Jonestown (20 page)

Could they spring up and seize me?
They
were
here
.
Sudden clamour, for now I knew the masked players at the table! Not only Presidents and Prime Ministers but Bankers and Peasants played at the table. They belonged to all parties across the generations of colonial and post-colonial histories. Some looked as Mayan or as Chinese as Lenin in the guise of a Pope gambling with millions of followers at the table of Latin American history. All well and good to mock them I thought, but I knew they knew me as one of the involuntary architects of the Jonestown holocaust.

It almost took my Breath away again, for they gambled with the dice of my bones, a benumbed survivor’s bones …

Carnival has many wrappings in the Circus of the Grave and Breath becomes an essential mystery for survivors who descend into ‘futures’ and ‘pasts’.

Politicians and Peasants – in their embalmed masquerade – are also Bankers: quite ordinary folk whom Deacon had indeed thrust into the Coffin: ordinary, extraordinary Coffin. Was it the death of politics around the globe and in Guyana?

I repeated to myself again and again:
‘They
are the
ghost-players
at the gambling table and my heart rises into my mouth.’

I fell on my knees in the scrum of worlds ancient and modern. I could not hold the players but they seemed capable of crushing me to smithereens.

I could not hold them but I was suddenly sensitive to my pagan lips bruised on the playing fields of Boyhood. I was sensitive to the Carib bone-flute within the natural, unnatural flesh that Deacon had bitten, it seemed, with his gun in Jonestown. Bitten from my hand! I was sensitive to the ground in which my mother’s body lay in Albuoystown. Two or three blades of grass
from my Nemesis Hat still sprang there. They resembled rain in the Paradise of the Rain God.

The difficulty in identifying the Pagan Body in Christian currencies, in Marxian money, or in any other Political or Religious cash denomination, lay – I felt – in the weight one gave to the blood of apparitions which sit on chests of treasure, embalmed treasure, that have been secured in the teeth of battle. The apparitions wave like flags on the Moon upon which Deacon and Jonah fought so fiercely on the day and night of the holocaust.

On the face of it such treasure was of museum value but blood was as real as dice. It dried (this was true) on one’s lips and left its stamp there. But its imprint, its labyrinth of love and fear, was a miraculous toss of chance or fate … Was Breath a matter of chance or of fate? Did freedom lie between chance and fate?

I looked up at the Prisoner who stood at the heart of the mysterious battle in the Nether World. Pagan surrogate God? Solid apparition on the treasure chest of the globe? Christian surrogate God? I could not be sure. But I grieved with all my heart (as if it were the world’s heart) for him. The crowd closed in on him, it touched him, they touched him, but he seemed still set apart and able to withstand assault. An extraordinary Game!

‘Real rain, real blood, runs in his veins,’ I cried. ‘He is as real as the Breath in my body. I know only too well now – as I stand or kneel in danger beside him – how pitiless is the crowd that surrounds him. Should they succeed in genuinely seizing him …’ I stopped. There were tears in my eyes that dropped like fluid dice in the Paradise of the Rain God. ‘Should they seize him it would be a phenomenal event in the Nether World. Should they – this beastly crowd of savages – cross the frontier between themselves and him, it would be a phenomenal seizure …’ Seizure of God, the killing of God, surrogate Prisoner-God?

The ghost-players and Bankers and Peasants and Teachers and Politicians at the table – giants of chaos they were – dressed in natural, unnatural flesh like embalmed figures, underpinning ideologies and dogmas, looked up at me. They gave an incredible smile that shook me on my knees until the pain I felt broke into
my joints. But I remained precariously whole and free to fight my way up from the Nether World of the Circus.

They threw their dice at the same instant that our eyes met. Diced eyes. I gasped as each die revealed a limb, an organ imprinted upon it, a splinter on my lip imprinted on it, eyes in my lips. Dream Body. Pagan Body. They were gambling on behalf of the crowds that surged around the Prisoner.

They piled the dice into a corner of the field or the table and secured another handful from their pockets to fling again upon table or field.

But it was the Prisoner’s turn now to throw. I gasped as he threw his lot on the table. The Players and the crowds leaned over – they shook their heads – when each die cast by the Prisoner proved as blank as a slate. Black slate. White slate.

‘Tell him,’ the giants of chaos said to me, ‘that he might as well surrender himself of his free will. Give himself freely to the crowds.’

I was heartbroken at the price that the Prisoner was asked to pay to reveal to the blind throng the jointed nests in the Phallic tree of space. ‘It is unjust,’ I said. ‘It is the mystery of injustice.’

There was a lull in the Game.

‘Here in Bonampak,’ they said to me, ‘we secure Prisoners and treat them as guests of heaven. If they want choice maidens they may have them. If they want banquets they may have them. All we ask in return is that when we bring them to trial at the gambling table they surrender their organs, heart and limb, to be given to the Sun. It’s an honourable vocation. To serve as a Prisoner taken in battle! In that way we light the Breath of the Sun in the sky.’

‘Barbarous, barbarous,’ I cried. ‘Barbarous, barbarous.’

‘Is the Sun barbarous, Francisco? The Sun requires sacrifice. It’s up to the Prisoners! If they give of themselves freely – few if any in our experience have so far – then they will be spared the assault of the crowds (we will carve them up gently like foxes in the field, that’s all); the crowds see them as the fountainhead of fortune and prosperity! They must give all they possess. Not only their body but the children of their body if they have any. For one of those
children may prove to be a king or a saviour. If they hold back, if they claim that the gift of freedom under the Sun is premature, that Mankind is still unfit to carry the burden of freedom, then alas the bonfire of passion in the crowds awaits them, there is nothing we can do but roll dice and wait. We are Bankers, Teachers, Politicians. We please the crowds even as we make them subservient to Money and to Propaganda.’

I was tempted – God knows! – to applaud their cynical jesting at the state of my corrupt age but I knew I was witnessing an unforgettable counterpoint between ancient savage ritual and mystical dismemberment scarcely understood as the twentieth century drew to a close. Unforgettable yet scarcely understood! Did a chasm exist between Memory, the history of Memory, and the genesis of mystical dismemberments as a redistributive focus of variable supports not only for Suns and planets but for disadvantaged cultures in need of sustenance and Breath
everywhere
? Such a chasm – and its reconnaissance – was pertinent to the Nether World in which we confront ourselves, our spectral selves, our inbuilt peasants and exploiters, prosecutors, inbuilt victims that we are in the scrum of the Game …

I could scarcely speak but I managed to whisper: ‘What throw of the die from him – this Prisoner – do you wait for?’

‘A moment will come,’ they cried, ‘when a face or a Mask will appear on a die that he throws …’

‘What face? What Mask?’

‘Who knows? The Mask of an angel-bridegroom.’ They hesitated, then they were emboldened by the operatic mystery of the Nether World.

‘Yes,’ they cried, ‘this is a trial that he cannot escape. And sooner or later the bridegroom will appear on a die: one destined to marry his daughter whom he is unwilling to surrender. The crowds will break him then, Francisco.’

With this alarming pronouncement they shuffled together the dice that they had thrown and proceeded to expose them to my gaze. My head rested on its chin at the edge of the table.

I knew of the imprinted organs and limbs but there was another die that I had missed entirely. It was a cross-sectional exposure of
the Prisoner’s body in which Deacon sat as upon a pillow of leaves or stone.

‘Is this the die of which you speak?’ I cried. I could not believe my eyes. ‘What does it mean?’

At long last they replied.

‘Deacon gaoled us in a Coffin. You do remember, don’t you? You and Mr Mageye were there filming the event.’ They spoke almost accusingly. ‘He is destined to be our liberator. Gaoler. Liberator. What a paradox. We bank on him. We teach his name. Deacon fell from the stars to expose centuries and generations in conquistadorial regimes in which populations were decimated and buried yet liberated in colonial history books. The legacy is strong. It encompasses all our presidents, prime ministers, etc. It encompasses the business of politics, industry, statecraft,
education
, everything. Burial. Liberation.’

‘Everything depends,’ I said, poking my head onto the gambling table, ‘on how we shoulder such legacies in order to take responsibility for our own fate enmeshed into the fate of others in ourselves. We need to go beyond politics and history …’

They eyed me severely as if my head had been draped in a veil. Then they put their lips against my ears which were plainly visible.

‘Let us put it like this, Francisco. Deacon is a cross-sectional apparition, at one level, of our residences in the Prisoner, our fate in the Prisoner, the gift of freedom bestowed upon us by the Prisoner.’

The smooth run of their voices filled me with misgiving.

‘You, Francisco,’ they declared, ‘may see us as thieves or tricksters but remember! we play interchangeable roles. Savage. Civilized.’ There was a hiss now to their voices. ‘We play voices in a crowd. We play that we fall on our knees, as you do, beside the Prisoner.’ I swore they were surreptitiously changing their masks as they leaned closer to my veiled or shadowed head on the table before them. ‘How can the rich save the poor,’ they demanded, ‘the poor the rich, the thief the saint, the saint the thief, the judge the judged, the judged the judge, unless they discard contentment, or self-righteous creed, self-righteous parasitism, and build
dimensions of self-confessional, self-judgemental art, that take them into recesses and spaces that may pull them
into
and
beyond
themselves? Unless this happens in the theatre of civilizations evolution remains a WASTE LAND and religion contracts into a Void. Yes, the Prisoner sometimes seems the architect of the Void in his uncertainties as to the nature of freedom in art, in science.’

Their voices grew blunt as if they had reversed their killing knives into self-confessional relics of terrifying Spirituality, terrifying necessity to change the music at the heart of the Sun, the heart of creation.

‘So Francisco!’ A drum in my senses throbbed.

‘So Francisco!’ they repeated. ‘We know the danger you are in. Yet the possibilities of a re-visionary surgery of Spirit! An old/new head. A new/old responsibility. You descended into the Grave with your twin even as we were pushed there by Deacon when he lassoed the Horses of the Moon. And believe me our protean reflections – inbuilt reflected exploiters, inbuilt reflected exploited – will pursue you should you escape from the Grave …’

The odd way they put it – ‘our reflections will pursue you
should
you
escape
from
the
Grave
’
– was a blow that I could not fathom. As though they had sliced my head from my body with their sharp/blunt knives and I would need to strengthen my frame, my tissues, my muscles to replace it with another. ‘Believe us!’ they cried. ‘You will see. We shall elect Deacon …’ Was it a threat? Was it a promise?

A howl blotted out their operatic voices. It smote me like a calm, a howling calm that replaces a silent storm. My emotions were turned upside-down. It was the howl of the interchangeable masks in the crowds of ghost-actors, hollow shouting silent masks, around the Prisoner. He had thrown another round of dice.

I wormed my way to the wall of the Grave. Time to attempt to leave, to prepare myself, time to strengthen limbs, gain tissues, muscularity, to bear another head after a mystical decapitation.

The tone of the crowds began to change.
I
swore
I
heard
rushing
footsteps
.
Had they seen me? Were they intent on pulling me back? I clung to a ripple of muscularity in the wall. I clung to ribbed
sculptures. The hands that sought to pull me back into the Grave imbued me with the fiercest energy to turn heaven’s brow upon them. Heaven’s brow in place of every skull. I flattened myself into a guest of heaven that the Prisoner had promised in the art of Bonampak.

I turned the Shadow of that brow, angel’s uncertain brow, upon them as they scrambled in the sculptures around me to pull me back. They hesitated. Their outstretched, carven hands upon the wall loosened their grip upon me. They seemed to see me differently from how I saw myself. I was still Francisco Bone. How hard to conceive of myself in a pagan mural of the LAND OF THE DEAD as a guest of heaven … I was veiled from myself within ruses of the Imagination that I could scarcely bear. They saw the veil that topped my Nemesis Hat as it began to descend upon my strengthened shoulders. They saw the rivets and the holes as well to take the new Mask. This was the key to my escape from the Grave. I had a key in the tattoo on my arm to gain entry. Now I possessed another key in ancient/modern sculpture to return to the upper air.

Marie of Port Mourant and Deacon were married in Crabwood Creek in the third week of March 1954.

A week or so before the wedding the Prisoner of Devil's Isle arrived on the Courantyne coast and was promptly arrested by the Inspector of Police. It was not the first occasion that he had visited the Courantyne, been arrested and sent back to French Guyana. The first time he came an accident happened which resulted in the death of Marie's Indian parents before her adoption by the Doctor at the Port Mourant Hospital. The Prisoner – despite all this – claimed that he was Marie's true father.

On his arrest – a week or so before the wedding – I followed and slipped into the cell where he was taken.

‘We shall have to ship you back in chains to French Guyana from British Guyana‚' said the Inspector.

‘I must see my daughter‚' said the Prisoner.

‘Your daughter? Who is she?'

‘The nurse Marie at the Hospital.'

The Inspector pretended amazement.

‘Marie is the Doctor's daughter!'

‘Not so, Inspector. Not so. The Doctor is her putative father. I am her father.'

‘The Doctor is a God‚' said the Inspector softly. ‘He runs the Hospital. He's a scientist. He sees through frames and codes of superstition.'

‘I am an old God‚' said the Prisoner. ‘I am the embodiment of untranslated fiction, the embodiment of the Void. I need to see her before she marries a fallen angel. Angels are of the Void. They are the embodiment of an art that we should take seriously. Deacon was inoculated, wasn't he, with the bite of the Scorpion.'

The Inspector stared at the Prisoner and became indulgent. He prided himself on being a tolerant man. Poor devil the Prisoner was! One should pity him … He could not resist murmuring however – with a taste or rumble of mockery in his voice: ‘One day I shall write a book of folk legends. You scrambled ashore
with a rag on your back and now you claim to be a God. Fallen angels! Scorpions! I ask you. I have heard it all. Do you know I myself am written into the stars as the magus of the Law in these parts? …'

I was tempted to interrupt the Inspector – from my recess in the Prisoner's cell – and to say: ‘There are prisoners and prisoners – we are all prisoners – sometimes it seems that we are all made in the image of an eternal Prisoner …
Except
that
the
gravity
of
freedom
seems
so
real
that
freedom
must
be
true
… It's a matter of broken archetypes that tests us sometimes beyond endurance and yet we must continue to be tested … Magus of the law, Inspector! What does it mean? What does this mean? Are not law and love parts of a whole archetype which baffles us as lightning baffles the sky? And yet we glimpse it as if by chance at times, within the immensity of a cosmic gamble which weaves together a diversity of sciences and traditions. These overlap within proportionalities of “music” in the “word”, well-nigh uncontainable word in music, uncontainable music in word, to revive the energy of endurance and sacrifice that would be incomprehensible
without
the
gravity
of
freedom
.
Is freedom rooted in an obscure premise of evolution that bears on all being and indeed non-being, all dimensionalities (past and present and future) …? Perverse Reverend Jonah Jones of the Whale – who boasted that he fucked heathens as a stick with which to strike his civilization – is twin to the poor Prisoner in this cell who claims to be the father of Marie! It seems outrageous. It seems alien. Perversity in the family of gods and humans and all species is a measure of alienation that we embrace within the gravity of freedom. Is this not so, Inspector? How else may we begin to endure the mystery of love that prompts us to see ourselves differently within a whole universe, within parallel universes, within the holocaustic, nuclear games that we play with one another? Through such alienation we may plumb some grain of innermost repentance within a fabric of hostilities that “space” itself engenders, inner spaces, outer spaces, inner bridges, outer bridges, finities, and infinities … We may begin to be incredibly whole, a journey beyond fear …'

The Inspector did not hear a syllable or a word. If he had he
would have labelled me a poor Jester in the image of Mr Mageye perhaps.

His rumbling mocking voice ran through the Prisoner's cell. ‘I am one of three magi at the cradle of Francisco Bone's
Dream-book
! Mr Mageye the Jester is another. And damn it all – who would believe it? – the Doctor in the Hospital is the other. Have you heard of Francisco Bone? I ask you, Prisoner of Devil's Isle.' The Prisoner bowed his head in consenting to the mystery of love and sacrifice that tied him to all cultures, species, imaginations in the name of the gravity of freedom.

The Inspector insisted: ‘Have you heard of Bone, you god-damn awful Prisoner? He and Deacon were Scholarship Boys. It's a long fragmented archetypal narrative. Read the Dream-book! Can you read, Prisoner? They became friends in San Francisco. It's recorded, I would imagine, in Jonah Jones's log-book in the Whale of the sun in Jonestown. Francisco and Deacon returned to British Guiana every year to keep in touch with freedom fighters. A month's holiday or so. Francisco and Deacon were American Guyanese – if one may distinguish them jokingly, self-mockingly, from English Guyanese who study at universities and colleges in England. Two different prisons you see within a fabric of broken archetypes. Sometimes English law seems alien to American law and vice versa. That's how Deacon – an American Guyanese – wooed Marie. He's been in love with her since childhood. So he claims. Jonah Jones of the Whale by the way signed himself in his log-book as a Prisoner of Classics of Anger! Yes, the ramifications of the broken archetype are startling but true when you ponder upon it. Perhaps they throw some light on why Jonah Jones and Francisco Bone and Deacon sought to build a new world they christened Jonestown in the Void of Guyana. As for Bone's other magi … I have spoken of them, have I not? I am infected at times by amnesia from which the Dream-book suffers! I have mentioned Mr Mageye, I think, and Marie's father, the Doctor in the Port Mourant Hospital …'

‘
Putative
father,' the Prisoner interrupted. ‘Get your facts straight. Putative father.'

‘Putative then. Have it your own way. The fact or fiction remains that he's another magus. The third, I repeat, is Mr
Mageye, the head teacher from Albuoystown.' He laughed to split his sides … And a key fell out into my hands (I was still hidden in the cell), a key to the prison of the Void. At last I was in possession of the magus-Inspector's gift. Marie's Wheel was the magus-Doctor's, a futuristic Camera was Mr Mageye's.

‘Eponymous magi are the foundations of a new world that takes its variable name from magus-Law, magus-Medicine, magus-Jest. Call the new world LAW/MEDICINE/JEST in an age of injustice, of a sickness of the soul, yet curiously redemptive and divine comedy. So I am told,' said the Prisoner. ‘But tell me again,' he said wryly, ‘how do you
know
all these things? Is it hollow folklore or is it the universality of a collective unconscious that secretes itself in the elements that we breathe or consume, in the sun's blood as in our blood, in the elements that consume us in turn though we may be oblivious of the teeth of fire or air, of dread, dread companionships that loom unseen within us and around us until we
see
and change and become open to changes undreamt-of within the very fabric of things that we dread, a conversion of dread into a womb of imagination, moral twinships with all species and things? Such a conversion seems an impossibility yet it is the seed or grain of knowledge that anticipates unexpected varieties of knowledge, knowledge that recovers lost foundations of knowledge, wastelands, gravelands, Skeleton-twins, netherworlds, blocked they seem yet susceptible to innermost self-confessional convertibility, innermost,
redemptive
, self-judgemental vessel of resource … Yes, it is this. Such a conversion is this. Or it is nothing. It is hollow folklore. Is it hollow folklore?'

The Inspector grew uneasy all at once. He was cut to the bone by the taunt. ‘How does one know anything?' he murmured in protest. Was it protest or was it uncanny, unselfconscious collusion? I wondered.

‘How does one know anything?' the Inspector murmured. ‘How does one know of the genesis parting of the Red Sea? Was it the genesis of blood or of rain? Or the existence of El Dorado? Was it gold or was it straw? Or the flood upon Plato's Atlantis? Was Plato a philosopher or a frustrated voyager? Or Toussaint's letters
to his generals in Haiti? He was an illiterate. Did he write in letters of fire? Were the sayings of Christ uttered by him or by voices in numinous rocks and trees? Were numinous rocks and trees
mass-media
television accompanying him as Mr Mageye's Camera claims to circumnavigate Teresa of Calcutta? How does one travel with the speed of light that remains constant in all circumstances? Common sense falters. But the lame who extend their limbs into mystical faculties may know for sure.'

‘You are the magus-Law,' said the Prisoner, ‘you should know. The Law is a star for all magi. The Law is an eponymous Shadow of Nemesis against which the light of a star – long extinct – still bends. Shadow is a caveat in the
name
of Light or long-vanished stars, of whose disappearance we do not yet know, across the light-years. Eponymous Shadow of Nemesis wears the name of apparitional and concrete heartlands of Light to address the materialism and cultural hubris of our age … Does Einstein's ghost roll dice in mathematics of Chaos?'

The Inspector looked chastened but it was his turn – in the strangest collusion of lips between the Prisoner and himself – to taunt the Old God of Devil's Isle. ‘We move and have our being in a Void,' he said. ‘That is all we know and hope to know. So don't knock folk legends, Prisoner, by pretending you are superior to them.'

‘I thought you were doing the knocking,' said the Prisoner.

I listened with beating heart, mind and heart, to the
conversation
between the Prisoner and the Inspector.

Beating mind, beating heart, like a bird's in the palm of the old Prisoner or God.

Equally his heart, his mind, beat in my three-fingered hand.

Were we both prisoners of the Void?

Not entirely. But I had to confess I was a feature of shadow myself with a Bag or a Hat over my head. Had I not returned from the future into the past – from Winter 1978 in Jonestown to March 1954 in Port Mourant and Crabwood Creek – from holocaust in Jonestown to Port Mourant's and Crabwood Creek's impending wedding of Deacon and Marie?

I had been here before in my Dream-book but I had returned
again. The tragedy of Jonestown had left me stunned but I needed to revisit the scene and the entire environment – not only interior but coastal – in which it had occurred to learn of the foundations of doomed colonies, cities, villages, settlements, ancient and modern, by retracing my steps, by accepting my wounds and lameness and the speed of light with which one travels back into the past from bleak futures.

My view of the Void was different from the Prisoner's. But I was unsure. The Void for me – perhaps for him – was open to pilgrimages and to pilgrims. It was a state of affairs that witnessed to uncertainties of Home: Home as I have attempted to define it upon a variety of bridges in my Dream-book … Uncertainty of Home sometimes seemed a state of permanency; except that eponymous Shadow implied a womb of hope, implied the triple, quadruple, even sevenfold name of the Womb of space; implied for me three folk Maries: Virgin peasant Marie of Port Mourant and Crabwood Creek whom the Prisoner claimed as his daughter in the teeth of the Doctor's influence (and claim as well), the Doctor's aspiration to clothe Marie in gold – if that were at all possible – when Deacon became her political consort; Virgin Marie of Albuoystown; Virgin Marie of Jonestown, the Animal Goddess, with her sculpted torso. Three Maries.

I tried to slip out of the cell but the Inspectors caught sight of me and drew me back.

‘Not so quick, Francisco. I saw you crouching there in a corner. You can't deceive the magus of the Law!' He was smiling with self-mockery I dreamt as he spoke. Then he turned grave and cool – not harsh – as the key which had fallen out of his split, laughing sides. ‘You must confront the Prisoner, Francisco.'

I turned and saw the Prisoner's calculating and extraordinary eye upon me. He was measuring me. Already I sensed he knew me differently from how I knew myself. My best tactic was to strike out boldly, to speak boldly.

How did
I
see him?

‘I see the Prisoner,' I said, ‘as the eponymous hero of the Void which he has endured in all religions for ages. He swims, he is one-in-many, many-in-one, he is a Jester like Mr Mageye, he
appears to escape, he runs, he appears to drown but he surfaces again and again. It is said that Jonah Jones is his perverse twin. Perverse, yes, that is true. He loathes cults. He is aware of the Virgin Ship and the huntsman Christ. They are new phenomena of Spirit in his aged sight I would imagine. That's my guess. So much so he fears for the peasant Virgin Marie whom he claims as his daughter. He sees her as subordinate to the wealth of civilization and therefore liable to become a pawn in the game of religious freedom.