Jonestown (16 page)

I saw all this through Jonah’s eyes with tears in my eyes. We were both mixed in the spirit of hell and heaven and earth and other nameless spheres of creation. I saw his subjection to anger, to a kind of authoritarian fixture of wrath, as the hell he had created for himself and for me in this Carnival moment of my return from the future to the past …

Except that I dreamt of converting such anger in him and in myself into transgression against the forces of absolute
damnation
.

Was I capable of creating freedom within the content of visionary losses I had endured?

Was I capable of converting such losses into chasms of the self that would take me beyond the split mind of my age? Was I capable of leaping into the arms of Love, Love so terrifying (in height and depth and range) and all-inclusive it imbued me with dread? Was I capable of dying yet living in order to sustain a vessel or vessels of living time, living ghosts, Memory
theatre
…?

Was I capable of such staggered fiction, broken trauma, in the hell of remembered Jonestown, revisited Jonestown?

Memory theatre indeed! I laughed with tears still in my eyes. I had forgotten so much.

I looked out of the window upon my Skeleton-twin. I was chastened. A column of fire arose on his Carnival skeleton head. It matched other columns upon the Carnival masquerading queens of Arawak and Macusi women whom Jones had had in his bed.

‘There they are, Jonah,’ I said at last. ‘Spring’s hofting up.’

‘Heathen savages,’ said Jones.

‘Perhaps they would like to tip you, Jonah, into a labyrinth of fire such as you experienced …’

‘Tip me? You are at sea in the elements, Francisco. I experienced a labyrinth or net of currents when I struck my head in the river …’

‘Rivers burn in South America today, Jonah. Fire spouts rain. Charisma and hubris, human-centred cosmos, despoil our planet. And yet the omens are visible. Fire’s speech lives in its
counterpoint
with rain and river. There are other voices, extra-human voices in angry living landscapes that we refuse to hear or see. To hear what one sees erupts in the senses and what is other than the senses in a language of counterpoint …’ I spoke from a depressed mind and heart.

But then I was utterly startled, utterly astonished, to see a woman, named Circe by Jonah, standing in the crowd of
ghost-revellers
beside the ominous Jonestown river. I could not believe this.

I
knew
her
now.

I had seen her on the Day of the Dead with her child in the Clearing but had not recognized her as Circe. Marie Antoinette. I knew her by that name. The Virgin of Jonestown. What a transgression of boundaries one takes for granted. What a transfiguration of animal goddess into Virgin.

Yes, I remembered in hell. Hell’s truths …

She had been Jones’s mistress in San Francisco. He swore – when he returned from one of his drunken orgies – that she had tattooed his face and his penis on her buttocks, he was her whale, her submarine, her tiger.

A terrible sadness invaded my heart and mind.

Memory theatre in hell bites deep.

In the games that we played – Deacon, Jones, and I – Deacon had claimed me as his Carnival Lazarus-son in order to project upon me a bewilderment in womb and tomb (as he used to put it). Who were his parents? He had been exposed as an infant-child in the Courantyne savannahs. He could easily have died there. His adoption by cattle-farmers and horse-rearers was a kind of resurrection, a buoy to which he clung.
I
had been born in Albuoystown. I was Bone and Flesh upon which to project his state of orphanage. He seized me as a canvas upon which to paint his bedevilled condition of a fallen angel, fallen from the womb of space, arisen from the grave of the earth.

Orphans tend to play at parenting the globe, the grave of the
globe, the cradle of the globe. Orphans tend to play at parenting other orphans. I was his Albuoystown orphan upon whom he was tempted to place his father-mask, his sonship mask as well. Composite epic!

In the same token – as if to appoint intangible distinctions and crossed frontiers as well in composite epic – Jones claimed that
he
was the puritan father of invisible savages – invisible to him and therefore ripe for blind salvation in his Church as orphans. Heathens and savages and colonial peoples were damned but once converted into orphans they could be claimed by any parent, or state, or university, and baptized afresh: indeed baptized for the first time in wasteland fire and water.

‘Circe’s your foster-mother, Francisco,’ he used to say when he returned from one of the brothels that he patronized in San Francisco. ‘She’s an animal goddess from Rio, Brazil in the United States and I shall take her with me wherever I go. Like a fucking masthead on a bloody ship. Fire in her veins that spout to heaven. She resembles you, Francisco. Epic nonsense in a Christian age. A dash of French blood perhaps, English, German,
and
tainted African and Arawak. Let’s claim that when I fuck her I save you Francisco from taint. I recruit you in her into the Church. It’s the sanctification of the beastly brothel, is it not? The art of colonialism. Give every Colony a civilized foster-mother,
foster-son
face.’ He was drunk as a lord, drunk as an aristocrat, drunk as a conquistador. But I was bitterly crestfallen. I was bitterly ashamed to confront such theories in hell, seductive theories of the conversion of colonials and bastards within a liberal,
charismatic
, imperial backcloth.

How to transfigure, metamorphose such a backcloth into a sail upon the Virgin Ship! Not by social realism obviously, which is blind to the mystery of orchestrated imageries of parallel universes of the Imagination and to counterpoint … Blind to the music of counterpoint in fiction …

The thought of such transfigured histories flickered in my mind but I was so downcast and ashamed that I blotted out the face of the animal goddess from my mind, from the wilderness of the mind.
Not
entirely,
for
I
knew
her.
I knew that I needed to speak to
her, to hear her voice, to attempt to translate her replies within a Dream-book susceptible to some degree of the convergence of the unconscious, the subconscious, the conscious …

But Jonah Jones’s voice continued for the time being to ring in my ears.

‘She chucked me out of her bed, Francisco,’ Jonah said. ‘She chucked me out one Spring day. Imagine that!’ He was laughing and yet I sensed genuine disbelief in his mind. I sensed he was confessing within the pages of my Dream-book to something that he rarely acknowledged and of which he infrequently, if ever, spoke. A mystical riddle lay on his tongue, that a savage woman was capable now of thrusting him from her bed. Alas it was too late. Or was it? Would such an apparently inconsequential gesture – directed at Churches of Eternity – save doomed colonies, doomed cities, doomed landscapes, from charismatic gunfire, charismatic closures of time, charismatic fires, charismatic floods?

Jones continued: ‘She (that bitch) said she felt pity for me. Imagine that! A whore and a bitch.’

I could not resist taunting Jonah. ‘Was Helen of Troy a whore and a bitch when she chucked the king her husband out of her bed?’

Jonah stared at me –

‘Helen was no
animal
…’ he cried. ‘You go too far, Francisco.’

‘What was she then?’ I asked. ‘Are not queens and princesses royal animals to teach us how invaluable is the Circus of civilization?’

‘Damn you, Francisco. You are not listening to me. Circe said she felt
compassion
for me. She said she was ready now to become a
human
animal. What the devil does that mean? She said she was ready to bring a re-visionary vista into the Circus. A protectress of animal species from every quarter of the globe. Such she claimed was the new legacy of queens! Or else the Circus would collapse around our ears.’

‘That’s why she’s called the Virgin of Jonestown. She tells of the hidden extensions of past doomed civilizations and of the fate that may await the entire environment of the Guyanas if we continue to be as blind and deaf and
numb
as we have long been.’

Jonah was outraged. ‘I do not need her pity, or her wisdom, or her compassion. Who is she to tell me what I should or should not do? Who is she to transgress against the frame of my Church? She is no Virgin. Who is she to tell me I am a pig?’ He stared at me in disbelief. But then – to my astonishment – he could not help laughing. ‘She said I was a threatened species and that I needed protection if I were to remain visible to posterity. Pigs she said were in danger of becoming a threatened species. Not extinct by any means. But still they needed protection.’

Jones was still laughing. But there was a hollow ring to his laughter. I was not amused yet imbued by a dark humour. Jones’s utterances seemed fragmented. They sprang from fabrics of Dream that floated into my Dream-book. I sought to translate them by placing them together in awkward yet pregnant collusion.

PIG rang a bell within the frame of the animal goddess as much as the torso of the Virgin of Jonestown on the Day of the Dead. Jonah Jones was a charismatic Pig within the shawl of the animal goddess and the Virgin. His brutal or coercive intercourse with nature, with a woman he deemed a whore, with a goddess who said she pitied him, was visible when he held a gun to Marie’s temple.

I recalled that Deacon, Jones and I had actually begun the construction of Jonestown in the early 1970s when students at universities in the United States plastered the word PIG on campuses everywhere – not far from famous churches, famous statues of the Mother of God – in their protests at the Vietnam War.

The implicit battleground of the campus threatened to invade the premises of the Church.

I saw it translated now into the Carnival lineaments of the animal mother of surrogate Gods, the animal human queen …

Yes, it dawned on me that the animal human goddess had been at work through those students. PIG rang a bell in Jones’s charismatic Church. PIG was the animal goddess’s denunciation of charismatic politics. Yet all species counterpointed in conflictual history were to be saved to make visible in profoundest Carnival
our misunderstandings and misreadings of the past and the immensity of challenges that lay ahead of us in the future.

‘The early 1970s when we began to build Jonestown,’ I said to Jonah, ‘were a turning-point for us all. The Circus of civilization had been shaken to its Asian and American foundations. Ancient Troy and ancient Greece turned in their graves. We were still involved – if my memory in hell’s Carnival on this Spring day serves me aright – in a war to save civilization from the barbarities of communism. We all had our implicit or involuntary versions of the animal goddess of humanity and the Pig whom she had thrust from her bed. We had pin-ups of film stars, emancipated queens of the media, side by side at times with bombed women and children in villages in Vietnam. Pillars of fire crossed the ocean and the air spaces into exotic pageantry upon billboards
everywhere
. Soon it wasn’t barbarous communism that sent a chill down our spines. It was the deteriorating fabric of civilization everywhere. Drugged normality. Faster and faster cars. Illiteracies of the Imagination. It was then that we – you Jonah, Deacon and I – sought to build a new Rome in the South American rainforests within the hidden flexibilities of civilizations that had collapsed in the past. We brought all our prejudices and biases with us in
half-ruined
, half-intact form. How to visualize these, how to plumb innermost self-confessional, self-judgemental change in ourselves is a measure of truth that I seek in the wake of the holocaust that afflicts us all in a variety of overt or masked forms
everywhere
…’

‘Human nature never changes,’ said Jonah. ‘And let me correct you about one thing. You talk about the brothels I visited …’

‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t speaking absolutely of houses of prostitution but of a state of mind, a seeping promiscuity in which you hunted for fallen women and made them your mistresses. Circe became a curse. She enslaved you. Then she clung to you like salvation’s uncanny plague. Why she followed you to Jonestown …’

‘Ask her, ask her, you poor Fool, Francisco. I thought she would take me back into her bed so I let her come but she has foiled me at every turn. All this talk about the Virgin of Jonestown!’

‘Where,’ I suddenly cried, glancing through the window at the assembly of Carnival ghosts, ‘is the boy (her child) who lay beside her in the Clearing on the Day of the Dead? Do you remember the Day of the Dead, Jonah, now that we’ve returned from the future to this theatre of the past? Hell hath no fury as profound as the apprenticeship to truth that it offers.’

My Skeleton-twin may have heard my question. He looked up at me. I recalled my quantum and psychical transference into the dead child beside Marie on the Day of the Dead. I was he for a flashing moment within the trauma I experienced. Some portion of myself had lodged in him then, some portion of him had come into me. The bridges of Lazarus are unfathomable. How would I know him for sure on this Spring Carnival day? Not for sure. That was plain as bone. Would he not wear a Skeleton-mask to rid me of complacency in my quest for innermost shared archetype, innermost shared identity, innermost soul? The dead grow beyond fixed frontiers, do they not? A child may wear an adult Skeleton-mask in Carnival. Or may fall back into the cradle and may wear an infant mask of soil or stone. Or may remain apparently unchanging in a void of flesh. One is twinned to masquerades of the growing, maturing dead and the unageing dead.

Jonah was laughing his hollow, confused laughter. ‘Go to the Circus and see,’ he said to me. ‘I tell you, Francisco, human nature never changes.’

‘I tell you it does, Jonah. I tell you the sacred reality of the Circus is embodied in the layered, multi-faceted mosaic of genesis and the womb in the animal goddess who may enslave us yet release us from subjection to swinish fates, to the fate of immortal cattle in heaven ruled by a queen whose dreadful beauty keeps us alive as pawns of unchanging eternity.’