Dear readers,
I was listening to Cate Blanchett speak about the limits of language when a thought stayed with me: what happens when we reach the edge of what words can carry?
Her remarks in Tokyo, around receiving the Praemium Imperiale, concerned something familiar to anyone who has tried to communicate an experience that mattered. There is what we say, what we hope another person will hear, and what remains between the two. An actor works inside that distance. So does a parent. So does someone trying, perhaps awkwardly, to say that they are hurt.
One sentence caught my attention:
“That doubt is my artistic starting point. It’s what allows me to hear.”
I found myself thinking about Èṣù.
And then about Ọ̀ṣọ́ọ̀sì and Lógun Ẹ̀dẹ.
That may seem an unexpected company for a speech about acting. Yet the connection interests me precisely because it takes us beyond a familiar account of Èṣù as a messenger who carries words from one place to another. What if the work of mediation also asks us to notice how much a message needs besides its words?
A voice can say that everything is fine while the body tells another story. A song can return us to a person whose name we have not spoken for years. A gesture on stage can make a character’s loneliness visible before we have decided what to call it.
This is where I want to begin: with the possibility that art gives form to something we have encountered but cannot yet explain. Silence gives us time to encounter it.
A word needs someone who can receive it
As a Bàbálórìṣà and Bàbáláwo, I would find it strange to celebrate what lies beyond language by diminishing the word. Ifá is carried through recitation, interpretation, memory, teaching and response. Names matter. The choice of a word can change the direction of a conversation. A careless formulation can wound long after the speaker has forgotten it.
But a written sentence does not contain every condition of its own reception.
Consider a simple phrase: I am here.
Spoken from the doorway, it can announce an arrival. Spoken beside someone who is grieving, it can offer companionship. Spoken during an argument, it can insist on being acknowledged. The words remain the same. Their meaning takes shape through tone, timing, relationship and the willingness of another person to receive them.
For me, this is one reason Èṣù remains so relevant to contemporary life. Communication is an event between participants. We can prepare a statement carefully and still misunderstand the situation into which it arrives. We can speak with good intentions and remain responsible for attending to its effects.
In my study of Èṣù, communication and the responsibility of choice, I explore this difficulty more closely. The messenger makes us examine the passage between worlds, positions and understandings. What leaves one person is not automatically what reaches another.
Art makes that passage unusually visible. A score needs interpretation. A performance needs a listener. A painting meets a viewer whose memories the painter cannot control. The artist gives something a form; the encounter continues beyond the artist’s authority.
That does not mean every response is equally attentive. A work can be misunderstood. Context can be ignored. A sacred object can be reduced to a pleasing shape. Precisely because reception is active, it carries responsibilities.
The body has already entered the conversation
The word “silence” can suggest a room without sound. Yet some of the most significant silences occur within sound: the pause before a reply, the held breath after a musical phrase, the moment in which a performer allows a movement to finish.
In such moments, we may become aware of how quickly we usually rush to supply an explanation.
We recognize a feeling and name it. We hear a fragment and decide what the other person means. We encounter something unfamiliar and place it in the nearest available category. This ability helps us navigate life. It also allows us to stop looking too soon.
Art can interrupt that habit because it asks us to stay with a particular form. The weight of a movement, the texture of a voice, or the relation between two colors can hold our attention before an argument has been made.
This is not foreign to Òrìṣà traditions, in which material form, movement and sound have particular relationships to practice. The University of Michigan Museum of Art, for example, describes a Yorùbá figure associated with Èṣù, made with wood, cowries, leather and blue pigment. Its catalogue suggests that it may have been held by or attached to a devotee while dancing in his honor.
The “may” matters; a catalogue cannot recover every detail of an object’s life. Even so, the possibility challenges the stillness with which we often imagine a sculpture. We are invited to consider a form carried by a moving person, within a relationship, rather than an isolated object waiting for a caption.
I would not make a theatre performance and a sacred dance interchangeable. Their obligations and contexts differ. What interests me is a question both can raise: how much do we miss when we treat the body as packaging for a message that could have been delivered just as well in a sentence?
Where Èṣù encounters the hunter
Here Ọ̀ṣọ́ọ̀sì, the hunter of knowledge, enters my reflection.
In Brazilian Candomblé, where his name is commonly written Oxóssi, the hunter and the forest provide a powerful field of meanings. I am especially interested in the attention required by the hunt: noticing a movement, distinguishing a trace, learning a terrain before assuming one knows it.
For me, this attention is already close to the work of an artist.
An artist also learns to distinguish. A musician hears where a phrase loses its life. A writer notices the false note in a sentence that is technically correct. A dancer discovers how a small change of weight alters an entire movement. These capacities require practice, correction and a relationship with what is being encountered.
The hunter is a useful companion here because attention has consequences. He must discern something particular within a living environment. A vague appreciation of nature would not be enough.
This is what I sometimes miss in the instruction simply to be present. Present to what? To another person’s hesitation? To the rhythm that keeps escaping us? To the detail that contradicts our first impression?
Silence becomes fruitful when it allows a more exact perception to develop.
In the meeting I am imagining, Èṣù brings us to the difficulty of communication, while Ọ̀ṣọ́ọ̀sì asks whether we have actually attended to what is there. Before we insist that a message has failed, perhaps we need to consider how we have been listening.
Beauty can also teach us to receive
Lógun Ẹ̀dẹ brings another possibility into this encounter.
In Brazilian tellings that relate Logun Edé to Oxóssi and Oxum, the worlds of forest and fresh water meet through a figure associated with hunting, fishing and beauty. It is this Brazilian meeting of forest and water that speaks to me here.
Within that Brazilian frame, however, I find a fertile way to think about artistic expression. An experience sometimes becomes communicable only after it moves into another form. Grief becomes a melody. A difficult relationship becomes a scene. Something we could not approach directly becomes visible through an image.
The form changes what we can receive.
Beauty matters here because it can invite sustained attention. We return to a voice or an image and discover that it carries more than we first noticed. Pleasure may be the beginning of an encounter whose demands emerge slowly.
Of course beauty can also distract us. An elegant presentation can make a poor argument appear convincing. The language of spirituality is particularly vulnerable to this: a beautiful sentence may feel profound before we have examined whether it says anything precise.
For that reason, I would keep Èṣù close to this meeting. Beauty invites; mediation still asks what has actually passed between us. Has the form opened a relationship, or have we merely enjoyed its surface?
I imagine Ọ̀ṣọ́ọ̀sì and Lógun Ẹ̀dẹ here as distinct companions: attention, expression and the movement between different worlds.
Why leave a little silence?
We are increasingly asked to accompany an experience with its explanation. We photograph it, caption it, name its lesson and offer an opinion before the experience has quite ended.
I understand the desire. As an author, I work with words. As someone who teaches, I want things to become understandable. Yet I also have to ask what my wish to explain may be preventing me from hearing.
There are moments when another person needs a clear answer. Silence can be evasive, withholding or cruel. There are also moments when a premature answer closes the very conversation we hoped to help. Someone begins to speak about loss, and we immediately tell them what the loss means. They offer something unfinished; we return it with a conclusion attached.
Art gives us practice in receiving a form without immediately demanding that it resolve our discomfort. A novel can leave a character morally difficult. A piece of music can sustain a feeling that would become smaller if we translated it into a lesson. A performance can allow tenderness and anger to inhabit the same gesture.
We need such experiences because other people are also more complicated than the explanations we make of them.
That is where Blanchett’s words brought me. The doubt that allows an artist to hear can become a discipline of attention. We remain willing to discover something that our first formulation did not contain.
Perhaps, at the edge of the word, Èṣù encounters the arts through this unfinished work of reaching another being. The painter, the musician, the dancer and the storyteller continue the attempt in their own materials. Ọ̀ṣọ́ọ̀sì asks for an attentive eye. Lógun Ẹ̀dẹ invites us to consider how a change of form can make an encounter possible.
For a moment, before supplying the explanation, we allow ourselves to receive.
And something may become audible that our certainty had been speaking over.
For readers who would like to go further, the continuation follows a sharp reversal in Ògbè Òdì: Èṣù correctly discovers one deception, then mistakes the contents of a bag. It opens a harder question about the difference between receptive attention and projection.
May your Orí find clarity,
Babá Tilo de Àjàgùnnà
DAILY IFÁ