My ear and IBK’s concerning concern – Part 1

Last Friday, in my essay entitled “Nigerian drug,” I dwelt, among other things, on my ear ailment.

Let me make it crystal clear immediately that since the experience, I have tried to make sense of my solitary conditions and of those of man in general – an experience which tends to make me an unusual experiencer dwelling in the domain of philosophy or of philosophical philosophy.

Let us suppose that one who has always had a keen sense of hearing, for one reason or the other gradually or suddenly loses his power to hear things and human beings and animals and words as was the case before his new condition, how will the new experience be properly defined or described by him from a normative angle or from a descriptive one related to ethics? How will he react to his new challenge and define and describe or narrate it?

What will be the emotional, ordinary and intellectual repercussions of the knowledge of the diminishing or diminished quality of his hearing and of his ear(s)? The anxiety caused by the loss of hearing awaiting anyone, especially if one is an intellectual or journalist or writer or pen pusher or professional of any worthwhile degree and class can be unnerving or will always and will forever be unnerving. If the loss happens especially in one’s middle age or in one’s advanced years the loss will be doubly unnerving. And with the loss, the total loss, that is, the experiencer or victim of the loss of hearing experiences what is tantamount to his death, sort of, to the world – or the world’s death, again sort of, to him.

The loss of one’s valuable sense – be it the sense of sight or of touch or of feeling or of taste as well as of hearing – will result – under normal circumstances – into the love of the other, the victim, whose emotion is and will be the emotion of the other – his empathiser, who feels his love. Thus, we encounter loss in the face of the other.

Loss of any kind is something we encounter in the moral or ethical responsibility we have toward other persons as a result of our interactions with them. In this wise, I cannot but remember Emmanuel Levinas (12 January 1906 to 25 December 1995), a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who was an existentialist and phenomenologist who informed us that loss of any kind “indicates that we are in relation to something that is absolutely other… as something whose very existence is made of alterity.”

For the purpose of this column, I won’t tie the meaning of the term to its keen philosophical import or concept. I am using or framing alterity here in terms of media theory, which has enabled my ear and its infection to be seen, rightly or wrongly, through the open screen of this column. Through this medium my infected ear and the discomfort it has caused me find/found meaning in their interactions with others, that is, my readers who read about my plight. Through this journalistic exposure some measure of societal understanding of my plight came to the fore, which ultimately resulted in my not entering the mode and mood of solitude.

Since the media announcement (in the frame and form of my essay aforesaid) of my troubling ear infection, the question of solitude has been not one would expect it to be. I am here free from an extreme limitation my ear infection would have placed upon me as a burden. Through phone calls and messages from diverse persons who interacted with me through their interactions with my column, my ear has had the sort of connection that is aiding its healing. One reader’s (in particular) suggested remedy to aid it has been of great benefit.

Without anyone to have a relationship with, how can the physical, medical, social, philosophical, literary and spiritual healing of my ear find or have any meaning? Without others, invented or not invented, the melancholic melancholy I felt would have contributed a great deal and in measures immeasurable to the tyranny of anguish that would have consumed me.

Someone may want to say to me as follows: “Why this so much fuss over an ordinary ear ailment?” Dear readers, no ailment is an ‘ordinary’ one especially in the context of your country my country our country’s current tragic economic and social realities. Every drug in this country now has a sharp increase in price day by day. Many of our compatriots are dying in silence and in solitude. We are losing them drastically and drastically without help from where they needed help and where it could have come from, but which is not the case due to what is what that is what in our modern/post-modern time of diabolical democracy and crude politics.

The plaque in this country now is high and nearing its peaky peak if it is not already there. Many Nigerians are dying out, and several of them must be committing suicide on account of the mental health they are confronted with. We cannot continue to watch the suffering of our fellow compatriots and human beings. We don’t want them to question why they will continue to live in this country that is their country their country their country.

Here I remember Lionel, the main character in The Last Man in the novel by the English novelist Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797 to February 1, 1851). Lionel is deeply downcast, and ceaselessly so, as result of pain upon pain he suffers on account of the suffering of his fellow man. On one occasion he could not let out a “fluttering prisoner from my agonized breast.”

In the pharmacies and hospital I visited I saw what I saw. And I remembered Levin as on every occasion. But I will refrain from quoting him fully here with respect to the “eternal immanence of death.” My ear opened my eyes to the crushing reality Nigerian representatives of the human race are succumbing to in our land now strange and foreign to us.

One reader, among others, whose long message helped to life-buoy my spirit was the professor well known as IBK (Ibrahim Bello-Kano). His letter in all its rigorous humour and amusement of incongruities appeared and appealed to me as some kind of “Music” that “is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness,” to borrow the words of Emil Cioran (Romanian philosopher: April 8, 1911 to June 20 1995). Let me quote IBK’s letter verbatim by and by:

To be continued and concluded next week.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.