The mystic drum

Lyrics (2011). African Studies Faculty Publication Series. Paper 12. Http//schoolwork. Numb. Deed/African_faculty_pubs/1 2 This Article Is brought to you for free and open access by the African Studies at Schoolwork at Amass Boston. It has been accepted for inclusion in African Studies Faculty Publication Series by an authorized administrator of Schoolwork at Amass Boston. For to a bang-uper extent(prenominal) information, please contact library. emailprotected Deed. The esoteric amaze unfavourable Com custodytary on Gabriel Okras Love Lyrics Checksum Oz starness, PhD Professor of African & African Diaspora LiteraturesIntroduction In the course of reading a chapter entitled Empty and providential In Alan Watts fascinating book, The Way of pane of glass (1 957), a serendipitous primal was provided, by the following state workforcet from the t for each whizings of Chinese Zen master,l aching kwai Weighing (1067-1120), to the structure and meaning of the experience traumatized in Gabriel Okras most noned make do poetry, The abstruse Drum 2 Before I had examine Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and waters as waters.When I arrived at a more than intimate k todayledge, I came to the pinnacle where I saw the mountains argon not at rest. For its Just now that I interpret mountains at a era again as mountains and waters in one case again as waters. What is so readily striking to whateverone who has read The abstruse Drum is the near perfect dynamic equivalence amidst the haggle of ache Yen and the phraseology of Okras language.In line with hurt Yuans statement, the lyric locomote into deuce-ace cl primal defined parts?an initial grade of ceremonious association, when men are men and fishes are fishes (lines 1-15) a median phase of more intimate populateledge, when men are no longer men and fishes are no longer fishes (lines 16-26) and a final hash of comforting knowledge, when men are once again men and fishes are onc e again fishes, with the difference that at this phase, the be kip downd lady of the lyric is depicted as standing(a) behind a tree with her lips parted in her smile, now glum cavity belching darkness (lines 27-41).The significance of this stopping point phrase will be discussed in the appropriate slot in the final section of the paper, below. But because of the hardity of the calculatery and symbolic representation by means of which progression of the lovers understanding of the nature of domain is developed, it seems necessary to consult the lyric in its entirety before proceeding to a phase-bypass compend of its structure The mystic bewilder beat in my inside and fishes springd in the rivers and men and women danced on add to the rhythm of my gravel But standing behind a tree with leaves around her waist she only smiled with a shake of her head. One of the major schools of Buddhism that originated in 12th- atomic number 6 China with current strongholds in India and J apan, Zen strongly emphasizes enlightenment through meditation and vehemently denies the honor of conventional thinking in favor of an attempt to understand the paradoxes of reality by direct pointing unfettered by what it sees as arbitrary wonted(a) compartmentalizing of phenomena.Since the middle of the twentieth-century, the arouse and fresh insights provided by Zen masters moderate been a source of inspiration for gentle numerous non- Asian writers, artists and intellectuals throughout the innovation, in particular in North America. 2 The point commentary is a revise and updated version of a paper lordly entitled Zen in African Poetry Gabriel Okras The Mystic Drum and overlap privately with some(prenominal) of my students and academic colleagues at Abidjan, Lagos and illness (Nigeria) and Boston (Massachu redactts), USA.Checksum Ozone / The Mystic Drum Critical Commentary angoras Love Poetry 2 rippling the air with quickened tread compelling the quick and the dead to dance and sing with their shadows? Then the drum beat with the rhythm of the things of the ground and invoked the eye of the sky the sun and the moon on and the river gods and the trees began to dance, the fishes turned men and men turned fishes and things stopped to grow? 10 15 20 25 And then the mystic drum in my inside stopped to beat? and men became men, fishes became fishes and trees, the sun and the moon frame their hind ends, and the dead .NET to the ground and things began to grow.And behind the tree she stood with roots sprouting from her feet and leaves development on her head and smoke issuing from her nose and her lips parted in her smile Then, then I packed my mystic drum and turned away n ever so to beat so loud any more. 35 Aching Yuans Zen experience is epistemological?pertaining to a step-by-step substructure of the madnessate lover into an understanding of the nature of reality, in particular the foundations, scope, and hardness of knowledge (Online Enchant) .It can thus be surmised that The Mystic Drum is not Just a conventional amatory lyric, revoked by the storm and mental strain of Okras passionate love for his adored and adorable second wife (an African-American with Caribbean roots, Diamond Carmichael, who died in Port Harcourt in 1983). 3 It is more by all odds a philosophical poem in which the dynamics, directions and management of the mystic drum of passion that beats in the poets inside are dramatically reenacted, in a tripartite ritual and initiatory practice session reminiscent of Aching Yen.From a conventional phase, at which the lovers understanding 3 Okras first wife, a fellow Jog from the Niger Delta and the m separatewise of his son, Dry. Ebb Okra?a clinical psychologist in Randolph, Massachusetts, who lives in Canton, Massachusetts?was divorced when Ebb was only ii years old. there is hardly an reference to her in either Okras lyrics or interviews. Nor do we have any information about the cause of her time inte rval from Okra. Of the nature of knowledge conforms to socially accepted customs of behavior or style (lines 1-15), the lovers progresses through a more intimate phase, at which this knowledge matures from a attached, thoroughgoing, personal race (lines 16-26), to an ultimate substantial phase, situated in the optimum zone of epistemological perception, at which what the lover has come know about the nature of reality is not only solidly strengthened just considerable in amount or importance (lines 27-41), culminating in the lovers self-imposed decision not to allow his mystic drum ever to beat so loud so loud any more (line 41).The poem concludes, in other words, with a firm decision by the lover to put strong reins on the unbridled flights of his amatory imagination, having produce wizened by the knowledge and experience he has acquired. Because the tropes (mystic, drum, and inside), two of which appear in he title of the present paper, are continual in all of Okras love lyr ics (Diamond, To Pave, and The Mystic Drum), it seems necessary to damp awhile to reflect on their meaning and significance.For Okra, the word mystic is thus connotative of the spiritual, the numinous, the magical, the uncanny, and the shamanistic. But it is more meaningful as a poeticalal code for the supervisory powers that enable the human personality to tap into surreptitious strengths buried in the innermost recesses of the psyche. In addition to any other signification carried over by the poet from his he theories of Swiss psychiatrist and smash of Analytical Psychology, Carl Gustavo Jung (1875-1961), as comprising the collective unconscious?the innermost recesses of the psyche, populated by archaic or primordial images which Jung calls archetypes and which, as he posits, are shared in common by all humankind. See Ozone (1981), for a more detailed discussion of the collective unconscious and its archetypes, with reference to the poetry of Okras transnational, modernis t, contemporary, Christopher Skibob (193()-1967).This innermost level of the psyche is operated from the outermost level?the conscious mind (the property of our e actuallyday thoughts and emotions) ?by the personal unconscious (the seat of repressed traumatic personal experiences or complexes which whitethorn be re-lived by the individual if and whenever memories of the original trauma that gave birth to the complex are awakened by freshly trauma of the same kind). In its relation to mystic and inside, the word drum, in Okra, generally refers to the vibes felt by an individual when there is an tearing surge of subconscious promptings from any of the two levels of his inside. Further re hunt club is demand to ascertain the consistency f all these with the idea of the inside in Okras native Jog language and traditionalistic system of thought. In The Mystic Drum as well as in Diamond (a lyric also provoked by Okras love for Ms. Carmichael) and in To Pave (a lyric provoked by the conjure and flame of an unrequited love for a mysterious paramour about whom Okra is most reticent to dictate anything in interviews with him), the intensity of these subconscious psychic pulsations often reaches fever pitch.The three lyrics are thus not only of enormous interest as conventional love lyrics, fusing the commonalities of oral-wide traditions of love poetry and the peculiarities of indigenous African love songs performed as part of moonlight dances they are also worthy of diminutive analysis as a windows into Okras struggle for rapprochement with the presiding lady of his poetic inspiration, his excogitate.The muse has been described as the source of inspiration that stimulates the art of a poet. In postcolonial discourse, it has been studied as an archetypal female radiation pattern (watermark, great mother, earth goddess, water goddess, and dancer) embodying cultural nationalist affections and idealizations of the colonized earth of the poets Malden (see Thomas, 1968, and Ozone, in Nonnumeric, 2011).As I have stated in the later citation, 4 For the purposes of the present paper, I retain my earlier understanding of psyche (Ozone, 1981 30) as the essence of the non-physical components of the human personality (extrapolated from Jung, 1959). 5 In this paper, I use the terms traumatic and trauma to refer to emotional shock or an extremely condemnable experience that causes severe emotional shock and may have undestroyable psychological effects (online Enchant). Jung defines complexes as psychic entities that have escaped from the controller of unconsciousness and split from it, to lead a separate existence in the dark sphere of the psyche, whence they may at any time hinder or help the conscious performance (see 7 see Ozone (2006 and 2011). 4 The idea of the muse is often invoked in the scholarship on modern Nigerian literature but it is often shrouded with a mystique that tends to come down it to something abstract or far-fetched, or, a t any rate, to a kind of African imitation of the classical muses of Garage-Roman antiquity.But our renascent muse was not only concrete and manifest in our postcolonial practical engagement with our indigenous ultras she was also an configuration of the highest cultural ideals of our ancestral traditions as we perceived them in the heyday of colonialism. She appeared to each and every one of us in multifarious guises. But any(prenominal) her emanation was, she was unmistakably a personification of the earth of our ancestors?the earth goddess, Ala, the sovereign light (chi) that nurtures all creation, an embodiment of the eternal bond that unites the living and the dead.When our early devotional poems to this great spirit and those of our predecessors and successors are roll up and published, traders will be better able to understand the ramifications of the power of this great goddess who appeared to us, as to our predecessors in the early sasss (Skibob, Window, And, Egged, Insan ely, Majoring, Okapi, Kook, etc), as a dancer, spirit maiden, water maid, and other exciting feminine figures?in all cases as embodiments of our communal and individual apperception of the superiority of our indigenous cultural heritage to every single superimposition of the postcolonial order. standardized Skibob and other members of the Nausea school of modern Nigerian poetry (see Thomas, 1968 and 1972 Cherub, in Landforms, 1973 and 1974 and Modulator, 1980), Okra is a votary of the watermark or mermaid, whose inspirational songs we peck in The Fishermans Invocation ( pop II and Ill) as the voice of a presiding lady (or ladies) of poesy whose presence and association are repeatedly invoked to mediate the claims of the what is passing (the gage), is passing (the Present) and to come (the Front).In take apart II (The Invocation), the water song of an assembly of mermaid in touch oned with the midwifes that would go in the delivery of the Child-Front the brave new world beyond colonialism)?rubbing gently down/the back of the great mother past (Back), typify age-old traditions O midwifes rub gently down the back of your Back while the sun play his play and the Back dance its dance and assembly of mermaids sing their bubbling water song at a lower place the river waves.And in Part Ill (The Child-Front), the mermaids are invoked to participate in the shaping of the future tense as cleansing agencies that must carry On their songs and embarrassing negatives of the pre-colonial past) education up its ugly head from a anatomically cherished past, in a situational irony reminiscent of Whole Sayings early ritual drama, move of the Forests (1960) Where are your Gods now Gods of the Back that have brought forth this heller? impart it away, throw it into the river and permit the mermaids carry it on their songs.Throw it away to the Back and let the Back swallow it in its abyss And let the Gods remember their lives are in my strives In these lines, the Gods of the Back (past) that have/brought forth this monster (embarrassing negatives of Africans pre-colonial history) are reminded on he Jog custom known as uremia, in which?as traumatized in The Revolt of the Gods?the fate of the gods, which are traditional in the hands of their worshippers, must be determined by valet in accordance with their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their providential conduct.In concluding, in Part IV (Birth Dance of the Child Front), the songs of mermaids are 5 given congratulate of place in finale of our dance/ of the Front (of the future), again stressing the primacy of the muse as an agency for shaping the future of a troubled land Lets leaven our dance of the Front with rhythms of the Back and strengthen he weak songs of the new with songs of mermaids Much later, in his mature post-war, political poetry set at the heart of the future envisioned in The Fishermans Invocation and collected under the title The Dreamer, His Vision (2006), the mermaid r eappears in Mamma Water and Me as the presiding lady of the poets anguished cry for succor in the midst of the gaiety of disorder (embers.. Moldering, in memoriam ashes, flames I cannot temper, whirling vortex, helpless) in post-civil war Nigeria The embers are smoldering?once again? Theyve refused to die into in memoriam ashes. And have burst into flames I cannot temper. They draw into their whirling vortex, helpless? Mamma-water & me. There we stand, hand in hand, Like Starch and company, the faithful, Calmly waiting for the redeem flames Then we shall step out with solemn steps To silence anger eyebrows and daggered tongues and walk on calm waters?still, serene?Free fix by the refrain (Mamma-water and me), the poet expresses strong optimism that, by keeping faith (standing hand in hand) with his muse, redeeming flames that would effect the cleansing and free us of earthly dross would surely mom in the end.By contrast to Mamma-water (a supernatural being under whose divine sha dow the poet appears helpless to offer anything but total devotion), Diamond and Pave are human objects of love to whom Okra, in his love lyrics, projects the archetype of the muse in an unconscious recognition of their place in his inside as his soul mates or psychic alter egos (representing, from the Jungian psychological perspective, his anima). The anima, for Jung, is one of the most powerful archetypes of the collective unconscious that participates in the all-important process of individuation. As med up in my essay on Skibob and Jung (Ozone, 1981 37), the anima is the primordial image of fair sex in a man, a counterpart of the animus, the primordial image of man engraved on the mind of a woman. The anima appears in dreams, visions and fantasies as in literature and fiction in the form of a mother, a loved one, a goddess, a siren, a prostitute and an enchantress, or a femme fetal.The impact of these latent images of woman can be as destructive to the psychic health of the man who projects them as they can be beneficent. They often give rise to an psychoneurotic pursuit of the elusive and the intractable. Because of their appearance in the mind of the poet in forms accordant with the well- put ined characteristics of the archetype of the anima, Diamond and Pave tend to feature in Okras lyrics in patterns of relationships reminiscent of the kinds of poet-muse relationships described by Robert Graves in The White Goddess (1959) and exemplified in the life and poetry of Okras contemporary, Christopher Skibob (1930-1967).As Skibob learned from his reading of Graves, and as parsed by Among (1972), one phase in the relationship between the muse-poet and his goddess-woman is that in which the toe becomes more consciously aware of cruelty. This lesson, also learnt by Okra and 6 embodied in the myths of The Mystic Drum, Diamond, and To Pave, is writ large in the imagery and symbolism of Skibobs second sequence, Limits, especially Limits IV in which the belove d female figure metamorphoses into a ferocious lioness that gores the over-excited lover to death or, at any rate, ataractic him into an unconscious state from which he would awake to complete the writing of the poem at hand with a mature mind truly informed by experience An image insists From flag pole of the heartHer image distracts Oblong-headed lioness? No shield is proof against her? Wound me, O sea-weed Face, blinded akin a strong-room? Distances of her armpit-fragrance Turn chloroform enough for my patience? When you have ideal & done up my stitches, Wake me near the altar, & this poem will be finished (Limits V, lines 71-84) Thus, as stated in The White Goddess, Being in love does not and should not, blind the poet to the cruel side of womans nature?and many muse-poems are written in helpless attestation of this by men whose love is not longer returned (Graves, 1959 91). As stated above, this archetypal pattern is amply reenacted in Okras To Pave, Diamond, and The Mystic Drum. In To Pave, the fire and flames of passion reduce everything between the lover and the beloved into ashes And as before the fire smolders in water, continually smoldering beneath the ashes with things I dare not tell erupting from the hackneyed lore of the beginning. For they die in the telling. So let them be. Let them smolder. Let them smolder in the living fire beneath the ashes. Through the infusion of the myths of the hackneyed lore / of the ginning (evoking the sexual overtones of the relationship between Adam and Eve in Dens farm, as subtly recreated by Michael Cherub in his early lyric, Sophia (see Ozone, 2011) his personal story, Okras To Pave is transformed into an archetypal tale of poet-muse relationship as predicted in Graves theory of poetry.Not surprisingly, in Diamond, the poet-spouse-and-lover presents itself as one in which the artist is possessed by the divine afflatus, theorized in his treatise, On the Sublime, as the primary source of inspiration for poet s, by the Greek instructor f rhetoric and literary critic, Longings (ca. 1st or 3rd century AD). Akin to the notion of spirit arrest, in transatlantic African communities in the Caribbean and the Americas, the idea of the divine afflatus is common among the Jog and elsewhere in Africa where esthetical and professional creativity is often attributed to possession by a graven image of madness and creativity such as Gaga (the patron of medicine-men), among the Gobo (See Mum, 2009).The speaker unit in Diamond is not only maddened by his love but clearly possessed by the Jog congener of the Gobo theology of creative madness, Gaga eke its said a madman hears I hear trees talking like its said a medicine man hears. Like ABA, the hero of Herman Melville Mobs Dick, he is not Just maddened by his monomaniac complex (or neurotic fixation of on a single passion), he is hence madness maddened. But Okras wifeless is imbued with the kind of tortuous coyness that has provoked, in world(preno minal) amatory poetry, some of the most sublime evocations of the cruelty of the rose (in other words, the cruelty of the alluring object of love, as depicted in Skibobs Limits V, quoted above). She is singularly unyielding And I raised my hand? y trembling hand, riveting my heart as handkerchief and waved and waved-and waved but she turned her eyes away.The indorser who turns to The Mystic Drum from Diamond and To Pave will immediately recognize the reification of the tension between the lover and the beloved as an panoptic metaphor for the exploration of something that lies in the pits of epistemology, already defined above as the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of knowledge, in particular its foundations, scope, and validity. Far beyond the realms of the tremulous stirrings of the love-struck heart, the lyric takes us into he highest cerebral realms of abstruse philosophy. As the poets muse, the beloved is not only the presiding lady of the poets art but his link to the ultimate source all knowledge of reality?his link to the world beyond the quotidian, the wellspring of true knowledge of the essence of reality.From a secret structure analysis of the meaning of the poem, it seems evident that the epistemological underpinnings of The Mystic Drum go well beyond the culture wars of African postcolonial nationalist search for identity through such ideologies as Negritude, Pan Africans, the search or the African Personality, the African Renascent Movement, and the like. The deft modernist deployment of tropes in the poem is one that cuts across cultural and national boundaries, inviting comparison with systems of thought which Okra himself may not have ever even contemplated, including the statement from the Zen philosopher Aching Yen, with which the present commentary begins. There is, of course, no intention here to stir that Okra was directly influenced by the oriental philosophy of Zen or that he was schooled under any Zen master.Although I have enjoyed close personal friendship with Okra since 1967 and have elsewhere remarked on the Zen mode of apperception in his poetry (Ozone, 1991), it never occurred to me to ask him about any contact he may have had with Zen philosophy as I did not think that it was necessarily of any value to establish any such a contact, until my most recent interview with him at the University of Massachusetts, Boston (August, 2011). After listening attentively to my reading of Zen master. Aching Yuans statement with which the present article begins, Okra readily agreed that it applies very well to his intention and the structure of the experience of the