in my mind expanded through my reading of a moving statement by him on his own personal life.
Now here I am playing with the image of his beard, being inspired by his playful , appreciative and perhaps bemused response to take the idea much further in play, only to watch it expand itself into something rooted in imaginative play but which I have to admit has moved beyond sheer fun into making, perhaps, a metaphysical statement derived from following the impressions from the images where those impressions have led.
Where are they leading now, in considering the implications of fusing the picture of Dele Jegede's face with that of the okpon iku?
I'm not sure I can put my finger on it, but various possibilities come to mind, relating that imaginative action of fusing both images with a diverse set of ideas in art, in its relationship with spirituality, ideas unified for me by my contemplating this possibility of imaginative fusion.
The first impression is the sublime images of Buddhas, their faces evoking the ultimate wisdom they are depicted as reaching.
Would the fusion of the human face in this instance and that shrine/divinatory form evoke such a conception, a form of sublimity?
Another is the fantastic description of Emenike's experience in looking into the face of the priest of the deity Amadioha in classical Igbo religion in Elechi Amadi's novel, The Concubine.
Awesome. Truly numinous in a manner both compelling and deeply disturbing in the spirit of the unforgettable description of the concept of the numinous in Webster's Third New International Dictionary as a invisible but majestic presence that inspires both dread and fascination and constitutes the non-rational element in vital religion, a definition I that has memorized itself in me through the sheer fascination with the formulation.
Do I then try to render in words the outcome of this imaginative visual fusion in terms of impressions communicated by a classical African mask, a representation of a spirit but embodied by its human wearer in terms of an impression both benign and awesome?
How could I do this?
Do I go to Christopher Okigbo's wonderful evocation of a vast countenance out of a phantasmagoric combination of geometric forms at the climax of mystical ascent in his poetic cycle Labyrinths?
Was it not fitting that Okigbo should be an inspiration here, on account of the similarity of his description with the marvelous Hindu Yantra theory which depicts being in terms of a history of the anthropomorphic, the geometric and the sonic?
Was I moving closer to such ontological fusions through this imaginative path?
It then occurred to me that the beard motif I was relating to metaphysical contexts is something I have encountered before, in Jewish mysticism where the tension between the divine transcendence of materiality and the need of the human mind to concretize the transcendent the transcendent is mediated through the fantastic symbolism of the beard of God.
Why so?
It has become clear that the beard motif is not new as I had thought when playing with it.
There is a wonderful image of the beard of God in Jewish mysticism, where the tension between the divine transcendence of materiality and the need of the human mind to concretize the transcendent is mediated through the image of the beard of God.
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