RADI OS by Ronald Johnson: Summary and Review
RADI OS is a retelling of John Milton’s Paradise Lost through erasure by Ronald Johnson. Milton’s classic epic is (in)famous for offering Satan’s point of view for biblical events, though it’s not now considered as scandalous as it appeared to readers at the time of its original publication. The metaphor of Paradise Lost is a warning to those who, like Satan, “choose” life without God. Johnson removes all mention of both God and Satan in RADI OS, centering the sun as the protagonist of the work, citing it as the one source of the universe and life as we know it.
Though Johnson strips Paradise Lost down to its barest bones, he manages to preserve and even create new poetic devices like assonance, consonance and (literal) universal imagery. The main imagery distinction between Milton’s epic and Johnson’s is the sun as the focal point, not God. More than that: The sun is a symbol of knowledge, not the fabled knowledge of “good and evil,” but the self-awareness that separates humankind from other animals. Indeed, Johnson uses orbs, stars, the sun and the human eye to represent the same knowledge: “The weight of all transcendent silence out of the huge convex of fire, Ninefold unknown in the shape as of above the rose through rising rose the radiant sun” (32-33, emphasis added). He shows the parallel between sentient humans and the universe that (slowly, unintentionally) created them.
I’ll be honest, I had some difficulty with this book, which surprised me: Rewritings of religious texts, especially Christian-themed works, are exciting to me. This erasure stripped the original text so much that it left the new work feeling more like a dreamscape meditation than the direct statement the Afterward claims it’s making. With the Afterward’s interpretations and commentary, though, the work (words scattered on the pages that seem to have no beginning or end) finally reveals its meaning. Re-reading RADI OS with this interpretation in mind enabled me to solve Johnson’s riddles and see the images he hoped to present. As I explore this medium myself, RADI OS shows me the dangers of using poetry—a medium with few words to begin with—as the original text for erasure.