Between Creative Essence and Creative Expression: The Journey of Toyin Falola: Part 4: Cultures of Creativity and the Polymathic Intelligence
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Circles of Being and Becoming
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Abstract
This essay is an exploration of relationships between self motivated creativity and external factors enabling innovation by examining the inventiveness and productivity of the polymathic scholar and writer Toyin Falola. The main text is interpolated with images, mobilizing the beauty and power of Ghanaian Adinkra symbols and of a visual symbol from Falola as well as an image of him, all complemented by verbal text, projecting ideas of cognitive quest as central to human existence. The name of each Adinkra symbol follows the end of each accompanying text.
That image/text progression is an implicit dialogue between my own epistemic quest, its experiences and aspirations, and Falola's, constructing an indirect version of the autobiographical journey depicted in the complementary image/text essay in the third section of this essay series, linked below.
The essay is part of a sequence examining perspectives on creativity inspired by Falola's example, centralizing the quest for knowledge as a driving force.
The previous parts of the series are-
The
Wizard Paradigm : Aṣẹ and the Metaphysics of Creativity: Mapping the Cognitive
Cosmos of Toyin Falola
From the Rustic to the Stratospheric: In Search of Toyin Falola
From Wizard to Cyborg:The Journey of Toyin Falola: Part 1: An Encounter and its Significance
From Wizard to Cyborg:The Journey of Toyin Falola 2 : Trance, Intellect, and the Polymathic Mind
Abstract
The Significance of Creativity
Between Essence and Expression
Image and Text: How Can I Hold the Universe in My Mind?
The Evidence from Chronology
The Evidence from Publication Content
Image and Text: Unravelling the Knot Epistemic
Anecdotal Evidence: Processing Speed and Expressive Force
Victor Ekpuk Travel Essays and Ibibio Cuisine
''Terrapolis and Orisa Energies''
Image and Text: The Calabash of Totality
The Tripartite Unity of a Particular Cognitive Identity
Image and Text: Being, Becoming, Infinity
Between the Secular and the Spiritual
Perplexities of Internal and External Islamic Identity
Eshu, Saraswati, Leku's Magic and Ancestral and Orisa Guidance
A Richly Complex Configuration
Image and Text: Vibrations from the Deep
How this Essay was Written
Leonardo da Vinci's Tower of Fragments and Aristotle's Networks of Enquiry
Image and Text: The Search
Between the Fire and the Fuel
Image and Text: Sun at Noon
''Morning Yet on Creation Day''
Dedication
What is creativity?
The development of something new — the emergence of a form that did not exist before? Or the discovery, within the existing architecture of reality, of connections previously unseen?
''What is the source of this oceanic creativity, of its ceaseless prolificity?'', a question provoked by the unusual expressive force of a polymath, is a subject Falola discourse grapples with, including accounts by Falola himself.
But a significant number of his most accomplished scholarly, autobiographical and poetic writings certainly or are not likely to have required the use of research assistants.
A further question sharpens the point:when the dust settles decades, even centuries from now, when the fields Falola works in have undergone significant change in terms of advances in knowledge, which of Falola's works will remain standing in terms of enduring significance to humanity?
His autobiographies, some of his poetry, his essays on creative people, essays and books that go beyond presentation of facts to exploring those facts in particularly striking ways, developing compelling interpretations of them, will remain resonant.
Having ascribed the scope of his productivity to his distilling, interpreting and applying the data garnered by those assistants, Falola states that his ability to use such a range of field workers and archival explorers stems from the research funds he has access to as an endowed chair at the University of Texas.Image and Text: How Can I Hold the Universe in My Mind?
At the apex of the
mind, in the depths of the self, in that space where the essence of your being
resides, a fire burns, the hunger to know why you are, where you come from and
where you are going, a fire in danger from the challenges of survival, of body,
mind and heart, in which every day is a race against mortality.
As the light of the sun shone at its apex, the farthest zones of understanding began to converge in the sphere of my mind, unravelling at last the the logics unifying being and becoming, existence and transformation, continuity, change, persistence, the long mental journeys across the intersections of existence and meaning through the corridors of space and time.
Could I receive this gift? Was I strong enough to contain this influx where nature and the supernatural collapse into each other? Could the calabash of nerves and muscle hold the emerging glory?
Kuntunkantan
The Evidence from Chronology
Complexifying Falola's claim about the scale of the impact of the funds from his endowed chair on his research is the fact that a year after completing his PhD at the then University of Ife in 1981, he began recording multiple book publications practically every year, beginning with two in 1983.
This is a culture of multiple book publications every year initiated well before his recommendation for a professorship at Ife (1988) , well before his later professorship at UT Austin (1991) and well before elevation to his current endowed chair after the initial UT professorship. This is clear from two CVs of his online, a short and a longer one from the University of Texas, even though both are incomplete.
Why then, should an embodiment of something complexly beautiful as a particular culture of polymathic, compulsive creativity publicly present that creativity in terms that explain only a fraction of it, in a manner that obfuscates what I understand as its essence?
The evidence from Falola's career chronology and publication contents suggests that essence is not accounted for simply by the author's description of his use of research assistants in providing large amounts of information he works upon.
Does Falola's account suggest that any scholar or writer or most scholars and writers who have access to his kind of financial resources will also be able to replicate his kind of productivity?
That productivity was what led to his various professorships. How did he fund the research that resulted in those professorships?
Does his account indicate that such productivity is unlikely or impossible without such financial resources?
''Ritual Archives'', in The Toyin Falola Reader on African Culture, Nationalism, Development and Epistemologies (2018), is Falola's most powerful piece of scholarly writing I have read, as I work my way through his poetry, essays and books, a task in which I have not gone far, given the range of his publications, but in which I think I have a fair idea of the various levels of accomplishment within various disciples, subject matter and genres his work represents, a general grasp of its thematic and expressive topography, an understanding open to modification as I proceed on the journey.
The ideational tour de force that is ''Ritual Archives'' is the work of a creatively restless mind playing among a constellation of ideas, revisioning everyday realities in the African context, from sacred trees to cognitive networks, from iroko to Ifa, pursuing the question of what may constitute an archive, a storehouse of knowledge, at the intersection of the concrete and the abstract, of natural realities and human constructs, in relation to engagements with spirit, exploring how this variety of possibilities may be interpreted, systematized and applied within knowledge systems unifying African and Western epistemic processes and structures.
There is no point of fact in that essay that I was not aware of before I read it. There is no piece of information there that any well informed person in African and Yoruba knowledge systems is not likely to know after having read what was known before that essay was published.
What makes the essay magical is its collocational power, its distillatory force, its exploration of possibilities at the edge of existing knowledge systems, seeking to peer beyond the present into a future it suggests how it may be created, resonating with similar efforts to remake the configuration of the dominant map of knowing across the world as defined by mainstream Western civilization.
Falola, however, demonstrates his own distinctive actualization of the historicisation of Yoruba thought that Ogundiran had pioneered, while pushing that narrative and analytical strategy from the earliest periods of Yoruba history into the present, beyond Ogundiran's culmination in the 19th century. Falola also pursues this history beyond Yorubaland and Africa into the Yoruba diaspora in the Americas, engaging with a more expansive and variegated range of coordinates of Yoruba existence than Ogundiran's more tightly focused zones of attention, vivifying and amplifying the narrative through many drawings and paintings, in various artistic styles, specially commissioned for the book. No matter the future advances in Yoruba Studies, that work cannot be superseded because it succeeds, in words and images, beyond informational and evaluative specificity, as scholarly narrative, critical analysis and artistic projection.
The innovations in this category of works are configurational. Creativity here functions as cognitive metallurgy: an alchemical process looking beyond the disparate to perceive its unificatory constellations, melting extant materials and recasting them into luminous structure.
One could go on but I'll stop here for now.
The universe is a puzzle in which we find ourselves, realizing that we ourselves are a puzzle even to ourselves and others.
I dedicated my life to understanding this universe in which I find myself, exploring the highways and byways of thought, seeking the penetralia of cosmos, companion of the Buddha in his lonely meditations in forests across years, the isolations of Anthony and his fellow hermits in deserts, Milarepa in his Himalayan caves, all seekers after the mystery of why and who we are, and why, in place of nothing, there is cosmos.
Reverting to living again among fellow humans as the quest continued, rising at dawn to celebrate and ponder the mystery of existence in the glory of the sun, seeking, celebrating, worshipping-until, at last, it rose beyond the horizon of the mind, the ultimate logic of being and becoming, but...why should that logic exist in the first place, what is the cause of the ultimate author...
Nyansapo, the Wisdom Knot
On visiting the artist Victor Ekpuk at his home in Nigeria's Akwa Ibom, Ekpuk treated Falola and his wife to Ibibio cuisine. Food is one of the most immediate of pleasures, one of the least likely to stimulate philosophical or cultural reflection and writing, strategic as food is to those subjects. One of Falola's best 2025 essays, however, is the one on Ibibio cuisine, resulting from that visit ( ''Five Days with Victor Ekpuk in Akwa Ibom, Part 3'').
I was still processing the experience by January 2026, assimilating the emotional and imaginative impact of that encounter with an art form unifying the evocative power of the rhythmic force of the human body with that of space, music and light, reshaping narratives and ideas I was familiar with but which the performance had gloriously transmogrified- transformed in a surprising or magical manner-into something beyond my adequate understanding yet projecting itself into me with an intensity enabling it take residence in my heart and mind, a castle of wonders-made of memory, mysterious, compelling, spell binding. Sublime.
Writing this in in February 2026, I remain still within that state at the border of assimilation and expression, mesmerized by something wonderful, yet, even as a compulsive and professional writer, unable to translate the experience into writing because I don't understand it enough to express much about it beyond the wonder of the encounter.
What makes the essays magnificent and the third part a sterling contribution to Yoruba philosophy and spirituality is his style of presenting and interpreting that cosmology, as well as his engaging the drama's progression as a meditation on relationships between humanity and Earth within the context of cosmos.
How did Falola manage to arrive at such rich reflections, expressing them so forcefully and memorably, while I am still trying to assimilate the same experience he is responding to?
I had to conclude that Falola had demonstrated an unusually high level of processing and expressive capacity in writing those essays, the transformation of the conjunction between new experience or awareness and existing understanding into new knowledge.
Did this achievement require the input of the field work of any research assistants?
The precision mind analyses and reorganises the details of the material environment [while] the cosmic mind synthesizes fragments of information to create a universally significant body of knowledge [by merging] significant units of information with universal concepts pulled together by a unique kind of intellectual power.
When the cosmic mind grinds its elements of experience into a totality of knowledge, it acquires a discipline which by its ‘horrific’ power erases the boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead, the physical and the non-physical. The individual initiate acquires, like the chameleon’s all round vision, the capacity to conceptualise the totality of life at once. Such wisdom is enshrined in the rounded calabash of symbolic cosmic power.
The Tripartite Unity of a Particular Cognitive Identity
The combination of the drive to interpret reality, the development of sophisticated, personal mental networks facilitating this interpretation and the relentless effort to express this drive, are at the heart of Falola's polymathic creativity and voluminous productivity. Everything else shaping his creative identity, all enablements of this ''orientation of a person's life and work in terms of their ultimate sense of mission'', as Webster's dictionary defines ''vocation'', are complementary.
Such orientations are evident in the history of creativity. The Dutch-French artist Vincent van Gogh, the US writer Edgar Allan Poe, the US scholar Charles Sanders Pierce, the English writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and more, who created great work in difficult situations, demonstrate creativity as a drive that may subsist even in challenging circumstances.
Various people's circumstances play different roles in their lives but Falola's own kind of creativity seems more expressive of an orientation that responds to the cognitive possibilities of an environment than of his circumstances determining the range of that creativity. Those circumstances may be described as further enabling his creative scope, but enabling circumstances for his kind of creativity are like pouring fuel on an already raging fire, enabling it combust further.
Knowledge, in this context, is describable as implying going beyond simple awareness of phenomena-of objects, experiences and ideas- to reflecting upon them, understanding their intrinsic character and extrinsic relations, their innate identities, as far as that can be comprehended, as well as their configuration within a network of extrinsic possibilities.
Cosmic and Individual Dynamism
THE IGBO WORLD is an arena for the interplay of forces. It is a dynamic world of movement and of flux. Igbo art, reflecting this world-view, is never tranquil but mobile and active, even aggressive.
Ike, energy, is the essence of all things human, spiritual, animate and inanimate. Everything has its own unique energy which must be acknowledged and given its due.
Ike di na awaja na awaja is a common formulation of this idea: “Power runs in many channels.” Sometimes the saying is extended by an exemplifying coda about a mild and gentle bird, obu, which nonetheless possesses the power to destroy a snake.
Onye na nkie, onye na nkie—literally, “everyone and his own”—is a social expression of the same notion often employed as a convenient formula for saluting en masse an assembly too large for individual greetings.
Ahoden, ''representing strength, energy, and vitality.
The design features a spiral or helix shape, symbolizing the energy that permeates living things.''
Between the Secular and the Spiritual
Another aspect of Falola's responses in that interview that challenges me is his description of himself as a secularist. I wonder how accurate that is. To what degree is that self description justified by his books and his accounts of his creative processes in other contexts?
Does that self description adequately represent a rich reality at the intersection of the spiritual and the secular, of intellect, imagination and spirit embodied by pictures of his creative identity dramatized by his other self expressions?
Or is locating oneself fully within one of those contexts the valid, non-contradictory way to live? Questions even more acute in relation to a scholar going beyond his academic training by cultivating sensitivity to pluralistic epistemologies, varied ways of developing, assessing and using knowledge, though groomed in the Western tradition, as Falola, trained in the rigorous application of linear logic, taught and required to be carefully sensitive to the differences and intersections of various kinds of logic-the intellectual, the imaginative, among others.
Even when one identifies with spirituality or religion, what does it fully mean to be Christian, Islamic, Hindu or belong with ATR, African Traditional Religions? What are the implications of the borderlands between various ways of identifying with these highly organised spiritual cultures?
These are questions of spiritual and religious identity, implicating the character of the spiritual and religious as individual and social cultures and possibly metaphysical realities independent of individual human and social structuring. Those enquiries are suggested by the tensions between Falola's responses to Obilo's questions on his religious orientations and the realities of his spiritual identities evident from his writings.
Perplexities of Internal and External Islamic Identity
Falola states in that interview-'' I am not a Muslim'', ''I am a secularist'', ''I accept all religions''.
How may one explain the discrepancies between ''I am not a Muslim'' and the profound Islamic spirituality of Falola's latest autobiography, Malaika and the Seven Heavens: A Memoir of My Encounter with Islam? (Open Access)
Falola states in the interview that one could not grow up in Ibadan's Ode Aje, as he did, and not be significantly informed about Islam, the same neighbourhood that he describes as initiating him into knowledge of indigenous Yoruba spirituality and philosophy and Christianity.
Malaika, however, goes beyond sociological reportage, beyond even auto-ethnography, to become a sublime devotional document, as demonstrated by the poetry that opens each chapter and the closing dream vision, where Falola describes himself as undergoing the equivalent of the pilgrimage to Mecca through a dream.
The entire book promises to be very powerful, worthy of correlation with the works of the great masters of the Islamic tradition across cultures, from Ahmadou Hampate Ba on the Malian Sufi master Tierno Borkar, embodying the spirit of inter-religious harmony Falola celebrates in Malaika as exemplified by the culture of Ode Aje, to the visionary encounters and metaphysics of Ibn Arabi in Al-Andalus, of the Afghan-British compiler Idries Shah, the Persian poets and thinkers Jalalal al-Din Rumi and Faridoddin Attar and other Islamic writers famous for dramatising the manner in which Islam pierces to the core of the human condition at the nexus of the self, humanity and the infinite.
What more is required to be identified as a Muslim? Does being a Muslim necessarily imply literally adhering to the foundational tenets of Islam such as praying five times a day? Must one even accept, in a literal sense, that Muhammed is a prophet of Allah, the creator of the universe? Can Mohammed's achievements and inspiration be adequately appreciated without subscribing to such absolutist interpretations of him?
I dont know what Falola thinks about those questions, although he clearly identifies with Muhammed as revealing Allah, but since Falola disavows being a Muslim, he thereby frees himself from literal adherence to those Islamic tenets, but clearly demonstrates an initiation, a self reshaping encounter, with the spiritual essence of Islam as a recognition of the supremacy of the creator of the universe as messaged by Muhammed, an orientation Malaika demonstrates.
Did his years at a madrassa, an Islamic school,so develop him?
These questions are amplified by Falola's other writings on Islam, demonstrating a significant range of insight into Islamic history and theology.
Moving on from his disavowal of being a Muslim, he also describes himself as a secularist. When asked to explain what that means, he states ''I accept all religions''.
Is that not a contradiction?
Secularity is the opposite of a religious mindset.
Can one be a secularist and accept any religion, talk less all, as Falola stated he does?
Perhaps the more realistic description of Falola is that he is a universal or ecumenical religionist, who identifies with all spiritualities and religions and is able to take advantage of them, as well as embodying his own distinctive spirituality, which may be interpreted as a variant of indigenous Yoruba thought.
Eshu, Saraswati, Leku's Magic and Ancestral and Orisa Guidance
How else may one explain the two intriguing descriptions by him of a meditation on the Yoruba Orisa spirituality deity Eshu presented in a manner akin to a personal experience in ''Ritual Archives'' and his immersion in a meditation on the Hindu goddess Saraswati which his friend Vik Bahl introduced him to as a means of gaining psychological healing and freedom from mental blocks resulting from the catastrophic loss of the manuscript of the first version of Malaika, as he narrates in that book?
How may one understand his private self descriptions, which he permitted me to share for other essays on his work, of his creativity as driven by a spiritual impulse which suffuses him, enabling him with a rush of creativity in which ideas and their verbal expressions pour like a flood, a creative compulsion at times suspending sleep until the ideational and expressive flow is fulfilled, an inexplicable experience he correlates with ancestral guidance and the overshadowing of the Orisa, the central deities of indigenous Yoruba cosmology?
A Richly Complex Configuration
He may be discerned as a universalist religionist, an ecumenical intellect, a cognitive pilgrim across traditions. Creativity, in this case, emerges not from dogmatic or solo allegiance but from spiritual permeability—the capacity to inhabit multiple symbolic worlds without being confined by any single one.
Keeping in mind all these considerations, about the character, scope and inter-textual resonance of his creativity in relation to his spiritual/secular identity, how may Falola be described?
Where do new ideas come from? From the brain, from beyond the brain, or both?
The source of existence is known as unmanifest because it is beyond thought or imagination.
As the origin of existence it is
constantly generating new ideas, which people
can access and share with others by developing their minds.
How?
Cultivating knowledge and skill through study, reflection, practice.
( Description of the nature and influence of the Great Unmanifest adapted from Dion Fortune)
The cosmic mind does not contain the particulars of human thought and experience, but is an exalted level of evaluation.
Harvey Spencer Lewis, The Rosicrucian Manual.
Noble thoughts, aspirations, and intuitive illumination have motivated mankind in a progressive trend. Men have not only sought to refine their environment, provide for their security and economic welfare, but they have likewise sought to satisfy an innate curiosity about themselves, the reason for their existence and what constitutes the summum bonum, the highest good for mankind.
From out of such curiosity has grown an inspired science, a sincere, dedicated inquiry into the mysteries of the universe. Moreover, it has resulted in an introspection, a turning of man's consciousness inward. This has resulted in a self-appraisal and through the centuries a self-discipline in terms of moral codes and ethics.
Though brutality, cruelty, primitive reasoning, and superstition still prevail, yet mankind taken collectively has slowly ascended from its earliest mental and moral stature. The very fact that we today are aware of certain vices and moral decay indicates we have a conscience that makes possible the evaluation of such behavior.
Whence comes the spark of higher idealism? What engenders the impulse toward righteousness in human conduct and endeavor? There is a Cosmic Harmony, a rhythm within nature that man can experience in various ways. When experienced it provides an ecstasy, a sense of well-being, a love of life which no physical satisfaction can equal. The poets have long sung about it. Religions in their doctrines have sought to relate it to one or more deities.
Shorn of sectarian and other vagaries, it is a simple truth. Man is a product of universal forces and energies. The atomic structure of [ a person's] body is of the same dynamic, nuclear attraction as all other substances. But a living being is something more—it is conscious, and man is a highly developed self-conscious entity.
Man is, therefore, not just a product of cosmic forces but is one also having the power of self-realization, the faculty of experiencing this essence of his being. The deeper emotions, the finer sentiments—which religion attributes to soul, mysticism to the psychic, and psychology to the subconscious and its various alternate names—are really the Cosmic in each of us. These finer feelings, constructive impulses, are a window through which the self looks out upon and realizes the one of which it is a part.
But man's thoughts are not all earthbound. Those thoughts which represent his highest concept of the good, of the right, and which gratify the conscience are the effect of man's attunement with the Cosmic Harmony that permeates his whole being. These transcendent, lofty thoughts radiate outward; they have an affinity with their source. Figuratively speaking, they ride outward upon the very crest of the vibratory energy which gave them birth in man's consciousness.
There is, then, a glorious, a magnificent focal point of all the positive thought, the finest concepts of which men are capable. This focal point is the Cosmic—it is not a place; it is neither limited by space nor time. It is a virtual Celestial Sanctum. At any time, anywhere, men may, in sincerity of heart, with noble purpose, and by a simple technique raise their consciousness and enter this Celestial Sanctum.
In such contact one can be imbued with a spiritual power that regenerates the body and mind. There is no requirement of a specific dogmatic belief, no compelling image which one must assume of a personage. This Celestial Sanctum is to all men what they want it to be—with one qualification. It must represent to each person the highest degree of purity and of sanctity of which he is capable, in terms intimate to each.
From this Celestial Sanctum can come personal gratification as health, the solution of many problems, and, above all else, a peace profound. It is not that some ethereal personage, some anthropomorphic being is to confer these things like an earthly king. Rather, the strength of union with the focalized thought of multitudes of others in this Celestial Sanctum quickens our own consciousness. It therefore makes more effective the creative Cosmic Harmony residing within us.
Charles Dana Dean, Liber 777, The Celestial Sanctum.
Collage is of Falola in his Lagos study, left, and of the cover of his In Praise of Greatness, background, which he describes as evoking the infinite scope of possibilities, ''the world you cannot close, in its eternity''.
On watching the Obilo interview, I had been thinking of how best to respond in writing to my dissatisfaction with Falola's description of the sources of his prolificity, composing a couple of short drafts but achieving nothing satisfactory.
On the 22nd of January 2026, I rose from bed in the morning with another, urgent project of mine in mind but which I needed to reactivate the drive to continue with. To motivate myself, I visualised Falola's face, as representing a person who accomplishes a broad range of goals related to the knowledge industry, constantly pushing the boundaries of his own possibilities. This visualisation was conducted in relation to what I have termed the polymathic intelligence, the drive to grasp a broad range of reality, symbolised by the synthesis represented by a circle, against the background of another, larger circle evoking the ultimate source of potential, beyond human cognitive reach yet generative of all possibilities.
On visualizing this Falola/polymathic intelligence/cosmic ground picture, with Falola's image at the centre of the polymathic circle, as embodying that multidisciplinary drive, the ideas that had been floating about in my head in relation to the incipient Falola essay suddenly rose to my awareness, with striking clarify and force, as they swiftly and steadily unfolded in terms of compelling coherence.
The experience underscores a central claim of this essay: creativity often operates through internal cognitive networks, facilitated by environment, in this instance involving the alignment of disciplined intellect with symbolic and contemplative environments that catalyze emergence.
The Italian Leonardo da Vinci (1452- 1519) is a particularly memorable example of the polymathic vision, ironically achieving only a slim portion of what he was capable of as an artist but commanding unending fascination through the dynamism of his visual intelligence, dramatizing the peaks of what is possible in art as well as straining towards potential beyond what was attainable in his time. Hence Ludwig Heydenreich describes Leonardo as famous for
...his unlimited desire
for knowledge, which guided all his thinking and behavior. An artist by disposition and
endowment, he considered his eyes to be his main avenue to knowledge; to
Leonardo, sight was a person’s highest sense because it alone conveyed the
facts of experience immediately, correctly, and with certainty. Hence, every
phenomenon perceived became an object of knowledge, and saper vedere (“knowing
how to see”) became the great theme of his studies. He applied his creativity
to every realm in which graphic representation is used: He was a painter,
sculptor, architect, and engineer. But he went even beyond that. He used his
superb intellect, unusual powers of observation, and mastery of the art
of drawing to study nature itself, a line of inquiry that
allowed his dual pursuits of art and science to flourish.
( ''Leonardo da Vinci", Encyclopedia Britannica, 2026)
The sense of potent animation, as of nature generating generating a unique vitality in something created by a human hand, and of mysterious, unforgettable beauty, that Leonardo's art conjures for me, is unified with Heydenreich's summation in vivifying Aristotle's declaration, ''All men by nature desire to know, as is evident in the delight they take in being able to see, beceause it enables them know the differences between things''.
''How are these differences united to generate the orderly world we perceive, the continuity within change that shapes the universe?'' Aristotle may be paraphrased as wondering, as he proceeds from that opening of his Metaphysics to explore the variety and unity of the cosmos, its dynamism and coherence, leading him to the idea of an ultimate cause, his multidisciplinary investigations shaping Islamic philosophy as well as creating the foundations of the Western intellectual universe across all disciplines, actively resonant in the present.
Falola
stands within this lineage of cognitive striving—not in imitation but in
orientation: a refusal to confine inquiry within disciplinary boundaries, a
drive to synthesize.The drive to see, to connect, to
interpret, to express — and to do so across the full range of what can be known
— is the animating principle that unifies Leonardo, Aristotle and Falola in works that continue to emerge with the relentlessness of a mind that cannot
do otherwise.
Image and Text: The Search
Who am I?
Why am I?
Who are we?
Why are we?
Fragments of luminous, diverse colour define the environment of Salubi Onakufe's painting as the figure within it seems to blunder in the variegated landscape, searching for something, something of great significance, as suggested by the radiance of the fragments, but something perhaps unclear even to the searching person, as indicated by the hazy impression generated by the medley of shards.
The puzzles of the psyche, the various drives shaping the self, its myriad emotional and ideational archipelagos, the diversity of selves developed in relation to different social roles, the sense of possibilities within the individual beyond their conventional psychological and social configurations, intimations of the person as traveller within and beyond those structural dynamisms...
Between the Fire and the Fuel
Institutional resources
matter.
Research assistants matter.
Recognition matters.
But they are accelerants, not origins.
Falola’s productivity arises from a cultivated cognitive culture—a disciplined responsiveness to experience, a polymathic architecture of mind, and an expressive compulsion that transforms reflection into contribution.
Creativity is not primarily
circumstantial.
It is orientational.
It is the decision—conscious or otherwise—to interpret every experience as an opportunity for knowledge.
The fire burns before further combustion by additional fuel.
Image and Text: Sun at Noon
The sun, journey and infinity
Are there different ''mes'' cohering into one identity? What invoked the ''me'' that ''sang'' the more powerful qualities of this essay into existence?
Perhaps I shall be returning to the contemplation of what may be called the polymathic matrix, the visualization of which ignited the decisive unfolding of this journey.
Within that mental shrine are to be found all those who represent for me the most glorious of human possibilities.
Dedication
This essay is dedicated to all who contribute to my growth as a seeker and expresser of knowledge.