Jonestown (26 page)

‘As you see, Francisco,' Mr Mageye continued, ‘Kali dances with you. A dread Goddess. But do not fear. She has conscripted you as another lame – shall I say inoffensive? – giant. She wheels
you around with Legba and Siva. But look …' he paused. I was horrified at what I now saw. Kali was also wheeling in her numerous arms strangled female infants.

‘Good God,' I cried. ‘It's impossible. She is the guardian of the Virgin.'

‘She is,' said Mr Mageye. ‘We all are, aren't we? Up and down streets and highways and in the byways – in planes that sail in the sky, in trains, in buses, in saloons, in brothels for that matter – the Virgin resides protected in someone's handbag or pocket or wallet. Is it superstition, or is it a promise of welfare, or is it an insurance? Yes, we are all guardians … But economic necessity is a plague. Hell is everywhere around us despite heaven. Kali kills out of brutal economic necessity. The male child is privileged, the female is sometimes a liability. I know it's hideously perverse.
Kali is associated with the guardianship of the Virgin yet kills infant females! It's a bleak parable, civilization fuels Kali, civilization sustains her, when economic necessity incorporates violence into itself and Love, the Virgin's Love, becomes an ornament
. The chasm between necessity and love needs to be bridged ceaselessly … Unless it is bridged the male child freezes into stone, the saviour-archetype is blunted. All this runs deeper than gender. Archetypes run deeper than gender. Their manifestation is partial at the best of times. We need to read them in their broken fabric, we need to read differently. Remember Herod slew
male
infants in panic and cold-hearted
self-interest
at the thought of the coming of a saviour that might shake the walls of his kingdom. When one reads reality differently from slavish alignment to literal frame or code, when one reads by way of indirections that diverge from formula or frame, by way of weighing another text (a hidden text) in a given text,
then
the privileged male discloses privilege as a form of perversity, a trauma, that cracks open to hint at the saviour-archetype dressed in partialities and biases that civilization should never absolutize or it is forever trapped in the venom of history.

‘Likewise the pathetic female infant on Kali's wheel may still break the shell of brute economic necessity to reveal the
Virgin-archetype
on the Cross of the Wheel. The chasm between gender, male and female, is momentarily bridged …'

I listened silently and was nudged by my Dream-book into contemplating American Indian peoples that were decimated since the Conquest. Was this decimation driven by brute economic necessity?

‘God help children if we succumb to the tyranny of gender and expunge mixed origins in the body of the archetype,
saviour-archetype
, Virgin-archetype.'

‘Children? What children, Deacon?' Jones demanded.

Jonah Jones was a naturalist in accepting changeless vice, changeless virtue, the naturalism of the charismatic pulpit, the charismatic preacher pledged to incorrigible eternity.

He seemed oblivious of the cosmic Spider (the Carnival attire of a Child) on the dining-room coffin. He seemed oblivious of its subtle Carnival metamorphoses as it hopped on the floor and crept out of the room onto the riverbank and into the fabric of Mr Mageye's Camera. Its eyes gleamed, light-year eyes within the cradle of humanity in the soil of the Earth; light-year eyes
sensitive
all
at
once
in
a
peculiar
and
unexpected
way
to
the
wheeling
presence
of
Kali.
I felt my phantom fingers move on
my
hand that had been despoiled by Deacon's bullet on the Day of the Dead even though they were alive now, it seemed, in the cosmic Spider.

Jones's addiction to changelessness made him oblivious of such
sensitivity
attuned
to
a
changing
nature
of
natures
within myself and within a cosmic Child or saviour-archetype or Spider quest in the stars and upon the Earth.

The Spider knew how unprepossesing it was, it knew the terror it could infuse into others. He (or It) knew it had edged itself into the lineaments of the nightmare guardians of the Virgin. But, on the other hand, its attunement to the mystical technology of the Gods, exercised in my phantom fingers, gave it a grasp or hold on the Virgin's
unconditional
love
…

Outcast from heaven it seemed to be (yet so was Prometheus). It dined at its master's table in the rafter of coffins, it instigated worms and fishes to transmute themselves into stars beside the Scorpion signature of lightning that breaks the door of the tomb.

I could scarcely believe the multi-layered, redistributive focus of Carnival which I dreamt or thought or visualized in my
Dream-
book
.
Spider-metamorphosis enveloped the cradle and the grave and a resurrection of consciousness through the door of space, a resurrection steeped in caveats, bitter counsels not to be deceived by lies (an age of lies) even when nature appears to change, when human nature in animal natures appears to change, to acquire attunement to a redemptive, evolutionary capacity within a universal creation.

There was craft, there was daemonic, self-mocking humour in the Spider's Eye, Spidery ape of Christ, ape of Prometheus. And so – in becoming aware of lies as I gazed into the depths of cosmic Tricksters reflected in a Child's masquerade in the womb of space, Spider Carnival masquerade in earth and in heaven – I was seized with sorrow, with a conviction of truth one must pursue within the innermost recesses of the living Word.

I was suddenly aware of the magnetic charm and beauty of the Predator born less of the Virgin and more from the shamanic lore of Tricksters. The Spider itself was unprepossessing and without apparent beauty. Except for his brilliant Eye that mirrored the door of the tomb split asunder by lightning.

I looked up suddenly as though lightning indeed had flashed through counterpointed immovable and movable doors of the Void. LEAP … LEAP … But I held my ground in fear of counterpointed imageries and spaces, orchestrated paradox … I was fearful still of my capacity to leap backwards/forwards in space and time.

I looked up at Mr Mageye's Cinema where I was playing the role of Deacon (Masked actor Bone as Deacon's ghost-flesh on the screen). I was confronting Jonah in the whale of the sun upon the screen or stage.

A terrifying role to play, terrifying Mask to wear on my sculpted yet frail shoulders. Was Deacon satisfied with my performance? Was he pleased with my split performance as I sat in the banqueting hall and looked up at myself/himself up there in space, in the Void of cinematic heaven?

Such conflict of conscience on my part (which led me to breach or cancel the pact with Jones), such conflict in Deacon's psyche (which led him to duel on the Moon with Titan Jonah) did not
appear to arouse Jonah Jones's apprehensions. He was firm in his allegiance to unchanged natures since time began, in his mind, its slippage into eternity.

As such he was less tormented – if at all – by the lie that I had perceived in the perversity of saviours which haunted the womb of space. How to accept responsibility – I asked myself – for a lie (an age of lies), which taints creation, yet submit oneself to the trial and judgement of truth one still (however precariously) embodies …?

I sat and dined now under the constellation of
Trickster-Prometheus
in the banqueting hall as if a coffin had been raised over my head from which I would awaken, or had awakened, when I ascended from the Nether World.

Prometheus, quite rightly, broke a pact with the Titan of eternity. But in so doing – out of fear perhaps (fear such as I had felt when I broke with Jonah Jones) – he invoked the lie in the Trickster's heart. Deacon and I had lied to Jones on the eve of the holocaust. We had pretended to be one with him when we dined … Prometheus lied to cover his rebellion. He lied in order to conceal himself, in order to plot. Violence was born out of apparent necessity, necessary rebellion, necessary lies. Why did he lie? Why had he not rebuked the Titan openly and inscribed his heart as a token of life in outer space, a token of therapeutic angelic blood to revive creative spirit in a fallen, human race?
He
saw
his
chance
to
rule.
That was it! He would rule with the gift of fire though fire was an incalculable element and from its ash would spring birds of prey and predators and all the
extraordinary
– sometimes nightmare – guardians of unconditional love; from its ash would spring the Predator, the magnetic beauty and charm of the Predator clothed in bars of shadow and fire. So was the Predator born in the vein of species, in the wake of a lie which would convert fire into ammunition and self-injury for humanity. The stress of counterpoint appeared within an inimitable haven (hoped for, longed-for) between fire and fire, therapeutic heart of fire and injurious ammunition of fire that humanity employs. A chastened and chastening music was born (within Love itself) whose sublimity, whose toppling precipice of sound was possessed 
of harmony and complaint, earthquake, lightning, storm, concordance, dissonance.

I was possessed of a glimmering perception of the sacrifice of the Prisoner of Devil's Isle, the sentence that he passed on himself in conceding freedom to Deacon's constituency, the sentence to remove himself to another plane of re-memberment and
self-understanding
beyond predatory coherence. I began
glimmeringly
to perceive why Mr Mageye would vanish. The sentence he would pass on himself needed to be translated onto a page on the Predator's skin if one were to leap backwards and forwards into the music of space … I perceived why the huntsman Christ held the Predator in his net when he saved my life. The dread, beautiful Predator needed to be stroked by a Child. Its markings and hieroglyphs and signatures needed to attune themselves to changing natures of nature, memorials of catastrophe, therapeutic Bone-fire, and the ultimate hoped-for withdrawal from lies in the ambiguous technologies of Prometheus.

The surrender of frames of language to inner frames and still inner frames – in plumbing the illumination of the innermost Word – is the music and the variable orchestra of reality.

*

The ghost of Deacon suddenly stood on the stage. A ghost from within the framed ghost that had previously informed me of its wishes in my performance in the Mask I wore. It was tall and thin and dressed in a coat like the flake of rock. It stood in my Ear. It was an inner cloak within a cloak. I saw it. No one else did. I had never seen it before, though I knew Deacon well and wore his Mask. It was inner flesh within a flesh-and-blood Mask, inner ghost within an outer ghost that had previously informed me how to play the role. And now the role I was playing began to reveal an inner role, an inner flesh, though no one else saw it as the
ghost-within
-a-ghost spoke in the labyrinth of my Ear.

It was a Voice in the phallic tree of space.

‘There's a leaf in my side,' said the Voice, ‘a leaf shaped like the face of Marie's Child. Marie's Child is both inner and outer seed. Your reconception or reconceptualization of the Child must release it from my outer grasp. That is why I now address you as
a Voice that haunts your Ear. The Ear is the labyrinthine imagination of music. And my ghost-within-a-ghost tells of the song of the seed everywhere. Watch for the song, watch for the coming of the song and save the Child.'

‘The Child sings amongst ghost-children in the Dark,' said the Voice. ‘On the Night of the Day of the Dead I followed you Francisco into the Forest. I contemplated the narrow shave that you experienced at the edge of the sawyers' pit. I followed you to the Cave of the Moon with borrowed eyes that I had plucked from a Cat, from Jonah's Tiger's head. No wonder my eyes shone in your back and you turned for a moment fearful of predators but did not see me when I pulled the lid of the Night over the stars in my head.'

The Voice within my Ear stopped again. I had no way of defining its innermost tread or illumination of the fabric of the seeing/hearing Brain. It was Deacon, I knew. I was sure now in the labyrinthine theatre of the Ear and in the muscularity of my back riven by starlight – through the dense ceiling of space – on the Night that I fled into the Forest.

It was Deacon I was sure. And yet he came from
within
the familiar body or shape I knew, familiar ghost I thought I knew …

Such is an actor's torment when the role he plays becomes abysmally, spiritually true …

‘I was about to follow you up to the Cave, Francisco, when I received a blow. Imagine that blow! It was frail, it was the leaf on the wing of a tree, it was a Child playing up there! A Child's blow. A frail wing of darkness in a tree. I stopped. In bodily hell I cannot describe. No! Let me qualify what I have just said. Not hell of the body, not that, pain of the Spirit. Is Spirit Body, Body Spirit? I do not know.
You
,
Francisco, now wear my Mask, you act in my shoes. But remember the inner Mask, the inner shoes, the inner dark. For those are messengers of Song.'

He was gone.

*

I made my way across the floor of the banqueting hall. A swirl of dancers swept around me, a river of Spirit running through a Church.

I was a floating shell on that river, paper of flesh-and-blood. I was swept uncrushed into the arms of Kali, the wicked princess. She spared my head but broke female dolls on the brow of lame giants in her wheeling arms. It was a new style of entertainment to make the populace laugh. But laughter sometimes breeds sorrow and I extricated myself from the Wheel, from her wheeling arms.