The Ignoramus Cave, the sick “scholar’s” mental cave, sings him, “I,” a cradlesong larded with the following bodacious refrain:
“But they don’t understand how I feel about ‘stupidity’; I walk with ‘stupidity’; I talk with ‘stupidity’; I eat with ‘stupidity’; I sleep with ‘stupidity’; I live for ‘stupidity’; I’ll die for ‘stupidity.’”
Die for stupidity? Live for stupidity? What oxymoronic understatements! Is the sick “scholar” not a fecal impaction of “stupidity”? Then, of course, The People knowingly cannot underestimate his shifty lunacy, which has always been as empirically slippery as the tachyons of particle physics have always been theoretically nebulous! Still, the epidemiological evasiveness of the psycho-emotional tachyons may eventually prove to be the sought-after etiological window into the vast intellectual desert of the sick “scholar’s” dislocated psychology, though no one in The Country have as yet given much thought to this controversial theory. The incomparable tachyonic “inner mystery” of The Scarab Beetle, of Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman”! It is, however, part of the streaming conscious recipe of The Country’s public pathos not to wish for the sick “scholar’s” ominous passing, as awful as he is, as the poignant biography of E.B. White’s beloved family pig, a diseased pet, recalled in the essay “Death of a Pig”!
Yet the legend “Death of a Pig” is merely an instructive metaphor for the sick “scholar’s” well-popularized intellectual obituary. But the sick “scholar” does not realize this metaphoric actuality because an apparent interpositional translucence from his pseudo nerd glasses blocks the dialectic demands of commonsense, of ingenuity, on the one hand, from the subjectivity of stupidity, of funky dumbness, on the other hand. The Country therefore cannot gloss the fact that his sick mind is a packed forestry of negative ideas, ideas akin to those expressed in Arthur de Gobineau’s “Essay on the Inequality of Human Races,” to those expressed by Immanuel Kant, Sudan’s Janjaweed Arab Raiders, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, P.W. Botha, etc. More emphatically, though, the gross internalization of this Milky Way of negative ideas by the sick “scholar” as well as through his whining intellectual library of whoppers has a telling impact on the general psychology of multiethnic socialization, national integrity, and scientific inquiry.
Indeed, the mucous path of his psychological luxation is evidently so narrowly linear as for him to misapprehend one of Wole Soyinka’s many obese statements of ecumenical import “fly off its seemingly magnetized trajectory into a new orbit of mutual human recognition and respect.” Imhotep, Ave Kludze, Trebi Ashitey-Ollenu, and Isaiah Blankson would have readily understood this simple statement of fact without so much as a blink of an intellectual eye, but not so with the sick “scholar.” Further, Soyinka’s acute remark is an informed commentary on the cosmic soup of ethno-racial sociality, again, not unlike Ravi Shankar’s musical dexterity in bringing harmony to the varied strings of an Indian sitar! Unfortunately the sick “scholar’s” Head of Medusa is not cut out for the political economy of humanophilia.
This implies the “scholar’s” infinitesimal psyche is appreciably more acclimated to the diabolic instinct of the serial killer in Caleb Carr’s “The Alienist” than to the philosophical numerology of multiethnic equalitarianism, the socializing habits of Julius W. Richard’s Dedekind Cut of cohabitation. Again, this is why The People should be analytically positioned to vehemently reject the varicolored aggregation of lies driven by the emotional absolutism of the “scholar’s” Hitlerite intellectual imperialism in The Country! That Hitlerite intellectual imperialism!
Stated differently, the philosophical crux of the foregoing paragraphs reasonably seem to revolve around getting rid of what D.H. Lawrence refers to as the “ugly imperialism of any absolute,” a concept very typical of The People’s, even of the “scholar’s,” affective yet limping popular conscience, for he, D.H. Lawrence, conceives of the world of creative modernity in terms of the political economy of “the novel,” Chinua Achebe’s “the fiction,” his imaginative literature, which can also be directly translated into another phrasal orthography “liberty of conscience,” ideal for those poet manqués such as the sick “scholar” in full possession of rigidified psychologies, invariably Bob Marley’s “vain imagination.” Evidently “vain imagination” does share a topological space of mutual exclusiveness with the innate mechanics of creativity. Thus, Lawrence maintains: “The novel is the book of life. In this sense, the Bible is a great confused novel.”
It is equally imperative to know Lawrence, like Achebe, views “the novel” primarily as “the book of life,” although “the Bible is a great confused novel” comes across as a pointed reference to the Tower-of-Babel mentality of the sick “scholar.” Thus, the “scholar” is just as “a great confused novel” as The Sheep, a sheepish humanoid, that lacks total understanding of life’s profound secrets. But the “scholar’s” diarrheic stupidity and anachronistic nerd glasses, his Hoot Owl physiognomy, curtail any serious attempt at locating the precise streaks of wisdom lodged in the pages of Lawrence’s “the book of life,” Chinua Achebe’s “imaginative literature.” Yet the sick “scholar” is just as hopelessly unimaginative as he is a helplessly spent flatus. Still and all, Lawrence notes elsewhere: “There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute. The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another.”
We may, alas, infer Lawrence is making a lineal allusion to the political morality of tolerance, an expensive notion the Malian ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ takes up in his biographical limning of “the Sage of Bandiagara” Tierno Bokar, “A Spirit of Tolerance: The Inspiring Life of Tierno Bokar,” with Wole Soyinka quick to gift us a toothsome morsel from one of Bokar’s many gnomic statements: “There exists your truth, there is my truth and there is?the Truth.” But “truth” itself is a functional manifestation of knowledge as a process worth a group’s or an individual’s constant pursuit, “perpetual elasticity,” according to Soyinka. Soyinka even goes a step further: “…claimants to possession of the definiteness of knowledge are, in fact, the greatest obstacles to the attainment of truth.” Once again, on the other hand, merely the fact of the sick “scholar” being admittedly neither “truth” nor a semblance of “truth” makes the polarizing extremities of absolutism a futile speculative exercise for the “scholar,” as he has never been in the possession of any creative instruments of critical thinking to guide him forge a reconciliation, then and now.
Consequently the “scholar’s” misguided, stone-blind pen cannot be said to be a monopoly of “truth.” Perhaps the absential proliferation of “truth” represents the most crucial etiological link to the existential crises of many a genocide, political anarchy, ethnocentrism, slavery, scientific racism, pogrom, sexism, etc., across the expanse of ethno-animal human history. No wonder the sick “scholar” is deemed an intellectual genocidaire by many a great thinker! Besides, he is not even a good Professor of Chicanery after all. Philosophically however, Lawrence’s phrasal construct “all things flow and change” assumes the definitive dialectic substructure upon which The Scarab Beetle raises the rational scaffolding of “categorical conversion,” an unmistakable leitmotiv of his “Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology of Decolonization.” Lawrence generally misses the point, however.
In reality, the sick “scholar” comes across either as impervious to innovative ideas or to the rotatory nature of change, as Wole Soyinka and the noble deities of the Orisa Religion have rightly noted, in addition to the latter’s and Bahá’í Faith’s ecumenical secondment of ethno-animal human, of religious unity! Well, enough has already been said about the moral utility of the “Unified Field Theory” of cohabitation, of mutual accommodativeness, of Ubuntu, though a learning-trip by the sick “scholar” to Benin’s Ouidah Shrine of Pythons, for instance, would have at least instilled in him a special sense of communal harmony between ethno-animal humans and royal snakes. Wilson Harris’ quantum fiction recaptures the “Unified Field Theory” of cohabitation, mutual tolerance, in ethno-animal human affairs.
On the other hand, Albert Einstein’s and John A. Wheeler’s “Unified Field Theory” of cohabitation necessarily joins in a metaphysical banquet of innate amenity, a well-defined philosophical modality characteristic of the noble trilogy of the lotus, Gohonzon, and Nichiren Buddhism, though, sadly, even unfortunately, the sick “scholar” remains a mummified android of hyperbolic Synoptic contradictions, a neurological corpse antagonistic to the tenets of historical criticism and textual criticism. Therefore, the sick “scholar’s” corpus of vulgar writings may be said to be arguably a representational equivalent of what hypothetical literary scholars have described as Ebola virus literary scholarship, O Great People of the World, also concomitantly the devious hand of nihilism, the Sword of Damocles, behind the clinical massacre of the mind, a nosocomial contamination of the living brain.
What is more, his graphopathological genre of writings lays the kind of corruptive eggs embodying the yellow seeds of internecine distraction: The Dagbon Crisis, mental corruption, the terrorism of Boko Haram and Ansaru and Al-Shabab and Lord’s Resistance Army and NLM, intellectual stationariness…The sick “scholar,” his Khmer Rouge intellectual mindset! The sick “scholar,” his foul-smelling yellow journalism which is neither stunt journalism nor gonzo journalism! The sick “scholar,” a dead ghost whose yellow journalism is anything but quality investigative journalism, whose dead tongue loves to blow inarticulate shofars in a desert of cemeteries! A sick “scholar” whose journalistic hot air is practically nothing about literary journalism or experimental journalism! The sick “scholar,” a deranged interpolation between Elvis Presley and Jesus Christ, between Tupac and Jesus Christ, between Wanlov the Kubolor and Jesus Christ…
As well, the political economy of homeostasis, appreciation of human genomics, and knowledge of the internalized optimality of well-organized collaborative processes among the disparate members of human anatomy are favorable auguries of clear-headedness, but not in the clinical case of the sick “scholar.” In any case, are there separate ethnic-specific pharmacopoeias for The Country’s motley collection of ethnicities? Clearly, there is at most one seeming many-sided response to this very question, a response necessarily out of tune with the antique sensibilities of the headless “scholar’s” flesh-eating bacteria Head of Medusa! Could the sick “scholar” be the Flashman character in Thomas Hughes’ “Tom Brown School Days,” the Simon Legree character in Harriet B. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom Cabin,” or the prostitute Wanja character is Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s “Petals of Blood”? Where is the beef? Wole Soyinka, it need be pointed out, sits on a lingering question, purportedly under suspended animation, wondering if the sick “scholar” is indeed “a proponent of the activity of reason” at all?
In the main, that unique response is indisputably the “truth,” which requires a caravan of creative ideas for the divestiture of its autogenic emotional ambiguities. Where is the beef? “Attempts to tell ‘truth’s’ side of any story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has explained, “is severely weakened by the danger of a single story!” It is also far from questionable to view Adichie’s critical observation as an ornate rhetoric gesture different from coin stochastics, the tossing trajectory of a fair coin in mathematical probability! What is more, the danger of a single story, on the country, would seem to follow a clinical stochastic behavior within the generalized context of a biased or unfair coin. However, the underlying philosophical rationalizations for these largely non-deterministic calisthenics, their instrumentalist application to the relative fairness of multiethnic sociality, ironically, falls outside the immediate province of the sick “scholar’s” childish poetization and novelization, hence his heavy emotional investment in the political Nazism of ethnic chauvinism and intolerance.
Understandably, his arctic intolerance, particularly, draws inevitably upon the masks of inferiority complex, his manic-depressive disorder, his intellectual backwardness, a clinical case falling on the negative axis of the psychology of compensation. These constitute the necessary masks from behind which he aims his discriminatory salvoes of outbursts at straw men, himself! Could midlife crisis have been a compensatory factor or covariate as well? That may also explain why his yellow journalism, his mediocre corpus of literary works usually get short shrift from non-existing critics to zero attention from serious, respected intelligent critics who are intellectually familiar with the formulaic innards of literary criticism, critical theory, literary techniques, literary theory, and history of literature. The other salient fact is, however, that the “scholar’s” terminally sick mind, his pre-Stone-Age poetics, his fecal yellow journalism, his sickening novelization are diagnostically symptomatic of his long domiciliation in The Ignoramus Cave, a topological trash-dump for the eternal habituation of poetasters and novelasters.
The sick “scholar” is in effect cyclically caught up in an intellectual state of static equilibrium, producing virtually nothing of value for intellectual consumption. A wannabe “scholar” trapped in The Ignoramus Cave is said to be in a state of intellectual weightlessness where, for instance, he or she does not come under the professorial confidence of g-force, zero-g! Yet the mingled aggregate foresights of Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe and D.H. Lawrence as well as of their essayed wisdom are creative therapeutic responses to the sick “scholar’s” gutter intellection. How? It turns out Soyinka’s rhetoric prescript on revelatory questions related to the platform of social-cultural and intellectual transformation within the circumferential space of The Country, an idea familiarly close to The Scarab Beetle’s and D.H. Lawrence’s, derives chiefly from the dialectic standpoint of philosophical cognation, Soyinka’s “age of choice” and “age of volition,” rather than from the latter’s “age of innocence, vulnerability, or social impotence.” What is more interesting, though, as should be expected, O Great People of the World, is the “scholar’s” seemingly unending concentric entrapment in the narrative paleontology of antediluvian sententiality, the “archaic age of amentia.”
Question: Is this intuitive proposition hardly surprising? No. It is public knowledge D.H. Lawrence’s sentential edifice “the Bible is a great confused novel” is a sharp reference, an already acknowledged fact, to the “scholar’s” confused psychology, as it is also a parallel sentential appellation expressive of the characterological crisis Du Bois calls “double consciousness” in association with the constitutive trilogy of The Brethren. The mention of Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” however, summons up another major apocalyptic interface between J.E. Casely-Hayford’s “Ethiopia Unbound” and W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk,” of whose reliably confirmed resolution is detectable in the boulevard of creative works given birth to by the authorial ballpens of The Scarab Beetle, Ama Mazama, Cheikh Anta Diop, Kwame Botwe-Asamoah, Kofi Anyidoho, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Chinweizu, Martin Bernal, Kofi Kissi Dompere, Wole Soyinka, Richard Poe, Okot p’Bitek, Chinua Achebe…
Let us also quickly add here the palpable existence of other strands of conscious resolutions in the militant verseology of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” and “War” on the side of Casely-Hayford’s “Ethiopia Unbound,” principally. Herein lies the long-awaited salvation of the sick “scholar,” the intelligence of Bob Marley, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, D.H. Lawrence…That major internecine apocalyptic divergence between ethno-animal men and women of high intelligence and the intellectual backwardness of the sick “scholar,” it should be stressed here again, constitutes a grim reminder of the latter’s original scarlet sin, his fall from divine grace across the gravitational field of the collective conscience…As well, Benjamin Franklin’s “rum” and scientific racism are not far from the matrical reference of The Brethren’s and the “scholar’s” sociopathic predilections.
As expected, The Brethren, William Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” Machiavellian Shylocks, would have none of Lawrence’s “all things flow and change” or of The Scarab Beetle’s “categorical conversion,” ostensibly an emblem of national, even continental, togetherness, of psycho-cultural freedom.
Let it be pointed out at this juncture that the one-eyed three-men Grey Sisters, the Machiavellian trilogy, namely The Brethren, had their scatterbrains locked up in the cryogenic fossilology of intellectual amentia, of cognitive backwardness, yet the trilogy, like the sick “scholar,” has since failed to avail themselves of the non-escapist wisdom of The Scarab Beetle. Indeed the unpardonable aggregate misbehavior of The Brethren is not what The People had always associated with “the novel,” Achebe’s “the fiction.” That misbehavior is clearly identifiable with Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s “Petals of Blood,” Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Wilson Harris’ “Palace of the Peacock,” Tsitsi Dangarembga’s “Nervous Condition,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories.”
Those, all the above, are in fact a carefully weighed philosophical distillate reflective of the noble advisory dynamics of Achebe’s “the fiction,” his priceless insightfulness, namely, of Einstein’s and Wheeler’s “Unified Field Theory” of cohabitation, Chimamanda’s and Jhumpa’s “One World,” The Scarab Beetle’s “categorical conversion”…the moral high ground of Soyinka’s “age of volition,” “age of choice.” Chinua Achebe says: “The fiction which imaginative literature offers us…does not enslave; it liberates the mind of man. Its truth is not like the canons of an orthodoxy or the irrationality of prejudice and superstition. It begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and human conscience.”
Where is the ugly Hoot Owl face of the sick “scholar”? Has he ever written or dreamt of anything remotely as powerful, intelligent, poignant, gorgeous, musical, sagely, liberating, imaginative, soulful, and prophetic in his entire life as Achebe’s? Oh no, he has not, never, not now, not in the future, for the sum total of “intelligence” entombed in the autogenic crevices of his bone marrows, his gray hair, his telluric existence, and his corpus of literary works is indubitably visibly zero…Emptiness, nothingness, sheer stupidity! In fact, none of the mythical chicken scratches superimposed on the quantum waves of his haphazardly cicatrized Hoot Owl physiognomy of supposed “superior” literaryism, an unproved mirage of literary nothingness, can even be vaguely ascribed to the stylistic elements of adoxographic literation! It is imaginably literarily shoddier, at least so it seems at the profound depths of literary criticism and literary theory. Call him “Yellow Sisi Dey for Corner” literary scholar then!
And since journalism is bereft of objectivity, let us say a total lack of self-consciousness on the part of the sick “scholar,” do archival research methods, an appropriated phraseology for Achebe’s frank sentential worminess “It begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and human conscience,” then, not conduce to an objective rethink about the relatively noble, sincere goals of investigative journalism, of experimental journalism, which, in turn, also points to an inventive exercise in “soul-searching,” call it Gestalt Practice if you like, in the case of the sick “scholar? Is there a whole new world out there without the leprotic psychology and spiritual dementia of the sick “scholar,” The Ignoramus Cave? Will the sick “scholar” ever pause to examine the corpus of literary works, mostly quantum fiction, by the Afro-Guyanese Wilson Harris, arguably one of the world’s most sophisticated and complicated and accomplished writers, for innovative clues as to how to engineer the political economy of ethno-racial conglobation?
Is the sick “scholar” deserving of a thunderous halitotic applause for his comic literariness should he ever attain the height of Buddhist enlightenment required of Achebe’s “imaginative literature”? Not possible from the look of things. No wonder The Country is sinking so unbelievably fast with his kind of “Yellow Sisi Dey for Corner” literary wannabe-ism, O Great People of the World, parading across the spatial quarks of moral stupidity as goodly as faintly what his imaginary literary critics benevolently call intellectual paedomorphism! “Educated Fools!” says Damian Marley.
We shall return…