ADINKRA SYMBOLISM AS A PORTAL INTO INFINITE POSSIBLITIES OF KNOWLEDGE



Art, particular abstract visual art, on the other hand, represents possibly, the ultimate opendedness possible to semantic form since its possibilities of interpretation in relation to known significations are deliberately obscured by an absence or opaqueness of reference to known interpretive possibilities. The viewer is given carte blanche, a completely free hand with which to interpret the form. Adinkra, on the other hand, would seem to operate between an openended and closed system. Its conventional symbolic interpretation implies that it is both closed and openended because, particularly with those symbolic attributions that represent social values, they embody conceptions that imply fixity of meaning, but which, on account of the possibility of their integration in terms of the subjective universe of each person, as well as a brevity, a laconicity of description that facilitates this subjective interpretation and integration, imply a corresponding openendness.

The open-ended value of some Adinkra symbols, however, goes beyond the possibility of the reinterpretation of the symbolic values assigned to them within the symbolic universe of the person who relates with them. It is in relation to this level or aspect of meaning that Gates and Faux’s conception of Adinkra is most insightful. It is insightful because it provokes the question of the order of relationship, if any between their visual forms ands the verbally expressed symbolic values attributed to them.

In that light, my brain aflame with quests for knowledge that had taken me in imagination, to India, Egypt and Europe, where through reading I had sat at the feet of Indian sages as they discussed in the forest, listened as they developed their ideas about language as the expression of cosmic creativity as expressed in the reverberations of their sonorous OM and the dynamics of the Sanskrit of the Vedas, with Egyptian priests at Memphis and Heliopolis as they invoked the devastatingly potent sound which issued from Amen Ra in creating the cosmos, listened in observatories planted at the rarefied apex of lonely mountains crowned by clouds, as I deciphered with the astronomers the echoes of the primal explosion that brought the universe into being, I began to see Adinkra as my portal into infinity, as the fragments of an ancient and possibly timeless language that had survived in the creative activities of human beings in terms of enigmatic and powerful symbols which if pieced together by a determined mind, would reveal to me a picture of the ladder of the universe, as it stretched from earth to the stars, from life to death, from one world to other worlds.

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