I've been living for quite a number of years in the Pacific,
in Hawaii.
And I have great--
I've had great hesitation always to arrogate
to myself Hawaiian material.
I think that this is a very long and complex subject
and one could talk about it a lot.
But finally, I think you have to go
by what you feel around your navel somewhere about it.
But there was one figure in the Hawaiian religion,
in the Hawaiian pantheon, to whom
I was drawn and feel drawn in ways that I don't understand.
And finally, it seemed to me that I could write it.
So I was-- felt pulled into writing about this person.
The person is the God Kanaloa.
Kanaloa is the late form of probably the oldest--
certainly, the oldest deity in the whole of the Pacific.
He begins as a creation God somewhere back in--
we know back when the Polynesian people had barely
left the Asian mainland.
And in the earliest known mythology, the name is Ta.
And Ta is the first God with form.
I mean this is an immensely sophisticated, extremely
ancient civilization.
As old as any civilization we know.
And they're sophisticated enough to have many, many gods that--
I mean, the first God that we can talk about
is just the first God who has form.
But there are gods before that.
And before the gods, the universe is creating itself.
This is the only creation myth in which I know this happens.
Out of the turning of the universe, warmth happens.
And out of the warmth, the beginning comes.
It's getting pretty close to a Big Bang, you know.
But anyway, Ta--
I won't go through the whole story.
But by the time the Hawaiian migrations early
in the Christian era, Ta, who could
be called Ta'aroa in some of the other Polynesian languages,
becomes Kanaloa.
And from being the God of creation,
he's already moved through a whole cycle of evolution
and become the God of the West, the God the sea,
the God of death.
And his manifestations-- because you don't
have symbols in this religion.
There are real manifestations.
The manifestations are the porpoise,
the octopus, the squid.
In certain forms, the coconut tree.
And places.
The places of the dead.
And above all in Hawaii, one island
that lies off the South Coast of Maui looks like a porpoise
and was the sacred island of the Hawaiians,
where all of their universities were.
Where they taught sorcery, astronomy, astrology, medicine,
the care of women and childbirth,
language, poetry, everything there.
All of their magics were there.
It was not a very high island.
But this was the island that when
they sailed from Tahiti as they did regularly, they aim for it.
They didn't aim for the great peaks,
they aim for this island.
Since 1939, the Navy has been using it as a bombing target.
It is possibly the richest archeological site,
or one of the three or four richest archeological sites
in the whole Pacific.
Make of that what you will, but the poem is called "Kanaloa."
"When he woke, his mind was the West
and he could not remember waking.
Wherever he looked, the sun was coming toward him,
the moon was coming toward him.
Month after month, the wind was coming toward him.
Behind the day, the night was coming toward him.
All the stars, all the comets, all the depths of the sea,
all the darkness in the Earth, all the silence, all the cold,
all the heights were coming toward him.
No one had been on the Earth before him.
All the stories were coming toward him over the mountain,
over the red water, the black water, the moonlight.
He had imagined the first mistake.
All the humans are coming toward him with numbers.
They are coming from the beginning to look for him.
Each of them finds him and he is different.
They do not believe him at first.
But he houses the ghosts of the trees,
the ghosts of the animals, of the whales, and the insects.
He rises in dust.
He is burning.
He is smoke.
Behind him is nothing.
He is the one who is already gone.
He is fire flowing downward over the edge.
He is the last.
He is the coming home.
He might never have wakened."