Ecosystemic Microverses at the Campus of the Obafemi Awolowo University
Ile-Ife
An Encounter with Amazement
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju in wide eyed wonder
at the
naturalistic magnificence of the OAU Campus
What would people think if a child smiled instead of crying on being born? Why is it believed that crying must be the first reaction of every child, crying because of removal from the womb universe in which it has existed for months? What if the child becomes sensitive instead to its entry into broader possibilities, into a more expansive flow of air, more expansive spaces, and starts smiling?
I became like one such child on encountering the OAU campus. My experience suggests what Jaideva Singh describes as the Yoga of Amazement, the title of his translation of the idiosyncratic classic of Hindu Tantra, the Vijnana Bhairava, in which a person is enjoined to practice approaches of sensitizing oneself to oneself and the relationship between oneself and one's environment, taking time to be alert to the most minute of perceptions, so that the glory of being alive may be awakened and entry into the splendour underlying existence may be touched.
On coming out of where I'm staying on the campus, I understand myself to be at work by the very act of stepping out into the open air. The landscape calls to me to recognise its glory, evident in moving through every inch of space.
On waking, I've also begun work, as is my style even before this sojourn at OAU. At work because contemplation begins from waking, inspiring sensitivity to the emergence into the moment of awakening as entry into ''morning yet on creation day,'' as Chinua Achebe references an image from Igbo folklore in his essay collection of that title.
Lungs vitalizing, mind alert, limbs dynamizing, indicating that the miraculous creature on terra firma, rising from absence to the wonder of existence, is once again awake, mind roving, hungry to exercise its powers, a journeyer across creativities in which, he, a representative of his species, is called upon every second to justify his existence by transforming that existence into something beyond what is given by nature, beginning from alertness to its own being and the cosmos enabling that being, represented by air and earth, enabling breathing and moving within space.
This essay is about the intensification of this experience of wonder through a surprise encounter with a unique concentration of this environmental force, a micro space inspiring the idea of an ecosystemic microverse.
Photo by myself
Camera: iPhone 6s
Image edited on Photos app of an HP laptop
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge''
The concept of an ecosystemic microverse is an idea I have developed to describe an aspect of the landscape of the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria.
It represents the evocative powers some of the natural forms on the campus have for me, associative capacities deriving from their design by human beings or from their naturally occurring character, or both. This may emerge from the design strategy of constructing or enabling sections of landscape which are partly or physically separated from the larger landscape in which they belong but which may share characteristics of this bigger space. It may also occur in relation to other kinds of spaces.
This idea was stimulated by my encounter with a wonderful section of the university campus partially hidden from view on the left side of the road leading from Central Market, a relatively short space beginning after a junction there and culminating in Polaris Bank.
Walking from the market, and getting close to Oduduwa Hall, I saw to my left a superb site of mounds and undulating spaces covered in delicately beautiful grass, trees prominent within it, like sentinels guarding a zone of covert beauty.
Moving further on, I observed an entire landscape was hidden from view from the road by trees whose leaves concealed a richly vegetative world, partly visible from a gap in the screen. Stepping under a branch at this gap, I found myself in a universe of bird sound, amplifying my enclosure in an almost primeval cosmos, far removed in character from the paved road a few feet outside and from the commercial activity and building construction taking place on the other side of the asphalt.
''The morning stars threw down their spears and the angels of God shouted for joy,'' this combination of lines from the Bible and English poet William Blake's depictions of a celestial event evokes for me the sense of wonder I experienced as I stepped from one world into another in penetrating that space.
A place so uniquely exquisite, so atmospherically potent, so delightful in it's spatial and arboreal varieties, a zone secluded and pristine, evoking for me the beginning of time, it would require a master nature photographer, with the best kind of cameras, to adequately evoke the atmospheric force of this space.
Something similar applies to the atmospherics of various micro-spaces, as sections of the OAU landscape may be called. This is exemplified by the ambience generated by particular stretches of heavily wooded space, spatial relationships between trees generating unique atmospheres.
These are all the more striking in evoking forest space as they overlook the technological identity represented by the often smoothly tarred central highway of the campus and the vehicles speeding on it, conveying people between the main gate and the university's academic, residential and commercial centres, homo sapiens in its fervent motion in space and time, watched by their older brethren, the trees, whose lives are measured in larger cycles of time within smaller spans of space.
In my encounter with the primeval space I discovered near Oduduwa Hall on the OAU campus, I marvelled at the good fortune of those who might be using the building overlooking this wonder, but the building looked derelict, infrastructural maintenance being a challenge on the campus, its condition making me wonder if the building was in use.
My mind went to the ardent cultivation of such superb secluded micro spaces, but perhaps without the sheer lushness of this one, at the University of Cambridge. Such enclosed locations, Fellows' Gardens as they are called in Cambridge colleges as known to me, are reserved for distinguished scholars, fellows of the colleges, yet here was a glory such as this, open to everyone, even I, a passerby.
What a microverse of possibility, I thought, a universe secluded from the sprawling magnificence of the campus, different in scale from its majestic trees and the hills dominating the skyline, the hills a guardian race of giants, immobile in sentinel duty, watchful through aeons of time.
This sheltered region, so different from those hills and the glorious trees on the landscape, dramatises the balance of intimacy and grandeur represented by the OAU campus, a balance central to nature's spectrum of possibilities.
The immediate inspiration for the concept of an ecosystemic microverse is my encounter with the OAU garden. The more distant motivation for the idea is Ghanaian artist and philosopher Owusu-Ankomah's Microcron image, in which the idea of multiverses, multiple universes, is projected through a circular sequence of multicolored circles, the Microcron, its circular rhythms suggesting an infinity of possibilities.
It is such infinities the OAU landscape evokes for me, the sense of an expansion into ultimacy, possibilities endlessly unfolding, as the sound of crickets constellate into a core of vibration in my mind as I rise from sleep, a sonic dynamism akin to the intense oscillation of creative powers from which the universe emerged at the beginning of time, cricket music being a constant accompaniment at Kufoniyi hostel, my residence on the campus, an acoustic lyricism purest at night, resonant in the darkness, as with the lights out, I am immersed in this fraternity of sound, my insect brethren expressing their own nature in their own universe as I am doing in mine, a biological creature expanding its capabilities through technology, the laptop on which I am writing.
The concept of an ecosystemic microverse is also embodied for me by other trees and natural spaces I have encountered on the campus and in the city of Ife that fascinate me with their dramatisation of multifarious possibilities.
Such trees and environments are further emblematized for me by a mound in front of Oduduwa Hall in the OAU campus, a domed elevation on the left as one approaches that hall from the main gate, a place on which a tortoise and a crocodile, mythic figures in some African oral literatures, are poised like entities from a mythic tableau, enacting a cosmogonic encounter.
Two of the three trees on this mound are shaped, not only by the single vertical thrust of trees in general, but by the combination of this upward motion with twisted strands, at times coalescing into knots, almost making two trees in one, as the twisting fibres wrap themselves in sinuous dexterity round the trunk of the tree, a dynamic conglomeration rising from the roots sunk in earth, as smaller plants and other existents congregate at the base of the tree, culminating in a creative cacophony, a symmetrical network of leaves and branches crowning the entire ensemble.
''Dew, pour lightly, pour lightly
dew, pour heavily, pour heavily, so you may pour lightly,
thus were myriads of existence poured upon the Earth
uniting on Earth activated by purpose''
as runs my imperfect memory of ''Ayajo Asuwada,'' a beautiful Yoruba poem in Akinsola Akiwowo's ''Contributions To the Sociology of Knowledge From an African Oral Poetry,'' dramatizing ecosystemic and social unity through an account of the creation of the world.
This memory is evoked by the renditions, for me, in these living tree sculptures and landscapes, of the multiculturally occurring image of the Tree of Life, rising from the fecundative synthesis of soil, of nourishment from the earth and nutrients from the sun, as the tree generates its own means of living, evocative of roots of cosmic essence from which all possibilities are awakened and reawakened, multifarious potential suggested by a tree's multiple branches, myriad actualizations dramatized by the unfolding of existence as narratives of dynamism in space and time, an idea derived from what may be called The Tree of Odu, an image of Ifa, a Yoruba knowledge system, as depicted in Wande Abimbola's An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus.
I did not take any pictures on that day of my fateful discovery of the primal microverse, one way of naming the enchanted space I stumbled upon, leading me to construct the idea of an ecosystemic microverse. The battery of my phone, my only photographic equipment, was flat after earlier prolonged photography.
I returned the next day and took pictures. In the process, however, I realized that a primary approach to that place is contemplative attention, cultivating an immersive relationship in which I would be opened to the spirit of the place, its identity as a blend of the visual, the acoustic and the atmospheric.
Such attunement, facilitated by looking and listening in stillness, assimilating the atmosphere through my senses and mind in a quiet intensity of embodied power, drinking the place in with the totality of my being, as the space seems to seeps in through my pores as its air circulates in my lungs, would sensitize me to its unique actualization of relationships between animal and plant life, of the webs of being formed by connections between growing things, and its evocation, in my presence there, of the the human quest for the secrets of the universe, adapting Wole Soyinka's summation, in Myth, Literature and the African World, of Ijala, a primary Yoruba poetic form.
I also became aware that the unique visual power of this place and its distinctive atmospheric identity were perhaps beyond the capacity of my skill and photographic equipment to capture. It embodies an individualistic constellation of qualities of which the most sensitive harmony of experience, technical and artistic methods and technology would be required to enable its sharing with an audience through an image.
Should I hire a professional photographer? Would the person be attuned to photographing landscape? Is the task at stake not beyond the simpler issue of the quality of one's camera or one's capacities photographing other contexts beyond landscape? Should I take this as an opportunity for self development as a picturer of natural spaces and forms, the way the French Impressionists groomed themselves in painting the character of landscape at it appeared at different times of the day, this place becoming my place of sojourn at various times of the cycle from sunrise to sunset, experiencing its shifting identity as it metamorphoses between pre-dawn, dawn, midday, dusk and night?
In my exposure so far to nature photography, I have encountered only one book in which the photography is able to adequately dramatize these subtle potencies in nature, Janet and Colin Bord's Mysterious Britain, it's matchless black and white photography projecting an atmospheric resonance that I have not seen colour photography, in all it's lushness, as able to capture.
This essay has no images even though I took a good number of pictures I would like to show. How do I choose between this visual wealth, how compose the images in sequence? Perhaps better to let the ideas come to life first, and the images follow at a more restful time, when the surging force of ideations inspired by that discovery of the primal space has stabilized into a quiet flow.
Donation Request
Great thanks to all donors who have enabled my stay at Ife and those who have provided logistical guidance and moral support. Futher
donations would be appreciated to enable further stay at Ife and proceeding to Benin-City, to sudy its great culture of sacred trees, groves and forests, particularly within urban space.
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