Invoking Truth at the Intersection of Possibilities
by a
Philosopher at the Edge of Knowledge
Adapting the Luminous Writings of Nimi Wariboko
The flame at the heart of the self, from which concentric circles radiate outward and converge inward
Sean Woodward's Fires of Erzulie Dantor
Surrounded by the tools of his trade, texts of knowledge ancient and new, he pondered where he was and how he had got there.
He was certainly far from Aboneme, far from the child of the struggling years. He was not far, though, from his mother who had nurtured that child and still nurtured him from her place in their hometown, her love reaching him across the ocean.
He was at a crossroads. Where was he to go from here?
Old forms of knowledge no longer thrilled him. What there was to know, he had learnt. He had arrived at a cliff, emptiness below.
He had surveyed the island of the known, remaining unfulfilled.
Beyond the horizon of human knowledge, is there, can there, be anything more?
Should he plunge off the cliff, and see what happens?
His soul called out in the depths of silence, in wordless speech that may be so rendered:
I call upon truth
interminable search for the proper mode of human existence
Remembering he had taken root in a place far from the zone of origin:
adapting to new places and periods
deeply rooted in history
Recalling that without change truth is dead:
poetry and knowledge renewed
enriching essence
glowing at its edges without abandoning its core.
Knowledge at play
sacred knowledge in a playful mode
signature of human creativity
totally given to its freely evolving potentialities
resisting any finite form of knowledge claiming to be infinite.
Anchored in history
yet emanating knowledge
improvisational
experimental
revisable.
His love of music speaks:
Like the sound of jazz
never fully scored
each performance a free play of recursivity, embellishment and enactment.
A quest for infinity:
Capturing
potentiality
inexhaustibility
the infinite set of possibilities that is the sacred
the 256 and the infinite
sixteen different paths
of knowledge poetry and its spreading branches.
In knowledge arcane and commonplace:
Concave and convex, bright and dark
the fall of the eight half-seeds
facilitating transformative encounter with an infinite set of possibilities
attending to their contextual realities and situations.
The soul declares its purpose:
Birds come to eat the grapes made as if real by the painter
the curtain on the wall may be mistaken for a door
may we see the reality behind the image
the image that leads to the reality
may we master this complex yet simple logic
even if we spend decades learning to understand the finer edges of your wisdom.
A and non- A
A, non-A and non-non-A
this, non-this and non-non-this
truth-telling beyond binary logics
charting pathways
endless depths of multidimensionality
across and beyond Earth
within and beyond space and time.
A gentle voice responded- "what do you want?"
Things were clearer to him now. He spoke into the rich silence:
I call upon you
at the crossroads
uncomfortable but fecund
opposing binary opposition
oscillating between spheres of knowledge
between
economics and ethics
economics and religion
economics and philosophy
ethics and theology
philosophy and theology
social history and ethics
social sciences and theology
and present and not-yet-present knowledges.
Where my soul finds deep peace
wrestling in a contact zone of disciplines that is neither/ nor.
The fragile, fleeting, and slippery para-site of erotic, new, refreshing insights and lights
the uncanny non-place
birthing the underivably new in history
the frontier,
the edge of knowledge that is always approaching and withdrawing approach.
I call upon the living and the departed
my teachers, past and present.
I call upon the distant sound of the footsteps of coming generations
whose coming is expected
and whose joy
in inheriting and encountering works and ideas
left for them by their own deeply excites me.
I call upon you in the name of the inspiration
I receive
from the generations
who came before me
who are with me
and who will come after me
the not-yet born,
they whose coming is expected.
I call upon you in the name of this collective of power
the totality the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.
I call upon you in the name of my joy
at you
my brothers and sisters
my children
who have been
who are
and who will be
committed to the quest for truth rooted in the public intercourse of rigorous ideas
carrying forward current intellectual questions and debates
challenging the ideas bequeathed to you
as I salute your accomplishments of this task transmitted by scholarship.
I call upon you in the name of the forbearance and guidance of all
walking and working with me in this unhomely space
searching in the darkness for the loose end of Being's fabric
unwrapping its hidden breach of novum and thymos.
"So, is the way clear to you now?" the voice responded.
"I call upon you", he answered, in affirmation, "in the name of the womblike chaos of the creative process."
Sources
Italicised text, edited from the prose originals to their current verse form, and at times slightly modified, come from the following works by philosopher Nimi Wariboko-
From "interminable search for the proper mode of human existence" to "truth-telling beyond binary logics" is from Nimi Wariboko's review of Jacob Olupona and Rowland Abodun's edited Ifá Divination: Knowledge, Power, and Performance in the journal Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft. Vol 13. No.3. Summer 2018. 307-309.
From "at the crossroads/uncomfortable but fecund" to "walking and working with me in this unhomely space" comes from Wariboko's acknowledgements pages in The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory. New York: SUNY Press, 2018. IX-X.
"searching in the darkness for the loose end of Being's fabric/unwrapping its hidden breach of novum and thymos" is from Wariboko's The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit. Grand Rapids: Erdmans, 2011. 170.
"the womblike chaos of the creative process" is from The Pentecostal Principle. 53.
Purpose and Context
Dialogue Between Aspects of Being
This is a presentation of selections from Nimi Wariboko's work in terms of a fictional imagining of possibility in his life. This imaginative visualization is related, in the reference to his hometown and his mother, to a degree of fact. This combination of fact and fiction is conjoined to a reworking of some of his writings.
The goal of this effort is the dramatization of what I see as the sensitivity of Wariboko's work to aspects of philosophical and spiritual ground zero, a fundamental, originating ground of spiritual and philosophical quest, here narrativised in terms of the sense of the limitations of human knowledge, even of human cognitive capacity generally, within the immensity of existence.
The image created here owes its inspiration to the idea of dialogue with aspects of being that are intimately accessible yet not always obvious.
This includes the idea of dialogue with the essence of one's self, one's soul. It also includes dramatizations, in magical fiction, of human encounter with non-terrestrial forms of sentience at the boundary of the mind between dimensions. The central image in this magical fictional context is that of the scholar magician Faust from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, who is depicted as experiencing a sense of inadequacy of human knowledge similar to that portrayed in the lines above.
Complementing the Faustian picture are such depictions of human dealings with uncanny forms of sentience as in Jonathan Stroud's novel The Ring of Solomon, in which the magician communicates with a spirit from a non-terrestrial dimension through a ring, the spirit responding in a gentle voice that may be correlated with the Biblical image of the "still, small voice" of God, the latter itself representative of the idea that the essence of self, the soul, often also communicates with the human being in such a voice, inspiring without imposing itself, easily unacknowledged if the hearer is insensitive to its gentle presence.
In all, these influences on what has been constructed above from Wariboko's work suggest an effort to evoke both mystery and intelligibility, a sense of the cosmos and human life as both supernaturalistic and yet illuminatable, and, with human existence directable, to a significant degree, by reason and human will, values I understand Wariboko's work as dramatizing.
Evoking the Numinous in Wariboko's Thought through Alignment with Sean Woodward's Fires of Erzulie Dantor
The verbal dramatization of the dynamic of the individual in dialogue with the core of their self is amplified by conjunction with Sean Woodward's painting Fires of Erzulie Dantor, a visualization of the great figure of Erzulie Dantor, the Voodoo Goddess described as she whose invocation before the Haitian Revolution helped to fire what is perhaps the only successful slave rebellion in history.
The painting's juxtaposition of a richly visualized flame and the outlines of a human face is used here to suggest a person, represented by the face, in dialogue with the core of the self, evoked by the fire, while the concentric circles emanating from and encasing the flame evoke the cosmos as engaged with from the self as the centre of human perceptual capacity and the idea of the self and the heart of the cosmos as unified in a rhythm of emanation and integration.
Colour rhythms and harmonies of line, in tandem with elegantly esoteric script, evoke a sense of the alluring beauty of the arcane, a contemplative force brought alive by a luminous imagination in exquisite command of its visual tools.
Invoking Truth
The idea of invoking truth in the central text of this essay comes from the splendid poem "An Igbo Diviner Invokes Truth Before Consulting His Bones" translated by Romanus Egudu in Black Orpheus and perhaps published in Egudu's anthology, Igbo Oral Poetry, a poem I read in the essay on African Literature by Ulli Beier and Gerald Moore in the Encyclopedia Britannica 1971 edition
The entire discourse is is configured in terms of a dialogue between the philosopher and his soul. In this context truth is invoked by the depths of the self.
The quest for truth is depicted in a dynamic form which I see as permeating Wariboko's work. This dynamism is dramatized by reworking quotations from Wariboko's essay on the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge in terms of an invocation of truth. I understand his essay on Ifa as representing his own understanding of cognitive quest at its best, a perception that permeates his work.
At the Conjunction of the Known, the Unknown, the Knowable and the Unknowable
I try to bring home to the reader this pervasive engagement with dynamic knowing in search of truth in terms of an individual wrestling with a search for direction in the face of the tension between the known, the unknown, the knowable and the unknowable.
This tension between cognitive possibilities is depicted in the dialogue in a manner fed by various inspirational streams. Most intimate of these influences perhaps is the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner who, in his interview with Leo Donovan, "Living into Mystery: Karl Rahner's Reflections on his 75th Birthday," distinguishes between "the unfortunate remainder of what is not yet known" and which may be known, a knowing that yet constitutes the island of the known in the sea of the unknown, an image he uses in Foundations of Christian Faith, and, as he puts it in the interview, the "ultimate goal of knowledge that comes to itself when it is with the Incomprehensible One."
Invocational Resonances
Interdimensional Intersections
Resonating in relation to the Rahnerian vision as this telescopes insights from various multi-cultural and temporal contexts, is the similarity between Wariboko's image of his quest for knowledge and various forms of spiritual invocation, an association I try to evoke in the structuring of the text.
Wariboko's depiction of his scholarly vocation in terms of a conjunction of disciplines, existing and non-existent, yet emerging into being, between "present and not-yet-present knowledges", "The fragile, fleeting, and slippery para-site of erotic, new, refreshing insights and lights/the uncanny non-place /birthing the underivably new in history /the frontier, /the edge of knowledge that is always approaching and withdrawing approach," "Where my soul finds deep peace/wrestling in a contact zone of disciplines that is neither/ nor" recalls for me efforts to evoke the point of convergence of dimensions represented in continental and diaspora African spirituality by the image of the crossroads, often abstracted in terms of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines.
This image is summatively described by Leslie Desmangles in "African Interpretations of the Christian Cross in Vodun." It is depicted with definitive force in Norma Rosen's "Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship" in a manner representative of the associative possibilities of this symbolism. It is discussed by Rowland Abiodun et al in Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought in terms of the conjunction of its interdimensional symbolism and the invocation of presences of members of the cognitive fellowship of Ifa, an invocation of the "living, the departed and the unborn,", as recurrently put by Wole Soyinka on the same concept in such texts as Myth, Literature and the African World and Death and the King's Horseman.
These are interpretations of existence of the kind Wariboko also draws upon in framing his acknowledgements in The Split God from where his lines in the central text here are drawn.
Embodiments of Transactions Between Modes of Being and Forms of Knowledge
The individualization of the idea of transactions between cognitive possibilities evoked by Wariboko's depiction of a "contact zone...that is neither/nor," " birthing the underivably new in history", "the edge of knowledge that is always approaching and withdrawing approach" is also evocative, for me, of figures who embody such transactions.
These include personages from various cosmologies, such as the Yoruba Eshu, the Igbo Agwu and the Fulani Kaidara, all embodying intersections between various forms of being and modes of knowledge, forever in motion from one place to another, and, as with Eshu and Kaidara, often in disguise, testing the edges of people's knowledge, expanding people's cognitive possibilities by revealing themselves in unexpected contexts.
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