#35
Secret Center

Language came to bury us.

That’s the opinion of the stonemovers, a group of Hawaiian men committed to rebuilding rock foundations of ancient shrines. I first met them forty years ago this month. (More on that experience appears in memorandum #14, “School of Grok.”)

At the time, I had no ambition to pursue a literary career … or any career. Apocalypse seemed imminent, and my entire being had focused on learning ultimate things. In December 1967, I came to O’ahu to meet worshippers of Kapo, goddess of sorcery, and to explore Her geophysical expression, the Valley of the Flying Vagina.

At that time, the Hawaiian revival had yet to begin, and I couldn’t find cultural authorities who knew anything significant about the islands’ deities --- except this group of stonebuilders. They spun tall tales and gleefully sent me home, my head filled with all kinds of nonsense.

When I returned years later conversant in their ancestral language and customs, they begrudgingly allowed me to tag along with the understanding that I help haul rocks, cook meals and sing. Though they frown upon and openly mock my writing, I persist, because this is my spiritual practice, a magical endeavor with origins in our civilization’s matrix (cf. #4 “Creative Writing”).

These forays along the ridgelines of the islands’ interiors consist mostly of hiking by morning and sitting around a camp site all afternoon and into the evening communing in song, chant, dance and a lot of ‘awa with a cryptid landscape, a fusion of spirit and matter. While the stonemovers and the numen powers of spirits and gods convene, I usually write. In fact, during these excursions, I’ve composed several short stories and two novels entire: Arc of the Dream and The Wolf and the Crown as well as “Monkey Puzzle,” “Wax Me Mind,” “The Dark One: A Mythograph” and “Zero’s Twin.”

I’m writing this entry in a hanging valley above Kaneohe. Two months ago, one of the stonemovers passed away – made the ‘soul-leap’ as they say. And today, December 7, 2007, several of his compeers have come here to see how he’s doing. I’ve been enlisted to cook meals and to provide several sacred stones given me by my friend Leo, this site’s webmaster. While the stonemovers pay minute attention to the arrangement of the sacred stones among Laua'e ferns, displaying great pleasure in the awareness of small things, I’m writing you.

Joy reaches us unknown. That’s the truth that sinks in as I reflect on the many years I’ve given to creative writing in an effort to approach more intimately the mystery of human experience. Not unlike moving lava rocks into well-mated arrangements, words fit together well in very precise ways. They are the edifice that Gilgamesh constructed in Uruk several millennia ago. That physical wall of one of the first city-states is now a pile of rubble – yet, the king’s story endures.

Language came to bury us. Contracts, treaties, deeds, tax rosters, warrants cannot equal the holiness inside one firefly. Though they often say that, the stonemovers’ disdain for language runs deeper than writing’s political origin. By collectivizing experience, language diminishes our secret uniqueness.

Our secret uniqueness is not something that can be spoken. Between psyche and experience, in that most high-hearted storytime of self-narrative, Eros connecting the parts, looking through the stars as constellations, mediating ideal and real, hooking us up with the power to hook up -- and so, empowering us to occupy that consecrated space between the infinite and present, that 'mind-the-gap' zone of metaphoric experience all of us who love creative writing can't get enough of!

I bring all this up now, at the end of the old moon, on a sinuous ridge, where the ancient followers of the hawk spirit long ago carved reflecting pools in the lava rock and where, last night, we watched the Milky Way dive deep into the mirrors of rain, because I'm personally trying to integrate these facts into the huge worldview that a spiritual life promulgates.

Just being human, we each inherit a tortured soul. What can redeem our human condition? Art? It's a cold bed. Relationships? I think of all my dead, and kinship itself seems lighter than air. But then, there is the Hyperspace Observer (the atman of our IndoEuropean legacy), the secret center, Whose transcendent reality is set against our profound self-centeredness -- a connectedness at the center that is also the remote edge of our singularity.

Presences come and go. The wind when it gets here has crossed thousands of miles of ocean. A few weeks ago, smoke from the California wild fires hazed all the islands! Today, I take this page on which I’ve written these rambling thoughts, hold it up, and let the currents of air carry it away. With it goes wayfaring my dream of reaching you.

[The next day, on the return hike, I find this page plastered by rain to the gnarled, spiral trunk of a hau tree, and I accept that as a daysign to post this digressive memorandum.]