Jonestown (17 page)

*

Jones was angry and he thrust me out of his house into the wilderness of the Circus of civilization in the wake of the holocaust. He placed a pen in my hand and told me to continue with my heretical Dream-book. I would be punished in due course. I would be put on trial. That was my theme now of
Tropical Spring beset by many hazards, threatened landscapes, endangered species, threatened and mired riverscapes, threatened rainforests. Who was on trial I wondered? Was it I or was it civilization itself?

I made my way now to the animal goddess and Virgin of Jonestown. I recalled her sculptured torso on the Day of the Dead. But this was the Day of Living Return of the Dead or pagan Spring in the calendar of the Maya. This was a Day of dark
cross-culturalities
and savage, purifying humour. She was my
foster-mother
in Jonah’s parlance of the puritan colonization of the Americas, his metaphor of intercourse with her to redeem my bastard progression into his Church of Eternity.

She was a surrogate queen, a tattooed mistress. No Virgin in his Christian, charismatic ideology but a useful frame or channel through whom to conscript orphans in his Church.

Intercourse with her was justified as a way for a puritan to absolve her of tainted antecedents, to accept unchanging human nature in himself and herself, to build the savage queen that she was in his eyes into a supreme colonial pawn or foster-wife,
foster-mother
of orphans, in his privileged embrace. Thus it was that an irredeemable continent was rendered sterile, it was voided of its pre-Columbian background, its legacies, its cultures, in a process of proselytization or conversion to charismatic Christianity.

As I approached her (my foster-mother) I saw her differently. His (Jonah’s) supreme pawn was holy in my eyes. Her
compassion
for him was a glancing backwards into a numinous paganism possessing unfathomable roots
not
in the purgation or erasure of mixed ancestries that he desired (despite his propaganda against racism) but in the purgation of violence from sex. The act of the penetration of space, of Virgin space, penetration of other worlds, was not in its mysterious origination an act of violence. It was an act of creation, the creation of living diversities, the living orchestration of differing spaces, ages, realities. It could prove an exposure of capacities for genuine freedom. But the Sorrowing Wound was inevitable. One’s masquerades of wholeness (the surrogacies, misinterpretations, misreadings of diversities-in-
unities
) fell far short of the origination of the penetrative act. So – in
that exposure of numinous difficulties interwoven with the gift of freedom – violence became the price that humanity was driven to pay. It was a price that challenged the arts of the Imagination to their core. I had seen in my Dream-book the breakage of the sovereignty of violence into mystical dismemberments sustaining diversities and enlarging the capacity for disadvantaged cultures to change and grow and rediscover invaluable omens and roots …

As a consequence I knew I was on trial in Jonah’s eyes, in the eyes of the establishment. Where the establishment sought the sterility of a conformable realism, as its absolute goal, I sought intangible but real frontiers to cross within an open universe in which my foster-mother stood as one of three Maries. She was smiling at my Skeleton-twin as I came close to her. Skeleton-twin? Foster-son? Such is the family of recovered being-in-non-being in Carnival creation.

I said to her: ‘Why in God’s name did you come to Jonestown to suffer a horrible death?’ I stopped aghast. I dreamt I heard my Skeleton-twin whisper: ‘Mystical dismemberments, mystical wholeness, is the body of the pagan Virgin through all Carnival masquerades.’ I held my ear and twisted it as if it were a flute, an organ, the vagination or sheathing of sound in space. I continued quickly, repeating the question, ‘Why in God’s name did you come to Jonestown? I did not know you on the Day of the Dead. I saw you as Marie Antoinette (an acceptable face in European eyes for Virgins), not Circe, the terrifying, unpredictable compassion of an animal goddess such as Circe. Only now on my return from the future …’

The column of fire on her head had cooled. She dislodged it and placed it in the soil between herself and my Skeleton-twin who was her son, or foster-son, within the broken, archetypal fabric of the family of the Self.

She knew me instantly though she was grateful for the numinous link with her Carnival son, my twin or Skeleton in league with masked Bone, fleshed Bone. Such ramifications, or identity of Sorrows and Jests, were codes into a family of creation in the eyes of the Virgin of devastated Jonestown.

‘You pay a price, Francisco, in your return. I pay a price for my former connection with Jonah Jones. He was my lover. Now he’s in hell. Hell takes many forms upon the Virgin Ship that you are building. Your Skeleton-twin descended into hell. Even now he’s unwilling to embrace you! He has suffered not only in the pit of Jonestown into which he fell, in your place, but in wars everywhere, in famines everywhere, from which he released you to live and eat.
You
were as ripe to appear to have perished as he, you were as ripe for starvation as he. He is intimate to you yet alien. He is your epic familiar and inner double in the grave of flesh, in the cradle of flesh. And all this is instinctive to the price you pay, Francisco! To possess such knowledge on your return to this Carnival Spring Day is to acknowledge your ignorance in the future from which you have come. Should one be wiser as one progresses into the future from the past? I doubt it. You doubt it. One needs to come abreast of the past if the past is to yield a kinship with futurity …’

If I did not know of her compassion I would have dreamt she was mocking me. She continued:

‘I speak as a Carnival oracle, Francisco. Not Delphic oracle! Carnival oracle. Have you heard of it? Such curious speech is distressing for you I know only too well. Oracles are steeped in hidden texts that may scarcely be translated. But still translations in your own tongue (let me say), orchestrated fabrics imbued with music – are necessary. Again such translations are the price you must pay, Francisco, to see the Dead alive after knowing them Dead …’

I broke into the Oracle of space, as it were, when I cried: ‘You said Jonah Jones was your lover. And the price you must pay …’

I stopped with the overwhelming impression that in breaking into the Oracle of space I stood within a gigantic brothel at the heart of the Circus of civilization. But the impression receded until I was filled with awe and terror. Awe of freedom, the terror of freedom, that the animal goddess sought now to explicate to me in the Shadow of the great phallic tree.

There was implicit truth, implicit deception, in that tree.

Implicit self-deception conceived in the notion of a mastered
female nature, a tamed female nature, implicit truth in balancing Sorrow and ecstasy, freedom and licence.

It was the searing conjunction of all such ambivalences and counterpoint that gave content to the price that my foster-mother paid in returning to Jonestown in my Dream-book.

She pointed to the great phallic member within the Circus. Jonah’s sweating body shone there now as he appeared to fall back into the river all over again and to climb the notched, sculpted log of wood floating above him, within him, beside him.

‘Does Jonah know he’s up there?’ I asked. ‘Is it an apparition, a Circus trick? I left him in his house a moment ago. Apparitions can be solid in that we grieve, genuinely grieve, for fleeting joys and pleasures, they can be hollow, without grief, technology without pain and grief. Does Jonah know he’s up there?’

‘Do you, Francisco?’

‘I see him,’ I said stubbornly. ‘I do not see myself.’

‘That’s easy,’ said the Virgin animal goddess. ‘Easy to see Jonah the charismatic, the tyrant. Not yourself, Francisco. Jonah was once an idealist. What chance do you have, Francisco, of seeing yourself not only in him but
through
him? I can help you. That is my burden, the price I must pay to enlighten you to the well-nigh
extinct
creature that you are …’

‘EXTINCT?’ I was stunned, bewildered. ‘How can a free man, a free, imaginative dreamer and writer, be extinct?’

‘Tell me,’ said the Virgin Oracle, ‘what in heaven’s or hell’s name do you really know of your long-vanished antecedents, Francisco? What do you know of the worlds and spaces they occupied or inhabited before the Conquest? Precious little. What do you know of the treaties they shaped with the Predator, the Wolf, the Beast, who spoke to them at the fireside? You call me holy foster-mother but what do you know of me? You are extinct, Francisco (in areas of yourself), as a species of bird or buffalo or animal that fell to the guns of the invading puritan in the Americas since the Conquest. You are the embodiment of lost tribes, or peoples, Atlantean peoples. It’s a tragedy as old as Plato’s Dream. Older perhaps. As old as the fates of Prisoner-Gods on Devil’s Isles.’

I knew now she was making Oracle fun of me. And yet a glimmering flock of wings – flash of wings – high on the phallic tree made me pause and consider the gravity of what I had been told.

Were those the wings of extinct, foetal organs in the Womb of Virgin space?

‘I am a free man,’ I insisted. ‘Am I not? I can travel everywhere. I can cross frontiers. Can I not?’

The Virgin animal goddess pointed to the great bunched head at the top of the erect phallic gland or leafless trunk, shorn tree where, it seemed, Jonah’s log broke into – or slid into – a belly of genesis-cloud and its flashing wings in the Womb of space.

‘Free, yes,’ said the Virgin Oracle, ‘in that
extinction
of so many areas of yourself may be viewed ironically, or tragically, or redemptively as a
mystical
unity
with
all
creatures
.’
Was she jesting, was she praying to dead Gods and living Gods in a curious sacramental orchestration of invisibles and visibles? ‘Extinction that leaves you cognizant of what is happening, or has happened, to yourself – extinction that erupts backwards and forwards into rare, epic solidity and ghosts of Carnival – imbues
severances
in
a
chain
of
natures
,
a binding chain, with a strange, obscure, tormenting faculty that we call freedom, a freedom that needs to be weighed and weighed again and again, considered,
reconsidered
, for the backward glance it may bring into losses that we have suffered.’

She gave a sudden, gasping laugh as Jonah’s log rose into the belly of the clouds.

‘The chain breaks,’ I thought I heard her say. ‘The chain loses itself to create a mystical self. Does not the Christian Church speak of losing one’s life to find it?’ I felt the slap of her voice in my voice. A long sighing pause continued at the top of the tree and then she continued. ‘Why am I telling you all this, Francisco? You write of it in your Dream-book when you emphasize
mystical
dismemberments.
Have you forgotten or is it too painful to bear? Extinction of parts of yourself brings a terrifying message of catastrophe – progressive catastrophe – or of the reversal of such linear progression into changed inner lips, inner limbs, inner
bodies in the evolution of the free man, the free Imagination cursed with profoundest self-knowledge. Human nature may change when it begins to comprehend the broken chains of Being in itself, a breakage that entails the gestation of freedom’s body to look back into overlapping texts of the birth of time and invoke vanished but long-suffering shapes and species within the seed and orbit of freedom’s self-knowledge …’

I shrank from the task, the trial, of Dream.
I
wanted
to
be
unfree
, I wanted to eclipse the rape of natures that freedom had imposed everywhere, the freedom of an Enlightenment (
so
different
from
the
Virgin’s
enlightenment
)
to send into exile all voices in nature and space that differed from a human-centred cosmos preoccupied with its own vested interests in power and wealth at any price.

I saw the animal goddess’s pitying eyes upon Jonah and upon me.

‘The future may still mother the spectral Carnival bodies of the past, Francisco. Not by purely linear progression but by
proportionalities
that bring us abreast of the living past in the womb of tradition.’

She pointed up to the erect head of the Phallus in the
Brothel-Oracle
of space.

Brothel. Oracle. I was close to despair but something was tremulously stirring, beyond the logic of fate, that I needed to pursue within the inner limbs, the inner bodies, of the Self.

It dawned on me all at once that the Phallus had broken on its penetration of floating wings in the belly of oceanic, riverain Cloud far above me but close to Jonah’s apparitional climb into self-deception of eternity’s closure of time.

A red rim or slice appeared beneath the lofty erection and mounted head, mounted by Cloud, in Jonah’s log. Waterfall log, rainfall log, that I saw
through
Jonah’s body? I was unsure. Within the slice of log or Phallus, feathered birds, white and dark as rain, seemed to pour like a river.

It was an incalculable spatial phenomenon or omen of genesis.

A river of feathers etched its insertion into cross-sectional sliced Phallus. The feathers flattened themselves into hair at the rim of
the log to which Jonah clung, intercourse with the Sky, Sky-flesh of the Virgin Animal …

It was but a game, a perverse and derisive game at times – as I recalled it in San Francisco (ages ago it seemed) – that Jonah played in electing me as his foster-son through the Virgin Animal of the New World that he sought to invoke as a medium or theatre in which to damn yet save, slaughter and bind my antecedents into his Church, his future Church, his charismatic Church that he entertained in his subconscious in his College days.

That the Animal Goddess would return as a formidable ghost in the Circus of civilization to illumine not only how she had enslaved him but how she came to pity him was virtually unimaginable until now when I saw the broken, mended Phallus, the notched log floating in Jonestown river, leafless trunk (devastated forest that such a trunk could imply in its intercourse with the elements) … The truth was that I was at a loss now in the Circus for intimate, far-flung words to translate
correspondences
in what I saw: leafless trunk, hell, heaven, intercourse between Sky and Earth in Churches of Eternity.