#31
There Is a Truth We Hold between Our Teeth

Storm clouds loom above a stubble field where rain unfurls gray auroras. Thunder mumbles like voices in a muted and melancholy dream. And from a still place among mist and heaven's high pall, a young woman defeated by sadness speaks -

"Where is the harm in harmony? Where is the master of my being? Where is the master not? Presence and absence are at the very heart of things. Understand that heart, and you understand everything. Achieve this, and you inherit a universe. Yet, what understands? I think that truth is in our language. Is life not a dream and language its ferment? Fighting fate feels natural. And loving it is so hard. How beautiful the world when we find the language to love fate. Then, where is the harm in harmony?"

Lightning flashes across thunderheads, a web of radiance flung briefly against the gloom. And in its branching brightness, the obscuring shadows of rain relent, and for one moment we look into the landscape of the soul.

___________________________________

I dreamt the above on Friday 4 May 2007 while camping in the Ko'olau mountains with friends. By the previous night's full moon, my companions -- some older islanders -- and I had replaced a temple stone that had fallen centuries earlier from the ridge where the shrine is located. Two of my friends on that venture are remorseless sleepers, and the third never seems to slumber, merely sits and stargazes with half-lidded eyes. I woke to find him watching me with wolfish attentiveness. "O ke kanaka ke kuleana o ka moe," he whispered: "What a privilege to dream." A glint of a smile in the dark as he inquired, "Moe kaha ula?" I shook my head, "No, not an erotic dream." I recounted in English what I've recorded above. "Pu'u ku 'akahi," he observed, drawing back into the lunar dark: "The place where souls loiter."

I've been there before. We all have, yes? It is the most inward vantage, where language falls away into emotional elements -- or, conversely, where we escape the undertow of the irrational with the strength of language. You've had dreams like this, with vivid imagery enclosing specific, focused sentences, imperative questions or earnest commands of immanent meaning. Who is speaking? What is this voice in our dreaming heads?

My islander friends have their theory of dreams, of exalting, terrifying journeys of infradimensional range. I think these bright vanishings are not so much astral transports from one realm into another as one's own transparence. In dreams, we see through ourselves into our own true being and the fullness of presence. And this dream came as a reply to a question I had been carrying (along with a heavy shrine stone) throughout a week long trek into the mountains to restore this forgotten temple.

I have been obsessing about the prospect of a creative writing project that both attracts and repels me: rewriting my first novel, Radix. I'm drawn to the idea, because I think I've become a better craftsman in the intervening quarter century. At the same time, I'm put off, as the original concept of Radix was not so much an ambition to create a world as to destroy the one we're used to. Dare I handle again such destructive images and ideas? The dream's answer is a climactic statement from my muse, an assertion so full of elegiac sadness I can't help but identify it with beauty: the way lost worlds are beautiful, though they may have been cruel and even ugly in their time.

Weirdly wonderful, the day I returned home a fan wrote passionately requesting a reissue of Radix. That decided the matter for me, and -- inspired by my dream -- I invited the fan to look over my shoulder during the rewrite and vet my changes. Who better to guide my hand than someone with a heartfelt investment in the original? That worked out very well ... for about 72 hours before I found not only Radix under scrutiny but my career: why wasn't I as commercially successful as ... well, name just about any living author. A tactical program of public relations followed, to counteract my tendency to "appear unreachable, aloof, beyond the grasp of mere mortal beings." Trying to steer the project back to the actual rewriting, I came across as sulky, petulant and defiant toward taking responsibility for my career. The significance of the dream darkened, emphasizing the interrogatory liveliness of the muse's disembodied voice: "What harm in harmony?" I was finding out! Though this stupendous reader had the best intentions and sincere good will toward me, my lot defeated us. Resisting the editing of my fate, I alienated this fan and lost an excellent editor, who had pointed out many missteps in the first chapter of my revision.

At my office -- a picnic bench at Makapu'u beach park -- in the sunburst shadows of littoral palms, the day after my editorial collaboration blew up, I confided what had happened to the friend who knew my dream. "Ho'ohoa hua 'alualua!" he laughed so loud he set birds to wing over the hard glitter of the cove. "Making friends writing code!" was the mocking reply, meaning relating in the wrong way, too much intimacy too quickly. The harm in harmony.

Of course, he's right. Inviting a reader into the writing process, I let a stranger enter the deepest part of my life. What did I think would happen? Edgar Allan Poe correctly points out that "most writers ... would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep ... at the true purposes seized only at the last minute ... at the painful erasures and interpolations..." What harm in harmony? We are building something in our sleep. And sometimes we are most asleep while awake ... which is our yinsanity, when the work of writing gets done. And rewriting? Is it even possible twenty-five years after the writing?

Maybe I should abandon the notion of rewriting something accomplished so long ago and leave the past alone? Fiction is written in fire and rewritten in ashes.

With morning light sparkling in the tide spray and turquoise swells, I asked my friend if this was a good idea, returning to a former work in the place where souls loiter. He shrugged, "`Oi kau ka lâ, e hana i ola honua."

While the sun is still shining, do all you can.