Jonestown (21 page)

‘Let me tell you, Inspector, that I see the poor Prisoner – within the backcloth of the poverty-stricken Guyanas – as so imbued now, in my Dream-book age, with the mathematics of Chaos that some reluctant sacrifice on his part, some cruel rending sacrifice, is impending – I have a dark sensation of what it is – which bears on the fate of freedom …

‘I say “reluctant” for the Prisoner would prefer not to be involved. He would prefer his daughter to withdraw from the marriage to Deacon. And I tend to agree. I am jealous of Deacon. But I feel it is now all too late and that the Prisoner, Deacon and I are bound together in a curious pact that resembles the pact between Deacon, Jonah and me but differs profoundly. Yes,
twin-pacts
they are but how they differ! The pact with Jonah led to the holocaust. The pact with the Prisoner leads I feel to an intricate dismantling of the Void.'

‘Does the Void exist here,' cried the Inspector, ‘on these coastlands? Great Europe I would understand as pertinent to a theatre of the Void, or the great United States, or the great Soviet Union that was and is in “futures” and “pasts”. But here on these poor coastlands?”

‘The Void has been here for generations. Take it at a basic level. They are deemed flat, are they not?'

‘The coastlands you mean?'

‘Yes, I mean the coastlands. They are deemed as flat as commonsense prose or journalism. Commonsense engineers decided long ago in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the cotton estates and the cane-farming estates, the sugar plantations, were to be laid out in rectangles and squares. As a
consequence they smothered the breath-lines in a living
landscape
. And when the peasant rice fanner came into being he had to contend with disfigured catchments, in the coastal river systems, that would occasion excessive floods and droughts for him. The sugar barons escaped, for they had empoldered their lands into a one-sided paradise …'

‘I do not follow,' said the Inspector.

‘It's simplicity itself, but as always simplicity is a complex achievement, isn't it, for it involves us in a net of profoundest inter-relationships, re-visionary relationships. Nothing is to be taken for granted. We are at liberty now to see that the landscape is not flat …'

‘Not flat?' cried the Inspector. ‘But I still think it is.'

I paused and considered how best to explain simplicity's complexity, complexity's simplicity, to him.

‘Have you heard of spirit-levelling?' I said. ‘An odd term I know. Spirit-levelling encompasses the use of dumpy-levels, theodolites, surveying instruments etc. A wholly new
reconnaissance
of the coastlands brought to light apparently minor but significant watersheds and drainage lines which – when
perceived
in relationship – were of extreme importance. They offered the contours upon which to build a redistributive alliance of canals, drainage, and other works orchestrated into the living landscape to provide a genuine intercourse between the art of science and the life of nature within a theatre of diverse cultivation and achievements. It has not happened, it never happened, it still is not happening. Instead the Void!'

The Prisoner stared at me with what seemed a baleful eye.

‘Where in hell did you learn all this, Francisco?' he cried. ‘Was it in hell or in San Francisco College? Or was it in the Nether World? You have touched me on the raw. My hands are bruised from battering against the Void. The Earth is flat in the Void. But it rears its flatness up into irredeemable structures, unchanging
institutions
, unchanging parliaments, unchanging human nature. I have battered my hands raw. So perhaps it's time for me to die.'

‘So have I,' I cried. ‘So have I. I bruised my fists when I arose from the Grave in Jonestown.'

‘Jonestown? Jonestown?' said the bewildered Prisoner. ‘Where is Jonestown?'

I almost bit my lip. I was
in
the past now, not in the future. I had returned to the past from the future. I was back in 1954. I had learnt to survey the breath-lines in living landscapes from my Skeleton-twin who made no bones about the articulation of ridges and watersheds and contours in the Paradise of the Rain God.

‘Oh nothing,' I said quickly. ‘You of all Prisoners situated in the Void should know of mixed “futures” and “pasts”. After all they are but frames. We speak in the framed word of God but the unfathomable Creator, the untranslatable Creator, cannot be framed.'

‘I am a framed God,' said the Prisoner. ‘Have I not uttered a dark sentence on myself? It's time for me to die!'

‘Language is deeper than its frames or Gods who claim to be an absolute God.' I stopped. Did I speak in arrogance or in simplicity's faith in an untranslatable Creator? ‘The resources of a living language sustain a re-visionary dynamic. There is real continuity running out of the past into the future. But such continuity cannot be lodged absolutely in the frames and the dogmas of the past. For then the past becomes an invalid. Even the Doctor in the Hospital knows this if he is to see through the masks of his patients, pigmentations, creeds, whatever, to their essential disease … But he exploits them. He turns away from his daughter's fiery glance when she plays at being a nursery princess in a sick world.'

‘What is the future, Francisco Bone? I know – or think I know – the past. The past becomes extinct unless we
live
it in the life of the future, freedom's future – however disastrous freedom sometimes seems – and freedom's reconnaissance of the past. A jealous man like yourself, Francisco (jealous of Deacon), who slips into cells, and hides in bushes, may have something priceless to offer. Your diminutive being is a recommendation of collective involvement with others yet divergence and capacity to see what others – even myself – may fail to see. What is the future, Francisco Bone?'

The Prisoner was tempting me I knew, he was flattering and testing me I knew. He was seeking to discover whether an element
of paranoia might not reside in a diminutive survivor such as myself. Is not paranoia another wall or factor in the prison of the Void?

There were footsteps in the street below that seemed to whisper like lips of leather upon the soil. They rose to the walls of the cell with a faint, sinister momentum. They seemed to declare that the Prisoner had challenged me to become a seer, a journeyman, a prophet steeped in inventions of time, Eclipses, Bags, Nets, Nemesis, Fate.

Curious how the traffic of an age runs in one's blood with intimations of past and coming events, footsteps in the Nether World, unearthly ruins, collapsing, sighing walls and cities, a Wheel in space.

The Prisoner's life was in danger, the Old God was in danger.

I knew for I had returned from the future to the past. So I brought within me from later decades knowledge of events in 1954 associated with the wedding of Deacon and Marie. But rack my mind now as I did, a blank fell out.

Had I forgotten in the light of a wholly new element and pact that I knew – though I was uncertain how I knew – was looming between the Prisoner, Deacon and me? It evoked the pact between Jonah, Deacon and me but it was profoundly different.

Whereas the pact with Jonah signified catastrophe – and this I remembered – the
new
pact planted in the past, the
new
shape to time
within
the
past
(in this revisitation from the future) signified a mathematic of decapitation in the re-shouldering of past and future in my body, upon my body, through Deacon's absent body, and through the Prisoner's potential sacrifice of his body.

Mr Mageye had promised me that we would build Memory theatre. And now I began to see glimmeringly that Memory theatre is rooted in events one knows to have occurred even as it breaks the Void that imprisons one to create new pacts within lapses of memory within oneself when one revisits the past. Such strange lapses – that seem deeper than mere common-or-garden lapses – are motivated perhaps by a mystical crumbling of the Void … I was unsure. I could not truly say …

I crossed to the window and looked down from the cell into the
street. Looked down a dream-ladder in the anatomy of the cellular body of the Void that I shared with the Prisoner even as it seemed to crumble … I remembered Bonampak. I remembered Jacob's ladder. I shuddered with the sensation that my bones walked in air with God's …

The dancing, ominous footsteps ceased, no one could be plainly seen in the street but Carnival Lord Death.

He was staring up at the window as if he had become a transparent reservoir of subconscious/unconscious dis-
memberment
costumery and re-memberment masquerade within the Grave and the Body of Carnival.

The footsteps had ceased as if the walking dead were more cunning than one realized. They were here for Marie's and Deacon's wedding. Did I hear Marie's now, Marie's footsteps approaching mine, though I had not moved an inch in the Prisoner's cell from the moment I came to the window?

How sensitive is the mind to read a walking epitaph and a walking marriage-bed and a walking cradle in the footsteps of humanity, ghostly humanity, bodiless humanity, bodily
humanity
?

All were tokens of dis-memberment and re-memberment in the air of the Void, the uncertainty of the crumbling of the Void.

Of one thing I was sure. There was danger everywhere. There was hypocrisy everywhere. There was injustice everywhere. Fiction was truth. Fact was polished and manufactured into lies. I trembled. I was a Jester of pasts and futures in the present moment. I was a Jester of chaos, I was susceptible to a transference of masks with giants of chaos, masks to be inserted within and upon familiar and unfamiliar footsteps. But I trembled. I trembled at the prospect of the wedding (Marie's and Deacon's). I trembled at the consummation of their union in the Void. This much I knew and remembered. I clung to the notion that my return into the past from the future was a phenomenon of changed time, new time, a phenomenon of the Imagination steeped in creative purpose despite every old hedge or blanket of terror.

When one returns from the future into the past, and the past becomes once again the living present day or moment or year, one
sees into the womb of time, the womb of Virgin comedy, as it adventures into intercourse with Fate and Dread inscribed into a bridegroom who lassoed the Horses and their riders on the Moon and who is claimed by them now as their leader, their hero promising salvation … Did I remember all this or had it been inserted into Memory theatre as a new invention however rooted in past time?

Why should Time choose poor Virgin peasant Marie to marry the ruthless angel Deacon? Did one need to assess and reassess the mystery of Fate and Dread in new fictions of reality if one were to break moulds of complacency in the Void? Did Time seek to pour cold water on eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century
portraits
of the family? Fate and Dread are banished from such portraits in favour of a comedy of manners as the tincture or costumery of the moral family.

The Void is converted into currency – comedy of manners currency – with which to purchase the furniture of an age carpentered from felled trees and forests or spun from the fur, or the horns, or the hide of extinct species, extinct flesh-and-blood.

‘A dash of cold water in one's eyes in the tears of Paradise, the Paradise of the Rain God,' said the Prisoner, ‘unfreezes Memory's hollow currency as Fate and Dread revive to wed Virgin Marie of Port Mourant.
Portrait
of
the
Moral
Family
– in the novels of the past three hundred years which you were conditioned to read at college, Francisco –
cannot
sustain
brides
and
bridegrooms
now
who
have
inherited
the
Void
and
the
crumbling
prospect
of
the
Void
. You see now, don't you, why I fear for myself and for my daughter?

‘Let me tell you, Francisco – in the shape of the pact that you and I share with absent Deacon in this revisitation of past time – that I desire the crumbling of the Void – yes, I do – but one is not spared from scanning the Void (even as one desires a change) for the Void is in the ascendancy everywhere still masked by varieties of diplomacy in markets of culture. The dangers then that one continues to face in a cruel and hypocritical age cannot be underestimated.'

He was standing in the middle of the cell behind me, as he spoke, even as Carnival Lord Death stood below in the street.

They (the Prisoner and Carnival Lord Death) were
still
, all of a sudden, as if they had become eighteenth-century pieces of furniture in Church and State. A Jest of God. The cell and the street became an altar and an aisle. It was an odd apparition to flash into one's mind. But then I remembered. Jonah had favoured such furniture and architecture in his Church in Jonestown.

The Prisoner was bent as if in pain under a sensation – it seemed to me – of a coming blow.

Carnival Lord Death looked like a clothes-horse in the aisle of the Church or the street. He too was motionless. But the garments on his back appeared to brood in carven suspension as if they could be worn or discarded at a moment's notice in the prosecution of family rituals and celebrations.

But then suddenly, and equally surprisingly, these flesh-
and-blood
furnitures began to breathe in a theatre of Dread. Dread imbued them with life to oppose a system of values that burdened them with picturesque inanimation.

The Prisoner seemed to know that there was a price to the blow that he would receive in himself as an altar in humanity. Inanimation would break into genuine intercourse with Fate. He would appoint me to respond to the mystery of Fate, the trial of Fate. I saw it in his eyes as they sought to affirm the fatherhood of the Virgin. Do Prisoner-Gods pray to men to respond to a wholly different family of Being in creation?