Abstract:
The title of this presentation is derived from Ben Okri’s latest publication, The Magic Lamp (2017), itself
an intersectional text featuring a selection of Rosemary Clunie’s art and Okri’s accompanying
ontopoietic/ heightened consciousness prose. This trans-disciplinary paper traces the trajectory and
suggests the import of Okri’s blueprints for regaining our true state of being: his aphorisms in Birds of
Heaven (1996), A Time for New Dreams (2011) and those in Johns Hopkins’s journal, Callaloo (2015,
38(5): 1042-1043). Reviving a wisdom corpus from antiquity, this Booker Prizewinning Nigerian novelist
provides a guiding paremiological exemplum in A Time for New Dreams to counter postmodernity’s
obsession with the pleasure principle or fast living and hyper-connectivity: “And out of the wilderness/
The songbird sings/ ‘Nothing is what it seems./ This is a time for new dreams’” (2011: 147). Based on
Italian Renaissance’s Desiderius Erasmus’s ([1540] 1982) view on the luminous benefits of concise
thought, the argument is that the quintessence of aphorisms or proverbs has been and is their pithy
wisdom. A basic premise is that the Imaginatio Creatix communicating in poetic prose aphorisms
provides fertile ground for new connections, new depths, and new transversals as well as epiphanies or
what Okri terms the alchemy of ‘serendipity’. A fragment in Birds of Heaven (1996: 40) highlights the
moral purpose of Okri’s aphorisms: “It is precisely in a broken age that we need mystery and a reawakened
sense of wonder: need them in order to be whole again.”
