Jonestown (13 page)

‘Take your own case again, Francisco. The gun that Deacon fired seemed to flash into your mind as if it had been built out of the concretion of your own trauma, your own numbness.
There’s
a warning from which civilization recoils! Perhaps it is unable to read the signs! It refuses to countenance its own predicament in the light of technologies that are – at a certain level – an extension of the trauma of an age:
a
trauma
that
is
building
a
void
into
sensibility.
New technologies should bring into play profound and new literacies of the Imagination. They are sprung in part from ourselves, our defects, our deprivations however novel they seem. They may appear to be our slaves, our servants, but as in the Virgin’s El Doradonne cradle (do you remember?) – the play in the hospital – they are already becoming toys for the privileged wealthy, or well-to-do areas of civilization, privileged nurseries, toys that we are unable to translate into the genuine service of humanity. The signs are there, the necessity for a different comprehension of the language of reality. The signs of
intervention
, the intervention of divine furies, are all there, but are we responding? Will our response come too late? Will it ever come?’

Mr Mageye had stopped but his glance was still riveted upon me. Suddenly I wondered if it was he, my beloved teacher, or whether it was an extraordinary eye in the Camera beside him. Had his apparition frozen into a parallel spectre of technology? Was I witnessing a species of dual technology, apparition and frozen spectre?

Was this an intervention in my Dream-book to be weighed and sifted in returning to Jonestown in Memory theatre?

I recalled the Day of the Dead when I lay on my pillow of stone and arose at nightfall in the bushes. I recalled my half
self-accusatory
, half self-confessional response to Deacon’s
intervention
and to the Virgin’s intervention in moments that seemed my last on Earth.

I knew then how ill-equipped I was to fathom intervention
through
the masks of fallen angels and Gods and Virgins (all of whom themselves are surrogates of an unfathomable Creator),
through
hidden texts that I needed to consider and reconsider again and again and to match with unspoken prayer …

‘Intervention by divine powers,’ I said at last to Mr Mageye, ‘is a challenge to the responses it seeks to invoke.’

He sensed my bewilderment as I faced him, two-in-one dual being he seemed, apparition and frozen spectre, frozen into solidity.

He said darkly to me: ‘I shall break, I shall break into many extensions, I shall appear to dissolve, a necessary trick.’

‘No, no.’ I cried in desperation. ‘I need you, Mr Mageye. What would I do without you?’

Mr Mageye gave his warm and magical smile. ‘It’s not yet time for me to depart from your Dream-book, Francisco. A warning that’s all. We have much still to do together. Have we not? We are still erecting a Memory theatre.’

‘But why break, why leave me?’

Mr Mageye touched me without appearing to touch me. He was deeply moved in himself by my need of him.

‘One guesses in the dark, Francisco, about the nature of the Creator as a subject to be taught in the history of creation. Should we not perceive creation itself as an extraordinary fiction susceptible to varieties of hidden texts …?’

‘Translations of the untranslatable that move us to look through and beyond ourselves?’ I could not help laughing at myself.

‘Quite so, quite so, Francisco. Without a sensation of uncharted realms, extra-human dimensions, I am inclined to feel that one is destined to freeze or burn in an absolutely human-centred cosmos
inevitably promoting dominion and lust as its hidden agenda. It’s simple really, though some will insist it is difficult. The paradox of extra-human characterization in your Dream-book which brings surrogate Gods, surrogacies of a Creator, is that the surrogates (kings or Gods or angels or phenomenal Jesters or Judges or whatever) may appear to stand on platforms in space, to walk on a wave or a vortex, or whatever, but they surrender a hidden agenda of dominion in fiction which takes its cue from uncharted reflexes built into space. Those reflexes are akin to the wilderness music of the Word. Thus the agenda of absolute command over all species and things breaks, and surrogate Gods – whether they are fully conscious of it or not – disperse their apparently broken limbs into supportive organs of disadvantaged cultures and a sick humanity everywhere.’

I was so excited I could scarcely speak.

‘It seems to me, Mr Mageye,’ I said at last, ‘that there is a sacred Wound built (if I may so put it) into the Creator, a confessional deity-Wound which matches the reflexes of uncharted space. The Wound is so mysterious that it cannot be measured … But it is this which authorizes at some level of hidden grace – in
counterpoint
to orders of dominion – the dismemberment of Gods into supportive organs everywhere.’

For some uncanny, emotional reason – some uncanny wound within philosophy that brings ecstasy and pain – I found myself laughing with Mr Mageye. But laughter ceased and we began to consider terrorizing and terrorized regimes, cruel natures. How does the intervention of the Creator apply? Can we read or translate such intervention within the dismemberment of Gods?

‘One is in the dark, Francisco. But I would venture to say that this is a question that runs beyond all man-made frames or realisms or commandments. We need to adventure into intangible graces in counterpoint with terrors in nature. Not beauty for beauty’s sake, or realism for social realism’s sake. These are often disguised kingdoms of dominion that we would chart in nature and in history. There are intangible graces that we cannot seize but whose tracery exists in a web or a vein or the music of a bird or some other creature. These may suddenly illumine the intensity
and extensity of a shared Wound within live, fossil realities of space, the
psychicality
of the living fossil … Such traceries are of immense archetypal significance and they break through absolute predatory coherence or plot …’

I glanced around within the chasm of space, in which the Earth revolved, and back through veils and intangible resources into the Port Mourant hospital in which the sick man was arising from his bed with his dog or lamb at his heels.

‘Shared Wound! I understand, Mr Mageye. Tell me more please! Is the imprint or tattoo on my Lazarus arm an aspect of that shared Wound?’

‘If it is,’ said Mr Mageye warily, cautiously, ‘it means that
you
, Francisco – as you wrestle with the severity of trauma – need to revisit Jonestown. You cannot do so without the horn of the huntsman and the sound of the flute. The huntsman wears the mask of Christ. The horn and the flute are branches of the archetype of a numinous and pagan Christ who summons Lazarus from the grave. That summons will take us through the Wheel of Virgin space. Your fate – if I may so put it as I read the signs, Francisco – is to venture into the music that addressed Lazarus, the music of the womb of space, the music of remarriage – in your case, Francisco – to the people of Jonestown. How can one break the trauma of the grave and not find oneself involved in a remarriage to humanity? I do not envy you the task. It is a terrifying embrace to remarry a perverse humanity, a bitter task, a bitter threshold or re-entry into Jonestown.
And
yet
it
has
to
be
done.
I can promise you a genuine ecstasy nevertheless, before I depart, and the trial that lies before you – however tormenting – will prove a liberation … I cannot say more for, in some ways, as I read the signs, I am as much in the dark as yourself, Francisco. Let me say however that
your
projection
of
sickness
upon
the
Christ-
archetype
is an unspoken cry for help, a cry from the grave into which you dreamt you fell when you lay on a pillow of stone on the Day of the Dead.’

How could I feel anything but sorrow and anguish in the light of such remarks? And yet I would not have relinquished the challenge even if I could.

‘None can respond to your cry, the unspoken cry of humanity, save the Christ-archetype upon which you project the sickness of an age, a sickness rooted in an eclipse of orchestrated imageries that bear on the enigma of the hunt, the enigma of genesis, the enigma of birth, the enigma of savage numinosity as much as phenomenal summons through dissonances and consonances to the dead … LOOK! THERE HE GOES, FRANCISCO. The horn sounds in the branch of a tree. The flute cries in creatures that we consume. Do you hear, Francisco?’

‘Yes, I do,’ I said quietly. ‘He also bears the net from the Virgin bride’s hair. And he holds a door ajar in the Wheel, a door between worlds, between ages, between times. That door cannot be seized. It is untranslatable space …’

*

Mr Mageye and I followed the huntsman through the door in the Wheel into Jonestown, early 1978, tropical Spring. We heard the noises of the town, a living town, unconscious of being hauled up from the grave in which it lay since the day of the holocaust.

‘I remember clearly,’ I said to Mr Mageye. ‘Would you believe it?’

‘Believe what?’ said Mr Mageye matter-of-factly. ‘Believe that the huntsman accepted statistical pay when he was employed by Jones around this time?
This
time! When one voyages back from the future into the past it is not just time that changes, it is the spatialities inserted into time that are different. He accepted statistical pay to mask himself as a Nobody.’

Yes, I saw now in Memory theatre that there had been something odd about the huntsman when he accepted the job in Jonestown back in the future from which I had returned to this Dream-book changed spatiality.

I remembered now the way his hands moved to articulate a spiralling touch upon the dollars that he received. He touched his pay as if it were sampled money in a pool of numbers justifying astronomical rewards to the managers of privileged companies and religious, sweatshop pay to someone like himself. Statistical justice in the pool of the marketplace! On occasion I had seen him come to the Carnival Circus that Jonah sometimes sponsored. I
had seen him wave a single dollar in the air and convert it into a huge bunch of fluttering pieces of paper.

Was it a statistical hoax, or caveat, or illumination of the fraud perpetrated on the Bank of America of which Jonah Jones was accused by the Police?

Eventually Jones’s suspicions were aroused that the huntsman was some kind of underground agent. He sent him packing straightaway. He did not relish such a warning to his flock. I had not understood or perceived the warning myself – executed it seemed now with a curiously dismembered hand – until I followed the huntsman through the door in the Wheel … The dog or the lamb at his heels invoked the invaluable life of the species of genesis. Nobody’s dog, Nobody’s lamb, imbued the huntsman’s pace, the latitude of his grasp, with a watchful eye for all species, care, scrupulous measure of instinct to put numinous flesh in the shape of living masks, plucked from Carnival Lord Death, upon the Bone of wasted lives that survivors of holocaust harbour in themselves.

*

Space was intrinsic to re-visionary narratives of changed time. I followed the huntsman and his dog or lamb in the music of space into the elusive foundations of Jonestown which lay, I knew, in the hidden vistas of modern and pre-Columbian civilizations.

We were walking in two forests, parallel forests, parallel universes. I shook myself at the thought of such trespass.

We were on the margins of Jonestown (or Jonah City) …

I concentrated on the silvery-grey bark of tall, skyscraper greenheart out of which the Port Mourant hospital had been built and which we employed in the construction of Jonestown in the 1970s up to 1978.

A delicate balance needed to be struck, a delicate clock of space, ticking space. The Reverend Jonah Jones was insistent that the treasury of the lofty trees – in which Jonestown was set – must be nurtured even as we made use of it. He had – to give him credit – issued the strictest instructions of which Deacon and I approved. For a Forest is akin to a Bomb. When it blows apart birds cease to sing.

‘It is Spring 1978,’ I said to the huntsman. ‘The prospects look blight for the new town.’

The giant leaf of parallel ages shivered under my feet, whispered.

The shadow of the grave with its rubbled door through which we had come cracked a vein in my mind within the music of the raining, sun-bathed leaves settling on the ground like a pillow resembling stone.

I heard the shivering leaf again and remembered how I had ignored it in the future from which I had come. I had ignored its intervention in seeking to warn me of the poisoned cup against the shattered lips of the woman in the Clearing; in seeking to warn me of the shaking bushes as well in which I hid from Jones.

The Forest opened all at once and we had arrived at the edge of a sawyers’ pit. Stalwart sawyers they seemed in the raining shadow and light of the leaves as they sliced limbs and planks from the fallen living body of trees.

I felt the sawyers’ living breath upon me in the lungs of the trees.

There were three pairs of active sawyers in the long wide pit to which I had come. Each pair operated a formidable saw with rhythmic precision.

A faintly mesmeric and profound shadow of music – sprung from the huntsman’s horn in a tree – enveloped the sawyers and myself.

Mr Mageye whispered that this was a portent of my remarriage to the people of Jonestown.

The sawn timber echoed the sound and dismemberment, the depth of dismemberment, of ancient tree-gods in the service of humanity.

They (those tree-gods) shone with the mysterious, alarming light of aroused flesh-and-blood, trembling flesh-and-blood wood that steamed, it seemed, as it arose from the pit.

The light in the incalculable glow and gloom of the Forest seemed to boil everywhere within the pit, within the noises of bustling Jonestown that one could hear through curtains of leaves, bustling Jonestown arisen from its grave; it floated within and
above the implements that the sawyers used like a mist in vein and artery to be traced in trunk or tool or body. It seemed to differentiate inwardly and outwardly – as it flocked within the sawyers’ arms – a range of perverse resurrections within an alchemy of true resurrections in our apprehension of the daily tasks that we perform and the materials that we use …