The Meeting with the Old Man in the Forest: Tales of Akporode (DeepSeek AI Edited Version)

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

The Meeting with the Old Man in the Forest

                   Tales of Akporode

            DeepSeek AI Edited Version 

           Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

                           Compcros

On my myriad journeys in pursuit of knowledge, I learned of an old man who had retreated into the forests between Ughelli and Warri. It was said he sought not solitude, but a different kind of knowing—an uncommon wisdom found only in the deep green silence of the Niger Delta. I resolved to find him.

The search was long and uncertain. No one knew his exact dwelling, only the vague section of forest from which he would occasionally emerge, a spectral figure baffling the few onlookers from nearby villages.

After weeks of fruitless searching, my guides, weary and discouraged, were forced to leave me. They needed to return to their village for supplies, promising to continue upon their return. That night, I was alone, sleeping in a hammock they had woven and slung high in the boughs of an ancient tree.

I woke to the faintest of sounds. Dawn was a pale light filtering through the canopy. Below, a figure stood motionless, beckoning with a slow, deliberate hand.

My heart leapt. Could my guides have returned so swiftly? Peering through the gloom, I saw it was not them. It was a stockily built old man, vigorous and still, dressed in simple shorts and a worn shirt. A current of understanding passed through me. Was this the one I sought?

I climbed down. As my feet touched the soft earth, he turned without a word and began to walk. Puzzled but compelled, I followed.

He led me toward a wall of vegetation that seemed impenetrable. Without breaking stride, he parted a curtain of thick vines to reveal a hidden path. As we proceeded, the very air began to change. The familiar chorus of the forest—the chatter of monkeys, the hum of insects—was not absent, but was slowly submerged beneath a profound, thrumming silence. This silence grew until it became a presence itself, a palpable entity so immense and unsettling that, had I been alone, sheer terror would have driven me away.

In the distance, I saw its source: a tree of mountainous proportions, its colossal form dominating the clearing. The awesome silence, carrying a strange energy more eloquent than any speech, seemed to emanate from its very roots.

After a walk that felt both an instant and half a day, we reached the titan’s base. The old man, now minuscule against the behemoth, settled on the ground and gestured for me to join him. He simply sat, gazing forward, his eyes holding a deep, untroubled calm.

"What could this mean?" My mind, ablaze with the questions that had brought me here, itched with impatience. Yet, beneath my agitation lay that immense silence, now orchestrated by the soft rustle of life in the branches high above. Its frightening intensity was made bearable only by his tranquil company.

Gradually, my frantic thoughts began to still. My questions, and then the very sense of my self, were swallowed whole by the quiet. In my mind's eye, I vanished like a shard of ice in a raging fire—only this fire was made of profound, all-consuming silence.

The old man never spoke a word, yet an understanding unfolded within me, as clear as any conversation.

“You have found me, or I have allowed you to find me,” the thought formed. “What is it you seek?”

I composed myself within the dreamlike exchange. “I have seen works of art attributed to you. Marvels carved from wood. I needed to meet the creator of such wonders and learn the source of his vision.”

“Are you an artist?” the unspoken question came.

“I am a writer,” I responded.

“Every artist must look inward to the depths within, and outward to the depths without,” he stated. “That is why I am here. To listen. To truly hear myself, and through myself, the universe.”

I was astounded. A man renounced society to live among trees and rivers solely to perfect his art?

“The purpose of the artist transcends the creation of objects that merely strike the eye,” he continued, as if hearing my disbelief. “We aspire to see truly, to hear truly, to feel truly. Only then can we act truly.”

My mind raced. Was this not what Duke Asidere described as listening to an inward voice, or what Picasso called the presence that stood beside him as he worked? But they created in studios and metropolises; this man had chosen to withdraw from humanity entirely.

“To each their own path,” came the gentle affirmation. “This silence is my necessary medium. Here, I can feel the contours of my own soul and remember the face I had before I was born.”

The silence descended once more, deeper than before. And in its embrace, my questions began to answer themselves. I understood. This was not merely about creating art; it was about becoming a work of art. He was seeking the artless art, where life and creation are one.

We sat within that immensity throughout the night and into the next day. They were the most consequential hours of my life. In that cathedral of nature, I measured the vastness of human potential against the grandeur of existence itself.

What I learned there continues to unfurl within me, year after year. And from time to time, I return in imagination to the old man under the tree, to feel my exhilarating smallness within the world’s splendour, and to know the profound glory of being a witness to the wonder of it all.

Notes

Bruce Onobrakpeya, the Nigerian artist who became 93 in August 2025, returns in this story after his first characterization by myself in the fictional narrative " The Old Man Seeking Knowledge and Wisdom".

This story is based on my picture of Onobrakpeya, above, taken at his home on an earlier birthday as well as on the second picture, an inage of a massive tree by  GummyBone on istock ( https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/biggest-amazon-tree-angelim-vermelho-in-tropical-rainforest-gm1705071497-539123132?searchscope=image%2Cfilm).

Both inspirations have been fused with ideas from various sources in actualizing a version of the archetypal images of an old wise man and an inspirational tree within a mysteriously inspiring yet awesome landscape, images drawing from the intersection of my first hand experiences and my reading. 

Why Onobrakpeya and why the tree motif?

Onobrakpeya is a superlative artist in dramatizing the numinous power, the mysterious potencies, of classical African visual sacred forms.

His advanced age lends itself to going beyond a focus on his art to a concentration on his person as distilling wisdom from decades of quest for knowledge within the wilderness of creativity. 

Trees, groves and forests are my primary inspirational force in nature. The experience of awesome, uplifting silence is strategic to my encounter with such natural spaces.

Onobrakpeya's majestic installation, Akporode, defined by glorious pillars suggesting trees and evoking the Urhobo pillar motif for aspiration to Oghene, the creator of the universe, conjoins for me the elevated ambience of nature, the grandeur of cosmos and the soaring creativity of the human being in responding to the glory of the universe, values suggested by the complex beauty of the installation.

"Every artist needs to look inward to depths within and outward to depths without" declared by the old man, is the beginning of my narrative development of n aesthetic mystical philosophy.

This philosophy organizes my own experience in terms of a philosophy of penetration to the essence of existence through sensitivity to inward and outward beauty.

This  philosophy demonstrates a confluence of Western and Asian thought.

It is  structured by the Yoruba concept, "oju inu", the inward eye or "oju okan", the inward mind, as mapped by Babatunde Lawal in "Aworan: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art" and further developed by Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.

It is complemented by the Igbo concept "ose ora", the eye with which one sees the physical and the spiritual worlds, as depicted by Anenechukwu Umeh, After God is Dibia: Igbo Spirituality and Sacred Science in Nigeria.

I have explored these ideas in various essays.

"The awesome and mysterious universe" in the story's title is one interpretation of the Urhobo term " Akporode ", according to Philomena Ofuafo's "Envisaging the Concept of Akpo in Urhobo Mythology in Visual Form: A Study of Bruce Onobrakpeya's Art" ( International Journal for Research in Arts and Sciences. Vol.9.No.2. https://academicexcellencesociety.com/envisaging_the_concept_of_akpo.pdf)