Jonestown (19 page)

‘You see, don’t you Francisco, how mobile are other frontiers of emotion in GRAVE LAND? Am I sad, am I grave, am I smiling, am I mad, am I a fixture or a fluid personality of shadow and light? Do I sail with the turning globe, do I stand still? Am I susceptible to nameless emotions? Let me put in bluntly. Do I speak truths as clown, as trickster? All these borderlines between truth and trick!’

He paused on perceiving my bewilderment.

‘Consider the key to hell within the grave. Is hell GRAVE LAND’S truths, is GRAVE LAND hell’s truths? You and I entered by the sawyers’ pit. We speak of a door through the sawyers’ pit to which we possessed a key. But reflect! There was nothing in the sawyers’ pit but a rusting lantern, some skulls, a rusting saw, rusting bolts and nuts, sodden leaves, sodden ground. How real is the key of the Imagination?’

‘It is invaluable to science and art,’ I cried.

‘It is, I do not deny it,’ my Skeleton-twin replied. ‘The reach of
the Imagination! But note the cautions inserted into that reach.’

‘One’s vulnerability!’

‘Quite so, quite so,’ said my Skeleton-twin. ‘On every frontier that we seek to cross one needs to balance truth-makers, or
truth-sayers
, with tricksters. Frontiers are obdurate, believe me.’

‘I know.’ What did I know?, I wondered. ‘I am impressed at times by such obduracy.’ I stopped. ‘Frustrated at times.’ I admitted. ‘It’s a new language, a new inferno if we are to glimpse a wholly different archetype of heaven. What am I saying?’

I stood on the brink of a chasm but pulled back in time to address my Skeleton-twin.

‘My frustrations are of a populist order. Is populism a new or an old conquistadorial heaven dressed up to please the greed of millions? Does populism mean grabbing what one sees and fancies and being grabbed by what one sees and fancies? You scratch my ass and I scratch yours. It’s called copycat love, copycat violence, copycat predator. It lays bare the hungry and illiterate body of our age.’

My Skeleton-twin recoiled a little. But then he recovered. After all it was
I
who had endeavoured to embrace him, not he me.

He wagged a severe finger at me.

‘The Cinema of GRAVE LAND, Francisco, jolts us – does it not? – even when we dream we know the blasted truth. Every blast invokes a spectre. That’s all WASTE LAND Cinema is about and GRAVE LAND makes it clear. It’s populist folly to think we can sleep with every woman or man in the world, we can seize or grab every dancer that we see, we can talk down each other’s tongue and throat across a chasm, we can bite each other’s ears off across oceans.’

‘I never said we can,’ I protested. But I knew I had entertained such follies in the WASTE LAND.

‘Frontiers are real until Love beyond all comprehension abolishes them. Chasms between us and the dancers in the field are real.’

I protested:

‘It’s the obduracy of frontiers and the spectrality on the other side that frustrates and bewilders the heart and the mind. We must learn to cross …’

‘We must learn to embrace the Enigma of Spirit if we are to see its relics breathe again, live again. A spiritual evolution upon every frontier, a spiritual freedom, is the task to be renewed,’ said my Skeleton-twin.

He saw my incredulity, he saw my desire to relinquish the task.

‘Ah, dear Francisco,’ he mourned. ‘You have so much to learn of the relics of Spirit. And of tricksters of Spirit. Charisma is not only the meat of tyrants, it is the meat of masses. And that’s a hard and bitter truth that hell engenders. Every trickster that you encounter may well seek to embrace you. I have not. Does that prove I am no trickster? Or am I cleverer than the rest?’

It was odd. Had he not said that I might have despaired entirely of the immensity of the task that lay ahead for which I was so poorly equipped. He was eyeing me closely. He seemed to be calculating the effect of what he had said. I was glad that he had freed me to accept the possibility of failure. The genius of hell – his genius – lay in its capacity to relinquish cleverness, a talent for cleverness, in favour of sifting every obstacle to truth in the fabric of the Self.

Failure that is built into Spirituality, the uncertainties of Spirituality, may endorse every relic with incalculable momentum beyond oneself. It may deepen the Compassion of hidden figures of grace across the frontiers of one’s life. It may deepen the severity of one’s hidden judges as well. But some miraculous reconciliation of the genius of Compassion and the genius of severity or judgement may breathe in one’s life when one confesses to failure …

We are assisted by powers we cannot define. We are tried by powers we cannot define. And their reconciliation is a crossing of frontiers.

‘I fail to know them entirely. I fail to see them entirely. I am subject to self-deception. But they cross …’

*

‘I used to play football in Albuoystown as a boy before I left for the United States in the 1940s,’ I said to my Skeleton-twin in the most matter-of-fact voice. Matter-of-fact Breath! Yet matter and fact had been imbued with immensity.

‘We played a rough game. Mr Mageye had told us in class of the ball games in the ancient Maya Circus. They played with a hard rubber ball like a boxer’s fist that they bounced on a wall in the Land of the Dead. It was a hard, bruising game of Death and Life in Bonampak. I fell on one occasion and cut my lips. I wanted to go to my mother in her Leather Shop but I remembered her
work-hardened
hands. And I decided to bear the pain. I plastered my lips with Bread. I spent my pocket money bandaging my lips with Bread. I was determined not to worry her with my troubles. She had so many of her own.
That night her work-hardened hands added an additional bruise to my lips.
It was a dream. I dreamt that she became a judge. She could touch me across the frontiers of Dream but I could not touch her. She stood over my bed and sentenced me to leap at the ancient Bonampak wall as if I were a blunted infant in her womb. Bread was flesh-and-blood on my fists and lips. I awoke in a sweat that dripped into my mouth … My mother was a woman of Compassion.

‘Do you know,’ I cried to my Skeleton-twin, ‘that I have never understood that Dream until now on my descending with you into the inner Circus of the Grave?’

We were strolling in pleasant fields and had stopped to watch the ghost-players of the Circus in the Paradise of the Rain God.

Rain bruised their lips.

A fleecy cloud descended and covered their head with Bread.

‘I understand the Dream now,’ I declared with Passion yet matter-of-fact Breath. ‘My mother – the gentlest, most caring woman in the world – became a severe muse or judge. I could not touch her in my Dream. She was looking at me with the eyes of Marie the Judge. She looked into my heart. I had never seen such eyes before.
I
had helped to make her into a Judge. When – out of love for her (was it love or was it fear?) – I did not go to her and ask her to wipe away the blood from my lips I condemned myself to eat the Bread of her sweat. She became a severe Muse or mother of humanity. She drove me to reflect on famines, on starving peoples who mask their hunger in a cloud that rains on Paradise still where dancing peasants are happy as larks. Do they dance now or do they dance in the long ago? I planted the seed of a
game that hungry generations play. Sometimes they are driven by a destructive priesthood or statehood to swarm on battlefields, to lift the game into a killing spectacle. Thus it is that the Virgin gives birth through her son to the necessity to look deep into the furies, into love’s fury, into judgement day fury …’

My Skeleton-twin stared at me with his mourning glance. It was he who – in bringing me to descend into the depths of the Circus that he knew so well – had opened my eyes to a Passion for truth upon all obdurate frontiers between the Inferno and Paradise.

He almost regretted it now but it was too late to turn back.

‘The hidden figures who assist us,’ he said, ‘the hidden judges who appear to condemn us, are at every wedding feast of the Virgin that is attended by the rich and the poor. They rub shoulders in hope of honeymooning in heaven. Do you recall the Animal Goddess and Jonah in the Oracle-Brothel?’

‘That was no wedding feast,’ I cried.

‘It was an affair of the charismatic heart in which an enslaving Goddess or Judge turned into a figure of Compassion. Jonah was upheld on a log and a net and given a chance to repent. Mr Mageye will film him once again at Deacon’s (and your) wedding feast. Repentance is hollow and meaningless without Muses and Virgins. Let me tell you a secret that you may have already guessed! Even as the Animal Goddess is the seer of the Brothel I am the seer of GRAVE LAND! And Francisco I
see
Kali of Port Mourant …’

‘Who is Kali?’ I cried.

‘She is a pin-up Goddess for the peasants of Port Mourant. She came from India with indentured servants in the nineteenth century who are amongst Marie of Port Mourant’s antecedents. She is a severe and terrifying judge who walks in the shadow of Marie. There again one comes upon a frontier between caring love and judgement shawl that Kali wears. These shall be visible at Deacon’s (and your) wedding feast when you both wed the Virgin of Port Mourant: concretely (in Deacon’s tragic marriage to her), apparitionally (in your retrial of the wedding and of Deacon’s hubris of
immunity
to
pain
in planting the seed of foetal majesty and great but illusory fortune in her). These are riddling terms but
you shall see. A seer tests the Imagination to re-examine all “futures” in the light of “pasts”. You shall see I trust.’

*

What was visible to me now in the Circus of the nether world was the game of PRISONERS in ‘futures’ and ‘pasts’… The game was in full swing in Bonampak’s Paradise of the Rain God.

The players were installed at a great gambling table in the middle of a field.

It was a sacred game set in a curiously pagan yet modern context that I could not easily define and which prompted me to ask my Skeleton-twin about ‘futures’ and ‘pasts’ … I heard him grumbling in response to my question:
‘There’s no short-cut for orphans like yourself, Francisco – born at the extremities of many cultures and civilizations in South America – with regard to “futures” and “pasts”
. You are immersed in motherships, brideships,
twinships
, games of every complexion. No short-cut! Each riddle that I offer in the Circus of the Grave is a promise of immersion in experienced truth – the experience of truths to be borne by you within the blending of ages and times –
not
a recourse to formula or plot …’

He raised a bony cautionary finger into the air and I was reminded of my mother’s work-hardened hands and of the mystery of pain. I touched my lips as though they bled in the school ground of long ago yet of which I was conscious again as an ingrained callous in this instant within my present age. Dream callous! Dream-conscience and the labyrinthine ruses of love and fear through which one may seek to short-circuit pain. Had my mother’s work-hardened hands touched my lips they might have bled all the more. An extraordinary game!

One field of the past overlaps another riddling future in the Circus of the Grave when the dice are cut from Bone. Cut from my Skeleton-twin’s cautionary finger.

‘Cut also,’ said my Skeleton-twin, ‘from the bone beneath the flesh of the two fingers sliced from your hand, Francisco, in Jonestown from Deacon’s apparently random bullet.’

‘Do you mean,’ I cried, ‘that the dice are cut from
me
?
And from
you
?’

‘And from the Virgin’s work-hardened nails as well …’

It was a cunning Jest of the crucifixion of the globe that Mr Mageye would have envied.

‘The ancestry and progeny of the dice in the Paradise of the Rain God – in a pagan Grave as much as a Christian Grave – are the substance of new riddles of the mystery of pain and the hubris that we now entertain of immunity to pain.’

I studied the players closely as they threw the dice which bounced it seemed in my own flesh upon the table. I felt I was in danger of being torn to shreds by Maya peasants and savages. But a Prisoner came forward. He was surrounded by a crowd of dancers who shuffled up to him and touched him.

‘They should be unable to touch him,’ I cried in alarm.

The Game in the Nether World had now become a battle: passions, emotions, spectres, realities, crossings, recrossings, judges, graces. But by and large the Game was steeped in terrors and uncertainties. Fear lit the Circus of the Grave. And I feared for my life. Grave Land. Nether World. Uncanny Circus. Staggered identities or names of Fear. Fear ran riot on the field. I would be unable to return to the Virgin Ship. Would I make it? Would I escape? Fear cooled a little within me. The riot seemed to subside. But all the danger signals remained.

No sign of my guide, seer, Skeleton-twin.

I looked for him at the heart of the scrum but he was not to be seen. The battle that ensued was fought, or played, at the gambling table in the field of the Paradise of the Rain God.

It was a battle over the Pagan Body (its susceptibility to the elements), Pagan Sport, Pagan Riot, Pagan Economies in Third Worlds, Second Worlds, First Worlds …

The Pagan Body had long seemed irrelevant to Western and Eastern, Northern and Southern ideologies. Yet one caught a glimpse of intrinsic paganism in the embalmed frames of charismatic warriors or revolutionaries or saints. One caught a glimpse of a family of Skeleton-twins fleshed with
natural-seeming
, unnatural flesh within the gloom and the glitter of sarcophagi open to tourists: Moscow, Vietnam, ancient and modern Egypt and Rome.

Such glimpses led me to fight for Breath to save my own life. And yet I was convinced of the complexities of resurrectionary pulse within the wrappings of the Pagan Body.

I heard the sudden clamour of giants of chaos that Deacon had embalmed in a coffin in Crabwood Creek when he lassoed the Horses of the Moon and the riders on their backs. Were Third World Presidents and Prime Ministers of Guyana and Brazil in that Coffin?