Epistemic Ecology and Ben Okri’s “Diminishing Boundaries of a Shrinking World” in “Heraclitus’ Golden River” from Wild (2012)

Abstract

Consideration of Okri’s “Heraclitus’ Golden River” occurs here within an epistemic ecology in which Nature and the poetic consciousness conjoin as dialectically twinned tropes – beyond culture and below consciousness. Heraclitus’s “One thunderbolt strikes root through everything,” cited as the epigraph to Okri’s Wild (2012) intimates an African epistemology of cosmic holism, while his concept of the metaphysical capacity of poetry to transform the earth into mother [Gaia] sheltered by the sky and under the sun as an inscrutable god, expressed in A Way of Being Free, foregrounds the relation between the fluidity of artistic creativity and an eco-phenomenological exploration of “the diminishing boundaries of a shrinking world.” This interpretation of Okri’s poem, “Heraclitus’ Golden River,” rests on his own conception of “wild” as energy meeting freedom, art meeting the elemental, chaos honed. The reading of this poem celebrates mystical unrest viewed from an ontopoietic appreciation of the sublime. The argument attempts to show that, for this Nigerian poet, “wild” is perceived in his third anthology from a heightened consciousness perspective as that which is transcendent – man’s link with the firmament. This cosmic aspect accords with what the American nature poet Robert Frost called wildness, that wild/ Arcadian place or the unconsidered land where life itself sways perilously at the confluence of opposing forces and to which the poet must go, alone and in silence, to ignite his/her creativity.