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.
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