This discourse is nearing its end, but certainly not its conclusion now – the conclusion that shall not appear now against the gleaner and glimpser and stirrer’s expectations. You may want to know why. The fashioning of this discourse has since been surrendered to The Galactic Federation whereabouts its inspiration lingers and shines forth. Each communication between the penner and the Guiding Masters has been a process of sumptuous spiritual decipherment not devoid of the taste of mystical madeleine.
One proof of the trueness of the picture the penner-stirrer is trying to form and illustrate came from the latest creation of art to him from the inimitable Niyi Osundare whose poetic art can be inimitably inimitable. Let me quote the latest laudatory text to the gleaner and glimpser by one of the leading men of letters of the day on the subject of our universities:
Take a short verse
Make it long
Then lend it the magic
Of the gleaner-glimpser
And call Tony Afejuku
Intrepid Town crier,
To make it to
The Seven Corners
Of the world….
Thank you for your latest two-part
column on the state of our
universities. Thank you for your
courage. You have left us convinced
that all is NOT lost.
The “gleaner-glimpser” tried to rise to the occasion of this inspired creation with the following unlabourious response to the towering figure of inimitability in our ivory tower that our country’s circumstances compelled to leave its four walls years ago:
This buoys me
Dear, dear our Sovereign –
Supreme Sovereign
Of Integrity –
Our one and only Niyi – Niyi Osundare
Read and interpret these two creations how you will; they respectively came from two golden hearts of genuine lovers of our universities – our “I-bury Towers” that have passed through successive states of poor health that will culminate in their doomed doom. But The Galactic Federation will not allow this to happen as long as visionary artists such as Niyi Osundare are not made to forget to think about our universities. Osundare is not a frivolous or sentimental thinker.
There is an ideal order in his thinking about our universities and his country my country our country destined to lead the universe in learning and scholarship so long as our artists do not allow the ruinous rulers of our common wealth to force them to go astray. By our artists’ courageous courage and exemplary conduct of noble intellectuals and scholars in all disciplines in our universities today weak researchers/teachers (of low morality) will be imbued with new impressions and fresh instincts that will aid them to evade vices that will hinder them from a state of beautiful or perfect perfection. Men of heroic stature will re-emerge in our universities as in the yore years to ensure the triumph of learning, of scholarship; and to re-define and restore the moral unity of our ivory towers and nation in line with the dictate, This impulse toward the new settings of our universities gives the thought or thinking expressed here its mystical dimension. Osundare’s createdness in his quoted laudatory lines above encapsulates all that the gleaner, glimpser and stirrer has tried to decipher as part of the monuments that exist in the highly gifted thinker’s mind with respect to his aesthetic theory and ideal picture of our universities.
The aesthetic theory he is advancing and the ideal picture he is recreating and revealing concerning our universities shall convincingly awaken to sunlight and reality when our ivory towers come under the supreme jurisdiction of the “Shinning Ones” inspired by The Galactic Federation. As a matter of fact, the “Shining Ones”, divine, passionate and exemplary, shall constitute the epic of our modern ivory towers whose fame shall “make it to/the Seven Corners/Of the world…”, to quote our supreme sovereign of fruitful patriotism again.
At this point Niyi Osundare’s valedictory lecture which he delivered at the University of Ibadan on July 26, 2005 enters my memory. The title of the lecture as I still remember it is this: “The Universe in the University: A Scholar-Poet’s Look from Inside Out.”
As the scholar-poet stated as I am trying to recall his words, not exactly as he put it, the oneness derived from the “Uni” in the university is the oneness of universal wholeness. So an ideal university anywhere in the globe is or ought to be a gathering of scholars and students from diverse parts of the “Seven Corners/Of the world.” Our universities of our yore years were universities of their founders’ genuinely patriotic dreams. This is not the case today.
How many of our universities now have international scholars and students? There is none, I must say. But through our artist’s vision of visions our current shrunk landscapes of learning typified by our local ivory towers of today shall re-exist when the “Shining Ones” are allowed to emerge even from ourselves to re-create them to re-live. Will this happen?
To end next week without a conclusion.
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.
