Table Of ContentRADIX
A.A. Attanasio
Phoenix Pick
An Imprint of Arc Manor
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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
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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 ***
