#22
Radix 2006

On Sunday 27 August 2006, the 25th anniversary of the publication of my first novel, Radix, I find myself high in the Ko'olau mountains of O'ahu. This is the culmination of a trek begun on Friday with three old Hawaiian men, whom I call stonemovers - a term they sneer at. Though they are in their 80s, these spry, ermine-haired fellows routinely hike steep trails to remote mountain locales. They seek out ancient heiau, traditional Hawaiian sacred sites, whose volcanic rock structures have fallen into disarray, and they rebuild the foundations of these edifices with their bare hands. That's why I call them stonemovers. They call me "pupule aikane" - crazy friend.

I first met the stonemovers and several others of their spiritual brotherhood in 1967, at the age of 16, when visiting O'ahu. I was on a quest at that time to learn about the Hawaiian goddess of sorcery, Kapo-'ula-kina'u. To distract the pig god Kamapua'a from molesting her sister, the goddess Kapo had detached her vagina and tossed that magical pudendum from the big island of Hawai'i to O'ahu. It landed in the southeast corner of the island and created a 400 meter high rock impression originally known as Kohelepelepe, the Inner Lips of the Vagina, named in modern times Koko Crater.

In 1967, political activism had focused the attention of many Hawaiians on the practical issues of homestead rights and participation in local government, and I had a difficult time finding anyone willing to talk seriously to a young white kid from New Jersey about the Hawaiian goddess of sorcery. The stonemovers did - but they goofed with me and dazzled me with made-up stories, which I took for real.

Years later, when the publication of Radix provided the funds for my permanent move to O'ahu, to my present home in the Valley of the Flying Vagina (Kalama Valley), I'd done my homework. The stonemovers were unimpressed. I had hoped that learning the theophany of their culture would have provided a slipway, a small passage into their world. They weren't interested in my company. Knowledge of autochthonic deities was a meager basis for relationship. They had committed themselves to a spirituality raised to the next power, the potency of practice.

During the following twenty-five years, eager to learn all I could about Kapo, this goddess who had mythicized my soul when I was a teen, I cultivated the friendship of the stonemovers by tagging along with them as a gofer. I earned my sobriquet 'crazy', because I carried my notebook wherever we hiked and wrote down the wonders we experienced on our quests for consecration, including apparitions, holes in time, poltergeist phenomena and rapturous, terrifying, dizzying engagements with the sacred atop precipitous mountain ridges. They consider crazy the act of writing about spirit powers, because encounters with gods are ineffable. We carry the truth of these confrontations with the divine within the inner spaces of the body, not in marks on a piece of paper.

So, on the 25th anniversary of the publication of the novel that delivered me to O'ahu, I spend most of the day hauling rocks with the stonemovers into the court of a shrine that overlooks myriad high ridges of emerald green. A light of heaven wafts over us through a steady traffic of clouds. As the sun slides down the sky, dark energies collude in the gorges below. They climb higher through the afternoon, and one of the stonemovers, a knobby, one-eyed fellow renowned both as a trickster and for his uncanny ability to whistle-down birds that alight on his shoulders, informs us that these are not whimsical sprites. They are death dancers. During the night, they will dance us right over the brink to our doom unless we distract them with an audacious offering, a story written in a medium they can easily apprehend -- fire and smoke - by burning the first edition of Radix I'd toted along for this anniversary occasion.

Dragonflies in the weary light flit around the seer as he makes this pronouncement, and with a trilling song he summons a small black bird with orange feathers behind its head and a white crest - an `Akohekohe, a Crested Honey-creeper, never seen anywhere but at high altitudes on Maui, a hundred miles away! In the slant light, I squint to make sure I'm actually seeing what I think I'm seeing. Meanwhile, the other two stonemovers are hooting and barking with amazement, and one has his flint striker out and is shooting sparks at me, which startles the bird - and it is gone, instantly, a phantasm.

I refuse to burn my book. The old men sullenly accept this, and we morosely finish our day's work and settle down under the westering sun to await the arrival of the death dancers. While eating our evening meal of mountain apples and mashed taro root, the first stars tap on in the purple ether, and we go through our usual night ritual of amusing each other with anecdotes and song. The stonemovers are not as ebullient as usual. With lorn expressions, they watch night climbing the steep mountainsides. They make much of fog in the ravines charging among trees like wild horses.

To put them at ease, when my turn comes to entertain, I begin recounting Hugh Everett's "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics. These old men never tire of mocking contemporary theories of reality. The absurdity of physics and cosmology tickles them. Their perspective is that every scientific explanation is a dream, an extravagant act of imagination. Even mathematics for them is a European fantasy, a delusion that the dazzling and reckless inventiveness of creation can be numbered and labeled.

Sure enough, not long after I launch into the democratic notion that all quantum states are parallel worlds and exist at the same time, the laughter begins. The sun is gone, the moon a serpent's tooth far down the sky when one of the stonemovers seizes the idea that we can elude the death dancers by slipping into a parallel world where we exist but they don't. Immediately all three are on their feet, shuffling and stomping a many-worlds dance. They pull me up, and we jig in the gloaming close to the deadfall edge where the many-worlds intersect - in some of which one or more of us plummet to our death.

Fear pulls me taut, and I stagger back and watch dismayed as the dancers hop and skip at the very verge of the precipice. Eventually, they are convinced we have penetrated a parallel world thanks to their vigorous efforts, and we all crawl into our sleeping bags. I fall asleep almost instantly, exhausted from lugging rocks all day.

In the gray darkness of pre-dawn, I wake shivering and find myself alone. My sleeping bag is gone. My backpack, too. So are my tabis, the rubber-soled shoes I wear on these treacherous climbs. I'm stupidly amazed that the stonemovers successfully slipped me out of my sleeping bag without waking me. I feel murderous. On other treks, they've abandoned me in remote areas, leaving me wandering about disoriented only to pop out hours later from behind trees laughing. They promised they would never do this to me again. I shout their names with a fury. But they are gone.

My copy of Radix is missing as well. I have nothing but the clothes I'm wearing - and this notebook with a pencil jammed in the spine. Barefoot, I circle the heiau, looking for the trail down. At first, I can't find it, and I seriously begin to wonder if I have indeed entered a parallel world, one where I am alone in a strange country. That thought fills me with despair and spoils all ambition to think clearly.

Then, in the smudgy light, I spy a small white flag flapping from the low bough of a silk oak. It's the first page from the text of Radix! "Blinded by the headlights, Sumner Kagan lunged off the road and slid down the dirt embankment into the dark."

My tabis are under the tree. A few paces away, in an evergreen grove, is another page. The stonemovers have fixed the pages of my novel on branches and under lichen-splotched rocks on a steep descent I don't recognize. I gather the pages as I go, wondering if they are leading me home or deeper into the dark, splendid profusion of the wilderness. Dawn stands in still flames on mountain peaks and night lingers below.

No water, no food -- I have a hard day ahead. Yet, as I follow the pages, gathering them in sequence while descending through fern forests in an obscure realm populated by ghosts and mist, I recall how I grew myself writing this book those many years ago. A cold wind accompanies me. A mountain god, the stonemovers would say. We converse.

The ineffable can move into the human fold through words, the god and I agree, if those words carry demonic desire, irrational enthusiasm. That's why I wrote Radix. The incomprehensible spirit breathes in us. Put words into that breath.

As if to confirm this, the mountain god dislodges a page, 103/104, and it flies out of the bracken where it had nested and flaps against my chest. "Memories begin and end in the blood," the page says. "Stay close to the blood."

Suddenly, it is morning. Sun shafts almost green pierce the canopy. Forty or more pages lead through holy light and a broad tract of giant fig trees. I expect to find the Buddha among these raucous amphitheaters of birdsong. Warmth and harmony escort me under the noisy trees and then down a tortuous, steep slope of limpid brooks. I'm glad for my tabis on this slippery footing, gathering pages left and right, so far not missing one.

At noon, Kane'ohe Bay swings into view. The way out is clear! But the remaining pages go in a different direction, back into the wilderness. What to do? If this were any day but the first day twenty-five years on, I would hurry out of the forest. Why risk breaking a leg? A forlorn wonder next door to dreaminess turns me back into the gloom. I follow the littered pages like a saint possessed with a love for the least. Those old men have caught Crazy Friend by his very soul. A cold laugh whisks through me.

Twilight shadows the mountains when I finally gather page 445/446. "Everything is best." Stars loom. Around the planet's far side, the sun rises. I find myself in another world, at the end of the trail above a Valley of the Flying Vagina from a parallel universe. On the foot path leading down to one of my homes in the many-worlds, propped against a boulder beside a launch ramp for hang gliders is the cover of Radix with front and end pages still attached. Sticking out between the pages is a small orange feather from the ruff of an `Akohekohe.