The ancient and the baroque – Grobli Zirignon

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S 'it is tempting to make Grobli Zirignon a thinker among the ancients, it would be because of the themes of existence, life, death, the status of man, his destiny and his relationships with the world and God , on which he focuses his gaze. In particular, man in Grobli is a being at the crossroads of a deep desire to be. But this is defined in a double confrontation, namely firstly, the great original solitude and the silence by which his individuality is naturally surrounded, and secondly, the efforts of personal structuring by which he must distinguish himself both in his sociality and organized sociability, both constitutive of his humanity.
By handling this double confrontation, the philosopher Grobli Zirignon makes current, in his own way, the theme of man facing his destiny. We must go back to Aeschylus or Sophocles to see with what art and depth this question can be treated and how, Grobli, reader and admirer of a Sophocles, inspired in passing by the scents of Hegelian dialectic, constituted his point of view on the situation of man in the world and in society.
Grobli Zirignon, in fact, defends a man, a unique specimen, moving towards conscious and progressive self-realization, but in a society of men each wanting the best for themselves. We see from this that Grobli's man necessarily fights on two fronts. In his existence, he encounters an original adversity linked to the very nature of his being but also a social and societal adversity linked to the fact that he lives with and against men. And it is this mixture of ancient and modern which gives Grobli's thought this baroque character, in the sense that this word designates the sinuous and full walk, filled with poetic, artistic, philosophical energies and surprises and in which the aesthetic itself rolls up syntheses of seemingly unrelated ideas onto coherent spaces.

I- Grobli Zirignon: a thought of man moving towards himself?

It is not easy to follow Grobli Zirignon's thoughts, as the author, who is an artist, painter and sculptor, throws aphorisms on his sheets, veritable jets of ideas which are so many stones that he then begins to cut and to be polished as it advances along an unpredictable route. In other words, it is practically impossible to do a linear reading of Grobli. This point of view is also that of Tanella Boni.
Indeed, for Professor Boni, our author walks with “…thoughts that are fragmented but oh so coherent, circular, ordering themselves like a series of spirals with a single center”. This means that in his writings, Grobli does not make logical demonstrations. He asserts and then declines, like a stonemason, using scissors, in its various aspects, the living sculpture that he intends to reveal. We have therefore not understood Grobli if we have not finished reading it. And to finish reading Grobli is to think that we have surprised him and unearthed him in the midst of the images, both colored and discolored, in which he surrounds this unique center of which Professor Tanella Boni speaks so well.

In this hermetic style, under the cadence of sentences and aphorisms, we must still be able to discern the framework of the question, which the author likes to hide as in a Kafkaesque painting. Grobli paints, sculpts, but his thoughts remain hidden. However, as there is always someone smarter than you, Professor Boni gives us the happy announcement of having flushed him out. Grobli's deep thought would be, according to her, a refusal, a permanent contestation of "...the perpetual principle of annihilation or flattening to which we are exposed". And this is what we summarized above in the idea of ​​the double confrontation of man with his destiny, man facing the two categories of dominant forces cited.

1- So what is man, in Grobli’s thinking?

Let us reflect in the light of his work Philosopher on Existence, the 07 chapters of the work sufficiently summarizing the author's thoughts. Man is above all (chapter 1), as if imbued with strength and will, sources of “a war of all against all where the one who benefits from a more powerful Nyama is the predator whose appetite “makes law” . This is the state of nature, and we are taken back to Hobbes and Rousseau. The Nyama being this authoritarian force which makes the law of the strongest, according to the author, “Man as such has no place” in a world governed by the Nyama alone. This is how “the desire to know” appears in chapter 2, as the human condition. “Without the desire to know, man would languish in the “darkness of ignorance.” The desire to know tears man from his dominance and throws him onto the thorny paths of the Quest for knowledge! »… This desire to know is the Father of the human being because it is he who encourages him to free himself from the state of alienation in Nature in order to set out in search of truth and being. .
Driven therefore by the search for truth and being, the human being is a great loner. It becomes, for Grobli, “The existent who cannot believe it is there”. We can say it: in the thoughts of our author, alone on his island, man asks himself questions: he wonders who he is and what he is doing there.
So he sets out, he searches for himself. Grobli says he is undertaking the journey. An initiatory journey that will lead him towards others and towards himself. The being on the move is not the being sought. The being on the move is a perfect anonymous person. He is not the man of a culture or a country or a society. Because Grobli has never created a character. To create a character is to give a name, an image, it is to have emotions, thoughts, arguments expressed by imaginary beings to act and justify themselves in an existence which, although imaginary, is presented under human constraint real.

In all his works, it is Grobli who speaks of man. This one is mute although he bears the attributes of a being who expresses himself. The author says it, he acquires the verb thanks to the community into which he slips. But Grobli's man doesn't speak. Is he acting? Yes ! “But unlike the wise man who never leaves, the “anxiety of solitude” takes the existing person out of its shell and in the Pirogue of language leads it towards the community.” The man in question is entirely in the refusal of the suffering to which his original solitude leads him. Within the community, the other will want to apply his Nyama to him, but he too can become the latter's apprentice, that is to say, learn violence and exercise it. Which makes it necessary to understand the law.
From then on, by reading this work, man defines himself as a being thrown into the world astride the earth, he must define his own path; and that's what existing is: knowing who you are, and making yourself through work, creativity, inventiveness. To exist is to leave oneself to meet the other, to walk towards the other and to enrich oneself by means of the word.
But do we know what will happen to the existent, the seeker of truth, in this quest?

2- A harmful game of arbitrariness in man's quest

As we cannot know automatically either the route or the manner in which "the initiatory journey" will end, we can only assume the effect of the walk that a person leads and which we call an encounter, is above all the adventure of one being “against” another. Because in this journey, the being or the truth encountered is not always what we ourselves desired.
Indeed, whether the other is a person or any entity, meeting the other most often leads to danger rather than good. There is therefore a mortal risk in the effort to seek truth and being. In this, Grobli's man, the existent in search of being and truth, is not a happy and worry-free being. On the contrary, he is a being who suffers from a “discontent in society” (Freud). He suffers from not knowing who he is, and caught in the whirlwind of questions, he is rather worried.
This is how Grobli's thought fits, in our sense, into the panoply of tragedies and pathos such as we find in a thinker like Sophocles. Doesn't Grobli say that man is a great loner, called to discover himself, but through combat? This fight, the solitary Oedipus certainly sublimated by the effort of man to free himself from the oppression of a superior will in the work of Sophocles, but he still led it first against his own progenitor at a “crossroads” of life and death and then against a monster devouring men. Grobli concentrates this fight in the symbolism of art, creativity and work, as with Freud, and defines an effective method: “scratching”.
Several of his works allow us to understand this method. Indeed, to find himself and know who he is, man must scrape away the matter, remove the filth with which his face is covered due to his existence, in community. But is scraping matter something other than digging deep within oneself? Like the plowman, you have to scrape, weed, discover the best part of the earth before sowing, planting, beautifying what you spent your time scraping. To move towards completion, Grobli subsequently proposes the other aspect of his method which consists of “scribbling”.

Scribbling is taking chalk and putting color where you want, freely, which is a way of remaking the world with your own strength and energy. To scribble is therefore to create, to make the hidden appear, to expose it. But what is hidden if not our perception of reality? By bringing out what we have within ourselves, doodling makes us beings who expose ourselves to the gaze and criticism of others.
Here we see a notable difference emerging between Grobli and Sophocles. While the quest for truth in this great Greek thinker resulted in an incurable moral wound, a horrible discovery and led the son of Laius to put out his eyes, in Grobli, on the contrary, the end of the story presents the man rather under optimistic auspices. Constructive, the end of the journey with Grobli, restores the human person through healing. This means that the impulsive tension caused by the original Nyama and which pushes the self to come out of itself as a desire to know, constitutes an effective spring for putting order in the heart of the individual. Controlled internal impulses are restored in words, scratching, scribbling as so many energies beneficial to the individual and to society. The man who agrees to scratch, to scribble, performs a cathartic act of restitution of self to self. This is, without doubt, the reason which prevailed at the birth of Psychart therapy of which Grobli is recognized worldwide as the author and inspiration, a method of monitoring the alienated man, to enable him to give meaning to its existence.
The individual may rise to the top of society, bear the most prestigious titles, but he will never be himself if, covered in so many ornaments, he cannot convince himself, deep down, of having found the true meaning of his existence. This is revealed in faith. Faith, not the illusory one that religions inculcate, or that through passions or blind impulses of fearful and intoxicated crowds artificially create, but the commitment to realize oneself through responsible and laborious choices. Grobli writes: “Without the truth about his final destination man does not exist but survives in wandering and dereliction. » What he affirms differently when he writes: “To have faith is to choose the side of “hope” in the face of the unknown. » This is why, he says again, “Men “without faith or law” (unstructured) are at the origin of the death and desolation which reign in the world”. You have to do your catharsis to discover yourself and be able to act and hope as you should. This is the path of psychotherapy.

Hope, driving force and transfigurer of the man of faith in Grobli Zirignon

To close this brief window on the thought of Grobli Zirignon, let us focus a little on this aspect of the philosopher's optimism, namely the role of hope and faith in the existence of man.
There is, undoubtedly, a becoming of the world in this universal will to be from which nothing that exists escapes. This, the Master, the artist, the philosopher told me one day in February 2023, after a meeting to which he had invited intellectuals. He said that latent despair leads men towards conflict and nothingness, but the courageous, that is to say those who have faith, always come through.
I only understood this sentient thought when I tried to look more closely at the activities of the speaker. I didn't know his age when he spoke to me. But the man who was born in 1939 in the village of Babré (Gagnoa), who left, according to Tanella Boni for France in 1952, more or less, the year of my birth, I found him sitting, a pile of more than fifteen works ahead of him, not counting the articles on online psychotherapy that he continues to produce. I was with my younger brother, Professor of Letters, Blé Théodore. How did a man, author of such an immense work, manage to live in complete anonymity in his country? I asked my companion when we were alone. “That’s what you see there!” he replied without more. But I saw in him almost the same spite as in me.
All things considered, Grobli Zirignon, writer, painter, sculptor, philosopher, this is a guideline. That of a man wanted and made by himself. An example from life. Did he not write: “Original creation makes the artist the servant of God because to create authentically is to reproduce the work, in other words to ensure its maintenance”?
Thus, for Grobli, “to have faith is to unconsciously identify oneself with God and reproduce his “creative gesture”. The man of faith is both a creator and a transfigured man. Victor Hugo in The Legend of the Centuries says of the transfigured man: “The great living breath, this transfigurator placed the celestial height under his feet”.
The man of faith, the authentic artist, this avatar of God, is therefore great among men, but he is nevertheless “the one who scratches”. Because scratching and rubbing to bring out the truth also means erasing ready-made images of oneself and others so that everyone can write their own truth. The refusal of flattening, we now understand, is the refusal of opinions, it is free contestation and the affirmation of oneself as a subject, a rational will in a society which needs truth. Ultimately, it even means renouncing what we believe we are in order to project ourselves into the sphere of the gods. It’s catharsis in action again.
Grobli is not the only one to think of this effort by the man of faith, the authentic artist. In the Odyssey, didn't Homer, this legendary creator, push his hero Ulysses to this same self-effacement? In the tragic scene of dialogue with the Cyclops, the cunning Ulysses declared in response to the monster's question: "My name is Nobody." By not saying his name, Ulysses took offense. He renounced his identity, which was contrary to the heroic morality of a pure-blooded Achaean. But, through this act, he entered into the symbolic anonymity thanks to which he would escape the wrath of the god Poseidon, father and protector of the Cyclops.

So it is with the artist, a symbolic creator repeating the creative gesture of the divine. Through this ability to reproduce the work of God, the artist transmits hope and makes people look at the dawn. Exactly as Ulysses in this risky journey was able to keep the hope of finding his native country as well as his wife Penelope, the artist looks to the future with faith and courage, two values ​​intimately linked in Grobli who writes: "Like the crossing of the desert the quest for oneself confronts the existing with mirages fatal to most. Faith that “resists” is necessary to survive and continue the (difficult) journey of existence.” This means that when the boat sinks, when society goes adrift, it is towards the horizon that the people turn their gaze. A silent beacon is perhaps there: it is the artist, the philosopher who kept hope who points the way.
A final collective effort can therefore save a society from the rubbish if it agrees to seek its true face, and if, despite the turbulence and the monsters encountered on the path of its evolution, it knows how to maintain hope. The brilliant Ulysses did it. Like a distraught star ends up entering the sky into its mansion, it has found its kingdom. But this society must emerge from its narcissistic selfishness, rebuild itself through an effort to overcome itself where it allows itself to be carried away by various contrary winds, if it really wants to regenerate itself.

As a conclusion

We could simply assert that in Grobli Zirignon, man is prey to the doubts into which he is plunged without wanting to, because of the social contradictions and the uncertainties that he develops in himself and about his true being. . But, supported by faith, he is able to get through it. The faith in question is the courage and perseverance with which man, individual and community, must learn to question himself in order to better understand and accept his existence.

By Dogbo Nahounou