Roots, Routes and Roofs : Images of Dynamic Unity at the Convergence of Personal and Cosmic History: Engaging the Toyin Falola Reader
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Roots, Routes and Roofs
Images of Dynamic Unity at the Convergence
of
Personal and Cosmic History
Engaging the Toyin Falola Reader
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in search of Knowledge"
Abstract
A statement of ultimate cognitive purpose, of vocation as described by Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language as “the orientation of a person’s life and work in terms of their ultimate sense of mission”, inspired by reading The Toyin Falola Reader, particularly by his motif of “roots, routes and roofs” as defining the unity of African civilisations across time and space and their ideological and experiential continuities with the African diaspora.
The essay correlates individual and cosmic history under the inspiration of the idea that all forms of being are unified by common roots, routes and roofs, an idea adapted from Toyin Falola's development of this tripartite motif .
The main verbal text is complemented by images of Ghanaian Akan/Gyaman Adinkra symbols and other African and non-African art, interpreted in accompanying verbal text.
This artistic complement operates in the spirit of Falola’s advocacy in the “Ritual Archives” essay in the same book, for African art, and, I would extrapolate, art in general. On account of what I understand as the capacity of art to subsume and catalyse awareness, Falola projects it as a source of ideas even beyond the context of discourse about art. He argues for the potential of African art in stimulating the development of theoretical formulations of universal value in various disciplines within and beyond the African context. This orientation is a move towards a pluriversality of thought, of multiple, coexisting illuminators of both the local condition from which they are drawn, and with suitable qualifications, of the human condition in general, as Falola describes this vision in “Pluriversalism”, another essay in the Reader.
“I will look”, said Frodo, and he climbed on the pedestal and bent over the dark water. At once the Mirror cleared and he saw a twilit land. Mountains loomed dark in the distance against a pale sky. A long grey road wound back out of sight. Far away a figure came slowly down the road, faint and small at first, but growing larger and clearer as it approached.
…
The vision now changed. … many swift scenes followed that Frodo in some way knew to be parts of a great history in which he had become involved”.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings Part 1 : The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, chapter vii, “The Mirror of Galadriel”. London: HarperCollins, 1999.477.
My encounter with the temporal sweep and ideational scope of The Toyin Falola Reader on African Culture, Nationalism, Development and Epistemologies (Austin: Pan African University Press, 2018), reminds me of Frodo’s encounter with the magical Mirror of Galadriel.
The Reader’s cognitive range and expressive force, in its focus on social and intellectual history, though without entering into metaphysical speculation, also inspires me to appreciate the book’s historical and ideational breadth as weaving a thread in a cosmic tapestry integrating Africa and its place in world history, a conjunction of possibilities in which I am implicated as an African, and thus a citizen of the world and inhabitant of the cosmos.
Toyin Falola's motif, roots, routes and roofs, characterizing the unity of African civilizations in the Reader, provokes me to ask the following questions at the intersection of the African experience with my own life as an African, a human being and a denizen of the cosmos:
What are our roots as citizens of the cosmos? What are the routes of our cosmic journey? What is the roof that defines us as forms of existence?
The inspirational Falola passage:
The record of civilizations in Africa suggests [Africans] have deep roots in the commonalities of ideas and institutions that once united the majority of our people. Our history tells us [ : ] our routes and paths lead to crossroads and junctions, movements, and interactions of peoples, goods, and ideas. Our spaces reveal that we are covered by big roofs that shape our perceptions and realities. In combination, our roots, routes, and roofs show ideas of unity, commonality, and interaction. It is these ideas and what they mean that form the basis of this chapter [chapter 25, p. 806].
This passage is superb in the evocative force of its imagery, pregnant and precise, primal and lucid. “Roots” call up ideas of organic depth represented by soil and the dynamism enabled by life, dramatized by roots, questing, variegatedly structured forms searching in a darkness that is rich with value as they seek food in the earth.
“Routes” is one of the richest pictures of the human propensity for motion, both concrete and abstract, physical and non-physical, pedestrian, mechanical, mental or spiritual, an image operating by recalling motion from one point to another, motion that takes place within space and thus within a period of time, thus combining a primary image of space with a secondary, implied evocation of time, space and time being the two fundamental structurations of physical reality, the framework and enablement of terrestrial existence, graphically dramatized in humanity’s migratory motion across the globe from its African homeland, carrying the cultural seeds that have become the roofs unifying humanity in its cultural march.
“Roofs” is a primal visualization representing the human movement from the life of other animals in the wild to that of the creature who shapes tools at such a level of complexity that the earth is transformed thereby. Roofs are fundamental to the shelter represented by houses, a principal technology of humanization. This word picture is thus superb for suggesting overarching ideas and practices that define a group, sustaining its existence.
A fundamental interest of mine
is the investigation of ideas along the
lines depicted by Masizi Kunene on Zulu cosmology in Anthem of the Decades
(London: Heinemann, 1981):
The ultimate authority that emanates from the Creator ensures a fulfilment for each species in accordance with its overall cosmic purpose.
Such a purpose cannot be grasped or defined, not even by the daughter of God, Nomkhubulwane [ ...goddess of balance, embodying the balance of the ultimate creative purpose as both physical and spiritual, symbolized by one manifestation of her as a half-forest and half–field, a “division that balances the two different but related worlds”, xv]. [Even then] Only the Creator knows the true direction of creation.”
…
Several truths converge to express a variation of the ultimate truth. There is no absolute truth, only a working hypothesis ( xvii).
In exploring the question of whether or not a cosmic purpose exists and the role of each possibility of existence in such a purpose, I find Falola’s roots, routes and roofs formulation inspiring in characterising the dynamism in unity of African development. It also facilitates understanding, not only of the African context but also of the cosmic framework in which the African dynamic is enfolded.
“Roots, routes and roofs” take my mind to the idea of the birth of the cosmos from an explosion, a root in time expanding to routes through space and time taken by the emergence of these basic structuring realities and the matter, energy and eventually consciousness that developed from or through this primal conflagration, this triple formulation of matter, energy and consciousness being one understanding of the foundational constituents of existence, an ideational roof through which all possibilities of being may be integrated.
In learning about cosmic and terrestrial evolutionary processes, in exploring various expressions of the possibilities of being, from mental facts to social facts to artefacts, a tripartite division of human existence also defined by Falola, in page 808 of the Reader, I am interested in unity within difference, of individuality within universality, of the whole and its constituents, of each and all possibilities of existence, everything and its own, to adapt Chinua Achebe’s quote of an Igbo expression in “The Igbo World and its Art”.
As the cosmos proceeds through the continuous expansion of matter described as generated by the force of the primal explosion that brought it into existence, as forms on earth and beyond earth undergo change through vast spans of time, I progress with them in the continual expansion of knowledge, of engaging with and reformulating ideas, seeking to pierce to the point where roots of mind and matter, the pulse of life and the motive force of existence, intertwine in the rich earth of the ultimate, a cognitive unfolding that progresses alongside the slow dissolution of the body as it moves towards confinement in soil, lifeless food for worms, even as the spark that animated it flees to an unknown but much speculated destination.
While still possessing the enablement of body and brain, I seek the infinite through the finite, trying to transcend the limitations of body and mind by penetrating to being in its essence, questing for the consummation of existence in deathlessness, deathlessness understood in terms of expansion of consciousness rather than as immortality of the body.
I thus explore the question of the coexistence of the individual self and the universal Self and the possibility of conjunction between them. I move beyond the disjunctions between my physical minisculity on a planet and the seeming spatial endlessness within which this planet is nestled as a speck in space. One’s time on earth is less than a second in cosmic time. The revolutions of the sun enable and witness the coexisting voluntary quest for eternity and the involuntary journey towards cessation of physical existence compelled by the laws of progressive dissolution built into nature.
“Aiku pari iwa”, a Yoruba expression which may be translated as “deathlessness consummates or completes existence”, from Rowland Abiodun’s “The Future of African Art Studies: An African Perspective,” later integrated into his Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art, arguing for a concentration in African arts studies on African aesthetics, exemplified in the essay by Yoruba philosophy. . The Indian Katha- Upanishad on the discipline leading to unity of self and ultimate reality. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s meditations on time, space and infinity from his Critique of Practical Reason. The description of the Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi spiral symbol as evoking the sun, journey and eternity, values resonating with Nigerian-US artist Victor Ekpuk’s deployment of colour in recreating this form, as described at the website of the Inscribing Meaning : Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art exhibition at the Smithsonian.
All
these ideas are subsumed in my identification with my mentor, Jetsun Milarepa,
the
12th century Tibetan Buddhist poet and hermit inspired, through the mediation
of his guru, Marpa the Translator, by the example of the Buddha, the Indian
philosopher whose quest for ultimate meaning also triggered my own quest, as Milarepa
is depicted in Evan Wentz’s edited Tibet’s
Great Yogi Milarepa and Garma Chang’s edited The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. From time to time, I
imagine myself as Mila, as he is fondly known, withdrawn into his cave, seeking, through
exploring the conjunction of individual and cosmic mind, what British-American
writer T.S. Eliot describes in Four
Quartets as “the still point of the turning world”, an ancient aspiration
inflaming my own struggle to reconcile the demands of a social universe centred
in acceptance of metaphysically inadequate values with a quest straining towards
penetrating to the roots of why we exist at all.
Roots, routes and roofs.
"Movement inheres in a variety of phenomena: in the shapes of plants, roots, bones and stones. Even the Zulu home captures the sweeping movement of the winds.
The correlation between movement and life translates itself dramatically in the first movements of a growing seed. As the shell is broken, the locked movements that encapsulate the seed explode in several directions. The life force which directs the seed to each stage of actualization contains within it both temporal and universal qualities. Some of these are corrective, that is, they restore balance after each point of degeneration and regeneration. (Kunene, Anthem, xxix).The symbolism of movement is extended to animals in which it is expressed par excellence. These include animals like the ram, whose twisted horns are expressive of the locked or ‘knotted’ movements, or the sacred snake (inyandezulu - the bundle of heaven) whose multiple movements are often conceived in thousands" (Anthem, xxviii).
This symbolism from Zulu thought is complemented by the Nigerian Igbo Uli and Cross River Nsibidi motif of the spiral, which, according to Robin Sanders in The Legendary Uli Women of Nigeria, evokes unity, the circle of life and the coiled bodies of reptiles such as the python, the “majestic body and sinuous movements” [of which] encode "knowledge of the sacred feminine-Ala” as summed up by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie in “Ndidi Dike : New Beginnings".
The Zulu and Igbo images of cosmic motion resonate with Obiora Udechukwu’s sonorous painterly visualization of cosmological progression, Our Journey, inspired by Uli symbolism of the spiral. The painting projects an unfolding spiral traversing and unifying space, space constituted by an expansive kaleidoscope of colour and abstract figuration, evoking solar systems and galaxies, suggesting the efforts of the mind to construct islands of order, of understanding, within the tantalising infinity of the unknown, the compelling power of these receding cognitive vistas evoked by the sheer beauty of the composition, awash with sublime colour contrasts, luminous disjunctive complementarities defining the undulations of strangely beautiful shapes, a work also resonant with the Dutch-French artist Vincent van Gogh's painting The Starry Night, depicting a landscape alive with a force sweeping across the celestial and terrestrial worlds in a spiral motion of which Udechukwu's adaptation of Nsibidi and Uli spiral symbolism testifies to its universal hold on the imagination as Starry Night portrays the stars, trees and houses unified in a cosmic loom, a symphony composed of the positioning of humanity between celestial and terrestrial nature (Adapted from my essay “Manifestations at Cosmogenesis : The Three Awo Before Time, the Descent of Ọrọ and Asuwa and the Splitting of Oyigiyigi: Universal Implications of Three Yoruba Cosmogonic Narratives”. Academia.edu, Scribd(PDF) Facebook, Part I and Part 2).
“Each experience and level of consciousness, each enrichment of the cosmos, is evolving towards the Great and Ultimate Consciousness (uNaphakade –Mother of Eternal Movements), a timelessness that is of the Creator but not the Creator” (Kunene, Anthem, xxx).
An inspiring idea.
