COVID-19 And The Meaninglessness Of Meaning By Femi Odere

Anyone who has been paying attention to my thoughts, and my using the WhatsApp platform to advance these thoughts, with the hope that I would either gain more insight or that some people would point to me the asininity of those thoughts through their feedbacks, would recall that I had interrogated the issue of meaning at least a couple of times some months back.

It bears revealing here, in case it hasn’t been mentioned before, that “meaning” in its real meaning and my conclusion of its meaninglessness, was triggered, if not inspired by the First Lady of Ekiti State Erelu Bisi Fayemi.

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In “Loud Whispers,” her latest book, is a chapter called “John’s Cafe.” It is probably the shortest chapter in the book but it packs so much punch. Erelu, perhaps inadvertently telling her readers that relationship is the first condition of humanity in that chapter, reminisced about her late friend Joana Foster (who she said introduced her to “John’s Cafe” as far back as the early 90s) when they both would be at the UN on assignments on gender issues. She also remembered Mrs Bisi Olateru-Olagbegi who has since passed on in that chapter.

The chapter now reminds me, probably because of New York’s unceasing human activities round the clock, of what Erelu described as the “permanence of movement.” Here now comes the “death of movement” as occasioned by COVID-19. Erelu also talks about how “life stretches into infinity” in the chapter.

Again, no thanks to COVID-19, can we still argue that “life (still) stretches into infinity?” This philosophical puzzle and/or question is why the chapter is my favorite.

It also bears revealing here that “John’s Cafe” (which is on the corner of 2nd Avenue & 44th Street) in Manhattan has such a gripping psycho-emotional effect on me that it was the only restaurant where I dined (after my daily train shuttles from Newark to New York probably unconsciously looking for my own meaning) when I found myself in the Big Apple late last year in the hope that the place could trigger further thoughts in me. It did. But melancholically.

If I could correctly recall, I think it was a colleague Elder Kayode Osho whose position was apposite in his response to my meaninglessness of meaning argument. But his stance was predicated on religion while mine, I think, was (and still is) on the philosophy that undergirds meaning. But his position expanded my thought on the subject matter nonetheless.

The coronavirus pandemic has once again thrown up this issue of meaning in human existence. Although one can never lay claim to being a philosopher, but one can wager that human activities in their entirety and in different manifestations revolves around his quest in finding meaning to his life.

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Some of us understand this quest and are making conscious decisions to manifest meaning in our daily lives while a huge majority of the human race are not even conscious of that quest, yet it is what they do on a daily basis. In which case it can safely be said, therefore, that life, in and of itself, has no meaning.

It is what we put into it the best way we know how that makes it meaningful. But this observation, if not belief throws up another question, and that is: Who determines what is meaningful or meaningless in someone’s life? This brings me to Dostoyevsky, to paraphrase him, who said that everyone must be responsible for his own existence?

I consider myself lucky enough to be living in such an interesting time as I’m witnessing with my “korokoro eyes” (please don’t run from me the next time you see me,it’s just a Nigerian speak) how the entire world has shut down, literally, because of a protein molecule (not an organism) that cannot be seen with our naked eyes when we thought that our civilization has completely subdued our planet and other known planets. This, in essence, is why meaning must be interrogated!

Is meaning then just as humanity, as we’ve been told by Adolfe Joffe in his letter to Trotsky before his death by suicide—infinite? Or should we now re-embrace the concept that life, in its raw and primordial, hunting and gathering status, is the real and true meaning.

Is meaning really nothing other than a mirage? Because despite all our purposeful living through the different meanings we have packed into it by what we consider to be our accomplishments, we are now simply confined into our homes because of a molecule that cannot see or feel, and all we now want to do is to feed and be happy, making the pursuit of meaning as we know it to be hopeless and worthless, if not meaningless, at least for now.

This, it seems to me, is another evidence of my concept of the meaninglessness of meaning. I hope this can be discussed with your loved ones in these uncertain times.