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RADIX A.A. Attanasio Phoenix Pick An Imprint of Arc Manor ********************************** Want Free Ebooks? Sign up for our Monthly Free Ebook Coupon http://www.PPickings.com ********************************** Radix Copyright © 1981, 2010 A. A. Attanasio. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Cover Artwork Copyright © by John Bergin. Used with permission. Interior Artwork Copyright © by James O’Barr. Used with permission. Tarikian, TARK Classic Fiction, Arc Manor, Arc Manor Classic Reprints, Phoenix Pick and logos associated with those imprints are trademarks or registered trademarks of Arc Manor Publishers, Rockville, Maryland. All other trademarks and trademarked names are properties of their respective owners. This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation. Second Edition.2010. Revised and Corrected 2011. ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-60450-492-7 ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-459-0 www.PhoenixPick.com Great Science Fiction Author’s Website: www.AAAttanasio.com Published by Phoenix Pick an imprint of Arc Manor P. O. Box 10339 Rockville, MD 20849-0339 www.ArcManor.com ********************************** For LIGHTWORKERS across time and space *** ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The inwardness of this effort has indebted me to many people. I am particularly grateful to my family for their compassionate support; the poet Jon Lang for sharing his visions and for allowing me to transmogrify his poem “The Other” into the Voor Litany (page 259); the editor Maria Guarnaschelli for ennobling this book with her clarity and caring; the composer Victor Bongiovanni for permission to use a voice from his musical composition “Berceuse from Suite for Piano Four-Hand”[“Berceuse from Suite for Piano Four-Hand” copyright © 1979 by Victor Bongiovanni.] as Sumner’s undersong (page 377); Artie Conliffe for the map of the hemisphere; and the copy editor Betsy Cenedella for closing the circle. Robert Silverberg published an early and greatly re-visioned excerpt of “The Blood’s Horizon” in his New Dimensions 7 (Harper & Row, 1977). For the second edition, I salute John Bergin for the cover art he shaped from light, James O’Barr whose sublime skill in the black art of ink graces the interior —and Leo Scarpelli, who befriended this novel in the human wilderness. *** Foreword to the Second Edition Originally titled Emblems and Rites, my first novel, Radix, began with an insight from one sentence in a third century biography of Greek thinkers, Lives of Ancient Philosophers: “Diogenes the Cynic lit a lamp in broad daylight and said as he went about, ‘I am looking for a man,’” He says nothing about “the man” being honest. In Radix, I am looking for a man. To represent our polluted age, this man must be ugly. He must be weak from the ineptitude of his body, as our manufactured world is weak from ecological stupidity. He is a hungry man, as avaricious as our mercantile society. This man must be a monster in a world of monsters. The rites in Emblems and Rites intend to provoke outrage, not admiration or pleasure, or there is no possibility of transformation. The nightmare of reason we call civilization is our exile from the truth of our humanity, which emerged out of the blind regime of matter into consciousness. True reason, the human spirit, offers the strength to contend against this blind regime of accidents, diseases, and malign obsessions. Through mindfulness, we possess the power of transformation. Likewise, the man I seek, vexed by his own derangement and alienation, carries his humanity hidden inside himself, within a resurrection core. But to claim this deep power requires an art of self-forgetting, an audacious transformation that empties the ego and recalls the unity of existence. Looking for the man who can represent us, I knew the emblems too must be grotesque or there is no hope for beauty in the transformation. I resolved to forsake reason, remembering what Goya wrote in his own hand on the forty- third Capricho: “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” The nightmare of reason—the environmental iniquities and calamitous impersonality of civilization—abstracts us from the sensate experience of the universe and secludes us among symbols. These are the flagrant emblems of our concealment from ourselves. The philosopher Kenneth Burke identifies homo sapiens as a “symbol-using animal.” In symbols, we sort out our perplexed reflections about this Mystery, the haunted now that is ghosting through us. These soft powers called symbols have taken us far behind the world and stranded us in the darkest precincts of nowhere. As Burke puts it in Language as Symbolic Action, our reality has “been built up for us through nothing but our symbol system.” Within this artificial construct, we have eaten of dreamflesh and hallucinated an irreality where other powers and intelligences take den within us. The human heart is their killing yard. They are the “-isms” that dominate us with unspeakable ferocity. In their grip, we are not what we are. But there is an art that, in its deep disposition to darkness, bleeds oppression from their wrath. It is an art of self-forgetting… The name of the darkling man in this novel of self-forgetting has to be as emblematic as his monstrous actions, a name beckoning thought to our thoughtless time, and I chose Kagan—Son of Aodhagáin, the stupendous Thinker in the Black Book of Caermathon, the medieval Welsh classic that introduces the most important hero of our tragic modernity, King Arthur. For a first name, I went with Sumner: “one who summons”…One Who Summons the Thinker. I wanted this novel to summon me as well as the reader to think on what our alienated age disregards, what the ancient Vedantic masters knew and contemplated: the whole universe is inside us. Emblems and Rites became Radix as I explored that remarkable point of view, the way storytellers of old did, dramatizing the natural world in human form— only instead of sun gods and moon maidens intriguing with mortals, I wrote about aliens from other worlds confronting human beings. The story is the same: it’s the hero’s clash with the gods. In our psychological age, that clash is the individual’s struggle to create an identity, and thus a destiny, out of the infinite flux we call reality. Is the infinite expanse of the universe really inside each of us? And, if so, what do we do with—infinity? st 21 century physics agrees that the universe appears infinite: black holes collapse to singularities, which are infinitely dense; and light—the fabric of our biological reality—has no rest mass and so is timeless. Our very bodies are composed of powers of mass so imponderably small that even photons cannot illuminate them, where they emerge from cosmic strings vibrating in a domain of higher dimensions beyond measure. Yet, few of us actually believe that we are infinite. Such a bold conception seems delusional, because we refuse to accept the basic Vedantic assumption that waking and dreaming are the same. What then is waking? What is the mind? And who is scripting our dreaming? Mind emerges from the brain. The brain is a very specific configuration of atoms. Atoms plus geometry = psyche. We are projected by stellar evolution and Darwinian forces into a geometry of atoms aware of geometry and atoms. Waking and dreaming both emerge from neurological structures whose fundamental constituents touch infinity. Science fiction provides an ideal vehicle for this descent into the dark abyss where the geometry of mind and organic molecules copulate. The frenzied passion of this union is everything we call soul. Radix is about waking up to this unifying perception, joining mindful spirit with soulful body and becoming aware that we wandered out of Great Silence to house ourselves in language. We look back from our narrative present, and we gauge the distances to the galaxies and beyond with stories that redshift toward mystery. Outside discursive thinking is the unspeakable—the arbitrary, the unpredictable and undetermined reality against which language shelters us. Out there, in the infinite, truth disappears, all the better to reveal beauty. The man in the transformative rite adorned with emblems of beauty is the solar votive hero of myths worldwide. He embodies the light of consciousness, and he reincarnates in this novel as the obese, slovenly form of Sumner Kagan. Kagan the Thinker lives in a world exposed to the strange light from an open black hole at the center of our galaxy. This naked singularity has transformed Earth into the landscape of the soul, where everything contaminates everything else: animal and human forms bleed together into distorts, starlight rearranges the human genetic code and reconstructs an alien sentience called voors, and ideas from bizarre alternate universes fuse with flesh and become godminds. On this haunted Earth, everyone Sumner confronts is actually himself. And the world changes around him exactly as he does. Writing Radix confronted me with the literary challenge of fitting the motive of the novel, which is Diogenes’ quest for a man, into a story that most readers would accept as a narrative and not a manual about self-transformation. Contemporary physics provided the metacognitive framework for the novel’s summons to think about being human in our surreal technological epoch. Cosmology theorizes that the universe is actually a flexiverse, with many histories existing simultaneously. The past is not immutable in the flexiverse. Because the cosmos began with a Big Bang at a point smaller than an atom, reality originated as a quantum event. As with any quantum phenomenon, the beginning of time occurs as a probability state in which all possible outcomes exist. How we choose to observe the present determines which history of all possible histories connects our Now with the quantum event at the moment of creation. st To be alive in the 21 century means to be summoned to think about this: each observer, each one of us, decides our past all the way back to the Big Bang. And not only that but also this: our future, what will happen, has already happened… and is choosing us. So what are we in All This? We exist in one particular timeline, with the future deciding our present, as our choices decide our past. The sun doesn’t rise. As the Earth turns, our fortunes roll over from the future into the past. Radix dramatizes this contemporary creation myth. The bizarre reality for Sumner Kagan is the same as it is for us. We are born as we are being borne. In Kagan’s drama, we see that we are broken where darkness has found us, and our calamitous confusion has set us against ourselves. We already know, for we have always suspected, and now science sanctions our mystic surmise: all that is was once light, every atom of every stone, the fiercest light, at the primordial instant of creation. The radiant memory of our origin is there in each of us, behind the awesome forgetting of being human. Between mind and experience, between presence and the long-dreamt, in that middle realm among all the timelines available to us from the uncanny dark sources of wonder and self-expression that assure our humanity, I wrote Radix to find myself—and all these years later I find myself here with you, the reader, setting out to discover a new fate—for ourselves and the world. A. A. Attanasio Kohelepelepe, Hawai’i 2010 *** Things can be— and their Being is grounded in Nothing’s ability to noth. —Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action ***
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