Jonestown (12 page)

I shook my head in fervent disagreement. But his eyes were upon the Princess Marie. Was I visible to him, to his X-ray eyes? A shudder ran through Marie’s frame. She clutched the cradle to her heart. No tears in this instance. Yet hollow tears of Beauty are sometimes the most heartrending of all.

I felt her anguish in myself. It was bitter as hell. I loved her with all my heart. No tears, in this instance, scalded my eyes. No tears, in this instance, were consistent with an inner, unconsumable fire in the wilderness Virgin, a fire one could understandably misconceive as hell. Not hell but a mirror reflecting
uncrushed
Spirit in the teeth of adversity. Uncrushed Spirit and hell sometimes seemed to walk hand in hand in the wilderness Virgin …

I sought to hide my eyes, and hers – as if they were wed together – in the Shadow of the Camera. Was this a heretical wedding? Had I taken Deacon’s place? A Dream. Nothing more.

One sees but is blinded in seeing …

‘Blinded less by Beauty than by what the apparition of Beauty begins to signify for the age in which you live, Francisco,’ I thought I heard the Virgin say. ‘Beauty can easily be framed by mass-media churches and states and cynical marketplaces. But when fire weeps yet does not seem to weep it breaks the frame. That breakage is misconceived as hell. For it plunges the world into mental anguish, it disrupts planetary hypocrisy, it disrupts the trade in commodities of framed Beauty, commodities of pigmentation that mask a void. God is dead! God is a Prisoner on Devil’s Isle. The truth is that the Apparition of Beauty within the hollow eyes of a child brings innermost fire that may sustain
us to question all frames, all partialities, all literalities that we enshrine as absolutes …’

At last she arose from her chair draped in the Shadow of Mr Mageye’s Camera. I dared not feast my eyes upon her terrible, childlike loveliness.

I seemed to gaze upon her within the fragmentation of my own composite, epic body. She approached the framed cherry tree in the kingdom of the Golden Man of El Dorado. She moved upon the Utopian Bridge into that ruined kingdom. The tree was wounded, her Apparition was wounded, her eyes were wounded, the numinous child in the cradle that I could not see was held by her to her breast in the game that she played with the Gods in her nursery in El Dorado.

I could not bear to look but I saw it all nevertheless through Mr Mageye’s fragmented Camera with its ancient, futuristic lenses.

She moved in her apparitional, royal nursery to another tree.

This resembled the ornamental branches in a Japanese garden. I swore now that I saw Prisoner-Gods, Prisoners of War hanging from it. Were they weak, were they mutilated? They held the Atom Bomb in their fingertips. At last she moved to the Christmas tree. She placed the cradle of a sick God beneath it. Was it possessed all at once of the lineaments of the patients in the hospital?

I bowed my head still further but I could not rid myself of the Virgin’s eyes, the Virgin Princess’s childlike fiery eyes.

They burnt a hole into the Camera.

I had sailed in that hole into the vanished kingdom of El Dorado. I had sailed East, I had sailed West, I had sailed North, I had sailed South, to sight the Golden sick Man in a village hospital in Port Mourant.

‘Marie,’ I cried, ‘the king at your breasts whom you rock invisibly in your arms has left the stage and become a child in your arms, a child at your breasts. A sick king. A patient in this hospital. What a bridge across ages! If only I could tread upon it. So many bridges to cross.
There
he
is!
The Doctor is back. Your father is back. He does not perceive the game that you play. He thinks he is well. He leans over the patient with the dog
resembling a lamb lapping milk. He does not see that you have pooled his reflection into the North and the South, into the East and the West, into a collective desire for gold everywhere, gold without pain. He does not see. Do I truly see? Do I truly understand? Let me lift him from your imaginary cradle and address him as the ghost of gold and medicine and science.

‘Doctor,’ I cried, ‘you are the Virgin’s son and father in this riddle of theatre. She sees you playing many parts, she sees me playing many parts, she sees us with the eyes of
uncrushed
Spirit.

‘Doctor,’ I cried again, ‘you are blind, you need her eyes to see in this hospital. Her eyes are the fire of
uncrushed
spirit.’

I held up my left hand with its phantom fingers. They were possessed of music even as the Virgin’s childlike being was possessed of ancient wisdom. Had I not heard her speak in an impossible tongue that had long vanished from the face of the earth?

The Doctor turned his back on me and made his way off the stage. Was he displeased with his daughter? Words seemed pointless now against the displeasure of a God. To whom should I pray?

‘Pray to uncrushed Spirit in every newborn child with whom you share an apparently empty cradle,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Pray to the heart of the Wilderness. Pray in silence, pray to invisibility’s wounds. All wounds, all stigmata, carry a silent and invisible counterpoint in the orchestra of ages. Silence speaks nevertheless, invisibility surfaces nevertheless, through you into a community of selves. One knows yet does not know one’s wounds in all their range and particularity; yet they are stored in some private mystery or theatre of music that animates oneself to come abreast of deprivation and numbness in humanity across the ages. One sees it in some unforgettable moment or glimpse into the temple of the human body as much as in the forlorn possessions in Carnival Lord Death’s Limbo marketplace. One strikes an exquisite chord or lament in the orchestra of ages with absent fingers upon a piano in a pawnshop, or on a beach against a golden flood of hollow materialism, or on the wave of a desert. The apparently
irredeemable
structure and plot of a civilization breaks …’

I waited within what seemed the displeasure of God (or of the Doctor-God). And it dawned on me to my astonishment that my unspoken prayer to uncrushed Spirit had been answered within the net of the Virgin’s hair.

Marie – the nurse – in her oversize, slightly ridiculous uniform, had turned from El Dorado in Guyana to the patient with the dog. I turned myself to Mr Mageye in further astonishment – ‘Is it possible?’ I cried. ‘He holds a long strand of her hair in his hand. Not to employ as a lasso for the Horses on the Moon as Deacon did or as Alexander the Great may have desired to do when El Dorado was an empire. No – look Mr Mageye – he coils it into a net. Have I not glimpsed that net before? In Limbo Land! I remember. The huntsman and his dog! He saved my life.’ I stopped to consider the extremities of response to unspoken prayer in wilderness theatre, wilderness orchestra.

When music and unspoken prayer animate language, all proportionalities of being and non-being, genesis and history, are subject to a re-visionary focus.

The Wilderness comes into its own as extra-human territory which unsettles the hubris of a human-centred cosmos that has mired the globe since the Enlightenment.

The interrelationships between the sciences and the arts – that ancient humanity may have sought to nourish within its crises and difficulties – address diminutive survivors of holocausts (such as myself) all over again in new and startling ways.

I voiced these thoughts to console myself. I was bewildered by the sudden dawning light on the countenance of the sick patient in the Port Mourant hospital. He was arising from the floor now with the net in his hand. I was bewildered … How could I have seen that net before in Limbo Land – when he flung it around the Predator and saved my life – if he had suddenly acquired it now from the wilderness nest of the Virgin’s hair?

Was it the same net? Was it an old net? Was it a new net?

Such are the paradoxes of musical chords that compose a net in the language of fiction.

Was it possible that a deeply sprung chord of music is unique and untranslatable fiction and therefore both old and new? Was it
possible that the strange density of the net – arising from the universal wilderness unconscious into the subconscious and the conscious – was of quantum linkage and differentiation and thus what was old was new, what was young was ancient, Virgin was child, child was ancient mother of humanity in the live fossil nursery of language?

I was so bewildered that I had no hesitation in setting forth my thoughts as if to plumb some tracery, however elusive, of the depths of unspoken prayer … I prayed to a disembodiment and an Apparition and an Abstraction that I felt I perceived in the sick man’s Christ-like face.

Why sickness? How sick was my
projection
of sickness, the archetype of sickness,
into
the
huntsman
in whose dawning light upon his face I dreamt I saw Christ? In such sickness I saw a dying age (though when that age would die, if ever, I did not know). Still it was implicitly dying and imbued with new elements of a
re-visionary
genesis of the hunt … The sickness of slaughter for slaughter’s sake was subtly evolving beyond fixtures of cruelty into a net to save me and hold the Predator at bay.

An enormous theme this was that I needed to ponder upon again and again and again.

‘Is it an insoluble net, Mr Mageye?’ I asked.

‘You must seek to understand,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘You must seek to visualize its tracery or traceries everywhere in Memory theatre. Remember, Francisco.’

‘I remember Limbo Land when I thought I would be crushed by the Predator but was saved by the huntsman. I did not see his face then even as I dream I see it now in a patient arising from a bed …’

‘You were caught in the same net that the huntsman used in bundling the Predator away …’

‘Why did he not kill him, make an end of him? Would not that have solved everything, Mr Mageye?’

‘Ah! Francisco, have you forgotten that in desiring the Predator’s end you were compulsively drawn to him …?’

‘Me
?
Was I?’

‘Yes, you! You were fascinated by his magnetic charm and
terrifying beauty. Try to remember. A beauty that you compared – do you now remember? – to the marbled hide of the globe seen from the Moon. Indeed the Predator has no qualms in wearing the elements of earth and sky on his back. It’s not so astonishing. You, Francisco – and I for that matter – wear shoes of leather, the occasional fur hat, the occasional skin of a creature. Though nowadays conscience pricks.’

‘Are you suggesting,’ I cried, ‘that the Predator and I are equal prey – or shared prey (an odd way to put it) – in the huntsman’s net?’ I stopped and considered as Mr Mageye riveted his glance upon me. An odd kind of broken, uneasy conversation we had been having … ‘I remember,’ I said slowly, ‘that in desiring his end my heart grew faint as though his end could prove to be mine as well.’

Mr Mageye smiled as though to hearten me afresh in my fear of self-induced closure within the magnetic compass of the Predator.

Then he cried: ‘Surely you know, Francisco, that there are no endings to a Dream-book of creation animated by music …’

‘I know nothing. Not a damned thing.’

Mr Mageye suddenly grew grave. ‘I understand your pain, Francisco,’ he said. ‘But consider. Here’s the crux of the net. Crux – I can hear you saying – is an odd word to associate with a fluid net. There is no ending, no closure, to the
text
of the prey in which you reside, the text of the Predator that you abhor and admire. Mind you! I am guessing in the dark. For there’s a hidden text of elusive differentiations in Predator and prey that lies behind all “beginnings” and beyond all “endings”. That is one awkward way of putting it. But I must be honest. Those hidden texts may never – I would say will never – be absolutely translated. They are wilderness music. They infuse an uncharted realm, a mysterious density, into every chart of the Word. They infuse immense curiosity and vitality as well in empowering the vulnerable prey (such as ourselves) to seek for endless translations in time of differentiations within ourselves between prey and Predator.’

‘What am I to make of the huntsman’s intervention when he threw his net and saved my life?’

‘Spared the life of the Predator as well! Each creature tends to prey on another.’

‘Where then lies the difference between me and …?’

Mr Mageye held up his hand. ‘The difference lies in prayer.’ Prayer? I was stunned but I understood. I understood the jest or pun.

‘Unspoken prayer matches hidden texts. One prays that one is free to offer one’s body to another in sacramental love. One prays for such freedom.’

‘And the Predator?’

‘The Predator draws blood, the blood of lust. The Predator sometimes seems invincible. The prey
knows
he is vulnerable and even when he prides himself on being unscathed in the huntsman’s net his blood nourishes the sun. All this is susceptible to extremity as we saw in the late Mayan world when men’s hearts were
literally
presented to the sun. Hidden texts teach us to breach such frames, such literality … The ghost of the prey in ourselves, the vulnerable prey, that we offer to the sun, is an unfathomable inspiration of grace, hidden grace in all subject creatures, that transcends frame or literality or predatory coherence or plot. But may I remind you, Francisco! Dream-books are translations of the untranslatable. It is a vocation that may well take us through and beyond the stars into life’s blood on other planets.’

‘Why did not the huntsman intervene and save the people of Jonestown?’

Mr Mageye riveted his glance upon me again.

‘Come, come, Francisco,’ he said. ‘You know – you must know in all that you have confided to me in your Dream-book – how odd, how varied, divine intervention in human affairs is. It’s not easy to read the signals, to respond to the warnings. Our minds are often closed …’

‘Was mine closed?’

‘Of course it was. Habit dies hard. I speak of myself as well. Educators such as myself need to be re-educated …’

‘But … But …’

‘I know, Francisco. I am in your Dream-book and I know that your mind cracked a little in Jonestown. Your mind-set that is! But consider how charged and peculiar was your apprehension of intervention. You were driven to weigh and assess the shot that
killed Jones in the nick of time, your own phantom hand on the gun, the pain of self-confession, self-accusation, numbness,
numbness
that erupts from one’s wounds, one’s traumatization that is built unwittingly into past weaponries, future weaponries, technologies … Yes, it’s all there in your Dream-book and still you are challenged to consider and reconsider the ground of experience.’ He was laughing all at once but I could scarcely fathom his humour. Was he laughing with me, at me, with himself, at himself? ‘Intervention by the divine cannot be entirely divorced from laughter at oneself, one’s refusal sometimes to read the signs until it is too late or almost too late.’ His expression was grave, half Sphinx-like again. I was aware of his lightning shifts of mood.