ATOFOJOWO ---meaning: "you can look at it for a whole day"

A word used often by the brilliant sculptor Moshood Otusomo Bamigboye as titles for his superb African masks and head pieces that I could for sure look at for a whole day.

After finding this utterly fascinating word , atofojowo, that seems to be Swahili with some Arabic influence and for sure fun to say, I researched a subject that has long bugged me and led me to conclusions that fuel my disrespect for people in general. Most cannnot look at anything for even ten minutes let alone a whole day. Attention spans, what there was of them to start with, went the way of the Concorde. This situation has been greatly exacerbated by the onslaught of iPhone selfies and iPhone photos by the millions residing in clouds. At what point will the clouds need to become solar systems for photo storage somewhere near the star system Kolob?

My search found the following information regarding the fabled "eye of the beholder":

With few exceptions, " . . . that visitors [to art museums] look for less than two seconds, turn and read the explanatory text for an additional 10 seconds and then move on. The Louvre found that people look a the Mona Lisa for only 15 seconds on average." This before sending their selfie with the Mona Lisa or other famous painting to everyone they know. This selfie would include about two dozen other people in the shot holding their cameras in the air while carefully arranging themselves to show their best angle and somewhere in the back would be Ms. Lisa herself with that smile on her face weirdly appropriate for this moment. What a seer, that Leonardo. Finally the mildly amused expression of suppressed puzzlement works--always meant for the year 2022.

So we have "evolved" to see in image on a screen in reverse making the phrase "eyes in the back of your head" a reality.

As someone addicted to paint on canvas and as a person who literally lives visually, I was able to accept that few would appreciate color and texture like I would, but, have found the feigned interest by the masses in anything visual to be a valid reason to dismiss much of humanity as inferior as they used their ignorance to increase their fame quotient among their texting cliques. Important thing is not to really see the Van Gogh but to say you saw it.


As a kid I was very dismissive of Van Gogh's Sun flowers and other paintings as I was only seeing prints and was stuck myself on realist representation as the one true art. My first experience with Atofojowo was seeing some Van Gogh's and all the other impressionists paintings for the first time in person. I had left the Louvre finding it boring and luckily happened on an Impressionist exhibition nearby. Few were there. This was 1973 and there was no cruise ship invasions dropping tourists off in ports ten thousand at a time. No snaking line with hundreds who had booked ahead for a guided tour with a recording. Air travel was still a luxury as were hotels in Paris and I practically had the Impressionist museum to myself. They had to drag me out of there. The paint. The paint. The texture. The brush strokes. The color combinations. Omg. My eyes were given an intervention worthy of the drunkest sot. Eyes disconnected from the generic part of the brain and hooked up to the adventurous lobe instead. That phrase,"The whole being a whole lot greater than the sum of its parts", finally made sense. I would have stayed the entire atofowojo-esque 24 hours had that been an option. Everything was new. Perhaps atofowojo works on the same principle as the psilocybin that currently is inspiring parts of the brain to play musical chairs for those with traumatic stress.


A glance is all we give most things in life. You have to pick and choose that which you deem worthy of your Atofojowo since the world contains too much to take in everything. Religion and Food and a few other things gain advantage by being given only "the glance". We Atofowojo'ed that church. Gave it the full "you can look at it all day" treatment. That's when something in us disconnected Mormonism and plugged it into its proper socket.

In the end the object being observed cannot perform the other half of he conversation. If there is nothing in or behind the eyes of the beholder the moment will be wasted.


Sometimes I want someone to see what I see in my own paintings. That of course is impossible, but those rare times when some one really beholds instead of glancing, that is everything to me. (I could crow about it even, wink wink, to a few of you)

There is a lot to atofowojo in this world. Good to look off menu sometimes?

“Wink wink” back at you, whatever that might mean. . .

Thus quoth the cockney raven: 'evermore, 'evermore!

wut is this thred about ? ~



asking for a freind ~




thx ~

ziller Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> wut is this thred about ? ~


This post is about a gifted person sharing his talent for language, art, communication and connecting with interested readers, many having been born into a staid, grey, unadventurous offshoot religious environment but reaching out into the world, yearning for more. Although that reference is doing a disservice to ‘grey’, a quite interesting, useful and peaceful shade, using it as a descriptor for Mormonism, the very name of which is somnolent - redolent of its meetings, teachings and leaders.

This post is about words, considering their etymology, pondering their intent, enjoying their sound, discovering an unfamiliar one, using it, sharing it, delighting in it.

It is about reaching out to fellow humans, many of whom will understand without explanation the place where each originated and the one to which they have travelled, encountering similar obstacles and enlightenment along the journey.

It is about evoking emotion, stimulating thought, sharing one’s experiences.

It is about everything a Sunday Mormon sacrament meeting is not.

This post prompted me to mull over words and think about meanings while I enjoyed the prose of a talented writer. The art and museum references flashed me back to my perhaps once-in-a-lifetime visit to the Louvre where I fulfilled a longtime yearning to view the Mona Lisa in person. I was amazed at how close I was able to stand and absolutely my gaze lasted for much more than 15 seconds. It is a precious memory, evoked in an instant by this post, which I appreciate very much.

So that’s partly what it’s about – reaching out, sharing, communicating, appreciating the experiences of others and also their thoughts and conclusions and memories. I’m surprised about selfies in the museum – I somehow thought that photography was not allowed.

The statement in D's post: “Finally the mildly amused expression of suppressed puzzlement works--always meant for the year 2022” is funny and clever. I enjoy being amused.

D: “Important thing is not to really see the Van Gogh but to say you saw it.” A sad indictment of our day. Hopefully, the pendulum will swing back.

I laughed at the query about the cloud. I had to call up my nephew one day and ask “What the {bleep} is the cloud, because I was so frustrated by that time. It’s like it appeared overhead one day out of the blue and everybody recognized it but me.

I love words and thinking about words. I especially enjoy off-label applications of words. This section from the OP is delightful: “We Atofowojo'ed that church. Gave it the full "you can look at it all day" treatment. That's when something in us disconnected Mormonism and plugged it into its proper socket.”

It's also on topic! See how that works?

This is what I mean when I say over and over and over that absolutely everything is connected to the topic of Mormonism. That’s not a compliment or pronouncement or prediction about the religion but rather a way of saying that no matter which medium is used to examine and dissect it, that church always comes out on the losing end, easily seen and deservedly so.

D&D says: “when one really beholds instead of glancing”. That is a fine goal in life. Drink it in. Savour the moment. Smell the roses (and the lilac of course).

What is this post about, indeed. It’s about the church. It’s about people. It’s about art. It’s about the human mind and human nature.

And it is about beauty. Beauty is truth, truth beauty, someone once said. I concur.

D says: “There is a lot to atofowojo in this world.”

Absolutely there is. Go and find it.

Enjoy.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/23/2022 03:07PM by Nightingale.

I have always said being understood is one of life's greatest gifts. Being understood by you in this way, Nightingale, is even greater than that.

The problem with museums is that 80% of the people in them shouldn’t be there. Maybe that number is even higher, maybe even way higher. The point is most people haven’t the first idea how to use them.

It’s not their fault. Many don’t even *want* to be there. But the culture has six ways to Sunday to make people believe they should be there and should want to be there. So, the aisles and hallways are clogged with kids and strollers and obnoxious parents and everyone is bored and miserable, most notably the ‘happy few’ who do know how to use a museum (which begins by ignoring the explanatory text).


I could ramble all sorts of boring stuff of my own but luckily conscience intervenes. Instead, here’s a bit of Jeanette Winterson, the text that your good words instantly brought to mind:


~~~~~~~~~~~
I was in Amsterdam one snowy Christmas when the weather had turned the canals into oblongs of ice. I was wandering happy, alone, playing the flâneur, when I passed a little gallery and in the moment of passing saw a painting that had more power to stop me than I had power to walk on.

The quality of the draughtsmanship, the brush strokes in thin oils, had a Renaissance beauty, but the fearful and compelling thing about the picture was its modernity. Here was a figure without a context, in its own context, a haunted woman in blue robes pulling a huge moon face through a subterranean waterway.

What was I to do, standing hesitant, my heart flooded away?

I fled across the road and into a bookshop. There I would be safe, surrounded by things I understood, unchallenged, except by my own discipline. Books I know, endlessly, intimately. Their power over me is profound, but I do know them. I confess that until that day I had not much interest in the visual arts, although I realise now, that my lack of interest was the result of the kind of ignorance I despair of in others. I knew nothing about painting and so I got very little from it. I had never given a picture my full attention even for one hour.

What was I to do?

I had intended to leave Amsterdam the next day. I changed my plans, and sleeping fitfully, rising early, queued to get into the Rijksmuseum, into the Van Gogh Museum, spending every afternoon at any private galleries I could find, and every evening, reading, reading, reading. My turmoil of mind was such that I could only find a kind of peace by attempting to determine the size of the problem. My problem. The paintings were perfectly at ease. I had fallen in love and I had no language. I was dog-dumb. The usual response of ‘This painting has nothing to say to me’ had become ‘I have nothing to say to this painting’. And I desperately wanted to speak.”

—Jeanette Winterson—
—Art Objects—
~~~~~~~~~~


“…saw a painting that had more power to stop me than I had power to walk on.” Only the ‘happy few’ experience this privilege. Not because people are dumb and distracted and self-centred and etc, -and people are all that, certainly- but because *the experience hadn’t chosen them*. No one can be at fault for that.

Cheers, bud!

Human, who knows your crow never winked a day in its life.

[Had the Met much to myself last time through. As my prettier half came to collect me, I was on the steps in Stendhalian throes. She knew the cure, tiramisu at our favourite little place down on East 73rd or so.]

I enjoyed this post too, Hu. (Just using the abbreviation because it rhymes. Small teensy tiny things amuse me greatly. I am juvenile that way, I know).


I especially liked this excerpt:

"The paintings were perfectly at ease. I had fallen in love and I had no language. I was dog-dumb. The usual response of ‘This painting has nothing to say to me’ had become ‘I have nothing to say to this painting’. And I desperately wanted to speak.”


There are many good and great writers around and about.

Thank you for posting this.

Thank you, thank you, Human. The Jeanette Winterson quote is stunning. I don't know her-- so serendipitous to find her this way.

"I had fallen in love and I had no language." So strong. Being left speechless. Forced to use something in us that we didn't know was there. The surprise of drawing from it. I love what she said. Hits me the way she says the painting in the window hit her.

The Yoruba language is a Volta-Congo language, unrelated to Swahili or Arabic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoruba_language


As a non-speaker of Yoruba, I have used Yoruba lexicons to try to parse the meaning given in the article for "atofojowo" of "you can look at it for a whole day".

It should be noted first that "you can" should be "o lè", so the translation must be idiomatic. Also, the transliteration lacks the usual diacritics that would be used to indicate tones, so I'm having to guess based on reasonable meanings.

* a- and à- appear to be nominalizers, the first creating an agentive noun (like "-er" in English), the second creating gerunds (like "-ing" in English).
* to may mean "to be sufficient".
* ojo is the noun meaning "day".
* wò is the verb meaning "to look".

Yoruba elides vowels across roots, so the remaining "f" may be a form like "fV" with V standing in for an elided vowel. Of the "fV" words, "fé" meaning "to want" might be a promising candidate.


To be clear, I've only spent a little while looking into Yoruba grammar, and slapping roots together in dictionary forms is unlikely to produce meaningful results.

(Putting "à to fójó wo" in Google Translate gives "let's take a look", but the reverse produces "ká wo" so the translation can't be taken too seriously either.)

Tyson