Between Scholarly Inspiration and the Larger Course of Life: Reflecting on the Recent Book Publication of My Essay ''An Exploration of the Mystical Potential of the Ifa Divination System''
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Oluwatoyin Adepoju
May 30, 2023, 7:03:50 AM5/30/23
to usaafricadialogue, Yoruba Affairs, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju, Osakue Omoera, Omoera Osakue
Between Scholarly Inspiration and the Larger Course of Life
Reflecting on the Recent Book Publication of My Essay
''An Exploration of the Mystical Potential of the Ifa Divination System''
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Abstract
An exploration of approaches to scholarship through the prism of my personal experience, in relation to that of some creative figures in Western history, foregrounding relationships between creativity, the unconventional and the conventional within social systems.
Contents
Alienation from and Admiration of Academia
My Paradoxical Responses to a Book Publication of My Work
Conjuncting Transformative Opportunity and Ability
Leonardo da Vinci and the Image of the Fragmented Creative
Between Leonardo and Social Disconnection and Integration of Creatives
Exploring Intersections of Creativity and Life's Dynamics
Clearing Spaces for Unconventional Interiority Within Conventional Networks
Alienation from and Admiration of Academia
Having my work published in formal scholarly fora often inspires an ambivalent response from me. I have difficulty taking unalloyed pride in the publication because a part of me is alienated from as well as deeply admiring of the academic contexts, the higher education system, associated with such publishing.
Academia is a scholarly system integrated within social contexts, contents challenging for me because I am more comfortable doing my scholarship in my own way, in my own time, deciding what rules to operate by and when, rather than acting at all times by rules defining academic systems.
One of those freedoms dear to me is my need to experiment with publishing systems, even in an era of open access formal scholarly publishing. Academic publishing may struggle to reach broad audiences. I am compelled to acknowledge, however, that whatever the limitations of their approach to audiences, they are much superior to mine, which is often focused on social media for its ease of use and sheer freedom, but significantly lacking breadth of visibility in an online search, a drawback very different from the instant emergence of materials on the very well grounded platforms represented by scholarly publishers.
My Paradoxical Responses to a Book Publication of My Work
Receiving today the book Intercultural
Encounters, Historicity and Cultural Communication for Development in Nigeria, ed. by Osakue Stevenson Omoera and Stephen Ogheneruro Okpadah ( Galda Verlag 2023) in which one of my most heartfelt essays, ''An Exploration of the Mystical Potential
of the Ifa Divination System'', has been published, inspires in me a similar sense of mixed feelings, in relation to styles of publication and the challenge the essay poses to me.
How valid is the content and bibliography of this essay, written as it was in 2003, one of the papers from my MA in European and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Kent? If I had tried to revise the paper and update the bibliography would the essay have been submitted?
The kind of patience required for reworking what I have already written, attempting such a revision at a time my mind is elsewhere, is one of my challenges with writing, preferring such revisions to wait for when I'm ready, not to approach them at the dictates of a program drawn up by someone else, such as a publication deadline.
How valid is the content and bibliography of this essay, written as it was in 2003, one of the papers from my MA in European and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Kent? If I had tried to revise the paper and update the bibliography would the essay have been submitted?
The kind of patience required for reworking what I have already written, attempting such a revision at a time my mind is elsewhere, is one of my challenges with writing, preferring such revisions to wait for when I'm ready, not to approach them at the dictates of a program drawn up by someone else, such as a publication deadline.
My general knowledge of the field of Ifa Studies from 2003 to now, however, suggests to me that the essay remains relevant and will remain so even if its suggestions become mainstream, the essay remaining significant even at such a projected stage as a pioneer in the orientations it projects.
The bibliography could be updated with reference to relatively recent works, such as Rowland Abiodun and Jscob Olupona's edited Ifa Divination, Knowledge, Power and Performance, to more recent writing on mysticism in general, such as Steven Katz's Comparative Mysticism and on mysticism in classical African spiritualities, such as the work of Monicka Brodnicka and Rebecca Masterton, my own work over the years, and gleanings from social media, which is central to the intercontinental unfolding of Ifa, but the core of the work and its bibliography remain cogent, in my view. In bringing out a book integrating my work on Ifa, something I hope I'll do soon, perhaps I would rework the paper to reflect what might be my new understandings.
Conjuncting Transformative Opportunity and Ability
I'm also challenged by questions of my professional, spiritual and philosophical direction provoked by the essay. It was written at a time when I was on top of the world, signalling the unleashing of creative energies long coiled up with little space for expression, until entry into the Kent MA program and another I did almost concurrently at SOAS in Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia), where, for the first time in my life, aspiration, opportunity and ability coalesced in the freedom to pursue my multidisciplinary interests in the visual and verbal arts, philosophy and spirituality, using skills developed through independent study and earlier schooling in Nigeria to undergraduate and postgraduate education and teaching and research years at the University of Benin.
The bibliography could be updated with reference to relatively recent works, such as Rowland Abiodun and Jscob Olupona's edited Ifa Divination, Knowledge, Power and Performance, to more recent writing on mysticism in general, such as Steven Katz's Comparative Mysticism and on mysticism in classical African spiritualities, such as the work of Monicka Brodnicka and Rebecca Masterton, my own work over the years, and gleanings from social media, which is central to the intercontinental unfolding of Ifa, but the core of the work and its bibliography remain cogent, in my view. In bringing out a book integrating my work on Ifa, something I hope I'll do soon, perhaps I would rework the paper to reflect what might be my new understandings.
Conjuncting Transformative Opportunity and Ability
I'm also challenged by questions of my professional, spiritual and philosophical direction provoked by the essay. It was written at a time when I was on top of the world, signalling the unleashing of creative energies long coiled up with little space for expression, until entry into the Kent MA program and another I did almost concurrently at SOAS in Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia), where, for the first time in my life, aspiration, opportunity and ability coalesced in the freedom to pursue my multidisciplinary interests in the visual and verbal arts, philosophy and spirituality, using skills developed through independent study and earlier schooling in Nigeria to undergraduate and postgraduate education and teaching and research years at the University of Benin.
The Kent MA program, my best schooling experience ever, and the SOAS MA program, in which I also took a course at UCL, meant I was now privileged to experience a learning environment of greater flexibility, enabling multidisciplinary engagements, interpersonal maturity and systemic wholeness and efficiency than the more fixed, discipline centred, embryonic graduate research culture and fledgling institutional efficiency I had experienced at my old university, a system representing the transplanting of the vision of Western higher education onto soil that is still challenged in efforts to absorb this new social implanting.
I was able to participate in academic programs I had long salivated over from a great distance ever since my friend Andrew Omorojor had sent me from England a British Council brochure of UK academic programs. The Comparative Literature programs at Kent and SOAS and the MA in the Study of Mysticism and Religious Experience at Kent, which I also took courses from, were the ideal context for my love of the visual and verbal arts, as well as mysticism and cross-cultural religious study, programs in which I wrote some of my most important essays, essays which I understand as both imaginatively adventurous and richly scholarly, even though at times suggesting limitations of such a fresh stage of development.
These include the essay on the mystical potential of Ifa, a piece contributing to excavating the most exalted possibilities of a knowledge system more readily associated with the day to day business of living and the terrestrial course of human life, even though within the context of a structure of ideas about relationship between these short and long term terrestrial immediaces and ultimate reality, valuable as that orientation is, but a system which may also be exploited in seeking personal, intimate engagement, beyond belief but penetrating into knowledge and transformative intimacy, of direct perception or union with ultimate reality, the goal of mysticism.
I was able to participate in academic programs I had long salivated over from a great distance ever since my friend Andrew Omorojor had sent me from England a British Council brochure of UK academic programs. The Comparative Literature programs at Kent and SOAS and the MA in the Study of Mysticism and Religious Experience at Kent, which I also took courses from, were the ideal context for my love of the visual and verbal arts, as well as mysticism and cross-cultural religious study, programs in which I wrote some of my most important essays, essays which I understand as both imaginatively adventurous and richly scholarly, even though at times suggesting limitations of such a fresh stage of development.
These include the essay on the mystical potential of Ifa, a piece contributing to excavating the most exalted possibilities of a knowledge system more readily associated with the day to day business of living and the terrestrial course of human life, even though within the context of a structure of ideas about relationship between these short and long term terrestrial immediaces and ultimate reality, valuable as that orientation is, but a system which may also be exploited in seeking personal, intimate engagement, beyond belief but penetrating into knowledge and transformative intimacy, of direct perception or union with ultimate reality, the goal of mysticism.
Another of these essays demonstrates the intercultural interpretive significance of Ifa hermeneutics in relation to the art and letters of Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. Another is on comparative hermeneutics of space between Ifa, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the London Underground. Another is on relationships between landscape and cosmology, ''cosmogeographic explorations'' I called it, in the art and thought of Susanne Wenger on Yoruba cosmology at the Osun forest in Nigeria and that of Katherine Matwood on Western astrological cosmology at Glastonbury in England.
Leonardo da Vinci and the Image of the Fragmented Creative
Leonardo da Vinci is one of history's most creative people. He is considered, along with Michelangelo Buonarroti, as constituting the peak of the High Renaissance in Italy, one of the greatest flowerings of human potential ever known.
Leonardo is so regarded even though he may be understood as a fragmented creative. His paintings are among the most celebrated in Western history but the best of his completed and still accessible paintings might not be more than three, the Mona Lisa and the two versions of the Virgin on the Rocks.
Leonardo da Vinci and the Image of the Fragmented Creative
Leonardo da Vinci is one of history's most creative people. He is considered, along with Michelangelo Buonarroti, as constituting the peak of the High Renaissance in Italy, one of the greatest flowerings of human potential ever known.
Leonardo is so regarded even though he may be understood as a fragmented creative. His paintings are among the most celebrated in Western history but the best of his completed and still accessible paintings might not be more than three, the Mona Lisa and the two versions of the Virgin on the Rocks.
His much lionized Last Supper is visually obscured by the effects of his incessant experimentation, a work, revered, however, for his mastery of visual storytelling through relative positioning and gesture among the figures in the painting, bringing alive the dramatic moment it depicts from the Gospels in visualizing it as a story of gripping immediacy, as well as evoking its strategic force in Christian thought, an achievement critical to the Last Supper motif becoming one of the enduring icons of Western culture, reworked in various contexts across the centuries.
Complementing his paintings are his awesome drawings, experimental efforts dramatizing his acute visual power and uncanny mastery of hand with drawing instruments, images among the most remarkable in Western visual culture, particularly his superb drawing of a human embryo.
The embryo drawing leads into another aspect of his genius, his scientific explorations, demonstrated by his anatomical, engineering and landscape drawings, pioneering intimate understanding of the dynamics of human musculature and physical dynamism, as well as projecting engineering visions some of which would not be actualized until centuries after his time, futuristic thinking that has led to some half playful descriptions of him as a man from the future.
Yet, later in life, the same polymathic master is described as asking himself, ''what was the point of it all?'', from what I seem to recall of Robert Wallace and the editors of Time Life books referencing Leonardo's celebrated notebooks in The World of Leonardo. Discussing the melancholy force of a late work interpretable as his self portrait, they remark that the portrait may evoke the master ruminating on his legacy. '' He had done so much, yet realized so little: without a home, without a patron, he was about to wander, almost forgotten, into his old age''.
Between Leonardo and Social Disconnection and Integration of Creatives
I see myself in the magnificent master as a person I am like, a person I aspire to be like and yet not to be like. Moving from one project to another excites me, yet the after-echoes of those projects haunt me, since I know they represent fragments of a larger whole I am yet to assemble or adequately integrate.
Like Leonardo, my creativity thrives in a form of individuality disconnected from social exigencies, leaving one hanging in space, to put it metaphorically. Such creatives blazing within socially disconnected spaces mark the Western tradition, the poets S.T. Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire and Friedrich Holderlin, the short story writer, poet and essayist Edgar Allan Poe, the short story writer and essayist H. P. Lovecraft and the artist and epistolary writer Vincent van Gogh, while the novelist and short story writer James Joyce and the poet Rainer Marie Rilke and others like them managed to salvage themselves from the brink through the help of others who helped them manage their unconventional individualities, even as the poet and essayist T. S. Eliot and the short story writer Jorge Luis Borges, among other creative luminaries I admire, were able to integrate themselves squarely within conventional social life.
Exploring Intersections of Creativity and Life's Dynamics
Like Leonardo, my creativity thrives in a form of individuality disconnected from social exigencies, leaving one hanging in space, to put it metaphorically. Such creatives blazing within socially disconnected spaces mark the Western tradition, the poets S.T. Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire and Friedrich Holderlin, the short story writer, poet and essayist Edgar Allan Poe, the short story writer and essayist H. P. Lovecraft and the artist and epistolary writer Vincent van Gogh, while the novelist and short story writer James Joyce and the poet Rainer Marie Rilke and others like them managed to salvage themselves from the brink through the help of others who helped them manage their unconventional individualities, even as the poet and essayist T. S. Eliot and the short story writer Jorge Luis Borges, among other creative luminaries I admire, were able to integrate themselves squarely within conventional social life.
Exploring Intersections of Creativity and Life's Dynamics
One can, however, ask the right questions to help one understand the dynamics of intersection between creativity and the course of one's life so as to help one make sense of these trajectories and steer the ship of life more intelligently.
What is the ultimate goal of such an essay as the one on the mystical potential of Ifa and other work which one does obsessively, without any ultimate plan or care for benefit, simpy driven by the need to create, as a person needs air to breathe? Is an overarching vision and purpose emerging from these effusions, a configuration only emerging in fulfillment, to adapt T. S. Eliot from Four Quartets? How may such emergences be harnessed and how may they be stimulated if they are not developing unaided?
What audiences could these works benefit and how could they best reach that audience? What relationships may be established between the creativity of ''the metaphysical moment'', Stephan Korner's term for a sensitivity to the depths of existence vital to much creativity, and the necessary economic challenges necessitated by society?
What audiences could these works benefit and how could they best reach that audience? What relationships may be established between the creativity of ''the metaphysical moment'', Stephan Korner's term for a sensitivity to the depths of existence vital to much creativity, and the necessary economic challenges necessitated by society?
Clearing Spaces for Unconventional Interiority Within Conventional Networks
''The metaphysical moment'' comes from Korner's book on the philosopher Immanuel Kant, another creative, who, like the scientist and philosopher Isaac Newton, kept his unconventional individuality carefully circumscribed within his interior life, while making sure to abide by the rules of academic socialization.
This allowed both men to do what they wanted with themselves within the space of freedom thus created, each of them hardly publishing or not publishing for about ten years after securing their future through gaining professorships in their universities, living carefully managed lives in which time they engaged in rigorous rethinking of the foundations of their disciplines, efforts proving transformative for future developments of those fields, approaches to scholarship which may no longer be realistic in academia, given its greater level of uniform standardisation.
This allowed both men to do what they wanted with themselves within the space of freedom thus created, each of them hardly publishing or not publishing for about ten years after securing their future through gaining professorships in their universities, living carefully managed lives in which time they engaged in rigorous rethinking of the foundations of their disciplines, efforts proving transformative for future developments of those fields, approaches to scholarship which may no longer be realistic in academia, given its greater level of uniform standardisation.
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