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A meditation on Aquaman, science and the alchemy of imagination

If you are looking for the path that’s most promising, look for the one with the dead end.

The new frontier is not outer space. Nor is it inner space.

Nothing is original. All is entangled, derived and shared.

Slowing down is taking care of ghosts.

A meditation in blackness

How do you understand a ‘miracle’?

Human-centredness asks meekly and ironically: “Would the world be better off without us?”

In more ways than are obvious, there is more to winning than clinching the trophy or whatever shiny object lies beyond the red tape.

The left’s present post-Trump election ‘whodunnit’ craze

A Red Sea torn apart, only to collapse again on barbaric slave masters; a mountain range affrighted by thunder, lightning and angry deities; a child in war-torn Aleppo kept alive, even as the once-thriving city he grew up in crumbles on his bloodied head; Mozart’s fingers caress the piano keys, and Salieri weeps in awe of his genius; the wordless beholding of a familiar stranger – love at first sight.

The invitation to transcend the ego, to sidestep it, to come out of our heads, coincides with a particular story about the universe.

Sustainable development is not our way of embracing our entanglement in the web of life.

What if what we call instincts are the lessons and legacies co-written by our human, bacterial and unthought ancestors, materialising as our bodies?

Your life is not the breathing space squeezed between your birth and your demise.

The psychological turbulence we experience today – the feelings of inadequacy, depression, disenchantment from normative relationships, dissatisfaction with work, the inconsolable anguish that will not be conceptualized – are not indications that something is ‘wrong’ with us or, even more strikingly, that something is wrong with ‘society’.

Have you ever lain flat on your back on a sidewalk with your two year old daughter and wife, late on a cold night, serenaded by chirping symphonies, pointing at distant stars and constellations?

We often speak about love and lovers in a way that suggests that the latter is a material embodiment of the former.

An older gentleman in Iowa asked me: “As a non-American, what do you think is our greatest problem in America today?”

The soil is a monster

Ej, Alethea, Kyah and I returned home today from teaching at the Workshop on Reimagining Education at the rapturous Swaraj University in Udaipur.

Scientific accuracy isn’t about how well the world ‘out there’ is represented.

The mere finding of answers is no longer enough in a world that resists resolution.

Tears are a prophecy. When we cry, and cannot hold back the salty waters within, it’s because our edges are curling up, making room for something else.

While speaking at the recent Africa Innovation Summit in Kigali, I noticed an ironic and uncritical fixation with a catchphrase that seems to have become the access code for those seeking relevance in the so-called ‘creative sector’: “thinking outside the box”.

On the great and righteous road to conquering evil…

We are in this together. Nobler words could not be spoken at this time of vexed exclusions, legitimized exterminations, and weaponized boundaries.

Underneath today’s blackened skies, we are bleeding, but this bleeding isn’t the kind of wound that desires to be cured, bandaged or sanitized away into oblivion.

Slowing down is not a matter of reducing velocity, but changing shape by touching the unwieldy ponderousness and excessiveness of our bodies.

We must relinquish our convenient narratives of human exceptionalism and triumphalism, those stories that centralize human agency and enthrone human interests as supremely paramount in the multiverse.

Applause – however raucous – is to the real magician a signal of failure.

Man’s last frontier is no frontier at all – for a frontier presupposes not only a given boundary, but a given traveller, the idea of departures and the promise of arrival.

When you happen upon a flower, especially one whose otherworldly beauty and feminine fragility contrast sharply with its less endearing environment, you immediately treat it as this localized ‘thing’, as an object – one deserving of admiration – but an ‘object’ nonetheless: removed, unique, separate, and even audacious.

After my talk on reconfiguring assumptions about agency and activism yesterday, the host made room for a Q/A session – which I hijacked by asking the first question: “So, what’s confusing for you – and it doesn’t even have to be related to my speech?”

And remember, when there are things that stand in your way...

A Trumpian wall of sorts divides the world into realms of the social and natural.

Your discomfort is a holy ally, a redeeming interruption. Where you are most confused, exhausted, distressed and compromised, is where the wild things grow.

The greatest injustice is perpetuated by a global economic order that somehow convinces us that people come in cookie-cutter sizes, shapes and colours;

Somewhere in the middle of things, there is no ‘you’ or ‘I’, no ‘this’ or ‘that’, no ‘here’ or ‘there’, no master and no servant.

A dead end is an invitation to reconfigure our notion of continuity.

I suppose that one of the less obvious signs of civilizational decline is the rise of tricksters.

A letter to Alethea

One of the new preoccupations of critical theorists, who are given to hours and hours of rigorous contemplation about how to best account for the complexity of our world, is with objects. Things themselves.

The divine is everywhere.

It seems society conspires to make us live in the distant ‘tomorrow’.

Don’t tell me there’s no magic in the world. Don’t pretend you’ve seen the frontiers.

The reason why Africans say that ‘in order to find your way, you must become lost’ is because they make no fundamental distinction between the traveler and his environment, or the pilgrim and the pilgrimage.

For now, I cannot help but think that what ‘we’ are, what this cosmopolitical adventure of consciousness is, is an orgasmic play of ad-hoc configurations of relationships; that life is much more than a collection of discrete things bouncing off each other in Cartesian spaces, save for the redeeming presence of human attention.

What if there were no pain?

It’s time to turn squarely to time itself.

Humusities.online is an upcoming envisioned community site that brings together previous participants of We Will Dance with Mountains into a virtual collective that is passionate about continuing the course’s conversations, deepening decolonial practices, generating rituals, attuning to place, and supporting each other.

When you tie a knot on a piece of string and then stretch the string, the knot gets tighter and smaller – losing its bumpiness, its disagreeability.

Oh! to speak of worlds hidden in magic sight

Love is violent. Isn’t she?

How do you find your way?

There is fire on the mountain. Run. Run. Run.

Sometimes when we stop, we traverse miles.

I am often told that I speak and write poetically, ‘with a lyricism to your words and thought – almost as if you were singing a song no one else could hear’.

Another story is possible. But the persistence of the anthropocentric gaze, the reprise of language’s triumph, is not what excites me.

Imagine the universal scientist’s angst.

A bright morning beckons at the end of the tunnel.

I suppose monsters are horrifically chimeric, because they are untamed by the aesthetic of polite proportions.

In a clone culture addicted to needless longevity, and frightened by the prospect of what lies beyond the grip of reason and control; the process of aging is an outcast, the one last public epidemic we fight desperately to quarantine.

“One day”, we tell ourselves, “I will be vindicated. The world will prove them wrong, and everyone will give me the attention I truly deserve.”

Perhaps grief is its own answer. Its own genius.

Dancing with my daughter and singing my son to sleep is just as cosmic as a star exploding and expiring in space.

Why do most of us feel like inner frauds? Like we don’t fit in? Like we are hypocrites – conflicted and broken behind smiling masks of authenticity?

We are not separate from nature. Better still, there is no such thing as ‘nature’.

(or why ‘We will dance with mountains’ is no longer happening on March 19)

Perhaps it is time to call a truce. Perhaps it is time to organize many spontaneous expeditions into the realms of the ‘Other’, the final frontier.

You are not ‘normal’ or ‘ordinary’ – such ‘things’ only exist in lazy metaphors and fading myths.

What is progress?

The world is mutually infectious, an orgy of touching.

Transcendental philosophies prod us to toss aside the ‘ego’ to get out of our heads, to leave the ‘I’ behind and rejoin the rapturous gyre of wonder and peace that is reality.

The noble gent on his tastefully furnished steed is no more superior to his scruffy servant than a child is superior to his river-surface reflection.

At the stroke of a painter’s brush...

To preserve anything is to shut it away from the elements, to freeze a hearty conversation, to clog the pores through which things breathe.

To make a new world, to move it, to wipe the slate clean, to start again, to retell these stories of injustices and exclusions and untimely death and soiled seas…

Someone asked me recently, “How do I get rid of the ego?”

This is to invite you into the waters, at the edge of mystery.

One of my fondest passions is gazing at the wilds beyond our fences, at the impossible sentences our culture cannot frame, and basking in the yawning hymn of a cosmos too magical for words.

We rob ‘reality’ of her most powerful gift to us when we try to understand her ‘as she is’, often with the stern exactitude that forbids creative play, subversive exploration and fanciful yearnings.

A certain strand of anti-humanist thinking lays the blame for climate disruption squarely at the feet of humans.

A 19th century French novelist, Charles Baudelaire, wrote the short story ‘Counterfeit Money’ – which focuses on the nature of gift.

When the Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, financiers of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, argue that the pipeline will bring millions of dollars into local economies and create an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 construction jobs, the members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe counter by stating that the construction of the pipeline – and resultant oil spills – will destroy their ancient lands, contaminate water supply, and disturb sacred burial grounds.

For those who fight at Standing Rock..

Welcome to ‘2017’.

Scratch the ground a bit…

Nothing is independent or pre-existent. Everything is hyphenated.

Your deep sorrows aren’t broken nuts and rusting valves ‘within’.

Through this year, my explorations into new materialisms possessed me. In talks and text, in teachings and learnings, I dived into the queerness of seriously rethinking the boundaries I had been conditioned to erect between me and nature.

What are dreams?

In a world where distance evokes authority and sanity, where seclusion whispers prestige, where scarcity suggests luxury and exclusivity, where exteriority means truth, and where privacy is the hallmark of an irreducible ego, intimacy – our carnal entanglement with all things – is the unforgivable sin.

As a severely introverted hyper-idealistic undergrad-nerd in the university, I had a curious practice of sticking to my schedule – even if it meant losing a limb.

Not too long ago I yearned for a life of greatness, the circumference of which would perpetually evade the keenest scrutiny.

An obstacle is the richest, thickest, densest place in the universe.

Invisible tentacles embroil us – stones, sages and stories – in a saga, an infectious ecology of co-becoming.

My struggles to outthink the deep problems around conceptualizing mental disorders associated with the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy (I distinguish these fields even though they cascade into each other) took a turn for the dramatic when, in 2008, I began my training as a clinical psychologist in Enugu.

Trying to understand the world without changing it in the selfsame moment…

Burrowing deeper will not bring us closer to the essence of things, or home at last; it will only generate a lot more dust.