The Osogbo Matrix and the Mystical Vision : An Autobiographical Fiction
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
The Osogbo Matrix and the Mystical Vision
An Autobiographical Fiction
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Mummy: What is Toyin doing in Osogbo? Having spent so long in England purportedly studying, at so much expense and great sacrifice to those affected, he returned without a PhD and no location within an academic context, even though he had left Nigeria as a rising academic.
Is this Osogbo venture not a matter of shame?
How can a person leave the University of Benin for the University of Kent, Kent for the University of London, London to live in Cambridge and now resolve he wants to spend a good part of his time in Osogbo?
Sister: The petrel is so called beceause it is named after Peter, Jesus' disciple who dared briefly to walk on water in imitation of his teacher.The petrel travels long distances at sea, like Peter crossed the boundaries of human possibility by walking on water for the brief time that his faith enabled him.
Our brother is never at rest. Something is calling him that even he might not fully understand. Imagine a far flying sea bird such as the petrel forced to live in a cage. A horrifying image.
Mummy: Really? So leaving the glories of Kent, London and exposure to such an academic capital as Cambridge and refusing to return to such locations, even to Harvard, which he yearned towards at one time, or any of the world resounding universities or to any other one anywhere else to at least find a footing if only to be called "Dr" as befitting of his intelligence but now spending a good degree of time in Osogbo is akin to flying high like a sea bird?
Jesus! What has the dust of Osogbo got to do with the oceans of knowledge represented by the yet uncounted books Toyin spends his money on, the marks of his dangerous lust for knowledge?
Uncle: The whole thing baffles me. He has a friend, one Nimi Wariboko,a professor in the US, the kind of person any family or mother would be proud of, a person who overcame huge obstacles in making a clearly defined name of global standing for himself. Is that not the kind of role Toyin should have aspired towards?
Yet he flies about from one social media site to another, writing things the ultimate value of which cannot be assessed and which give him no social recognition and questionable economic returns.
Sister: But he earns significant money through those social media initiatives.
Uncle: Accidental. Money earned by accident. The accident of discovery by clients who see the skills from his social media work.
But is not more respectable to have an academic job as suits a person dedicated to learning?
Sister: Even if Toyin wanted that, its rather late for that. He has also since lost interest in that path. He is happy on social media. That does not mean he can't expand his publication scope to more conventional forms such as books.
Uncle: Toyin once claimed that he had a vision in connection with the Ogba forest in Benin-City in which a woman laid her hand on his head.
Has that experience not transformed him negatively, rendering him unable to fit neatly into society?
Sister: The Ogba forest story emerged in the context of his wanderings in search of knowledge. Yes, he had degrees behind him and was in an academic job at the time. But have you forgotten the years of struggle before he got those degrees?
Mummy: His refusal to continue with schooling? Claiming he wanted to educate himself instead of going to the university? Taking on jobs as a labourer and a restaurant server in order to support himself in the process?
Sister: Exactly. I begin to think he should have been allowed to continue on that path instead of being forced to go to the university, as was eventually done.
Mummy: Hm! You are wishing for us the elongation of that terrible experience.
My own son, my first child, refusing to attend university, remaining at the level of a secondary school certificate?
I, a teacher, a BA in Education/History, a lawyer, all achieved after I had had all three of you?
For years I did not know what to do.
Going from church to traditional spiritualists to psychologists, seeking a solution to my son's terrible resolve. The pain of the mere thought....
Sister: Ironically, the world is changing so that academic qualifications are increasingly having less relevance.
Mummy: Where? In Nigeria?
Sister: Globally. The advent of AI, complementing the Information Revolution, implies that continous self education is going to increasingly be the way forward.
Mummy: Hmm...then why did Toyin eventually get all that schooling? Three MA programs in different parts of the world and two PhD attempts, both truncated? Why not take the road to the conclusion?
Sister: Why continue on a road the end of which one has reached? What of if the path has terminated and there is no way beyond that?
With Toyin's level of productivity in his social media writings, clearly he has found something nourishing him at a deep level.
Ironically, was Socrates, foundational ancestor in Western philosophy, not a philosopher of the marketplace, like Toyin is a scholar of the online "dugbe", as the famous Ibadan market is called, its name fitting for the cacophonous meeting point of people from all over the world?
Toyin read something interesting from his friend Wariboko to me the other day which may be adapted to describing his own orientation, something along the lines of :
"I am a philosopher at the junctions- the junctions of economics and ethics, spirituality and philosophy, existing and not yet existing knowledges, an unhomely place where I am at home".
Uncle: At this rate, you will be calling up Esu, "uncomfortable in the verandah but can at last stretch himself in the groundnut shell" in order to explain Toyin's restlessness.
Sister: You could not have put it better.
Mummy: Let's pray for him then. The moth seeking to know the nature of the fire has no rest till it has tasted the searing flame. May he survive the blaze and return to tell the story.
Father, in the Zone of No Time, where past, present and future exist as one, where he has focused his intelligence since transitioning from the Earth, watching the entire debate, unfolding over years, thinks to himself:
Without those books I left behind in the family library would Toyin be going through all these challenges?
Seeking a place in the world for so many years?
The books intoxicated him, tore open his vision so he aspired to become like such revolutionaries as the Buddha, escaping into the wilderness in search of ultimate truth...but the Buddha was in India with a long culture of such pursuits...
Toyin, barely a teenager, facing bafflement by others when he sought a similar path in his Benin metropolis where he was seen as no more than a child spouting things beyond even his own understanding by adults who had never encountered such ideas.
Even in studying in England, he could not fit in, intoxicated with opportunities beyond his experience, opportunities which still proved too limiting for him.
But every person is a star marking its own orbit. His revolutions around the sun of knowledge are constant. I will guide as I can.
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