Jonestown (18 page)

I kept my eyes glued on the Phallic tree on which the apparition of the Reverend Jonah Jones ascended.

Was the Animal Goddess jesting (as Mr Mageye would have done) in revealing to me such Carnival Cinema of the playful, monstrous workings of the psyche?

In every Oracle a play of monsters brings us close to
self-confessional
, self-judgemental magic by which to come abreast of the terrifying responsibilities of freedom, freedom to liberate others in ourselves, freedom to crucify others in our hidden selves.

‘Look!’ said the Virgin, ‘the slice mends, it appears to mend or heal, it is a cross-sectional slice, it runs right through Jonah’s puritan member or log (and its surrogacies in exploited woods and rivers and forests). It mends itself – let us say, Francisco – but not absolutely, for do you not see vestiges of feather and bone protruding from it, phallic wound, climactic moment?’

I was startled or I would have laughed at such a seminal Jest planted in the elements.

I looked up and studied afresh (I had lowered my eyes for a
moment when she spoke) the cross-sectional breakage, yet mended trunk, in the Phallic tree.

The vestige of wing or bone or feather within the mend, protruding narrowly at the edge of the mend, from within the mend, rushed into my mind like a sudden nest of psyche: I was privileged to see through the Animal Goddess’s eyes into a sudden nest of psyche, a labyrinth of branches and cells to which – in its inscription of sacrificial sculpture – Jonah was numb. And as a consequence he was unresponsive to the intervention of grace, the intervention of the subtlety of freedom that
sacramentalized
the embrace of others in their own right (without forfeiting their ancestral heritage) in a nest within the mended Phallus …

He was numb to everything except an everlasting divide between the damned and the saved in charismatic, brutalizing sex …

A host of questions arose within me. I recalled the torso of the Virgin in the Clearing on the Day of the Dead. On this Spring day that torso or sculpture became a towering Ship reaching up to the nest of psyche in the Phallic tree: intervention or reach of savage grace: sudden Storm: orchestrated elements to break the
unresponsive
heart.

Perhaps the Oracle was angry at my questions spoken or unspoken. The climate of civilization began to change. Extinct ages began to come alive.

An ancient Storm (one would have deemed extinct) – such as I had never seen in all my life of wanderings and voyages – arose within the Circus. It arose and stood above Jonestown which lay now – in that ancient, revisited time – nameless under the sea. The Atlantic rolled far inland from the drowned Guyana coasts of South America to the base of the Kaieteuran escarpment.

The flood was as tall or taller than the Phallic tree. It was in itself a series of Phallic waves or mounds of water. I floated in the Ship or torso of the Virgin. I glimpsed the rape of Atlantis, Plato’s Atlantis, far beneath me. Rape of Virgin Atlantis. It encompassed Jonestown, nameless Jonestown, in the belly of the flood.

In that flood lay the lineaments of the drowned, pre-Columbian
New World, since the European Conquest, in every mutilated landscape and catchment and lake.

Freedom and conquest were as old as Atlantis. Tall catastrophe.

How could such an ancient, extinct Storm be the intervention of grace in the Phallic tree of the elements? The Storm blew a leaf at last in the beak of an extinct bird. The leaf was lodged in a crevice of the flood. The flood broke, the chain of waters broke, as if to mirror a sliced, cross-sectional eruption and mend in the trunk of waters, a mound of waters, on which I sailed on the Virgin Ship from which a net descended to which Jonah clung.

Curious net! More akin to a nest that floated through the leaves of water upon which fish swam like birds that flew through the air as if defying gravity yet sustained by interleaved fractures in the body of gravity.

A chain of elements, water, earth, wood, broke. A prison of conformable natures broke. And the fate of Atlantis was laid bare as a counterpoint between rape or devastation and implicit freedom still to balance extinction with a renascence (or
renaissance
) of lost cultures whose vestiges and imprints could be orchestrated into the seed of the future.

I could scarcely gather together the immense orchestration of the Storm that I had evoked in the questions that I addressed, murmured questions as well as unspoken questions, to the Oracle; to the formidable ghost of the Animal Virgin who enslaves us yet pities and protects us and awaits our grasp of the nest of psyche in the broken, mended Phallic tree of universal element. Without that grasp freedom’s messengers perish. Sacrificial sculpture grows meaningless and the Virgin ship itself drowns.

I should have been swept away myself in the Storm except for the Virgin torso or Ship in which I sailed. I should have been pinned into the grinding cross-sectional wound of broken, mended pillars between Sky and Earth through which one sails into the Cave of the Moon upon the Phallic gravity/anti-gravity tree.

Instead I was left to ponder the Oracle’s proposition of sacrificial sculptures that break a prisonhouse of unchanging law and logic into innermost fabrics and scales on which to weigh and
weigh again and again messengers that arrive and nest in the wounds of the Phallic tree.

I had seen in the Storm how those wounds grow larger and larger, steeper and steeper, when our response to message and messenger becomes adamant and insensible and numb.

On the other hand those wounds become the inimitably complex and sensitive sculptures of science and art when our response acquires re-visionary momentum and graces born of Spirit.

Freedom then turns into the servant of Spirit not the despoiler of worlds.

*

I was grateful to the Animal Goddess for a rare vision of equations of Chaos, mathematics of Chaos, that were in themselves profoundest, terrifying interventions of savage grace.

Not that grace was not tender and instinct with incalculable harmonies but humanity’s numbness made it essential that the orchestration of the elements, abused for generations and
centuries
, would acquire configurations of omen, within Storm and Fire and majestic Phalli, to which cultures clung paradoxically in seeking intricate gaps or room to manoeuvre, room for the renewal of Breath, in the grave and the cradle and the nest of space.

The chain was broken within terror itself, the prisonhouse was broken within violence itself, broken, it seemed, within
long-neglected
inscriptions and texts of the birth of memory itself: memory’s eruptive, marvellously fissured, spatial organ sprung from the unconscious into the subconscious into the conscious.

Each break was a form of primordial, sacrificial sculpture that one tended to eclipse, or lose again and again, within a proclivity to numbness, to a loss of depth and range and profoundest passion, to fixtures of bias.

The bird that nested its leaf in the flood came as a messenger of eclipsed freedom erupting again, the nested leaf broke the chain of the Storm to match extinction with the genius of recovered omen or insight into invaluable resources and species linked to us yet susceptible to freedom through us, as we were to freedom through them.

My eye was sharpened, renewed, reborn as I sailed in the
sculpture or torso of the Virgin as in genius’s Ship of Breath.

A rhythm of equations linked the Ship to the Phallic tree to the leaf. Breath I dreamt I possessed – in which a leaf or a feather from long-extinct Atlantean forests and species circulated – but as the Storm subsided I was unable to translate the Oracle of Chaos and its equations. Perhaps the Oracle took pity on me.

*

The Animal Goddess sharpened my ears to catch the whisper of her voice on my Breath in the orchestra of the subsiding Storm.

‘When one slices a chain, Francisco,’ she said, ‘one builds another
intangible
series of relationships. The vestige of bone and feather – you do remember, don’t you – in the jointed Phallic tree is sacrificial seminal sculpture. Extinct wing possesses minute fractions that are memorialized into rocket-ships as this
millennium
draws to a close. Bone-Ship rocket, Feather-Ship rocket, are masks of science whose grain lies in the mended Phallic tree in its intercourse with the Sky. Rocket is
in
the bone’s and the feather’s hidden texts blown to us within counterpoints of creation. Simplicity itself I would say, Francisco, when one opens one’s life to freedom’s responsibilities but an enormous trial it remains alas that is set by me, by the three Maries, by Virgin Space …’

I wanted to press her with further questions. I was obsessed. But I did not wish to arouse her anger at – despite her pity for – my ignorance. The enormity of the trial was dismaying. Should I tear my Dream-book into shreds? Did not freedom signify – despite its intangible linkage with all things and species – terrorizing structures, exploited bodies, manipulated resources?

Was freedom obsolete? Had it ever existed?

Violence existed. And the ancient Gods who were steeped in sacrificial sculptures on the Phallic tree had become, it was said by charismatic philosophers, Prisoners of Devil’s Isles.

Despite my misgivings – and the unspoken weight of my questions to the Oracle – the Virgin replied. Her ears were as sharp as a pointed nail’s in the strangely moon-like eyes of Lazarus, Skeleton-twin Lazarus. Such is the orchestration of imageries in Oracle-Carnival to move and transfigure the numb heart of humanity!

‘You need to meet the Prisoner-God of Devil’s Isle, Francisco. You will quite soon. In due course. Time is sometimes vague in my mind. Better so than to succumb to the hubris of eternity in charismatic institutions. You need to experience through the Prisoner-God
not
the obsolescence of freedom but the premature gift of freedom to Mankind …’

‘But freedom was present before time began,’ I cried.

‘That may be so,’ said the Virgin, ‘but we have come close – have we not? – to forfeiting such priorities in our
misunderstandings
of evolution. Evolution in its innermost unfathomable coherence within parallel universes is intangible. It serves hidden texts that we can never absolutely translate. Hidden priorities. Hidden beginnings prior to all beginnings. And these accumulate into a Jesting net that gathers up everything. The re-visionary truths of love, the re-visionary love of truth. Intangible as Breath.’

The Storm abated.

It seemed to arise within me all over again.

The relic of Storm within. It blew from some region within me that lay in a time before evolution was, in a time prior to evolution’s wasteland. How should a pilgrim such as myself, prone to bouts of amnesia in the wake of Jonestown, spell or paint or sculpt ‘wastelands’ or ‘gravelands’ and not make them excessively newsworthy in a violent age? Perhaps I should confess again to divergences built into numinous alphabets which witness to the unfathomable premises of creation. Is ‘wasteland’ a whisper of a nether world in THE WASTE LAND or in WASTE LAND, graveland in GRAVE LAND? Is ORACLE the heightened shout of brothel-oracle in Hollywood Limbo Land?

Evolution’s spectres are the pilgrims of time in Memory’s flesh, wasteland flesh, yes, surreal time prior to flesh, yes, graveland time prior to resurrections of consciousness, netherworlds, constellations, subjective time, objective time, post-subjectivity rooted in hypnotic objectivity, extremities of Breath, the
breathlines
infused into architectures of space in science and fiction and poetry and art.

Subjectivity is the comedy of intangible objectivity that ignites the stars into the ash of genesis, black holes, fuels the sun with greed for blood in ancient sacrifice.

On such altars of lust and catastrophe unimaginable Love is born for all creatures. And Evolution turns in its grave of space into the mystery of trial and judgement each and all must endure in Memory theatre.

Evolution becomes the resurrection of spectres to confront themselves, to indict themselves in bleak play, bleak but redemptive theatre, Memory’s head on one’s shoulders, limbs sculpted in ancient arts in one’s limbs, dismembered Prisoners, Gods, woven into one’s extinction through which – as if by another unsuspected Genesis of the Imagination – one accepts Dread and the gift of freedom to travel beyond the dice of Light in one’s Skeleton-twins, the flesh of Darkness in one’s
Skeleton-
twins
, to travel beyond all wastelands and gravelands into ultimate transfigured Bone in the wilderness of space …

The Storm abated and I descended the stairway of subsiding waters to the floor of the Circus.

There I jested with my drowned Skeleton-twin who arose from the floor with sleight-of-Breath skill. I jested in a theatre of Breath, relic of Storm.

‘Fiery customer and performer you are,’ I said to him, ‘despite your drowned bones. You have changed. Two deaths! One in an ancient sea, one in the sawyers’ pit or grave in the land. We are ghosts of the sea and ghosts of the land in ancient and modern America. I am changed too. It’s this business of relics. They bring a borderline between the oceanic lightning of the mind and vestiges of unearthly Passion that retain a spark from the blaze. One is equipped to wear another Mask on one’s head and shoulders, a fiery Mask that cools.’

I tried to embrace him but he rejected me all over again. For a moment I dreamt that it was his Mask that I would come to wear in the near future. I touched the holes that had been driven into my neck and shoulders in Limbo Land in preparation for such a Mask. In his changed costume – drowned bones, sleight-of-Breath body – he acquired the air of an ancestor of mine, the air of lightning cooled Storm or Passion. He no longer breathed fire in arising from the sawyers’ pit and the sea.

He may have sensed what I was thinking for he said:

‘Not my Mask shall be placed upon you, Francisco. Yet to be intimate with my descent into hell may prove a necessary initiation into the angel’s Mask that shall possess you …’

‘Angel’s Mask?’

‘Wait and see,’ said my Skeleton-twin.

‘When we rode on the bicycle to Jonah’s house,’ I cried, ‘I wondered if you would grow flames and burn me, reduce me to a handful of ashes. But now I think I know better. We are twins, yes, but you are also an ancestor of the lightning mind secreted in graves of space and in Bone (universal kith and kinship Bone) when it flashes in the Sky. Before evolution’s dawn Bone flashed as a relic of Spirit in a Circus. Circus animals bounce back into
lightning in the Sky. The mystery is Breath! There are different layers of Breath in the architectures of space. Imagine Circus stairways, Circus architectures, in the elements. Without peculiar rhythms of Breath one could not leap onto a frontier upon which every flashing relic of Spirit marks a crossing from pre-evolution to evolution’s wasteland. And beyond evolution’s wasteland to post-wasteland graves steeped in the dance and the resurrection of consciousness. One crosses the wasteland and descends into the grave. So many lightning relics descend into the grave! So many peoples, so many houses, so many dancers …’ I stopped.

‘Weigh Breath in dancing feet in the grave as they strive to leap into the resurrection. There’s a key in the Breath-body when one unlocks a door into the Cave of the Moon. There’s a key in the sawyers’ pit and the dark moonlight fleece on the stars of the nether world,’ said my Skeleton-twin.

‘Let me embrace you,’ I cried. ‘You understand …’

‘I understand nothing,’ said my Skeleton-twin self-mockingly. ‘I stand above and below. So I can teach you a thing or two about the dance.’ He eyed me coldly. A faint flare in the sockets of his eyes deposited a key into the tattooed inscription of Lazarus on my arm.

How could one tattoo the Breath-key of another upon one’s arm unless one invoked the cool lightning dance of wilderness space, night-dance that one’s flesh could bear, upon broken archetypal fabric that one shares with those to whom one is indebted, and who begin to take one into hidden architectures, the hidden lives, in the grave of the Circus?

One needs to weigh every trickster of the cradle and the grave that one embodies yet sees as a separate entity in composite epic.

Was the Skeleton-twin a sacred trickster? He was the shared Breath of a broken archetype, heaven and hell.

We set out into the Forest of the Circus and I recalled the route that I had taken with Mr Mageye and the huntsman Christ.

He kept me at arm’s length under the dark, tattooed
inscriptions
of the Forested Night. Skeleton-twin Lazarus! We walked on a frontier between pre-evolutionary darkness and evolutionary wasteland, a frontier that shone white with the Skeleton’s glowing
body, a frontier on which my dancing feet and the Skeleton’s dancing feet were buried before they blazed afresh into
primordial
consciousness.

I now heard the surfing rasp of the sawyers’ blade in the
ghostland
of the grave, a wave of sound breaking on the coast of the mind, my eyes floated into that wave, I was in the wave, in the dance of the Skeleton, unable to embrace him, but in the wave, in the dance, of the dance …

The conversion of the ghost sawyers into architects of GRAVE LAND or the nether world into which I was descending took me wholly by surprise.

The key was in the lock as I danced and soon the glowing Skeleton and I had arrived.

Breath shone in the Sky. The sun of GRAVE LAND or the nether world was the Breath of fire.

I turned to my Skeleton-twin. ‘Is this the Land of the Dead? The dancing figures before us wear the masks of Maya peasants. I know of such murals in the city of Bonampak and elsewhere. Abandoned cities flooded with murals of the happy dead …’

I had stopped dancing but the field before me was alive with dancers in floating apparel as they encircled a mound. They danced in the field. They danced in open spaces. They danced past houses that were lodged it seemed in a net. Had they been lodged there, drawn up there, from a lake? The rasping surf of the blade struck my ears like waves breaking on the bank of a river, or coast, or shore.

‘It’s also called,’ said my Skeleton-twin, waving at the dancers, ‘the Paradise of the Rain God.’

‘Let’s join them and dance,’ I cried. ‘Let’s embrace them …’

‘A chasm exists between you and them.’

‘No chasm! They’re across a field, that’s all.’

I heard the rasping surf of the sawyers’ blade again like the sea. But there was no sea except for the cinematic sensation on the coast of the mind, in the field of the mind beside an invisible lake or river or ocean or sea.

‘There’s the rub,’ said my Skeleton-twin. ‘You see a field, you see dancers, you hear an ocean but nothing’s there. Is the field
really there? They dance in elements upon a borderline between the wasteland and the post-wasteland theatre from which they seek to leap …’

‘But that’s wrong,’ I protested. ‘The borderline’s between
pre-evolutionary
darkness and evolution. Did you not say so yourself when we were arriving?’

‘The two borderlines look alike in GRAVE LAND.
I
am your twin now and your ancestor then in the past. Such is the comedy of relics of Spirit.’

‘How do we know the difference?’

‘Variations of Breath, the land that breathes, the water that breathes, are in the difference. Hard to define. For instance the sound of the sea in the sawyers’ blade indicates substance that is used to build houses. Houses of the invisible sea. Houses with walls of solid water. Paradise of the Rain God. The dancers in the field then have settled for a while. As
you
appeared to settle on your Virgin Ship. Their houses are filled with the joy of rain. The Paradise of the Rain God. I would say they are primordial folk myself. Pre-evolutionary folk.’

‘Who am I? What are you?’

My Skeleton-twin laughed.

‘It’s a good question, Francisco. You danced into GRAVE LAND on primordial feet. But in fact
you
are
alive,
you
survived
the
holocaust
,
you possess – it is true – all the appearances of having died. But you belong to the living extremities of the WASTE LAND. You are almost in a post-wasteland grave. Almost in. Almost there. Not quite. That is why you are tattooed …’

‘And you?’ I cried. ‘Where do you belong?’

‘I am indisputably of the Circus. I fell into the pit and whilst you lived, whilst you grew flesh and I suffered in your place, I became a curious Skeletal animal of the WASTE LAND. I performed numerous tricks. Think of it this way. When I fell into the pit I left my inscription on your arm to remind you I was still there, I would arise, I walked in two worlds. GRAVE LAND. WASTE LAND.’

I could not help protesting. ‘It,’ I said, ‘the inscription or tattoo, was done at Deacon’s instigation. He took me to a specialist. It
was a Jest, his assumption of himself as my orphaned, peasant father. We were of the same age. A game we played, Deacon and Jonah and I. I found myself with two fathers, a schoolboy rag, nothing more, but serious as hell in a land of orphans, and
slaveowners
, and conquistadores, and puritans. Jonah – my puritan schoolboy father – slept with an Animal Goddess, and Deacon anticipated sleeping with the Virgin of Port Mourant. For some unearthly reason he projected
me
into her, upon her,
he placed his fallen angel’s Mask upon my head, the Mask of the Virgin’s husband and the Virgin’s son. He said my epic would redeem a relic.’

I stopped. Shattered by the revelation. Dream-book revelation that made me into a stranger to myself, a multi-faceted stranger, a vessel of masks suspended in past futures coming abreast of future pasts.

The pain of Memory theatre, of breaking trauma in the wake of the holocaust, was great.

My Skeleton-twin reached out and almost held me but he desisted. Profoundest sympathy or empathy perhaps within which lay a chasm. Close to each other yet subject to broken archetypes that we shared but could never absolutely mend.

‘Likewise myself, Francisco‚’ he said at last. ‘I descended into the grave in your place. I anticipated the difficulty, the
preternatural
difficulty, immanence and transience combined, of
your
leaping up out of the grave to play your dual part, bridegroom-
in-son
, son-in-bridegroom, and beyond such duality intricate distinctions that would break a mould of incest within the mystery of freedom … Yes, I was aware of the immensity of the task. So I exercised my limbs as doubly supportive of you. In GRAVE LAND I suffered for you. In WASTE LAND I was close to you however apart from you. I created a chasm across which you would need to leap to fulfil your fate, to become free, to know love as you never dreamt to know it … Wait and see … A paradox of Breath-bodies I grant! You need, you see, to combine several keys into yourself. Wasteland key, post-wasteland key, primordial key. But the price you pay is the relinquishment of conquest! Your intercourse with Virgin Sorrowing space is the
intangible
but
innermostly
supportive
embrace of many cultures living and dying
upon the extremities of the WASTE LAND. So you see Francisco there are Deacon’s projections that you bear and relive as a survivor of the holocaust.
Deacon
did
not
survive
in
the
extremities
of
the
WASTE
LAND
as
you
do.
There are Jonah’s projections that you bear and relive in ORACLE-Brothel. Jonah did not survive on the extremities of the WASTE LAND as you do. And there are my projections from within the grave and without the grave. I survived in a sense through you for whom I suffered and whom I assisted in the clothing of yourself with Flesh as you dance on the cradle and the grave of the globe. Wasteland extremity Flesh, evolution’s extremity Flesh, in the Circus of Mankind …’

Flickeringly changing expressions swept across the Skeleton’s Mask that my twin wore in the Carnival Circus of GRAVE LAND.

I swore I saw an expression of gravity. But as I scanned this it became a ripple of bones on his brow and across his high pointed cheeks like stricken sails in the Phallic tree. It may have been the Circus laughter of the relic of Storm within myself. My twin was known to ache with laughter.
I
attributed laughter to his fluid, however curiously rigid, flights of expression. But I may have been witnessing the genesis of some other nameless emotion. My Skeleton-twin caught the drift of my mood.