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.
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