#32
Broken Journey

Each of us is on a journey. We are all going to the same place, but we won't all get there the same way.

The afternoon before Memorial Day, I'm with three of my islander friends, the stonemovers. These agile, elder men restore rocks that time and feral goats have dislodged from the foundations of shrines constructed by the islands' original settlers, the Marquesas voyagers, a mystical people, followers of Iolani, the hawk spirit. The hawk wanderers arrived and cultivated the land prior to 600 C.E., long before the Tahitian priest-chieftains invaded with fleets of warriors and installed their aristocratic hierarchy and culture of taboos (kapu), which is the local tradition usually recognized as Hawaiian.

In my bloodline's history, all wandering is spermatic - knights pricking o'er the plain - Hermes, the messenger deity, guarding crossroads and doorways of the ancient Greco-Roman world with a huge divine erection, protecting the coming-in and going-out that is the intercourse of travel and trade.

On this journey up the high trails of the Ko'olau Mountains, one of the stonemovers' great-grandnephews accompanies us, a burly young man less than half my age. He is a Marine lance corporal and veteran of the ongoing Iraq war, who lost his right leg below the knee at Fallujah in April 2004. His great-granduncle, a serenely ageless fisherman, possesses the formidable ability to build and dismantle clouds, summon showers and banish squalls by chanting. He developed this remarkable power as a reply to two of his friends with an orphic skill at reading future events in clouds. With impish delight, he often frustrates the prognostic efforts of his chums, repeatedly warning them with a gentle smile, "Even God loses when He gambles."

Plato's Timaeus informs us that space is a receptacle of all becoming. The ancient Greek philosopher refers to the world-mothering space that contains us as a 'vessel' (literally, 'undertaker') and a 'matrix' (a 'mother'). On our spermatic journey, we embody time as we move through the Mother, the uterine Presence of space. The elliptic Hungarian anthropologist of the first half of the 20th century, Géza Róheim, in "The Dragon and the Hero: Part Two" describes our journey as "light walking in darkness: the son-sun-hero in the mother-dragon night."

I'm glad to 'undertake' this journey with my old friends, because my creative writing this past month has been vacant and listless, my spirit ravened from within by doubts about what direction to go with my caved-in literary career. I wondered aloud in my previous memorandum about the possibility of rewriting my first novel, Radix. To date, thirty-seven individuals have offered to look over my shoulder as I tweak Radix. Fifty-two readers insist I leave well enough alone, and most of them agree I should simply move on and write a new science fiction epic.

So, I've decided to do both. Eventually, I'll reissue Radix and readers can decide if my editorial touch-up proves worthy. And I intend to begin work on Otherlight - a transdimensional novel whose salient features I obsess about during my five day excursion in the mountains.

I look forward to hiking through heroic landscapes without having to lug a heavy rock as I did on previous treks. We are going to inspect the isolated shrine whose rubble stone walls we restored on the highest ridge at the last full moon. My enthusiasm wanes, however, when I meet the others where the trail begins in the state park above Makapu'u: I'm unpleasantly surprised to find that this young, surly Marine is joining us, because he behaves like he doesn't want to be there. What mischief are these old guys up to?

Clearly, the reluctant Marine embodies the split of self from environment, the divorce of soul and flesh … which is the famous dynamic of the dream, when the dreamer becomes the double who leaves the body and wanders far beyond the known world. Who is this double accompanying us on our hermetic journey deep into Mother Nature?

Straight out, the stonemovers announce that they intend to disrupt the maimed Marine's chronic depression by immersion in the original and powerful sensory world of the mountains. But then, after hiking a short while, the three older men cheerfully ask me to hang back, then hurry on ahead when the young man rolls a thick joint of resinous marijuana, which he has a medical permit to smoke for his chronic pain. The islanders disapprove of smoking anything and prefer chewing 'awa root as an analgesic and drinking the root's infusion for prolonged euphoria. Hiking these treacherous trails requires all one's wits, and I'm unhappy finding myself alone on a vertiginous slope among baffling ferns with a stoned and desolate warrior.

My forebears call this world 'mundus.' The realm of the dead, the deepest pit, in their tongue is 'mundus puteus.' What hides the deepest pit is a female veil that also classically adorns the vulva - sort of a cosmic g-string - known as the 'mundus muliebris' - implying that death and life are but thinly separated. The uterine Presence is itself the world of the living, upon which the knight goes pricking o'er the plain. We move on our journeys through the Mother with a thin membrane separating us from the afterlife.

The secret of the mountains is that they are secret. Every year dozens of people disappear in the uplands of these islands, because they don't know this secret. The mountains seem simply to exist, which they do not. What appears to be rock is often so much air, just a suspension of grit and pumice sand not strong enough to hold the weight of a man. The contours of hills and mountain slopes seen from afar are actually awnings of vegetation beneath which yaw ravines so immense you could wander in them for days and never glimpse the sky.

I try explaining this to the lance corporal after he finishes his spliff and bravely marches up the profusely overgrown trail on his prosthetic leg vaguely in the direction where the stonemovers ascended. But he won't listen to me. He has been on pig hunts since early adolescence and believes he knows the secret of the mountains. Within minutes, we are utterly disoriented. He sits down against a stupendous boulder, big as a house and scrawled with great swatches of lichen like a giant's stylized graffiti, and rolls another joint.

Life is but a dream. A moment's reflection on the many generations that preceded us provides irrefutable proof. The spermatic wanderer and uterine space are, in fact, emanations from the one body of the dreamer. The fission of time and space, wanderer and journey, is the sleep of Adam, the mythic dream we call reality.

In these tremendous fern mazes beneath trees of cathedral heights, I'm lost. So is the Marine, but he has a cell phone, and though it receives no signal down in this congested grotto, he's confident we can call for help once we climb higher. All around us, soul animals flit through the cool shade and ignite into fiery carats of green sunlight. I point them out; yet, even high, the lance corporal regards me as though I'm the one in an altered state.

His look implies he has no idea of the true weirdness of the universe we occupy. I begin relating to him the biggest enigma faced today by scientists, whose ambition is to reconcile the laws of physics with what actually happens. I point out that physics makes no distinction for a process moving forward or backward in time. Any process can be reversed - in theory. In actuality, numerous common operations are irreversible, such as a mug of coffee cooling to room temperature yet never spontaneously warming up. Why? Why does time move exclusively in one direction when physics says it can go either way?

The Marine shrugs. Clambering up the side of the colossal boulder and scouting from the top, he spies a cliff, which he believes we can climb to higher ground. I warn him that those trails are good for goats not people. He dismisses me and lumbers off into the fern maze. I would prefer to stay put and wait for the stonemovers to find us. But I can't let a friend's relative wander alone aimlessly, even though I have no idea where we are, and so the double leads me deeper into Adam's dream, a trance walk darkening toward nightmare.

Strenuously and repeatedly, I silently wish I had stayed home. This, of course, is the timeless desire to remain unborn and in the womb, the original (but not final) destination of the itinerant hero. Night descends before we find our way out of the grotto, and we crawl into our sleeping bags, pull up our mosquito cowls, and submit to the uterine regression of sleep and dreams.

On the way to dreamland, I work out some of the ideas for Otherlight. The science inspiring the fiction is genetic amplification. Not long ago, I read about a genome wonder that entailed the inoculation of human DNA snippets (that code for color vision) directly into the eyeballs of color blind mice and monkeys and that immediately endowed these animals with color vision! The researchers were amazed at how quickly the recipient nervous systems went from b&w to color -- and that got me fantasizing about genetic transformations that could instantly add different senses, new ones, with a science fictional bent, like seeing other dimensions, parallel worlds ... and then not just seeing but interacting with and adventuring in alien universes. DNA in 10-space!

The Marine cries out loudly from the pit of nightmare and jolts me awake time and again, until I finally plunge into exhausted slumber. I wake in predawn dark to the sweet redolence of marijuana. It's Memorial Day, and the lance corporal volunteers that today is the reason why he agreed to accompany his great-granduncle into the wilderness. This day of remembrance for his fallen comrades wracks him with survivor guilt. He doesn't want to see the parades or hear the speeches and martial music.

The absence of the warrior dead closes on us as he describes his brothers-in-arms who returned in body bags. Soul animals gather to listen. His is a timeless and ageless story, unchanged since before Homer, effulgent with human warmth and the terrors of war. When he comes to how he lost his leg, he holds up his prosthesis, a trophy for the forces that created it and killed his friends. Within that mechanical shape - emblem and image of foot and journey, of wounded and fractured humanity - lies the argument that the death of one soldier is the prophecy for the survival of the other. Yet, telling alone cannot complete this meaning. Memory cannot make the fallen real. Remembering cannot make the storyteller real. I see that in his stricken eyes. The chief event, the horror and valor of war, reduced to blunt syllables and poignant phrases remains a caricature. Words collect shadows. Words are their own nothingness. Memory is dissolution. He has come face to face with these things.

Serendipitously, as he crosses the narrative distance between the powers that sheared his leg and took away his comrades, just as he arrives again in the thickening present, the sun rises through a rock cleft. Red light suffuses the massive tree behind me, lighting it up with stunning radiance. The expression on his face turns my attention to it, and I see what looks like a vast brain in silhouette: enormously complex nerve sprays of black shadow and blazing ventricles of fire.

Powered by this visionary dawn, we break camp and shove boldly through the ferns. Birds click and fret at our trespass, and a ghostly swarm descends from the high galleries - dozens of blue butterflies (Udara blackburnii) flit around us for most of our trek through the bracken. When we eventually exit the dense maze, the black cliff of goat trails walls us in. A destiny of seconds slips by like music as the lance corporal assesses the likelihood his prosthetic leg can support such a steep ascent. Soon as I see he's going for it, I take the lead.

Life begins when we fall from the womb - and halfway up the precipice, testing every step with a stomp, life nearly ends with a fall. The cosmic g-string of the trail gives way with a thunderous cavalcade of boulders and shrieking kiawe bramble. Seized by my backpack, I sidle into the Marine's arms and for a hysterical instant fear the whole ledge is going down. We anxiously back away from the trebling echoes and gush of small rocks clattering off the sunny ledges into the occult depths below.

A long, nerve-wracking retreat follows as we edge our way carefully down the escarpment to where we started, and then I'm ready for a spliff. The Marine exhausted his supply earlier in the day, and I settle for a granola bar. Writing all this down days later, the words come easily, but the rest of that day silence accompanies us while we mosey under the cliff searching for a way up. We pass the unworld where the boulders we dislodged have crashed, erecting a shrine to things without a future. The avalanche smashed several large kukui nut and kopiko trees, and spectral shafts of sunlight stand in their place, investing the tenebrous gorge with a reverent aura.

After that near fatal incident, the very idea of creative writing feels like the middle of nowhere. Why did I ever want to live in my imagination when the world of rocks, sunlight, trees and gravity is where we exist and die? Like computers, stories work by algorithms, precise step-by-step rules of grammar and syntax. Yet, there is more to a story than can be determined algorithmically. A story is true because of its meaning, not because of its syntactical relation to an axiomatic system.

These thoughts gradually loosen my morbid anxiety, and before long I'm contemplating "Glowbones," the opening chapter of Otherlight, which recounts the transdimensional escapades of a character accidentally injected with the hyperspace gene. Experiencing the phantasmagoria of Planck-length sylphs and devils, holographic empires of inverse time, and our world's secret cosmic rulers, dominator sentiences of sublime geometries, influencing reality from their cyclopean cities in a grain of sand makes Earth seem like a rundown circus in a remote prairie town. But, unlike me, our hero is not lost, not ever. The topological truism that knots exist only in our world of three dimensions and are impossible in any of the extradimensional realms -- that fact binds our adventurer to Earth: the only place where there are ties that bind, emotional as well as physical.

The day flows away from us before we find an egress from the mesic forest. In a small clearing, we lie in our bedrolls and watch the nearly full moon rub along the mountain peaks, then float upward…

Out of the chirring dark, the Marine begins to speak. He relates what he saw at our memorial shrine of landslide rocks, where our broken bodies sprawl in a parallel universe not far from this one. The fallen trees, he realizes, admitted the light. He begins to see how his fallen comrades open the dark of his solitude to illumination. His own life shines more clearly now, because his friends died. Listening to him, I begin to gong again with fright at how close we came to joining the dead and don't much appreciate his insight. Later, when I write this for you, with the cosmic g-string firmly back in place, I understand better how the darkness of his life, after going down to hell and returning alive, found some kind of illumination after our foolish misadventure on the cliff. But at that moment as I drift to sleep, I'm thinking, "Yeah, yeah, yeah…"

The Marine shakes me awake, awe shining in his opalescent face. The nearly full moon is directly overhead. It's midnight. He points above to a half dozen orange lights floating far above us, hovering in the icy river of stars. UFOs? Spirits? I recognize these bobbing luminosities. They are 'oahi flames - small bundles of duff and light wood set on fire and tossed from on high into the brisk trades, which keep the dazzling brands aloft for minutes at a time. The stonemovers are conducting a ceremony at the shrine on the ridge summit. But I don't tell this to the lance corporal. These are dream doubles skimming the surface of our fierce and stupid world.

Early the next morning, climbing steeply through the corduroy shadows of a mango grove into crashing sunlight on a treeless, rock-strewn slope, we stand amazed. Rain flashes out of a clear sky. The torrent soaks us instantly with its incandescent energies and then lifts away. The next moment, the three stonemovers saunter into view from a thicket of haggard conifers cresting the versant. They wave nonchalantly, and within the hour we work our way up to them.

They aren't the least bit curious where we've been, and the Marine offers nothing. The old men are excited about a pig they trapped late yesterday and which they are cooking in a fire pit near the shrine. On the hike up to the summit, they regale us with three different versions of how they captured the wily swine.

The stunner for me when we mount the sacred ridge is finding my laptop perched atop the shrine's north wall. The stonemovers took it from me months ago to 'fix.' Now it's working fine, and they are returning it so I can get on with 'making code,' their tag for writing, which they consider a thorough waste of time, because creating fiction requires living for the sake of dreaming and with a fierce love of words, which are the loneliest thoughts in the human heart.

The lance corporal, grinning with epic joy at the top of the world, uses his cell phone to take photographs of the islanders and me and the panorama of faceted jade mountains, cloud plateaus, and mosaic cities far below. His great-granduncle asks to photograph his friends with the Marine and - whoops! - butterfingers drops the cell phone with its captured soul prints over the brink. The serene fisherman accomplishes this so expertly, his great-grandnephew doesn't suspect for an instant that his loss is anything but a clumsy accident.

For two days, we celebrate the culmination of our journey. By day, we admire the stone-age architecture of the shrine's foundation as well as the stonework of nearby house sites and burial structures. The old men tell stories of Mokumanamana, a small basalt atoll (also known as Necker Island) in the middle of the Hawaiian Archipelago, at the exact point of the Tropic of Cancer, the northernmost ascent of the sun's annual migration to summer. The sun can go no farther, and so here is the islands' major 'soul leap,' where the spirits of the dead transit from this world to the Beyond. Many chants are sung for the slain warriors who served with the lance corporal. In between, we tend the fire pit, forage for food, and play skill games with bow and arrows and a sling. At night, the Marine learns how to create his own 'oahi fire brands and set them adrift on the trade winds.

Days later, I'm writing this with my own computer, a kind of 'yab-yum' - the Tibetan 'sitting coitus' - between author and machine, the creative end of this spermatic escapade, where time and space conjoin in story. A new turn of mind changes the direction of my journey. Outside my window, a rainbow bends its seven vertebrae over the mountains where I got lost. Ah, Glowbones has arrived for lunch, and she's dressed in Otherlight!