Buhari: The Supremacy of the Heavens, By Uthman Shodipe-Dosunmu

He is gone now; forbidden from the present, eclipsed in the inscrutable womb of time and space, locked in some unknown eternal permanence all mortals must invariably reside, accounting to the heavens our sojourn in this transient realm.

He is now superior to us all in the fullness of his new confrontations, in the humbling summative largeness he must now contest, hidden even from those who still pretend a mastery of our yet confounding pathways.

He is now a moral of our collective finitude, a defining emblem of our necessary ephemerality ; our ultimate cordon indifferent to position, voiding power, halting ambition, severing the physical, kindling our inevitable passage from the mortal frame.

If the voidance of man must always come, if the eternal sway does not exist, why then must power delude itself with the certitudes of heaven : heedless and savaging, thoughtless and triumphant, resolved in an imperturbable rootedness, believing all conquest is made, that all knowledge is grasped, that the final height is reached , that the gods are now puny and helpless, incapable of sanctioning the riotous power.

But the unconquerable finality of death tells us that power doth lie, warped in the illogic of the moment, distorted by the variegated ancillaries of the present, blinded by vain choristers and swooning actors , all huddling in scavenging mercenary prowling, hailing hosannah in sacrilegious opportunism.

And when power believes in self-defined truth, when power twists the hour to fit its own lore, there is that fictive creation of a deathlessness, of insuperable might etched in concrete.

But, pray, is there any man woven in some infinite latitude, is there any power grasped in some unfailing eternity of the heavens ?

Alexander of Macedonia, Xerxes of Persia, the Caesars of Rome, Kubla Khan, Ghenghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Chaka the Zulu, the Hindu monarchs of old and all the thronging warriors of ages gone by, both brutish and commendable, have but perished by the withering wastes and claimant of the mother soil.

And still, power does not learn from yesterday’s men. It perceives itself still in infallible exceptionalism, weaving itself in philistine giantism ; not to be conquered , not to fall, to reign forever !

But at the last, death vanquishes the myth of power, striking in terminal fury, indifferent to any plea, unpurchasable, savaging with a finality none can contest.

The time , the place , we do not know. Even here, the oracle is helpless, confirming in the end the supremacy of the heavens over all things.

What then should the mortal man do while in this realm? To appreciate his own temporality no matter the height he may ascend, acknowledging the fragility of his own frame, knowing that the Fates are unfathomable, that the will of the Heavens cannot be swayed or defied by the command of a thousand artillery or the debasing filigree of wealth, that the Leveler must come when the Heavens beckon.