Uplands
Toward noon on the first day
of October 2006, not long after my 55th birthday, a catamaran that friends
and I had sailed across a glittering sea from O'ahu came in under the northwest
cliffs of Kauai. A big broad-headed shark had flanked us the entire trip.
My companions, four islanders in their 80s, identified the creature as their
tutelary spirit. The channel crossing, a frightful escapade for me, a non-swimmer,
proved an exuberant and triumphant procession for them. They believe the
world is made of light and the night sky proves this. The stars are shards
left over from the world's construction. One of the contractors who helped
gather the light to build the world is the shark, and its attendant presence
in the broken blues of the sea proved our purpose sacred.
A small beach inset in the
cliffs offered no sign of habitation. Black terns rose and settled on the
rocks. Anchored in the lee of the cove, our boat rode steady while two of
the islanders and I waded ashore across a low bar, up to our chins in green
water. Well, they swam, I waded, eyes swiveling, searching for that big
shark.
The two who remained on board
weighed anchor, and when the catamaran fell downwind, trades thumping in
the sail, scudding along the coast to the village where it would await our
return three weeks later, my heart sank. I didn't want to be here. But I
had made a promise, years ago, to a goddess that I would complete this pilgrimage
to her holy ground, and promises are round things that come back to us wearing
the shine of memories they have collected along the way.
My companions, familiar with
this inlet, followed stream paths that conducted us on a tortuous and steep
climb into the ancient mountains. By late afternoon, we arrived among the
dragonflies and limpid breezes of the upland meadows. Here we spent our
first night under the shards of creation. I am the merry cook wherever we
wander. Food must be whipped up with song and laughter or my elderly friends
will not eat what I prepare, which for our first supper on this trip happened
to be red lentils and rice with some java plums we found along the way.
These old men are stonemovers.
That's my name for them. They call themselves 'Elemakule: old man. Outwardly,
in dress and manner, they seem no different from other geriatric locals,
but they are uncommonly strong and limber as acrobats. And they daily commune
with spirits.
They came to Kauai to reassemble
the foundation stones of a temple that had fallen into disuse several centuries
prior. I came to affirm the direction of my literary career. Thirty years
earlier, I had dedicated my work to the goddess, the Muse of my ancestors.
I knew then the stakes were high. I risked ruin. But, of course, failure
is not a surprising outcome for writers. Herman Melville leaps to mind.
And a quote from Carl Jung's Collected Works, volume XVII, chapter 7: "The
fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing. He
must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and
wonderful paths".
There's a longer story detailing
the accrued obligations to these spry old men that delivered me to that
mountain slope of shining pines, glittering spider webs and greenfinches.
The sufficient cause is my willingness to make a new start as a creative
writer.
Reason takes a rest in the
company of the stonemovers. That first night, they brusquely shook me awake,
gabbling with excitement. The goddess had come down to our meadow to greet
us. The deity to whom they frantically referred is a local divinity, Kapo-'ula-kina'u,
goddess of sorcery, who had created the valley where I live.
I sat up, slapped my eyeglasses
to my face and beheld a woman standing absolutely still in the chinked light
of the pines, bare breasted, wearing a traditional plant-fiber waist wrap,
crow-black hair sinuous in the mountain wind. Her eyes glowed oddly, like
streaks of light.
Stricken with awe, I sat upright.
At the edge of the black forest under silhouetted fins of mountains and
splashes of stars, she shone violet. Her tomfool, I walked right toward
her. I got close enough to see her expression, an existential face, sad
and wise. She smiled.
Clouds closed to utter night.
The earth shrank -- and she vanished!
Impish masters of pranks, jokes,
antics and games, the stonemovers have gulled me time and again. My first
expectation was the sonic assault of their guffaws. Instead, I found those
two rascals with their faces pressed to the ground. They timorously peeked
up at my approach, aghast to find me still alive.
With urgent hands, they built
a fire and spent the remainder of the night close to the flames fully awake
and in complete silence. They have said nothing about that apparition since,
and whenever I broach the subject, they behave as if I'm not there.
The morning following that
visionary night, we ascended among gnarled thorn shrubs to the vibrant,
luminous slopes where we would gather rocks for the next seventeen days.
All my worldly pursuits and our inevitable end retreated beneath a vast
sky of cumulus swarms, sword flash sunrays, bursts of rain, then sun again
and dervish mists off higher ridges, and more sun dragging iridescent cloud
shadows across the mountain faces.
A fissure opened in my being,
a sense of unreality. Nothing paranormal occurred during those strenuous
days; yet, the temporal world felt annulled. The work exhausted me, and
I slumbered dreamlessly each night so that sleep became mere punctuation.
By day on those vertiginous heights, I opened to an awareness of a new psychic
limit, a plenitude elaborated out of life's eroticism and nature's superabundance.
I experienced then an interior transfiguration.
So, here I am now, almost two
months later finally finding the necessary totality to write again. Shortly
after returning, I heard from the publisher of my latest novel (Killing
with the Edge of the Moon) -- a request to write more Young Adult fiction.
That's the first request from a publisher for a novel I've received in seven
years, and I took that as a sign of the new direction I had been seeking
when I went to Kauai. Maybe the smile of the goddess had sanctioned the
new beginning I craved. But the creative impulse, my ration of the eternal,
proved difficult to take in hand. Weeks in the uplands had saturated me
with estranging feelings, a sublime sense of the ineffable.
There is no beginning, middle
or ending to this flux we summon to mind as reality. That is an Aristotelian
rite. After experiencing the astonishing audacity of the natural world directly,
as I did in the uplands of Kauai, words fail inevitably. All universalizing
of experience is a lie. And that lie is the glorious domain of the fiction
writer.
I'm finding it harder to lie
the older I get. I possess less strength to derange the world into stories.
Is that what the goddess' smile meant? Did she see through me?
In bewilderment, I come before
you. Our relationship is an intimacy of solitude and communion. There is
no sentiment in our intimacy. You don't know me, or I you. Yet, here I am
inside you. Here I am where only you can remit my exile.
I don't know if I can write
another novel. The stonemovers think me mad to write at all. "Sentenced
to the sentence" is one of their derisive expressions. But they didn't
see the goddess smile.
If you've read this far, I
think you did.
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