Dig this 4 minute video that a UK guy made to illustrate one of my public talks about hylozoism.

You may or may not know that (a) I published a novel called Hylozoic, and (b) that hylozoism is an actual honest-to-goodness official Wikipedia-listed word meaning the philosophical view that everything is alive and conscious.

The guy who made the new “Hylozoism” cartoon video is named Andy Simon, and he’s a recent graduate of Bath Spa University in Bath, England. The audio for the video is drawn from five videos of me that Andy unearthed. He hails from Weymouth, and is presently applying to film schools.

Quite awesomely, Andy uses old toons that feature living objects—and cartoons like this were a huge influence on me as a kid. Synchronistically enough, the video ends with me talking about “the big aha”! A nice poke in the ribs from the divine muse, that. Given that I’m spending all my time these days working to finish my next novel, The Big Aha.

My family and I were on the North Shore of Oahu early this month, fourteen strong, with the kids, the spouses and the grandkids. I have a bunch of photos from there, and I’ll run a few of them today and, here and there, point out some hylozoism connections.

Banyan trees are fairly common on Oahu, I love these things, how they spread out and send now new trunks. They’re the very image of a futuristic biotech house that grows itself. We spent a couple of days in Honolulu, near a park just after Waikiki Beach, and quite a few homeless people were living in this park—specifically, many of them were making the banyan trees their home. Despite Hawaii’s image as a vacation paradise, they have a very large homeless population. One guy told me that Hawaii doesn’t really have a middle class. A few rich people and a lot of poor people.

Anyway the Honoluluans use the park for all kinds of things. I saw a yoga class there as well.

Up on the North Shore, it’s all about surfing. You see surfers doing yard work or working as gardeners just so they can live there, waiting for the Banzai Pipeline type surf in the winter. Saw this cool surf shop in Hale’iwa.

We were staying in fairly old and beat-up bunch of cottages, very calm and mellow with nothing but a couple of super high palm trees between us and the beach.

Add in a sunset, and oh, baby.

One day we went to the Waimea Falls park, right by Waimea Beach, famed for it’s forty foot waves.

The park had all these great plants. The plants that sit around in bank lobby or top of your fridge or on your bathroom counter—those plants are dreaming of going to the tropics and getting big.

This one tree was all covered with thorns, scientific name Bombacopsis Quinata. Common name Don’t Climb Me.

I like how this heliconia looks like a tropical bird or fish. Everything alive in teh same kind of way. I was kind of lost in the park for half an hour, dazed by the heat and humidity, intoxicated by the scents of flowers, wandering around very very very slowly. Like a butterfly. Everything alive, even the rocks. Paradise.

The actual Waiamea falls were great. We were about the first people of the day to get up there. Some mellow Hawaiian rangers/surfers were there to give us all life-jackets. We swam across a deep rocky pool to this hundred foot waterfall pounding into the pool. With some effort you could get under the fall, find handholds in the rock, and pull yourself up so that your head went through the waterfall and maybe a little further to the legendary breathing space behind the fall. Where gnomes always hid their gold.

I hung in there for a very long and wonderful minute, letting the water pound onto my skull and my shoulders, and it felt like time rushing past, like a cascade of thoughts and memories, like fire, like the big aha and the White Light.

When I get out, I feel really high and wonderful. I babbled a little about it to one of the cool young guys handing out life jackets, telling him that I’d seen everything in the falls, and he looked at me closely and nodded. “You saw the fire?” he said, then added, “I’ve seen it too. They used to build ritual fires on a platform in there.” He gave me a friendly, brotherly nudge and sent me on my way.

A little later I saw the same guy, walking along talking and laughing with a black Hawaiian woman who was the exact image of a guide named Rayna who’d been with my group on what was one of the very best days of my life, kayaking in the rock islands of Palau near Micronesia, see my old post on this.

“Jake and Rayna start dancing and chanting, crouched, facing each other, their hands shaking in their air, slapping their thighs, vital and joyous as a pair of indestructible cartoon characters. Archetypes.”

So, elated as I was from Waimea falls, and seeing this Rayna look-alike talking with the guy who’d seen the fire in the falls like me, man, it was like seeing a pair of gods some down to Earth, or making themselves visible to me, just for a few minutes, the divine reality a part of my day.

Hylozoic, man. The boulder and the tree.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 30th, 2013 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.