From the Chi Calabash to Shevirat ha-Kelim, a Vision of Creative Tension
Between Chiagoziem Orji and Vincent van Gogh
The Way of the Calabash 3
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
We kept walking until we came to a valley, rich in beautiful flowers interspersed with glorious trees, but curiously, some of the trees were unbeautifully distorted, almost frightening in their forms, while some of the flowers gave off malodorous odors, as they seemed eaten by insects.
What could this place be, both marvelous and distorted, I wondered.
It looked like an incompletely assembled jigsaw puzzle, like bright fragments mixed with rough casings through which the inward brilliance flamed, brighter in some cases, dimmer in others.
As we moved through this place resembling the outcome of a cataclysmic explosion, scattering pieces that resolved themselves into sparks, brightness encased in coarse forms, the entire configuration forming an inconclusive kind of order, I was fascinated and restless all at once, wanting to explore this place both glorious and forbidding.
At the same time, I felt a strong pull towards something I did not understand, a pull intensifying my restlessness even as I basked in my fascination with that strange zone of contradictions in which I found myself.
I looked up in the direction the pull seemed to be coming from and I saw a mountain wreathed in clouds, awesome and compelling, dreadful and fascinating.
''What is happening?'', I asked my guide.
Her voice low, as if subdued by the wonder of the place, she answered, ''You have entered Shevirat ha-Kelim, the Place of Shells and come under the Spell of the Mountain and the Valley.''
''Having reached here, you can have no peace until you climb towards the mountain and even as you climb you will be torn between the fascination you experience in this valley between the beautiful and the ugly and the restlessness inspired by the pull of the mountain.''
An image came to my mind, the night sky ablaze with stars as a mighty force moved through it, sweeping across sky and Earth, wreathing the celestial bodies and a little village beneath the sky in what seemed like rhythms of power, as a tree in the foreground rose upward in undulating vibration, like a fire rising from its planting in the Earth.
As this image arrested me, another rose, a man's face, eyes both animated and probing, restless and powerful, his features lean in concentration as the space around him swirled with the same dynamism sweeping through Earth and sky in the first vision. The sense of powerful yearning and restless hunger emanating from those eyes was fascinating and unsettling.
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Somehow, I knew that was my own face, though not visible in a mirror, the inward face, the face of the hunger that had led me onto this quest, the hunger sharpened and intensified by where I found myself.
I described the experience to my guide, and she responded.
The journey speaks in symbols. The valley welcomes you. The mountain calls to you. The grand vision invites you, your inward self reveals itself.
There is no turning back.
What is Happening Here?
The journey of the lost traveller continues as he enters into a valley reminiscent of the view of the world developed by Isaac Luria, the Jewish Kabbalist, further developed by Nachman of Bratslav in his tale ''The Heart and the Mountain'', complexified by visions suggestive of Dutch/French artist Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night and his last, most iconic self portrait.
Is a vision of human possibility unfolding at the intersection of the contradictions of the universe, exemplified by the art of van Gogh as it expresses the tensions that shaped his life, the struggle between ultimate aspiration and the limitations of being human, the Agwu dynamic of Igbo thought in which creativity embodies both insight and tension?
Is such a vibration between between heightened order and chaos thereby projected, as the person seeks to grasp and birth the potential embowelled within the chi calabash, personal cosmos and its intersection with the universe at large, conjunctions suggested by the collage above integrating Chiagoziem Orji's self portrait and that of van Gogh, both in dialogue with the Dutch/French artist's apexical image of cosmic vision, The Starry Night?
Abstract
The
Way of the Calabash is an ongoing series of complementary narratives
and essays tracing an inner symbolic journey at the crossroads of art,
spirituality and philosophy, a progression inspired by Chiagoziem Nnaemeka Orji’s
self-portrait ‘’Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe’’.
This third part of the
journey continues the visionary journey of a lost traveller who enters a
landscape of radical contradiction—a valley of shattered beauty and a
compelling mountain wreathed in cloud.
Guided by the structure of Lurianic Kabbalah’s Shevirat ha-Kelim (the
Breaking of the Vessels), the narrative explores the dynamic tension between
fragmentation and wholeness, dramatizing
the condition of existence as simultaneously broken and luminous.
Visions of Vincent van
Gogh’s The Starry Night and his final self-portrait emerge as
images of this very struggle, mirroring the Igbo concept of Agwu—the
creative force that embodies both insight and destabilization.
The work weaves
together Jewish mysticism, Igbo cosmology, and Van Gogh’s artistic vision to
suggest that the human quest for meaning unfolds precisely at the intersection
of order and chaos, where the pull of the sublime meets the fractured beauty of
the world.
The “calabash” becomes
a metaphor for the personal cosmos—containing within it both rupture and
possibility—while the journey itself represents the ongoing effort to reconcile
these opposites.
The work asks what it
means to seek the fullness of one's chi — one's personal cosmos — within
a universe that is itself incomplete, its fragments still flaming toward
wholeness. The mountain calls; the valley holds. The quest deepens.
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Part 1: "The Woman in the Forest: Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji's 'Onye Kwe, Chi Ya Ekwe' and Bruce Onobrakpeya's 'Akporode' "
Part 2: ''The Way of the Calabash: Part
2: Chiagoziem Nneamaka Orji, Victor Ekpuk and Bruce Onobrakpeya''
