 When things don’t go according to plan, when the laboratory explodes into splinters of glass, smoke, and worthy intentions, it is very usual to subject the errant event to an analysis of what went wrong so we can draw useful lessons. Who doesn’t do this? We all do, I suppose. But of late I have wondered whether this very obvious thing to do isn’t a getting around something else — a blindness to a different sense of things.
The Yoruba have a proverb: Ile oba t’o jo, ewa lo busi. The king’s palace burns, and is more beautiful. You might think you’ve heard this before in a more familiar saying about dark clouds with silver linings or some other anecdote with the germ of the idea that rough times don’t last. But I think the Yoruba proverb is saying something more. Something else. Instead of merely instrumentalizing the failure, quarantining it behind the defence mechanisms of the ego, surrounding it with measuring devices to extract nuggets of wisdom, and processing those rough resources into bullions of solutions, I think it suggests that there’s wisdom in being taken by it. Taken by the plumes braiding the air with our desperation. Taken by the mystery of this thing we rudely call life that isn’t anchored to our best efforts. Taken – at least for the moment – by the disruption; by the glitch; by the dying; by the swaying; by the memorized lines that won’t show up when it is time; by the limbs that won’t move when we will them to; by the lyrics that travel to the places where migrant darlings – killed by their authors – take up new dwellings.
At what point do solutions become technologies of avoidance? And is it okay to try something else? To let the ruins become fleeting messengers of a queer commonwealth of abundance in a world that is richer with losses than with the things that are lost?
Failure is difficult. Humiliating. But I suspect there is some gift, some beauty – a lock of Persephone’s hair, maybe – in bowing down ever so slightly to the tornado as it screams across the plains in front of you, a dismembered town left in its wake.
"Look for the black goat while it is daytime," another Nigerian proverb cautions. There is a time for solutions. Then there are other times. Let them pass unnamed. |
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Sangha of Auspicious Companions 