Odu Meditation

This powerful image from the work of the great undersea photographer David Doubilet shows a diver sorrounded by a swirling school of fish.

The composition of the shot,placing the human being at the centre of the circle formed by the nonhuman creatures suggests a number of ideas,all of them relevant to questions foregrounded by Ifa in relation to the quest to undertand the place of the human in the universe.

One perspective that emerges is the notion of the human as the centre of all things as the human figure in the image is at the centre of the circle formed by the fish.

But how do the fish perceive the human creature?What would it be like to see the world, in general, and humans, in particular, from the perspecvtive of a fish?

Possibly an impossible question to anwer but one that has been suggested by Doubilet's efforts to immerse himself in the marine world,making himself unubstrusive so that the beauty and power of that world can radiate through his art.

A similar effort is realised by the great widlife photographer Frans Lanting,as in his book Eye to Eye ,where he does soulful potraits of animals where the viewer looks deep into their eyes.

But then,these men are artists,and art implies craft,deliberate effort,a form of artifice.So that no matter how reverential they are towards the creatures they photogragh,we don't see the creatures through any eyes other than those of the photographers.Those photograhs where nature seems to reveal itself in unselfconscious splendour represent the results of hours of effort and the culmination of a lifetime of expertise developed by the self chosen human ambassadors of the animal world.

It is this paradox of the relationship betwteen the human and the nonhuman,in thise case, the animal world,that is foregrounded by Ifa.

What can a perspective developed through Ifa relate to Heidegger's effort to arrive at the meaning of being in general through the vantage point of human being?

It would seem to be a reworking of the same notion that once emerged in Western thought and which perhaps dominaates it even now.The notion of the human as the point of evaluation of everything else.

In what way do you think you have arrived at a different perspective with the aid of Ifa?

While I reflect on that,we could look at this perspective from Foucault that seems to attack the notion of the human self as the necessary centre,whether directly or directly,of discourse:

One thing is in any case is certain:man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.Taking a relatoively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area-European culture since the sixteenth century-one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it.In fact,among all the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things and their order...only one,that which began a century and a half ago and is now perhaps drawing to a close,has made it possible for the figure of man to appear.

...it was the effect of a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge.As the archeology of our thought easily shows,man is an invention of recent date.And one perhaps nearing its end.

If those arrangements were to dissapear as they appeared,if some event which we can at the moment sense no ore than its possibilty-without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises-were to cause them to crumble,as the ground of Classical thought did,at the end of the eighteenth century,then one can certainly wager that man would be erased,like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

Interesting.It would be interesting to examine his grounds for these claims.But would you not think that the following reflections from Heidegger's Being and Time are more representative of actual human experience,particularly in the construction of knowledge and of the discursive forms in relation to which this construction takes place :

Click on title above or on Doubilet image for video meditation relating to this subject using the words of Nigerian Bini Ifa teacher Joseph Ohomina.