The Harder You Throw it, the Closer to You it Falls.

A word about Contranyms. A word that contains its own opposite. Bound, Cleave, Sanction, Secrete, Quiddity, Buckle, Bolt, and Trim. I have a thing for them. My memories are intense like they have been written in tiny ink, hot and gold, and seared along the insides of my skin. I remember primary school and my little notebooks. And the scent of my new textbooks all six or seven or eight of them bundled in rubber band and pressed against my chest by my little hand. I remember learning things such as Mineral Resources and the great giant pyramids of Groundnuts in Kano, Nigeria’s north. I remember Grammar and I remember strange things, relationships between words. Synonym. Antonym. Homonym. Contranym.

As a child I liked antonyms. How my mind travelled the distance between difference. Black to White. Cold to Hot. Woman to Man. Later I will learn the greater power of antonyms, which resides in analogy, which resides in alchemy which is about collapsing the distance of difference. From Putrefactio Black to Albedo White, from Saturnine Cold to Solar Hot, from the White Queen to the Red King. From base lead to bright gold. A conjunction of antonyms giving you something magical to behold, something as potent as god.

Amour feels full of antonym. Indeed, love poetry, Petrarch’s particularly, is built on Cupid’s power to place us in the power of contrary things: ice and desire, cold hearts and tender loins on fire. Petrarch’s pleas: I burn, I freeze. Désire does such things, born of the distance between lover and beloved. The greater the distance, the greater the desire. I cannot have you and it sets my soul on fire. Coitus, the consummation of our Cupido, is the commencement of contranym. In coitus we cleave. Arms bound around our bodies. After coitus we cleave, break our embrace as we leave, bound for our day-to-day, our separate individual ways.

Contranyms are Janusian and are thus placed under the aegis of Janus, the two-faced god. One face young, the other old; one face looks to the future, while the past is all the other can behold. Patron of passages, doorways and duality, transitions and time. He reminds me of another deity one who long fascinated me and one who along with Janus can be said to be the patron of contranym.

…

When I was eleven my favourite person in the whole world, my Uncle, gave me a birthday present. He had lived in Paris in his late teens. He played the piano. He wore wine-red bow ties. Like me, he was quirky. We both loved Shakespeare. He was the first person in the whole world who told me about Oscar Wilde.

Nuncle promised to lend me his copy of Wilde’s complete works. Instead, he gifted it to me. It was an old, old book with strange, fantastic illustrations. They chilled me… I decided I didn’t like them. Especially the one of a woman clutching a decapitated head as it bled down into a black stream. I tried to read The Picture of Dorian Gray. I devoured the fairy tales. “The Nightingale and the Rose” still makes me cry till today.

One afternoon on a school excursion to a strange field I looked for a nice place to sit hidden away from my teachers so I could read the book nuncle had given me. There was a small rickety bench. I walked toward it and discovered a hidden entrance to the side. I walked through the airy open metal gate to find a courtyard, large with a small square of earth at its centre where stood a tall grass shrub. I smelt the plant. It was lemon grass. I looked up and saw these paintings on the wall. I walked around the courtyard and studied these large murals. I recognized some of them. I knew the burly man dressed in red, wielding an axe, with fire coming out of his mouth was Sango, the god of thunder. I recalled watching a Yoruba film with my grandmother and kind of laughing at the “special effects” where they show a highly pixelated digital fire coming out of the young virile actor’s mouth. I giggled. A woman painted with golden ornaments and a yellow dress. Duh, that’s Osun, the beautiful goddess of joy and sensuality. I didn’t know anyone else. My Yoruba was non-existent and hasn’t improved much since then, I’m afraid. I couldn’t pronounce the names of the other faces, nor place them. I had schemed my way into solitude to reread “The Nightingale and the Rose” in my Oscar Wilde anthology yet there I was mystified by these strange paintings on the wall. 

Was there a sudden laugh or did my memory at some time insert this?

I heard rather than saw the smiling young man. It was strange. Where the other gods and goddesses looked serious and sombre he had a wide grin. He was laughing. And it was weird. It was… a man, but it had soft feminine features like a pretty woman. Anyway, his hat was definitely curious. Funny, it was like a winter cap but elongated and flopped theatrically to the side. Silly. The ick-inducing thing was his toothy grin. Wide and inappropriate. Inappropriate because he was alive and informal and jovial in a way the other deities were not. Almost mocking their gravitas. I didn’t like his grin. And his smooth girly face. And the menace in his dark eyes. And the name written in red: Esu. 

“Let’s go.”

I remember the sky grew dark. It may have already been dark. How long was I standing there? It feels like I am still standing there though memory fades the scene fuzzing out everything except, his hat, his toothy grin, and his name.

“Let’s go!”

I realized my teacher, Mrs. Oni, was calling out to me, running towards me, at the same moment I registered the plop of rain on my forehead, then the fat drop against my eye, that made me blink out of my reverie, then the torrent. A sudden splash that soaked my jade jersey which clung like second skin to me. Her large white shirt was animated by fierce wind.  She grabbed my wrist and we headed into the large school bus. I shivered into a seat by the window. Clutching Wilde and fearing the sear on my soul – the smile of Esu.

…

He goes by different names. I guess the Greeks called him Hermes. The Romans, Mercurius. The Yoruba call him Esu. The Haitians, Papa Legba. To the Germans he is Wotan. To the Christians, the Evil One. To the Alchemists, Our Mercury.

…

In the Benin myth, in the beginning was boredom and the one God sunk in his self and his solitude. He had an idea to create, to emanate, and he made six gods and endowed them with specific forces and fates. One was given the power of lightening and thunder, the other the power of infectious diseases, the other the mysteries of iron and vegetation, the other the mysteries of the white cloth and purity, the other the secrets of the erotic and the life-giving powers of fresh water, the other the mysteries of the ocean and the seas and all the creatures within it.

God was disappointed as he watched each deity sink into the same saddened state of solitude he had longed to shed. Each god sat alone on a palm tree mute and guarding their power. So, he gave nothing to the youngest of the gods, the seventh, except for a strange object. According to myth the harder you throw this object the closer to you it falls. This young god brought the energies of eros and exchange. Merchant as well as thief, he established the crossroads of communication and commerce. Through his powers of eloquence and economic exchange, seduction, lies, and language, the gods began to share with themselves as well as share themselves. Now existence could finally commence.

…

Mercurius is my Man.

Try and catch him if you can.

He’s a willy, sneaky magician.

He is also the earth’s first musician.

Indeed, he invented the lyre.

Then became the patron of liars.

Lord of the Gemini who can’t stay mute

Singing of the gods on the first-made lute.

But there is to him a secret side.

Ah yes, a depth he loves to hide.

He reveals it only to a chosen few.

And if you’re lucky that person could be you.

…

Cleave rates highly as one of my favourite contranyms. Cleave: to adhere; to tear. To split; to stick. To bring together. To separate. It also reminds me of the word cleavage which brings breasts to the brain. But my favourite contranym might be secrete. To release. To conceal. To extract. To hide. Like the secretions of the Soul. Dripping myths, mysteries, and madnesses in our dreams. Concealing itself in the dark behind the bone of our skull. Our silent shadow, the witness to it all. Quietly, Soul places a banana peel of amorous fevers and synchronicities in our path. She awaits our fall. Blinking blankly at our Jungian slip as our feet fly into the air. Soul secretes in the shadows and hides in our subconscious stream. We land on our back, we awake as if from a dream, unconscious of her scheme.