#14
School of Grok

Robert Heinlein's science fiction masterpiece Stranger in a Strange Land [1961] introduced the neologism "grok," a verb that means to attain intuitive understanding that is replete and intrinsic. One of the novel's characters defines grok as "to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed -- to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience.

A creative writer groks through receptivity to the ongoing narrative of our creaturely psyche – our yinsanity, which forces the question, "What is imagination, this special category of consciousness?"

We don't even know what general consciousness is. For us, as ever, reality is fantasy. The more fabricated, the more authentic [cf. the Teutonic wizards: Heisenberg, Gödel and Wittgenstein]. Physics builds a googol of universes in the string theory landscape. The Landscape refers to the mathematical space whose values are the "fields" that make up the physical laws and constants of any particular vacuum (or what we commonly call a "universe.) The many possible sets of physical laws and constants predict stupendous numbers of vacua or universes, with less than 1% capable of evolving observers with consciousness -- and imagination.

Science assumes that the many fine-tunings necessary for a universe that supports observers are accidental. This assumption rests on the Anthropic Principle, the idea that consciousness exists exclusively in the few possible universes in the Landscape that allow our existence.

Instead of assuming a googol number of existing universes with only a handful occupied by observers, we can use our imagination just as well to assume an observer in hyperspace creating the fine-tuned universes that this cosmic observer needs to exist in spacetime. To what purpose? The answer lies in our myths.

And I mean "lies" in both senses. The empirical limits of science forbid knowing other universes in any objective sense. Subjectively, however, in imagination and in dreams, we trespass other realities. We feel the reality of higher dimensions in the indescribable affects (or qualia) contouring our days with subtle emotional tones and hues of mood. There are other worlds all around us that science knows about yet cannot see. We feel their presence.

With poetic myth, we confront the wolf in the dog of literature. I first encountered the concept of poetic myth in April 1963, at the age of eleven, when I discovered Robert Graves' The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. That book describes creative writing as an act of magic. Graves beguiled my preadolescent mind with the alphabet trees of the druids, numerology of the magi, mystic networks for words and numbers encoded in riddles, poems and stories. All writing is spelling, and all texts are talismanic objects with spellbinding magic to enchant and transform those who know the code. At the unifying center of this sorcery, the Goddess presides. She personifies creative power, the permeant intelligence that sculpts the whole world and everyone in it out of atoms and the void. Is She not, then, the observer in hyperspace Who creates our fine-tuned universe?

In my sixteenth year, when a neighbor came back to my hometown in New Jersey from a vacation in the Hawaiian Islands with an outlandish tale of a caldera that myth identified as the rock impression of a goddess' vagina, I recognized an opportunity to meet the Goddess in the physical world, and I determined to go and say hello. I intended to camp out long enough to compose some poetry to the goddess of the place, Ka Akua Po, Hawaiian divinity of sorcery. I had no notion then that the locus genius* would haunt me until I returned and then hold me here for the remainder of my mortal life.

[*Places that prompt deep feelings of inexpressible peace and inspiration result from the habitation of peculiar spirits known in Latin as the locus genii. Sometimes the place is an old family home, a chapel, a placid glade or a sea cove. An encounter with a locus genius provokes serenity, creativity and sympathy.]

Like burst light inside a diamond, divinity refracts into ambient colors of mood and inexpressible influences: qualia. Usually we feel these sublime intimations long before we know what we're feeling.

Myth opens a powerful path into the 21st century, because advances in physics and cosmology confirm many of the aboriginal intuitions about reality at the core of our human legend. What grabbed me as a young writer about The White Goddess is that it's not a source book of myth or history. It's a work of sheer imagination -- Graves' fantasy. Visionary fiction! In the curving world of the hourglass and the horizon, The White Goddess finds truth in another dimension: imagination, the fugitive joy of fantasy.

Graves' outlandish ideas about the Celt's biblical affiliations, a grammar of trees, poetry as moon magic and the creative fever inflicted on men by the Triple Goddess of Birth, Love and Death are all confabulations of the author or a salmagundi of Romantic notions originating among 18th century British antiquarians yearning for kinship with the Classical Greeks and the Chosen of God.

The White Goddess celebrates this kind of magical thinking. Poetic myth is such a new human phenomenon, most sapiens don't know what to make of it. Ours is a shadow world already, and poetry opens into deeper shadows yet. That sense of adventurous trespass of death-in-life and creative rebirth in text beguiled me -- as text has done to sapiens from the first magi to the existentialists.

At my initial encounter with the Goddess, in 1967, there were no housing developments in the southeast corner of O'ahu. I hiked through a desolate, surreal terrain of colossal rock formations (that have since become major tourist attractions), bizarre cacti and desert-flower scrub in the rain shadow of an immense, emerald cordillera at the spur of the Ko'olau Mountains. The caldera towering above this dramatic cinderland of sea cliffs transfixed me, and I understood immediately why the native Hawaiians named this dominating geological feature Kohelepelepe, literally, "the inner lips of the vagina".

From the western approach, Kohelepelepe, known in modern times as Koko Crater, looks like a typical 400 meter mountain. Only visible from the east, the tuff ring bears an uncanny resemblance to the pudendum, including a clitoral hood known as Pu'u Mai (pu'u = "bump, lump, peak"; mai = "come"). As if that's not explicit enough, koko means "blood". In reference to Kohelepelepe, Koko Crater is a caldera of menstrual blood.

I buzzed with excitement when I clambered up the talus slope to the rimwall, awed by the fusion of myth and land. Then, like Moses, I recognized that I trod on holy ground -- and I noticed my boots. This was my third pair of hiking boots that I had customized with skin from reptiles in my home terrarium -- but this was the first time that I'd felt any sympathy for those cold blooded creatures. I sat down right there on a black, micro-perforated lava rock and wrote this poem:

Pet Snakes, Now Boots

Stretched beyond life
all I know of you wanders, blue lizards,
into the sensible sounds,
voices of birds, the wade
of wind. You have gone back
down the cold blood
streams to the desert,
skull and cactus flower.
You have gone to sunbursts
and the moon's empty evolution
leaving behind your last molts,
sacred sheaths,
mystical shells.
You pass, blue lizards, pilgrims,
terrible and silent,
leaving me
shamed and simian
where many deaths come together.

Lava is fire held still. In aa lava, you can touch the jagged contours of flame, and with pahoehoe lava the plasma soul of fire spreads like glass. Both are present in Koko Crater, built into the rock walls, a ceremonial splendor that died and turned to stone. Gazing up at these titanic sheets of fired rock, vision out stares fate. One senses the presence of the place, reverberant as thunder in water. I vowed to return and get to know this locus genius better.

The suburbs of Honolulu arrived at Koko Crater in Kalama Valley in 1975, but at that time I had no means to move. Six years later, I sold my first novel, Radix, and came here to live where myth and the geophysical world unite.

To understand better the goddess of this place, Kapo, my muse these many years, you need to know the Hawaiian story of Koko Crater, which actually begins 150 miles southeast of O'ahu on the Big Island. There, the lusty Pig God, Kamapua'a, assaulted the goddess of fire, Pele. The frenzied Pig God would have ravished his victim if not for the intervention of Pele's sister, the sorceress Kapo, who distracted Kamapua'a from his lewd advances by detaching her vagina and tossing it from the Big Island to O'ahu. The Pig God chased after it. The flying vagina slammed into the earth. And Kamapua'a, unable to stop quickly enough, crashed into the earth, gouging out Kalama Valley. Kapo retrieved her portable genitals, leaving behind this impression in the land, which is the tuff ring of Koko Crater.

Kohelepelepe is a place of mythic deception and sorcery. You must watch your step here or risk plummeting into a ravine. Find a place to meditate, out of the wind, among the wild rocks. Soon, sitting on the crater floor as in a giant well, the blue voice of the sky clears your brain and lifts you above the bottom of things through drifts of cloud running like a hunting song toward the zenith of infinity. Then, She comes.

I edited Radix here in the extinct cinder cone of Kohelepelepe and have written all my subsequent fiction in this region sacred to the goddess of sorcery, Ka Akua Po. This Polynesian divinity is the locus genius. I live nearby, in Kalama Valley, Honolulu's most remote volcanic rift, situated beneath the goddess' caldera. I moved here from Manhattan in 1981 at the age of twenty-nine to fulfill an ambition that had begun eighteen years earlier with The White Goddess.

Inside the crater, rim walls lift sight to the peak of ascension, embracing clouds. The land is a story. The story in the land receives wanderers at a womb door of scree and gravel. Ironically, the entry to the crater opens into a plumeria grove, the Hawaiian cemetery tree! Womb and tomb right from the start.

Steep gullies crowded with bramble and kiawe score the crater floor in a panorama of despair. Keep to the high trail that climbs through thorn forests where Eurydice skulks, and the land eventually opens into a broad, sunny champaign of colossal fan palms. Here, precipitous cliffs block all evidence of the nearby suburbs, and one transits a primeval territory over two miles in circumference. This is where the locus genius resides.

Writing in the crater, I'm more keenly aware of the Uncertainty Principle than usual. The black tumulus and cairn boulders, some blotched with silver lichen, crumbled from the rim wall above me. Decades from now or in the next moment, the Archon of Chance will drop an anvil stone right where I'm sitting.

I've composed all my memoranda here. In the course of this metacognitive exercise, I've experienced more intimately the yinsane relationship between myself and the Goddess, the hyperspace observer Who -- in my imagination -- fine tunes the reality in which I find myself. I leave you with this thought to grok:

The string theory landscape is a collection of all the universes projected into the true vacuum from compactified dimensions underlying reality as a 10-Dimensional continuum. Physicists suspect that each of the compactified dimensions has hundreds of possible configurations and each configuration hundreds of subspaces each of which can be shaped in hundreds of ways, so that a conservative estimate of the number of distinct universes produced by the various conformations of higher dimensions is more than 10 to the power of 100. This set of possible universes is called the Landscape, and it is unimaginably vast -- a googol of universes! One of them is ours. Curiously, the subset to which our universe belongs -- Observer Class Universes -- is exceedingly small. In most universes, there can be no observers, because the fundamental conditions for observation (spatial dimensions that differentiate "things" and permit subject-object relationships) do not exist.