2 Aug 2009
Bohe
By
George O. Obikoya
She concedes her goal is curious. No matter who is at the other end, she seemingly ensures she gets her points across. People say she is too young to know the intricacies of the given, that she is the epitome of crass, a wannabe thrust into the glare of publicity by the very oblivion she seeks to discredit.
It has been a long month she laments to whoever cares to listen. Straight from school she seems never able to stop. Atop her on the wall directly opposite the entrance to her office reads her credo. And she does not seem to wager reminding anyone about it who she deems transgresses in her domain.
Even in college, mates cowered to a famed intellect, one clearly oblique towards relative appraisals of the unified, at which even the proclaimed champions of the eclectic apposite expressly marvel. It does not seem to matter though, even now, what anyone says, her motion, itself strewn, its irreverence of its master patent locked in constant conflict.
She says she feels the heat, the cacophony that generates deafening decibels lost in the ephemeral, the bane of the romantic she suffers to bear they claim exclude her from the pantheons of the somewhat cryptic advance of the select, the heralding of the motion to bear with an open mind, even as unrealistic as to pontificate it is in the prevailing dispensation.
Yet, she seems bent on not being sucked into the eye of a tempest only she says to be blown even harder off what she argues is her preference for a professed view that itself sounds akin to the meta-narratives she so also abhors. In her world, as she says, it does not behove her to prove anything, simply because the proof is there for all to see.
The credentials she argues nullify others endear her to the very movement she steers in the overall scheme she does not apparently submit to its tendency to tether elements sometimes in opposition being justification for its impression of the grand imbibed by some, to dismiss the view by others of the antithesis so proclaimed.
She says it is okay to embrace the confusion, rather than being alarmed and dismissive of its significance to move the motion forward in the right direction, the very notion of right some are wary of, one they openly consider reason to eschew who they term a pacifist, indeed, as a few impute, an apostle in a hood obscured, the soutane sullen gray, as is the message, all perplexing.
That she perches perilously astride openly sworn foes however seem not to bother her, even a she struggles to reconcile their potential to coexist. She does not see why one group should seek inclusion and the other, the exact opposite, when the goals sought by either are not mutually exclusive, not to mention the questionable validity of either position pursuing the goal to begin with, she says.
She does not seek to escape from the pessimism that pervades her reality, she concurs, but in fact to embrace the discrepancies evident between her subjective and the objective world she also agrees imprisons the soul in an equally pervasive entrenchment of the given, the reality she insists some such as she does that venture beyond its shores, stamp, perhaps even if unwittingly, in sync with the notion of exclusion, out of reality.
For her therefore, the question seems not to be or not, in the confines of a reality sunken in professed change, one clearly puffed comprehending kowtowing to the apparently presumed impenetrability of what to change it claims, simultaneously purporting to change.
She says that is what from which she cringes, revelling in her appreciation of the concert in motion, and of the perpetuity of change, the given, in fact, elemental in the scheme, just as subject to change as the reason to even try to conceptualize the real, the world, an expression of the rejection of the angst she claims is widespread and resultant merely figuring the given.
Nevertheless, she disdains a throw back to ideas she says places her in limbo in history, the basics of which the technological abyss into which the present plunges her, an amalgam of social and economic forces that create an excuse to seek comfort in a supposedly glorious past that she nonetheless says characterized the very notion from which some seek to hide. She insists, she knows who she is, and needs no patrons to figure where she belongs in an evolving schema.
Questions soon start to fly even before she declares the end. That some are wary of her intentions she says does not surprise her. All her life she claims she has been different from the mould, a rebel in her own skin she says amazes even her spirits as she toggles the rudiments from view of the variety of ways she embraces explains her inner rumblings amidst the endless confusion of existence.
To some in the audience, she is a freak, and they seem not abashed to say so. Others admit she is a visionary, someone able and courageous enough to take a stand in a world that typically veils its bulbous veins in an assumed reality that she clearly sees differently from even within a climate of internal strife to locate her identity in a consciousness stream she says she is proud is her own.
When she alights from the podium, a throng besieges her for elaboration, clarification, and inspiration, among declared others, which she admits intrigues her given the unremitting world-stress she insists de-humanizes but should inspire not rejection, or perplexity, let alone collusion in camouflage with the movement to placate an underlying reality, but rather to enjoy the moment as it transitions so not to imperil the need to dissipate the equally overarching consequent angst, she counsels.
In the end she declares the ability to transcend a discernable underlay of the montage of life and not to embrace it willy-nilly not only defines but empowers the identity in an increasingly imposed powerlessness, the resulting mutuality of the subjective vis-à-vis the objective, the recipe for clarity of not just a transitory reality but also of its often somewhat depressing motion.
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