Jonestown (10 page)

‘And this brings me to the mystery of injustice that the Soul expresses in my wounds. To suffer injustice is to see the Soul within every small creature that cries out for pity against pitilessness. Can we fathom the enduring, insubstantial cry of pity? Pity’s sake can neither be bought nor sold. Compassion is beyond price.’

Another form of prayer it was that involved me not in a plea for justice but enduring, creative capacity to suffer the mystery of injustice if the Soul were to live, phenomenal fellow-feeling, despite predatory games and uniform insensibility to crisis …

I feared Carnival Lord Death but he appeared to acknowledge – in some recess of himself – the mystery of prayer and he returned the scarf to me.

‘You poor devil, Francisco‚’ he said, ‘if it gives you some comfort have the bloody scarf. It went well with my daring dress. I came upon the eighteenth attire I now wear in Jones’s house …’

I wanted to tell him that this too was mine. I had loaned it to Jones for a fancy dress occasion in Jonestown. It was a kind of heirloom or legacy that I had been given by my mother.

The travail for me in the grave-digger’s evolution into a capitalist and into Carnival Lord Death lay in the chasm it illumined between mechanical Justice and the extraordinary numinosity of Injustice and in every trial one is called upon to endure at the bar of time. How to come abreast of the past one believes one has forfeited or killed is more self-searching than knowledge of current affairs. For if one fails to come abreast of dead time (or what seems to be dead time) a Predator in the future
will destroy us. And time past, the living texture and spirituality in time past, would have become too weak to stand at our side and assist us.

Limbo Justice involved an equation between numbness and immunity to hell. To be just then in Limbo Land was to serve one’s vested interests absolutely, whether pleasure or profit, to
sublimate
or suppress or eclipse one’s wounds in favour of strengthening a wall between oneself and the inferno that rules elsewhere in many dimensions of one’s age.

Injustice, on the other hand, bore on a coming abreast of wounds one has suffered in the past through which one knows pain in oneself and others, pain of mind that revives the Soul of Compassion beyond all machineries of the law of Death or of the state of embalmed institutions.

Without the mystery of Injustice – when one suffers with others to whom the world is unjust – the soul would vanish entirely and leave behind the mechanical futility of knowledge in the besieged Brain in the crumbling Body …

I had never meditated on morality in this light and I needed to emphasize and re-emphasize, rehearse and rehearse again, what I had learnt from my encounter with the capitalist Carnival Lord Death.

I needed a Dream-book that would take nothing for granted within the prayer I had attempted to address to an unfathomable Creator of worlds and universes. I needed to embrace ‘pity’s sake’ though such an embrace of the Word made me infinitely vulnerable.

I was now convinced that Limbo Land was a trap from which it was unlikely I would ever escape to view the open cities of Paradise. I had failed in building a new Rome in Jonestown’s web of abandoned and lost cities arching back into pre-Columbian mists of time.

All well and good to have escaped from the holocaust into Limbo Land but a variety of enormous and subtle dangers now encompassed me. Foremost amongst these was the menace of the Predator who lurked in the giant forests of Day and Night.

I was infinitely vulnerable. How could I withstand such a
menace? In a sense I felt easier with the grave-digger now – when I ran into him in my wanderings after the Day of the Dead and prior to my arrival in Trinity Street – I accepted his new role (with the death of the conventional Church) as Lord Death. Perhaps he and I possessed a secret understanding about the omens of Carnival.

Nothing however could forfeit or erase the scent – the backwards, forwards scent – of the Predator. I knew I was hunted, pursued, or stalked in Limbo Land. Stalked as a commodity to be devoured by mighty institutions, great Banks, great systems that ransacked and devoured privacy: but such systems were but one feature in the unnameable menace of the Predator.

I wondered,
as my mind tended to lapse and to lose reflection in the bark of a tree to which I clung, in shed leaves of memory here and there or cracked branches of trees into which I occasionally climbed (as my Carib or African or Arawak ancestors – runaway European antecedents as well – had done in the sixteenth century when slavery and persecution ruled the Americas)
, whether the Predator was Carnival Lord Death after all despite our secret treaty or understanding. A part of that understanding was to inform him of flying or running strangers in Limbo Land.

I had no intention of doing so but I humoured him, especially when he assured me that the Inspector would take me to see the Prisoner or Old God of Devil’s Isle who claimed to be the father of the Virgin of the Wilderness, Marie of Port Mourant.

BUT NO! The Predator was older than Death itself. The Predator possessed a curious weight that lay beneath gravity’s Skull, beneath every falling or fallen creature, a curious
violence
that subsisted on nuclear deadlock, or perversity, or cosmic devastation, on meteorites colliding with Jupiter, on the
manipulation
of elegant mathematics into spectacles of beauty that kill, random bullets in space, or from space, that strike the Earth from time to time. The Predator’s craft and skill and range in Limbo Land was immense and I felt his breath (unlike the breath of resurrectionary organs of Compassion) rearrange the grain of the hair on the back of my neck.

The tickling sensation of the hair on my neck and head aroused
in me a contrary sensation to absolute fear that the Predator sought to instil in me. I broke my Nemesis Hat or Bag into two containers. One I retained as a Hat and this I replaced on my head. The other I adopted as a Bag. I retraced my steps in Limbo Land and collected the fallen leaves of memory from cracked branches or trees into which I had climbed. They possessed the numinous texture of a book and I promised the three Virgins (Jonestown, Albuoystown, Port Mourant) that I would write a Dream-book should I gain Trinity Street in New Amsterdam …

How much did I know, how much remember – within composite epic – of ages prior to Death, ages in which the Predator’s regime of violence seemed both immanent and transient, ages in which nevertheless the Womb of Virgin Space seemed shorn of violence, shorn of intercourse with reality that was violent?

Within that implicit and terrifying opposition how wounded were the parameters of genesis – the genesis of the Imagination to cope with terror and grace – how wounded the Virgin herself as she broke into a trinity of Masks, the three Maries?

I scanned each leaf as I placed it in my Bag. A variety of inscriptions appeared upon leaf after leaf. Faint light-year vistas … Were they progeny of the Virgin driven by a quest to minimize violence in a world in which Death had appeared? Were they progeny of the Predator to augment or absolutize violence in a world in which Death had appeared?

Such vistas lay beyond absolute translation into certainty.

They were resources of uncanny drama, resources of uncanny rehearsals of the genesis or unfinished genesis of the
Imagination
…

The Scorpion Constellation shone in the eyes of the Tiger-mask of the sun. Which blinded which, who whom, it was difficult to say. The Scavenger swooped. The Eagle dealt the Jaguar a blow on the Moon and on the walls of abandoned Maya cities. But all such manifestations were curiously hieroglyphic: self-deceptive and true within the partialities of genesis. They bore on the mystery of injustice that runs hand in hand with the resurrection of the Soul of Compassion for all wounded creatures whether born of the Predator or of the Virgin.

A further complication lay in another well-nigh indescribable imprint, a huntsman who seemed to stand within the Womb of Virgin space. I sensed that he had no illusions about the might of the Predator. As I listened to the whisper or rustle of each leaf within my phantom fingers I dreamt that I heard his voice seeking to instil the strangest wisdom everywhere, into creature and constellation, however prone these were to linkages with the Predator, into heroes and angels, however prone these were to linkages with monsters. I sensed his tread at Night in the footprint of the Predator.

The gathering menace broke into a Storm and I felt it was useless running from the Predator any longer. My desire had been to destroy him by hook or by crook. So much so that unconsciously, subconsciously, I was driven to contemplate poisoning the air everywhere that he breathed, the seas and oceans and lakes and rivers in which he swam, the environments and places that clothed him. ‘Kill him even if it means killing yourself‚’ Carnival Lord Death had said to me. Death’s freedoms encompassed the advocacy of Suicide. ‘Walk with a Bomb of environmental disasters under your shirt to blow up the globe.’

But the huntsman in the footfall of the Predator – close on the heels of the Predator – possessed a different tune.

‘Leap‚’ he said (in the gathering menace of the Storm), ‘into my net and help me to hold the heart of the Predator at bay within rhythms of profoundest self-confessional, self-judgemental
creativity
. The leap into space I grant is dangerous. It is a kind of surrender to an unfathomable caring Presence that seems absent in a cruel age. It is the leap of the unfinished genesis of the Imagination that may bring to light unpredictable resources in an open universe that nets, in some paradoxical way, creature and creation. LEAP …’

But I was unable to do so. Nevertheless my desire to poison or slay the Predator loosed its grip on my unconscious, unconscious motivation, motivation of disaster. I settled myself on a
tree-platform
instead and created a pillow with the Bag of memory leaves and pages. The Storm blew a further volume of leaves upon me. The Predator knew of my lofty hiding place. He knew of my
inner Dream-pillow or book. He knew of the outer volume that the Storm had granted me, the raining blanket of leaves in circulation, cross-circulation, rehearsal, re-visionary momentum … I was lost. I was convinced I was lost. It was finished. I lay in the Predator’s bed and he knew.

And
then
the
huntsman
threw
his
net.
I knew without knowing how I knew that the net fastened itself upon the limbs of the Predator even as it appeared to release me, leaving me still to leap …

‘I cannot leap‚’ I said. ‘Not now. But thank you huntsman for saving me from madness, from being devoured by an appetite for violence that grows everywhere.’

I wondered in a flash of lightning whether the huntsman would now seize and destroy the Predator forever. I listened and my heart virtually ceased to beat. BUT NO. The huntsman held the Beast at bay, he lifted him in his net. And I was privileged to gain, with another flash, a glimpse of terrifying beauty. I was bewildered, confused. Heartrending grief arose in myself at the sight of such stripes of beauty. Such was the inimitable hide of the Predator. As the huntsman turned in the lightning Storm with the Beast in his net I dreamt I was free to surrender myself at last,
not
to
leap
now
but to contemplate surrendering myself to an omen of Beauty that I needed to turn inside out for hidden graces, hidden sorrows, in creatures one despised because they appeared to lack the might, the power, the charisma, of the Predator.

The Storm passed and as the Moon descended on my
tree-platform
it shed a striped visor over my Nemesis Hat: an astronaut-knight above Limbo Land. One version of Limbo seemed charred, another version appeared to have been pierced to the heart, still another glowed, intricate, lovely, beauty translated into inside-out, marvellous graces and sorrows. It was the vulnerability of the Earth, planet Earth, that made me weep.

Once again I wanted to leap but instead I flung my visor into space. Skin and Bone throbbed where the shield had grazed my countenance and I was conscious all at once of punctures on my head and neck and shoulders. Holes had been imprinted there. The subtlest holes into which futuristic nails would lodge as if
they were new bones to uphold another Mask of flesh-and-blood in Memory theatre. Perhaps the huntsman’s net in its range and sweep – as it bore the Predator away – had inflicted wounds from which new bone would grow to uphold the Mask when it came … I was confused and bewildered by the prospect …

Dawn light brought me to the ground again. No visionary leap this! Problematic descent, problematic feet … I felt faint and leaned against the trunk of the tree. I placed the Bag of leaves over my shoulder and set out for New Amsterdam.

Problematic feet implied problematic stages of implicit
surrender
to the huntsman’s net. But the hiatuses and gaps in Memory theatre remained to be reconnoitred afresh in my Dream-book, the fears, the uncertainties, of pilgrimage, of departure, arrival. Who was I? Where was I?

Were there perverse resurrections, death-dealing regimes and crushing labour, that one would need to re-vision and come abreast of, in order to break a numbness and paralysis of the Imagination everywhere?

Were there amazing truths of unfinished genesis and
resurrectionary
consciousness that one would glimpse through the Wheel of civilizations within the turning globe in the Womb of space?

Hospitals, El Dorados, colonial possessions, Dutch, French, British, within a web of ancient vanished empires in the Americas, apparitions of the dead-in-the-living (of all races) in the wake of imperial Limbo and Jonestown, banqueting halls, circuses, would haunt me as I wrote. Yet from their debris I became a diminutive cosmic architect of a Virgin Ship and of Memory theatre. All were stages for, and initiations into, my trial at the bar of time.

Foundations of Cities

I tipped the leaves from my Dream-pillow and came upon the hieroglyph of the betrothal of Marie and Deacon in the savannahs, their dance on the Mirror of the Moon … It should have occasioned me joy – however tinged with jealousy – but it brought me sorrow.

Inscribed into the dance were re-traceries of horses and cattle that Jones had stabled in Jonestown (or Jonah City as I was inclined to name it).

Jones, Deacon and I had been the architects of Jonah City within the huge, forested belly of South America, the new Rome afloat upon sea (a sea of leaves) as upon land branching into space.

Marie, the Virgin of the wilderness, fled from the dance on a Wheel, and I followed her into Port Mourant hospital. Marie was but a slip of a child. She extricated herself from the Wheel in which I had lodged her. She was naked, wet, dripping with the glass of rain through which she had run. So it was a miracle that I salvaged the imprint of the Wheel on a leaf. It was less a question of running and more of securing herself in the Wheel like a reflection of time: the Wheel of civilizations that corresponds to the Virgin’s circular leap in space!

Fractions and circles are profoundest mathematics that one needs to weigh and reassess with the greatest care in returning to the foundations of lost cities: riverain fondations, falling or rising whale’s belly Atlantis, Plato’s Cave, light, space, earth-cradle foundations, sky foundations that dripped on the Virgin Marie’s body.

Four-square leaps, triangular leaps, vertical leaps, horizontal leaps, are a measure of the dance that one equates with lost, revisited cities, villages, homes …

The sky dripped through the leaking roof of the Port Mourant hospital into which I had come with Marie. Hospitals and Ships within the Wheel of civilizations are symbols of the globe. The dance of the Wheel brings one intimate knowledge of bombed villages and churches and hospitals and houses.

Jonestown. The sky dripped upon Limbo and upon Jonestown.
Jonah saw himself in the belly of the White Sky or Whale of American legend as a saddened Aeneas afloat upon coffin and cradle.

‘Do ghosts cradle themselves in tree-tops above their graves? You lucky devil! You survived, Francisco.’ I thought I heard his voice in my ears in Port Mourant hospital as I stood amongst the sick on pallets on the floor.

I had been one of Jones’s lieutenants, his left-hand man. In the 1970s when we were busy erecting the new Rome, afloat on the back of Atlantis in the South American rainforest, I used to play music on a Maya drum. I possessed five fingers then.

But in my sorrowing resurrection backwards in time from 1978 to 1939 Albuoystown, Crabwood Creek and Port Mourant, I found myself with only three. Yet I continued to play with two phantom fingers as a memorial of Soul, apparitional grasp, apparitional reach into Soul, Soul’s design of invisible triangles, parallels, and spaces.

Memory theatre has no fixtures. One exercises a riddle of proportions as one writes of time and times, in time and times, through time and times, as if blended times are the solid and elusive foundations of holocaustic Jonestown … The lives and limbs of those who have perished need to be weighed as incredible matter-of-fact that defies the limits of realistic
discourse
. Fallen angels become engineers and architects on the death of a child to whom they build citadels and memorials on earth and in heaven. Babes such as Marie are replete with the eloquence of the Virgin. Fiction’s truths are absurdity’s common sense, absurdity’s revelations of composite epic heart in the ancient and the modern.

Deacon occupied a privileged station when we began the construction of Utopian Jonestown in the 1970s. It won the approval of the head of state in Guyana. Jones appeared to cherish Deacon. He was the great evangelist’s right-hand peasant angel and engineer. No one knew (and I myself forgot within lapses in my Dream-book) that he nursed a fear of the Predator after the death of his son Lazarus born of the Wilderness Virgin Marie in December 1954. One forgets. One remembers. Such
lapses and bridges between memory and non-memory are native to the trauma of cultures … No one knew that he nursed a fear of the Scorpion Constellation that brought him immunity to pain and wealth and fortune with which to build a memorial township to Lazarus.

Jonestown was a memorial to Lazarus, a memorial of deadly fortune that was to catapult me into space in due course. As if dream-rockets are sometimes founded on the slaughter of infants or twins or brothers. Had not the eighteenth-century Frenchman’s fortune – founded on repentance that drove him overseas to El Doradonne Guiana after the slaying of his brother (whom he nourished in his imagination as he aged as a composite son, composite slave and son) – granted me a scholarship to San Francisco in the twentieth century?

Had not Herod’s slaughter of infants – when Christ was born – cemented a resurrrectionary Bank of Fortune in Christendom?

So does civilization question itself, in dread at its foundations, through composite epic survivors of feud, or conflict, or genocide, or death-dealing regimes.

Composite epic parents itself, parents its Gods, parents humanity, in order to answer at the core of the self for the shape of things everywhere. Yet the apparently random choice of diminutive being, a frail Imagination here and there, to bear this burden of multi-faceted collective, multi-faceted community, is unfathomable …

I was a South American Utopian in the 1970s. It was a peculiar burden to carry. Utopia was less an absolute place, absolute society, absolute theatre, and more a Bridge festooned with ruins … Utopia signified a Bridge of collective genius, yet dread for me, from the coastlands of Guyana (into which people are chained) into the hazards of capacity within the interior of the South Americas: a wholly different architecture, a wholly different Imagination from the politics and the institutions of economic fixture and habit.

Were the oceans to rise along the South American coastlands in future generations they would play havoc with the coastal shell of settlements already beneath mean sea level.

Sea defences and walls and foundations of villages and cities would be shaken to their innermost core.

Utopia was therefore a way of turning a world (while time was still an ally of creative possibility) into perceiving itself from within its future, shaken core of self: perceiving processional expeditions from one ocean to the North (the Atlantic) to another ocean to the South (the rainforests). Except that the latter ocean – however deep it seemed – was far above the reach of the Atlantic plundering tides that had once blossomed into pirate and conquistador.

Now the time had come to move … Depth was uncanny proportionality of Memory theatre, Memory’s lift, Memory’s height, upon which to view impending events, failed events, lost causes, futuristic ruins, as well as past events that are native to the wastelands of the future, past events that one may have buried in conventional complacency within the present moment that continues to ignore the Shadow of the future …

Jonestown was now a ruin in Memory theatre. It was rubble and wasteland on the Utopian Bridge from the coastlands of Guyana into the interior of the South Americas. Its leaking roofs and ruined or flattened walls became an imaginary station to be revisited through other imaginary stations and ghost trains in time.

In returning to 1939 (Marie’s childhood, Deacon’s childhood, my childhood) I stood on the Wheel of civilizations, and the Utopian Bridge, as upon a stage on which to assemble the poor people’s hospital, and its pathetic walls and leaking roof, that invoked the wastelands of 1978 in Jonestown. The sick who lay on their pallets on the ground were true Utopian characters in the Carnival of the future. Lord Death was already amongst them making a tally of their possessions as the grave-digger had done (or would do) above the pit or mass grave in Jonestown and theatre of the burial of the dead.

How does one build new architectures out of the rubble of traditions and out of diasporas across millennia?

Marie was weeping her heart out on the floor of the hospital in 1939.

Poor Marie. Rich, wilderness Marie. Virgin Marie. Queen Marie. Princess Marie. Peasant Marie. Child’s ancient heart. Bride of humanity. Mother of Gods. Child of Gods contesting their parentage of her. Biological magic? Adoptive, spiritual, medicinal magic?

Marie was weeping ancient tears until they formed a
mysterious
pool on the ground, or sea, or ocean. Refugees swam from Cuba and Haiti, climbed the Utopian Bridge, and began their futuristic trip into the heartland of the Guyanas. 2050? 2025?

Hungry masses pressed against the wall of the Mediterranean seeking entry into an overcrowded Europe. Jobless Mexicans fought to cross the border into lands once theirs now part and parcel of the United States.

The dying and the sick – assembled in South America from every race around the globe – lay on the floor of the hospital within the Shadows of the past and the future. They were masked actors of El Doradonne Utopia, a new Rome to be founded by apparitional Aeneas, or Lazarus ascending from the rubble of Troy; such founders were in my blood, and in Deacon’s blood, and in everyman’s blood within experimental nuclei of epic,
resurrected
consciousness.

I dreaded the mark of Lazarus tattooed on my arm as much as I dreaded the bite of the Scorpion on Deacon’s arm.

Deacon’s infant Lazarus – born of Marie in 1954 – was a deadly fortune or role that I would inherit in Memory theatre.

That fortune would unfold in Dreams long before it was conferred upon me. It would unfold in absurd, even humiliating, ribaldry, when Deacon taunted me in San Francisco. It would unfold by unforeseen stages into a honeymoon with bliss. I would be appointed – when Deacon vanished after Jonestown – to return in Memory theatre to his wedding feast. I would be appointed to read or scan the intricate, terrifying seed gestating in the womb of the Virgin of the Wilderness. I would be appointed to play the role of her bridegroom in order to know in myself how worthy, or dreadfully unworthy I was, to plant the seed of Lazarus once again across millennia in the womb of space …

Yes, I knew of the news of my appointment but it tended to
fragment in my mind, it tended to slip from my mind as I awoke and wrestled with the Dream-book …

The patients in the hospital in Memory theatre 1939 (when World War Two lit up flares across the Atlantic which alighted on the Utopian Bridge) may have seemed divorced from Jones’s flock of the future in the 1970s. Divorced from Bosnia, or Rwanda, or Ethiopia in the 1990s… They were different at first glance but the fires of war lit up Carnival mirroring blood in feature and mask.

The finest cast of actors one could assemble to play at war, war with famine, war with plague and addiction, in the twentieth century. To play at holy wars, religious wars.

They ate cherries of blood in hopeful, hungry mask, hopeful, hopeless lip. They ate cherries of hope in the 1970s decade when Jones, Deacon and I visited the head of state in Guyana, obtained a generous lease, gave them their lines to read in the tragedy of Jonestown. They were our sheep. Brilliant actors on the world’s stage.

They ate cherries in 1939 when they lay on the hospital floor.

Each cherry – planted in the teeth of Masks, Bridges of Bone across generations, centuries, millennia – was a rounded thread coiling in Marie’s hair, upon Marie’s Wheel.

‘The unfinished Wheel is my father’s gift to you,’ said Marie. ‘Even as hair grows in the grave but vanishes on an infant’s brow.’

I felt no surprise at such an utterance. Marie was the queen of ghostly children as tall as Bone who flit in the Shadows and the Lights of wildernesses since time began.

Her tears were genuine. A dog resembling a lamb arose from the bedside of a patient on the floor and lapped at the pool as if it were milk.

I dived from the Utopian Bridge – on which I stood with Mr Mageye and his ancient, futuristic Camera imbued with elemental proportions of comedy and tragedy – into the pool of milk.

POOL OF MILK was a private joke between Deacon, Jones and myself when we were in San Francisco College and tended to swim in a hothouse, atmospheric, veiled pool not far from the Golden Bridge that arched across San Francisco Bay.

Men and women consorted and swam there in the misty, milky,
hothouse, fleecy light that the theatre of the bath provided … They all seemed naked in the Camera’s Eye and immersed and preoccupied with sexual, underwater intercourse, instant
milk-and-coffee
. Black and brown bodies loomed in the milk to give coffee pigmentation to the scene.

‘It’s not true,’ I said to Deacon (as I arose from the Pool and joined him at the edge of the Milky Abyss, the consumer abyss), ‘it’s not true, they’re innocent actors abroad, surely no sexual games on Sunday in broad daylight. It’s a trick of Mr Mageye’s futuristic Camera.’

‘This isn’t broad daylight,’ said Deacon, ‘it’s the Milky Way, the white tears of the Virgin for every lamb or dog and for Leviathan. Look! the White Whale rises festooned with Ahab’s doomed voyagers.’ He was laughing. Jonah was displeased. I was unhappy.