“WHAT MEANS THAT!?”
WHAT MEANS THAT
The world is enough (28/11/2017)
Get rid of him mum, he’s weak, I hate weak people, they are dangerous. The 16 year old, usually quite funny, was not joking, she had that steely thing in the eye. I know what she meant, he was cowardly, I detest cowardice, it is the underlying weakness responsible for all the isms that plague our human existence.
Cowardice is the irrational fear of death underpinning our civilisation of scarcity, it is that thing preventing most from living fully. If you are a living dead, you cannot die now can you? Or at the least you’d have so much experience being dead, death would be a smooth transition.
How does one recognise cowardice in one and others? Look out for non existential anxiety, an inability to be at rest and at peace in one’s being, a refusal to fully engage with one’s soul and an inability to accept beauty in the fallibilities of one’s body. The fear that this life is not enough so we must extend it in myth or protect it with force rather than enjoy, leverage and expand it fully for the duration we have it.
I hear you say this is abstract animal manure which it may be but those things nurture life don’t they? It was Emperor Aurelius who puts it quite nicely when he said “to be fully engaged in the affairs of your own heart”. Cowards are very external, constantly struggling with notions of and around others. Other people’s perception, ideas, opinions, reality and being. Never fully engaged with an urgency to fulfil the intelligence in their own souls, never un-performingly kind and loving to their own full being and embracing of others’. Everything of the other is filtered through the fear self. They are so shocked by life and fearful of it’s intent, they detest anything they perceive as weak, reading it as a death kernel. It underpins the disregard and hatred of time (the aged or aging), life (the female or feminine), resources (the poor) and knowledge (the intelligent). This, not in a them and us way but in a us and us way because people in all those categories -except the intelligent, which is not to be confused with the knowledgeable- can and often are just as guilty, liable or culpable. Now if you were to ask me or not, I’d offer to tell you to be more wary of those who have disregard than those who have hatred. Open hatred is honest, it can be avoided or warred against. Disregard in its subtlety has real power in deniability and a cruelly dysmorphic longevity. It is clever and effective in its’ ability to reduce, flatten and lessen matter, seemingly for the greater good.
Disregard is weakness that rewards weakness in others, fear rewarding fear. Hatred in is its’ brutishness lacks longevity, rewards nought but itself and is so obviously an ugly weak, other more intelligent forms of weakness can easily dissociate from or attack it.
To be brave is to stand face to face with your own fully flawed and dying self, to be fully engaged with its’ intelligence and purpose. In essence to be fully alive to life, its’ elements, its’ idiosyncrasies and foibles in the way of knowledge that this is enough in itself, the world is enough. A non neediness from freedom of fear of scarcity and non greed from knowledge of abundance. A refusal to be less of your most honest self, at least not for long and certainly not as an ongoing reality. Oops I think I just defined love.
Only the brave truly loves; themselves, life, others, the world.
Only the brave are non validation kind.
– ms chief witch
The birds and bees (21/11/2017)
Children are punishment for narcissism. Mine who is 16, quite funny and often weird asked one of her famous dumb questions recently. What is the difference between the love we feel for a partner and that we feel for anyone else? I didn’t like this question, at this point, all l really want as a mother is a young adult who does her chores, bring good grades home and lets me watch Shameless in peace.
So we started one of our convoluted conversations in which we agreed that love is love but not all are born equally never mind treated fairly. I tried to indoctrinate her into my preferred basic, lazy generalisation that men and women love differently whoever the gaze of love is directed; parent, offspring, sibling lover, work or material. Men seem hardwired to love in relation to themselves whilst women are conditioned to love in relation to relationship. Men love me, women love us. The result is men tend towards selfishness and women towards manipulation. This does not make men bad and women bad or holy, they are bad and holy, recognition of this would make them more sexy, less problematic and pent up. One must always fear and possibly detest those too cowardly to own their bad.
My late great friend who was tearjerker funny often loudly proclaimed a preference for what she called bush bad men, she called them powerful. She was disdainful about “new men” whom she called New York vulnerables which l understand now to mean performance wokeness or what l call Adire progressives. The female equivalent would be the ya-ya sisterhood of lies, manipulation and liberated repressors. They of the literal literati and academia who use words as weaponry to hide what is in essence crippling self doubt and social anxiety.
I was getting off on my own juice when the 16-year old who was now casually bored drawled, yeah mum but my question is what is the difference between the love we feel for our partner and love for others regardless of how women and men love.
Distractedly, all l could think of was sex so I blurted – they are the ones we want to have sex with, even though we may want to have sex with those we don’t love as well and might no longer want to have sex with those we love. I could hear myself sounding dumb although l trust my dumb.
She looked confused and I felt confused so I dug further saying – I think the problem is we often have emotions we can’t put words to and we tend to use sex as a way of expressing those emotions. Words are such inadequate convoy for emotions. Sex is one of our tools of comfort, expression and camaraderie. It’s Abrahamic modern day power is derived from a need to organise society for material gain. That’s why sex generates such complex emotions in us, like food water and any other forms of taxed and regulated interactions with others and the elements. We can use it for our own good or detriment. Making it a major determinant of romantic love is problematic. Love itself is fluid, I love you differently today than l did at 3 months old but l love you no less.
She said she thinks she understands, so we both went back to doing things we love but which we do not want to have sex with.
Who is the educated illiterate? (7/11/2017)
Last week my younger friend who does not like South Africans very much spat out scathingly, -those people whose country is not a proper name, just description of a region.- I felt compelled to remind her that Nigeria is also just a description of a region bestowed upon her by the mistress of a racist white man although there’s nothing wrong with being a mistress, white or a man.
She goes on a bit about racism and what they did to us, I was more interested in what it did to us but l can tell she finds comfort in her spot on the polar opposite, the fashion today being performance polarity. She zeroes in on colonialism and talked herself into a frenzy until my daughter who is 16 and rather funny asked; – how did Nigerians get educated before colonialism?- On this she became a bit stuck as the outrage was more directed externally at getting reactions and reassurance of an enemy a little beloved. This question however forces the issue away from the enemy to the self with the responsibility of recognising the lasting effects of an oppressive system and dismantling the structures of that system when one’s covert validation comes from same.
How did Nigerians get education before western education, how was knowledge acquired and passed through the society? This is a very good question although of course it must be said, there was no Nigeria before colonisation and thus the question is how did the nation states and communities that were merged into Nigeria acquire, assign, share and pass on knowledge, what was the system of education and structures that enabled it?
A month or so earlier l had watched a twitter convulsion over a news story about experimentation with non-gendered pronouns in a Swedish school which many self assigned intelligent tweeps from Africa had roundly condemned as yet another un-natural western thing designed to kill the family system and drag humanity to extinction. On the polar opposite of that were even more self assigned intelligent tweeps claiming it to be yet another example of ‘the Wests” steady stride into progress, tolerance and human sophistry.
I have a non-slight vexation was this unending “Oyinbo na God, Oyinbo nah Devil” bi-polarity which filters everything through the lenses, actions or inactions of the so called white man, who is actually not white and who has as many ethnicities and differences as any other but who has moved on from overt tribalism or backed into performance tolerance.
Without that filter, it is easy to remember that this idea is neither new nor western, it can be found in many ancient cultures around the world including some in Europe. For example, the Yoruba culture has non gendered pronouns although this was not about gender as l believe these ancestors considered personhood as a sum of the whole not a part of it.
Even more interestingly is what it tells us about how language is a vehicle for culture which provides a glimpse into the philosophy of art and science within an education system we have long lost knowledge about or value for.
I’ll break it down. So, in Yoruba language, there is no gendered He or She but personhood You (Ó) and They (É). You and They is an inaccurate representation of ó and é. A better representation is the binary 0 and 1 which is also the Yoruba scientific and religious coding system and basic language of computer technology but let’s ignore all that for now. What do ó and é really mean? Simply put they represent major and principal or more eloquently Ó or you or 0 denote a singularity, a beginning or a state of zero whilst É or they or 1 denote complexity, mass or state of many.
Typically and rather bastardly, this delicately nuanced concept has been reduced to age. Originally, in that use, age was not determined by time alone, that would be too literal and reductive. Age was determined by the rather juicily complex mixture of time, experience, achievements, status and contribution. Thus age would be relative to context and to addresser or addressee. Therefore the pronouns would be fluid and context dependent. Non of this is about gender or sexuality. Sexuality, biological sex, age, achievements and value are all part of personhood which is not denied anyone through a reduction to any of its singularity.
Personhood was fluid, complex and layered, thus no one is defined by a singularity of the self for good or bad. Personally I find this bloody fantastic and evolved. It lays to the wasteland of simple mindedness, the many fractious conversations around singularities like sexuality, identity, sex, age and so on as determinant of value on their own.
To think all of this was seamlessly woven into the fabric of everyday life, art, religion, philosophy and science is pretty exciting, oh how wonderfully well educated our illiterate ancestors were.
– ms chief witch
Oya’s perspective 31/10/2017
My daughter who is now 16 and quite funny was once 3 and rather funny. She spoke so early she didn’t bother with making the words pretty or the sentences perfect. There were many examples but my favourite is “what means that?” She started saying this at age 3 with a tinkle and a laugh. She meant to say what does that mean but she puts the word mean ahead because she knew meanings or interpretations were vital. Her child-like jumbling of words continued for a while with what means that outlasting every other. This made the oracles of motherhood frown at me beneath their bonnet of political hair.
What means that? The other thing I remember her saying quite sternly when she was 4 and we went into an argument about something so significant l have forgotten it, was the sentence, “..but that’s not how my mind thinks that”.
The mind, a combination of our brain’s wiring and the tools of education, environment. conditioning and experience is a vital entity. It is a thing of beauty when it churns these disparate complex elements with a seamlessness that comes from practised use so that like any other form of art it reaches the point of sublime ease which we recognise as genius.
That of course is the ideal which is often the preserve of the indulgent or those unaware of the privilege that props the ideal. The role of life is building the props so we can always aspire towards the ideal.
Anyways, back to my daughter who is now 16 and still funny.
I am fascinated by how minds interpret phenomena, news, events and stories. I am not repelled by asymmetry of thinking or its askew staging whether thoughts are still in entropy or not. Childlike curiosity, lack of fear about presentation and confidence with jumbling information interests me.
“What means that” is a chosen life motto of mine having not consulted my daughter who never jokes about copyright. “What means that” is the prism with which l approach phenomena, information, news, events and stories. It is my prism of perspective.
So, welcome to my newsletter, every week I will share my perspective on matters l find interesting from the prism of ease with asymmetry. I encourage you to take it with a pinch of salt as my guiding spirit is the cheeky Esu, Yoruba deity/philosopher of perspective who expects us not to take ourselves too seriously and gives permission to each mind to think things differently. Consequences being as unique to each as action is. My intention is line with Oya, my favourite deity/philosopher of progress begetting turbulence.
If you are here, I presume you intelligent and hopefully you are funny as anything else is a bore in a life not short of those.
Here’s where I leave you with one of my favourite movie sequence because, like Anton Ego, I don’t like things, I love them!
Share this:
0.Comments