Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
A work by by Joseph Eze at the intersection of classical Nigerian female arts of hair styling, dress, body inscriptions, Nigerian conceptions of the arcane feminine, particularly witchcraft, and post-classical print media
It was Science 101, a fascinating lecture on fundamental laws of science.
The teacher, Chinyere Olagbairo, was in top form, expounding on matter-energy convergence, space-time and the quantum nothing.
She turned her back to the class, raising her hand to write on the board.
At that moment, instead of her smart skirt, I saw a white wrapper around her waist.
On her bare back, I perceived fascinating but undecipherable scripts, in red and black, shaping the groove that divided the symmetry of her upper rear, foregrounding the vitality of her skin.
A neat line had emerged in the centre of the thickly massed weave of her hair, the hair spiralling left and right in two massive knots.
The knot on the left was powerfully coiled in the centre of its outflowing, as two white birds perched on the knot on the right.
A plant grew out of the groove at the centre of her back, under the wrapper.
Within a square space at her right buttock, in the interior of the shadowed space, sat a green orange.
At her left buttock, from within a round, dark opening, a white bird looked out, a plant stretching out one half of its stem to grow from that aperture and another half to grow from a smaller, circular concavity directly on top of the lower entrance.
What was I seeing?
Something triggered by the lecture on scientific law?
Was I looking into another dimension, an inverse mirror image of the one I had been in before this strange sight, another universe where the laws of science are different and where these conjunctions of humanity and nature, of strange shapes of the human form are possible?
I heard my name called in the teacher's voice.
I blinked to find the lecture was almost completed, the teacher dressed as normal, and I was staring at the board while others were writing.
Nothing is superior to knowledge.
Knowledge is everything because knowledge is the primary expression of consciousness.
Consciousness constitutes awareness.
Consciousness is the self.
More intimate than the skin on one's body.
This knowledge that is consciousness can be represented by words but not encapsulated by signs.
Where do humanity and nature converge?
At the intersection of life and matter, of the composition of the human body by earth and air and of the mind by awareness.
Reshape the mind, so, that like a bird, it can fly.
But, is the mind not already in flight in the fact of the existence of its dynamic self?
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