Jonestown (28 page)

Every supreme teacher wears the Mask of Enigma, Jest and Compassion in ruined banqueting halls, ruined Colleges, ruined legislatures, senates, in Brazil, in the Guyanas, Mexico, the Yucatan, everywhere … Perhaps a state of ruin had been hidden but present all along, misconceived beginnings, misconceived empires, doomed Colonies, doomed Jonestown, Bonampak, Chichén Itzá.

He tossed the skin of the Predator to me.

I scarcely knew him now. He was devoid of his robes. The Skeleton-twin of all creatures! But that could prove to be another masquerade in some other dimension, some other universe.

‘Write upon the Skin,' he said. ‘Use quills plucked from the Eagle or the Vulture. Write upon the walls of rotting, colonial institutions, test every fragment of a biased humanities, break the Void by sifting the fabric of ruin for living doorways into an open universe. This is my last gift. Remember me, Francisco.'

‘Francisco? Francisco? Where is he hiding?'

‘In my Mask, in my head,' I said. But Jones looked at me, at Deacon (whose Mask I wore) with scorn.

My first task – as Mr Mageye began to leave the hall (I knew I would never see him again, and I wept) – was to collect the scraps that littered the floor of the banqueting hall. Scraps of an orgy on my wedding night. I thought of civilization's sacrificial supper which Leonardo da Vinci had painted. I had once dreamt of buying this for the Virgin Ship but could not raise the requisite millions in gold.

Was it possible to build a Ship of Bread from the scraps in the banqueting hall? Was it possible to sail upon this to seek a fortune for Marie's first-born? The Play in Memory theatre, my
revisitation
of the Day and the Year of the Wedding, required me to sail in Deacon's footsteps to Roraima, to wear his Mask, and to return with a fortune. But black-out music made me conscious of discrepancies in Memory and of a changed spatiality in time as I contemplated the journey. I felt I was under the eye of judges whose faces I could not discern. I looked hard but they vanished.

The shattered banqueting hall – shattered across forty years from 1954 to 1994 – was littered with trampled crumbs of bread, meat, fish, rice, sugar …

‘Guyana is poor,' I said to Jones. ‘Is it not time to contemplate a new Economy for the North, Central and South Americas? Guyana is shackled to an accumulation of negative dollars and interest on “futures” as obdurate and solid as Atlas and the globe on his back. Brazil is shackled to inflation. Destitution is starkest when seen backwards from discouraging futures
within
flexible
generations
nevertheless
and a Waste Land of Politics; generations that need to ask themselves profoundest questions about the life and death of the Imagination, the limits of materialism and realism, the necessity to transgress boundaries into the hidden caveats of ancient civilizations, to leap beyond conventional codes of racial or cultural individualism, and into cross-cultural epic born of diverse re-visioned legacies and inheritances …'

I began to assemble buckets and baskets of bread scattered everywhere on the floor after a riot, a century of riots, a century of hunger and orgies.

I stopped and mounted a rostrum under the screen on which Mr Mageye's film had appeared. Jones came close and waited.
Perhaps – I was unsure – he expected me to pay him a tribute. He had forked out a lot of American dollars to make the banquet a roaring success. Poor people's fees to the Doctor and Jones's American dollars (Jones had been attached to Deacon in San Francisco even more than he had protected and favoured me) were not to be sneezed at. Jones saw himself as a giant back in 1954, but now that he had returned to the year of the wedding across fifty years, the disguises that he had worn, since his death (or deaths) in 1978, had perversely accumulated or subsided into the head of a mighty dwarf.

‘I am steeped,' I said to the audience in the banqueting hall, ‘in a bottomless sense of sorrow at Mr Mageye's departure. In olden days, it is said, humanity mourned the passing of a golden age into a silver age. In later days nostalgia seemed to feed upon despair. Gold and silver had declined into lead or bronze or coal or oil or bauxite or whatever.

‘Each age and its passing – whether golden or bronze or bauxite – was neatly labelled as fate or fact within history's unswerving plot, unswerving closure of the lives of labouring men and women.

‘But Mr Mageye taught me differently. He sought to unshackle history and fiction from predatory coherence or closure that reduces communities to a desert …'

I stopped. I was aware that Jones was listening intently but a cloud overshadowed his brow. He listened but did not wish to hear what he heard. As if it were a book he turned each page but did not wish to read what he read. ‘Deacon is inventing a new language,' he said silently to himself as he confronted my Mask. ‘But no,' I replied as silently as he. ‘I am drawing upon dynamic resources within a living language that we could so easily imprison and forfeit.'

The hall had darkened as if the faintest mist of dust were raining from the rafters.

‘True,' I continued, ‘I am sorely tempted to say that the age of the Virgin Ship in my Dream-book is over and is passing into the age of the Ship of Bread built from crumbs that fall from rich men's tables.

‘I am tempted to say this because my mind is flooded with acute sadness, with oceanic misery, on Mr Mageye's going. Not his passing but his going. A gleam of hope remains in that – as he left the hall – he seemed to hint at complex layers of repentance. He broke apart the investitures of the Sphinx. Not to imply finality to theatres of cruelty … Not at all.
I
have inherited the Skin of the Predator upon which to write … The Skin illumines the Carib, cannibal morsel which one must digest and transform in oneself within the cellular organs of a new body. Do you remember, Jones, the Carib morsel that we ate on the eve of the holocaust?

‘Why should Bread – however trampled – be inferior to the horror and grandeur of Gold and the crimes that the
conquistadores
heaped on themselves when they ransacked the treasuries of ancient America?

‘The defect lies not simply in the constitution of Bread or Gold but in our difficulty to discern the innermost ghost of Bread, the innermost spectrality of Gold that can haunt us with excess.

‘Ask King Midas, enthroned by greedy cultures as an immortal. His twin was the Golden Man of Guyana's El Dorado. Midas starved himself to death (his first death or his second?) when the Bread he ate turned to Gold in his mouth, when the gospel of materialism he preached in charismatic palaces and churches turned to hell on earth …'

‘You bastard,' cried Jones. ‘You are not here to sing praises to Mageye …'

I hesitated but sensed there was still time to complete my eulogy or address in praise of my teacher.

‘Here's a quick snapshot of voyages we have made, voyages – God forbid – that are closed or over, voyages susceptible to
re-visionary
perspectives. We sailed from the age of Jonestown (1978) back to the age of Albuoystown (1939) and also to Crabwood Creek in the same year when Deacon – a mere child – lassoed the Horses of the Moon, a feat comparable to the seizure of serpents by Heracles in his cradle.

‘On our voyages we glimpsed Alexander and Genghis Khan and the Golden Man. Marie – a nurse in the Port Mourant Hospital – played the role of a princess of El Dorado and minted a
range of currencies in the Bank of history: some were possessed of the head of Lenin and Marx, others were imprinted with the bust of the queen of France who herself loved theatre and played at being a milkmaid and a nurse in the revolution until the axe fell down the precipice of the guillotine.

‘I glimpsed that precipice in the torso of the Virgin of
Jonestown
, another Marie Antoinette in the Carnival theatre of
sorrowing
mothers and peasant queens, and milkmaids, of dispersed humanity around the globe.

‘Some legends claim that the Prisoner of Devil's Isle arrived in the Guyanas in the age of Reason forged on that precipice of the guillotine. But this is untrue. The age of Reason was the golden age of the Void. The Prisoner himself was a native of the ancient Americas. He anticipated the coming of nihilist Reason long before it plastered itself on banners of freedom, dread freedom.'

‘Stop, stop, Deacon,' cried Jones.

I started. I was Francisco Bone. Not Deacon.

‘How dare you stand there and overlook me in praising this Mageye? This hybrid? It's outrageous. And what you are saying is barbarism.'

A beggar crept out of a cardboard box and touched my hand. I bent down and he whispered in my ear. ‘Mr Mageye, the huntsman and another rider have ridden up on horses from the Moon to bring you an urgent message. They are waiting outside by the river.'

I was overjoyed. I descended from the rostrum and made for the door. Jones climbed up and began to voice his annoyance at my behaviour. No sign of the horsemen outside but I dreamt I could perceive the phantom hoofs or prints in the dust. And the Ship of Bread lay at anchor in the river!

‘Where are Mr Mageye and the others?' I turned to the beggar. But he too had vanished. And then there was a crash. The roof of the banqueting hall had collapsed entirely. The walls of the building caved in entirely. And yet some obscure, hidden salvage persisted in a black-out net in my Dream-book.

‘Jones is dead,' I thought to myself. ‘Jones is dead. But he lives, he will re-emerge from the salvaged banqueting hall in space in
another charismatic crusade. Poor Jonah! The road to repentance is a long, long one.'

A key fell at my feet and I unlocked a door into the Ship of Bread and began to sail for Roraima. Epic hoofprints of the leather of horses (such was the jest of the unravelled Sphinx in translating hide into hoof) metamorphosed their grain into human footgear, uncanny footsteps, Deacon's footsteps in a space age, footprints in space, upon water, upon air, upon fire, earth, upon the Moon, upon Mars, upon space stations, upon distant planets …

Such is the logic and illogic of a Dream-book mirroring the breakage of trauma after a holocaust. Outer space and inner space begin to respond to the folklore of remote localities upon planet Earth in which angels fall from the stars and require profoundest fictionality of origins. Remote localities become a theatre of counterpoint between outer spaces and inner spaces. They cease to be remote. They are here and now, they harbour past and present and future voyages. They bring home the gamble of life in all its immediacy, pressing appearance, elusive character,
uncertainty
, arrival, departure, trial, judgement … They bring home the gamble of resources, the gamble with resources, across an ocean of Spirit trailing itself into one's Masked blood …

‘All this is rhetoric,' Mr Mageye would have said, ‘the rhetoric of cosmic Jest.' He once hinted to me that a rhetoric of Jest was native to twentieth-century epic; a rhetoric of Jest – which seeks to embrace inner spaces and outer spaces – was a form of repentance for theatres of cruelty implicit in nature, a nature in us, in our consciousness, that recognizes its kinship to hostile and deadly environments close at hand and far out in the universe, in parallel universes that whisper in a flicker of lightnings …

I sensed that such kinship is an enormous caveat, it illumines our apparently natural proneness to savage the planet on which we live; it invokes the mystery of universal repentance that runs in our blood interwoven with dread. Universal repentance perhaps, but one remains largely blind, largely deaf …

What
is
repentance?

Does repentance invoke shared extremities, shared with all creation, extremities inner and outer? Do extremities imply a
counterpoint between parallel universes, a well-nigh
untranslatable
counterpoint harbouring and nursing unconditional Love despite brute appearances, despite one's spiritual blindness, one's spiritual deafness? In the counterpoint between all extremities resides the music of a haven, an archetypal haven one never seizes though the extended Shadow of the imagination is nourished there.

One is naturally blind, it seems, naturally biased and deaf, it seems, to insubstantial premises of counterpoint in the music of space, insubstantial counterpoint between extremities. One clings to the extremity of wealth or fortune as a natural fortress of economic salvation in a cruel world … Wealth seems real; it is, is it not, a trustworthy appearance. It blazons and embellishes the apparition of Bread in a hungry age. Saint Francis of Assisi, on the approach of his death, dreamt that the Bread he held in his fingers (
I
dreamt
of
my
phantom
fingers
sliced
by
Deacon's
bullet
), with which to feed his flock, began to crumble …

It was a poignant parable of appearances. Why Bread? Why should poor Bread speak for gold, or diamonds? Why should a parable of brute appearance not dress itself up in august, imperial robes, why ride on the back of weak Bread? Unless Bread itself is susceptible to predatorial instincts and needs the administration of a saviour-Child as much as a saint?

These are riddles of evolution I am unable to solve except that Bread leaps, even as it crumbles, fish leaps, fire blazes and leaps even as a waterfall evolves through fossil apparitions of Rock in cosmic and geological theatres of appearance …

Long before Jonestown, November 1978, Marie of Port Mourant and Deacon were married in Crabwood Creek on the 24th March, 1954.

Curious, it seemed, to recall such detail, the exact date, and to forget so much, to be in the Dark about so much, to remain in the Dark about the journey which lay ahead of me in my revisitation of the past from the future.

Deacon set out the morning after the honeymoon pregnancy.

He had no time to waste to secure the bountiful appearance of a fortune to place at the feet of his unborn, soon-to-be-born son, the promised saviour of his people through whom he would rule. The
saviour-archetype is universal, however hidden. It is as much the promise of salvation as it enshrines, or appears to enshrine, wealth and prosperity. I myself had no time to waste as I boarded the Ship of Bread to voyage along the course which Deacon had taken on the day he set out. I voyaged in Memory theatre. I saw now as never before that Deacon's eyes were blind on that morning when he set out and that I (in his Mask) would need to see
through
his blindness. Seeing
through
was the art of Memory theatre, the dispossession of implacable appearance. To be blind therefore may prove a curious gift, the gift of the strange ghost Deacon had become in me, the gift of epic theatre, the gift of the voyaging part I played, the gift of seeing
through
…