Oracle Quest 8
Integrating Divergences
Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle XII
Central Panel
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
The time is a thousand years from now. The Oracle series of mixed media works by the 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, first presented in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows, and adapting the visual structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, have long been missing, rumoured to have been scattered to unknown locations across the world in order to prevent the arcane knowledge they embody being available to any one person,so dangerous these perceptions are whispered to be.
Someone, however, determines to track them down and unearth the mysterious cognition they enable.. This series, combining art criticism, art theory and broader philosophical reflection within the compressed evocative and narrative power of the short story and rich in detailed visual and verbal engagements with each element in each of these works of art, represent this person's account of the quest.
Divergences and complementarities of meaning between the circle and the square.
The central panel of Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle XII
A face gazed at me, its serene beauty mirrored by the symmetry of the circle within which it was positioned. The Yoruba orisa or deity Esu, in the form of an imitation of an exquisite head from the Yoruba city of Ife, had been displaced from his conventional place at the top of Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle constructs and at the apex of the opon ifa, the symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge which inspired the Oracles, to the centre of a circle at the lower section of a rectangle.
The relocation of the circle from its previous role in other Oracle creations as subsuming the entire construct, to the lower centre of the flat space, reducing its size, foregrounds its structural perfection by focusing the eye of the viewer on a tightly circumscribed space.
This visual focus is amplified by the centrality of the circle within the larger expanse constituted by the rectangle, a centrality highlighted by the culmination in the circle's centre of a cascade of multi-coloured cylindrical woven threads and an intricate vertical design.
This visual centrality is further enhanced by the assortment of objects in the centre of the circle, the circle's lyric symmetry emphasized by the procession of abstract and figurative figures that define its circumference.
The central panel of Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle XII
Esu's location at the centre of the circle invites reflection on implications of Esu as orisa of intersections, crossroads of possibility bringing together various practices, conceptions and disciplines, diverse forms of being and modes of knowledge, as these correlations are embraced within an integrative constellation suggested by the circle.
This is part of the working hypothesis of Okechukwu Nwandiani in his investigations into the relationship between Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle XII and the prehistoric Ikom monoliths in what used to be Nigeria's Cross River State.
He is convinced that Onobrakpeya's Oracle series represent a visual transposition of the intersection between the Nsibidi symbol system of the Cross River region and the Ifa tradition, a conjunction represented by the Ikom monoliths, themselves a variant of Nsibidi, their embodiment of a conjunction between Nsibidi and Ifa demonstrated by the designs inscribed on them and their spatial configurations.
We are at Nwandiani 's office at Akwashi University, examining the central panel of what, from its picture in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya : Masks of the Flaming Arrows, was originally a panel of three separate constructs collectively named Oracle XII, the central panel being a gift to the university from an anonymous donor.
We discuss his theories. "I am convinced I am on the edge of a massive cognitive breakthrough", he enthuses. "Onobrakpeya's Oracles constitute a language of their own, a language constructed of relationships between shape and colour.
This language is another version of his self-created Ibiebe script. Like Nsibidi that exists in the multiple forms of the symbolism of human physical action, script, abstract and figurative and quasi-figurative shapes, verbal expression and object arrangement, Onobrakpeya's visual language is multivalent, both scriptic and visual, colour and object based", he declares.
"How does this relate to the Ikom monoliths?", I ask. "Clues in the Oracles, as evident from pictures of them, from this example in my office, the central panel of Oracle XII, from the inscriptions on the monoliths and their spatial organisation suggest a relationship", he states.
"I think the circular organisation of the monoliths on some sites relate to astronomical configurations, corresponding to the circles in Onobrakpeya's Oracles and circular constructions in opon ifa.
The face of Esu looking out of the centre of the circle in Oracle XII may dramatize the capacity of human consciousness to integrate various bodies of knowledge within a cosmological framework evoked by astronomical patterns, these patterns represented on the circumference of the Oracles' circles by elegant figurative and abstract designs", he concludes.
Most fascinating. I don't understand the details of why he has made these links between Onobrakpeya's Oracles and the Ikom monoliths but the ingenuity and scope of Nwandiani's ideas are intriguing.
I turn my attention back to the striking beauty of Oracle XII. The multi-coloured woven threads hanging from top to bottom enliven the space with startling colour in the midst of the orange that suffuses the surface of the structure, the central white textile weave bifurcating dramatically to frame the objects underneath it as its colour contrasts sharply with the multiple luminosities of the textile elongations on either side of the white bifurcation.
Cowries and various metallic and other objects, at the centre of which is the Ife head, shape the nucleus of the circle as two slender, delicately inscribed vertical panels frame the entire construct.
Nwandiani's theory makes sense, in a speculative spirit. The placid expression of the Ife head that stands for Esu within the perfection of the circle could evoke a contemplative equanimity from within which the self tries to integrate its cognitive scope and the unknown into a totality akin to the Zulu conception of ultimate knowledge represented by the circularity of the calabash, evoking the integration of past, present and future, the particular and the universal, life and death, space, time and eternity into a cohesive whole, as described by Mazisi Kunene in Anthem of the Decades. A great vision to which people have aspired to in various ways across time and space. Is it possible of fulfillment? What validity is demonstrated by claims of its accomplishment?
When we are able to develop an equation that unifies all the laws that describe the character of the cosmos we shall then know the mind of God, the physicist Stephen Hawkins states in A Brief History of Time.
If God exists, could the mind of such an ultimate referent be circumscribed by the character of the physical cosmos and the means through which this character is described by human beings, however far reaching human insight into this cosmic configuration?
An intelligence so far above human consciousness that we are only able to grasp it in terms of the crude forms represented by its dimmest expressions which are the best our most exalted perceptions are able to reach, another physicist, Albert Einstein, describes his conception of God.
Through their senses human beings experience the outward surfaces of things, and even through their minds, are unaware of the inward substances of phenomena, much less the substance of God who can be known only through the perfection of the laws that regulate the cosmos, Isaac Newton, another physicist, declares in his Principia Mathematica.
These perspectives from some of the deepest thinkers across centuries of the discipline suggest the scope of efforts to integrate the aspiration to a comprehensive understanding of the cosmos with the quantitative systems through which this goal is pursued in physics.
Later that day, I take a walk amongst a circle of Ikom monoliths. Their silent eloquence, expressed by their forms and organisation, as they stand rooted in earth but point to the sky, lend themselves to associations with a conception of order unifying the celestial and terrestrial worlds.
The association with Oracle XII is not difficult to reach, the circular structure of the organisation of the monoliths, the circle of opon ifa iconography and the circle at the visual centre of Oracle XII which the opon ifa circle inspires, are identical geometric forms in various media, created to suggest an idea of perfection, a conception through which the human mind represents both its sensitivity to its own potential as capable of conceiving and aspiring to perfection and the relationship of this aspiration to the world beyond the self.
The Esu evoking Ife head at the centre of the circle of Oracle XII suggests humanity, the head being the physical centre of the kind of consciousness that defines the human being, as embodying the ability to integrate contraries in order to perceive their unity, a capacity vital for grasping whatever meaning is accessible in the often puzzling but glorious multifariousness of the universe.
Also published on Facebook.
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