> [Tortoise] sets out to gather all knowledge to himself. To become the wisest of all. He takes a hollowed-out gourd—the one with the big pregnant belly and the narrow neck hung out thirstily to the world—attaches a string to it, places it on his neck, and goes on his way. When he meets eagle, he takes eagle’s wisdom of flight and stuffs it into his gourd. From lion, the wisdom of strength and courage; snake, his notorious cunning; mountain, her proud silence and resoluteness; the sea, his radical hospitality; and human, how to make a fire. When Tortoise’s project to encapsulate the world is done, the next thing to do is to secure his precious cargo. He chooses the Iroko tree, tall and durable, able to withstand the onslaught of untoward winds. He plans to take it up, tie the gourd at the topmost top of the tree, and camouflage it among Iroko’s deciduous leaves. But no matter how hard he tries, Tortoise can’t wrap his stunted limbs around the large hardwood tree’s trunk: the gourd, heavy with the world’s wisdoms, is between him and the tree, and weighs down heavily on his neck. As he battles with gourd and trunk and despair, a snail crawls by, observes Tortoise a while, and says, “You know you could simply put the gourd on your back and climb the tree. See if that doesn’t help.” It does. Tortoise swings the gourd to his back, climbs the tree, and reaches the top—only to be confronted by a paradox. Even though he has all the wisdom in the world, he is not the wisest. The poor snail, slow and pathetic, is the one that has given him a way to climb the tree. Tortoise removes the cloth he has tied around the gourd to secure its contents, and releases them into the air. The world will not be embraced, owned, or encircled. It is “too much to handle.” > > This indigenous notion of a thing being “too much to handle”—of the world retreating from our constant attempts to grasp it, to circumscribe it with words, with culture, with knowing, with definitions, or with discussions about identity and power—coincides with an emerging tradition that seeks to bring attention back to the material world. --- Source: Akomolafe, Bayo. These Wilds Beyond Our Fences (pp. 55-56). North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition.