Jonestown (3 page)

After the holocaust, when I fled Jonestown, his self-mockery, his mockery of me, gave way to truths I wrestled with on every ladder between heaven and earth, the truths of fictionality in enemy and friend, Virgin space and animal bridegroom, animal masks worn by heroes and monsters when civilization is in crisis.

He was to don the mask of the Scavenger or Vulture or Eagle. Jonah, at the point of death,
when
Deacon
shot
him
,
was to achieve guilt and remorse in the metamorphosis of the whale into a
sun-striped
tiger swimming in space.

But all that lay in rehearsals and stages in the Dream-book in the future.
In
consuming
such
a
rush
of
thoughts
I
am
in
the
future
now.
I
fear
Jones
but
shall
continue
to
wrestle
with
him.
I
dislike
Deacon
but
shall
continue
to
learn
from
him.

A rush of thoughts takes me into the opening chapters of
Jonestown
long before I begin to write. I see them, those chapters, in my mind’s eye, as I quarrel inwardly all over again – in Memory, in my state of trauma – with Jones and Deacon on the eve of the Day of the Dead. An infinite quarrel from which one’s pen is fashioned, heart’s blood, the setting sun’s ink on the eve of the Day of the Dead …

That coming Day already devastates my mind. I am driven to contemplate inconsolable grief, yes,
but
within
a
context
of
rare
Beauty.
Why Beauty? As though the dying of an age blends sunset in sunrise, inconsolable grief in Beauty.

WHY ME? WHY HAVE I SURVIVED? Dying ages do not entirely die when there are diminutive survivors.

Let me – in this opening chapter that rushes upon me with incredible urgency (am I already writing it, or living in it, being written by it?) – give a trace or a clue to the burden of inconsolable grief in Beauty …

*

Deacon had been abandoned as an infant child in the Courantyne savannahs of Guyana. A rice farmer (also a rearer of horses and cattle) and his wife adopted him. An infant, a peasant, fallen from the stars! Later he became the hero of the populace, a monster as well. He was inoculated by a medicine man of Mount Roraima with the venom of the Scorpion Constellation. He gained, or appeared to gain, immunity to pain!

But this was to prove the unmasking of the huntsman into the inner burden of unspoken grief suffered by victim cultures. The price of relief from pain, immunity to pain in a peasant angel, was to uncover all the more terrifyingly the helplessness of animals of fate destined to impart the rage of stone, or the venom of marble, into civilization for therapeutic, aesthetic purposes (it was alleged); the helplessness of animals of fate destined to labour in the promotion of privileges, but never to be accepted as. equal participants in sorrow or joy or ecstasy of flesh-and-blood.

Did he (the infant peasant fallen from the stars, the infant angel of the precipice of civilization) bring the venom when he fell, does the venom lie in him or in despised creaturely souls that map the earth and the heavens in the intricacy of laddered feet, antennae,
the intricacy of wing or feather or scale, the miraculous
grotesqueries
in masks of God, the terror of God, the instinctualities-
in-numinosities
in the mind of God?

Grief lies in creation when creaturely, apparently dissonant Beauty – in its infinite, webbed or cellular or corpuscular
particularities
and voyaging ramifications – is so despised, so outcast into spare-part methodologies, that it offers little or no solace, and the therapies it provides become functional callouses or tools. Immunity to pain, within privileged orders, comes to mirror functional callouses framed into animal destiny.

Grief lies in Beauty when the unmasked priest Jonah Jones, the unmasked right-hand angel Deacon, the unmasked left-hand associate (myself, Francisco Bone) discover their animal,
archetypal
masks within the hunted creatures each pursues in himself. We are hunted, we are pursued by repetitive catastrophes, repetitive Nemesis, and our insight into Beauty – which we may gain at the heart of terror – deepens the trial of creation to bridge chasms in itself.

Or else we will continue to perpetuate hierarchies of brutality sponsored unwittingly perhaps by Privilege, hierarchies in which each theatre of inhumanity is placed on a scale to measure which is less horrendous or more hard-hearted than the last, the symmetry of hell …

The angels in my Dream-book – playing on harps like stringed skeletons – brought messages I needed to interpret and
re-interpret
into infinity, into parallel universes that seemed at times to touch, to jar against each other like quake organs or plates within the earth’s crust.

The music and the drama saturated my Dreams as I lay on my pillow of stone and the angels descended and ascended …

Yes, it was clear to me that dissonances in music lie in depth within all harmonies to acquaint us with unwritten relationships that disturb our Sleep. Or else harmony would consolidate itself into an illusion …

*

Jones withdrew the gun from Marie Antoinette’s temple. She had been loyal, she had swallowed the last drop of poison. He pointed
the gun at the space between his eyes. Time to join his flock on the
Day
of
the
Dead.
I could not stop my limbs – as I lay on my pillow of stone within the bushes at the edge of the Clearing – from shaking. They shook so hard that a miniature storm, it seemed to me, arose in the leaves and bushes where I lay.

Jones stopped. His ears were sharp as claws. He could not see who actually lay in the bushes, but suddenly he roared – ‘It’s you, blast you Deacon. It’s you – who else would dare to disobey? – hiding there. You thought to escape. I see it now. God damn you Deacon. You’re dead.’ He turned his gun and aimed at the heart of the shaking storm of leaves. He mistook the vestige of a garment protruding from the bushes for one of Deacon’s cloaks. Indeed it was no mistake. I had borrowed it from him. It had lain beside the table on which we dined the previous day. Jones’s ears seemed to pick up the sight of the blowing garment. They were sharp as a Tiger’s seeing claws.

In that instant of miniature Chaos that made my limbs shake and tremble I seemed to fly or run back into primordial memories of Maya drawings and sculptures of Tiger-knights, Tiger-priests. And Jones’s blind eyes but sharp seeing claws loomed above me in the Clearing. He was a Priest above his sacrificial victim, above an altar. Altar of death. My death? His death? His blind eyes gave me hope that he – in some unimaginable way – would collapse into darkness before he fired.

I prayed to the Scavenger of heaven that it would seize him in the twinkling of an eye before he fired. A Maya prayer!

His sharp ears however were sharpened as if the Tiger in the blind of his skull would win the Day after all, would claim me for Deacon on the altar of Jonestown; would claim me and encompass a circuit of enemy friendships around the globe. The trade in death, the trade in guns, was universal, friend competed ruthlessly with friend for the Tiger’s share, the lion’s share, in the marketplace or altar of industry …

I closed my eyes but continued to pray, to hope against hope …

And then I remembered the sensation I had had – at dinner on the eve of the holocaust – that Deacon held a bullet on his tongue or in his stomach as he ate. A Primitive morsel or bullet to be
disgorged as a barn owl resembling an Eagle or a Scavenger disgorges a pellet … I remembered in the nick of time and my fingers clutched Deacon’s stomach, pulled forth the bullet or pellet, inserted it into his hand and gun. Thus I appeared to complete the deadly circuit between Jones, Deacon and myself.

DEACON FIRED. Answer to my prayer or quantum
hallucination
of a deadly circuit!

Out of the corner of my eye I saw him standing at the other end of the Clearing. He wore the Eagle/Scavenger mask that duels with a Tiger’s sun-mask in Maya Bonampak. Eagle, Vulture, Scavenger. He seemed all three in Maya, enigmatic triple portraitures, the mathematics of Chaos. Not one bullet but three pellets had been held on his tongue or in his stomach to be disgorged in a lightning flash.

The first bullet sent Jones reeling, sent the Tiger reeling. It blazed in the Tiger’s blind eyes as if to confirm a state of Eclipse, miniature blaze, miniature Eclipse in Jonestown.

Deacon fired again with a pointed beak that overshot the Tiger’s Carnival ammunition in the darkening whale of the sun.

How old is Jonah? How ancient is he? He was disgorged by the whale to launch a miniature atomic bomb in the rainforest desert of Jonestown. Does Jonah harbour unwritten oceanic texts – in paradoxes of sacred scriptures – when darkness envelops the sun in any corner of the globe, however apparently remote? Does a Tiger’s remorse affect the threatened species of the whale when humanity dons archetypal masks, creaturely masks, and begins to dislodge the hubris of an absolute, all-conquering divinity?

DEACON FIRED A THIRD TIME. The third random bullet sliced two fingers from my left hand. Or was it my right? I was too numb to know or to care. I felt nothing at all. Nothing even as Jones seemed to rise over me again and crash back to the ground for good. He was staring at me. The sun darkened in the sky of his eyes that seemed to shine, to grow bright with sight, then to be veiled in a state of Eclipse when they seemed blind in the skull of an ancient Priest.

I lay in a miniature storm of leaves and bushes that shook as I shook. He lay in a miniature, darkening storm of the sky.

I had prayed for his death. Had Deacon answered my prayer? I felt my numb phantom fingers pulling the trigger in his grasp and firing and firing again and again at Jones.

Prayer had anticipated Deacon’s random bullet as if my fingers were already sliced before they were sliced to lodge in his on the trigger of the gun. As though the future lived in bringing me insight into answered prayer that troubled and disturbed me immensely.
I
lived.
I
survived.
But God knows … WHY SHOULD I LIVE? WHY SHOULD I SURVIVE ON SUCH TERMS? IS PRAYER A CONFIRMATION OF INTERCOURSE WITH
VIOLENCE
? I had prayed for a weapon with which to kill Jones.

There was a sudden, wholly unexpected, cry from the despoiled Virgin not far from where Jones lay. It was music. Perhaps a bird had lodged itself in her throat. I saw her broken body, I felt myself in that breach, in that terrible womb, I was drawn out into the shadowy resurrection of the child beside her. ME! That child and I seemed now closely knit together, he lying there, I here.

We lay within another prayer or traumatic dream-text prompted by grave extremity when the mind trips into the body, the body into the mind: a prayer-text to live
but
not through intercourse with violence.
That other prayer released one
awkwardly
, with uncertainty, to visualize vistas stretching into ‘pasts’ prior to the genesis of violence, the genesis of conquest. An extreme prayer it was to the Virgin with a bird in her throat on the uncanny battlefield of Jonestown. An extreme prayer I dimly remembered now within the palimpsest of the womb, the intricate layers of the womb – more mysterious than the Brain’s –
half-erasures
, half-painted new visibilities within the temple (temple it was despite everything) of a mother’s, a bride’s, battered body …

A prayer I dimly remembered now that lay on my lips, one half of my lips, even as the deadly circuit or plea to Deacon lay on the other.

Did the child’s silenced utterance lie on one half of my lips? Did my call to his mother lie on the other half of his?

Such is the potency of language to make the dead speak through every diminutive survivor in the living body of humanity. Such language involves us in chasms that need to be
crossed and explored … Intercourse with reality through the Virgin is shorn of violence …

Such is the impossible/possible womb of the Virgin from which Christ sprang, a womb that lay paradoxically in pre-Christian pasts, a womb prior to the genesis of history, the genesis of religion, a womb dimly perceived through a haze of hideous violence, a womb that encompasses – or responds to – a different prayer from circuits rooted in intercourse with violence …

The despoliation of mothers of humanity everywhere
augments
(what a paradox!) the necessity to
break
or
erode
compulsions to batter or rape …

To be born of the Virgin now, in a hideously violent world, is to glimpse within the numinous terror of the womb voices of hope that nest in the throat of the earth’s bombed towns, or cities, or famine-stricken theatres of Mankind …

I
tried
to
assemble
some
measure
of
meaning as I dreamt all over again that I lay on my pillow of stone at the edge of the Clearing in Jonestown
…

What is the meaning of history, what is meaning? It is null and void until one sifts varieties of prayer, some perverse, some desiring revenge for evils one has suffered, others steeped in
non-intercourse
with violence … Not easy to put! Except to say that a capacity
prior
to
violence
makes one see how tribal are pacts or institutions founded on coercion and conquest.

To glimpse this abhorrent tribalism is to begin to question all one’s premises and to look backwards into the mists of time for alternative creations, alternative universes, alternative parallels – so to speak – imbued with different weddings and marriages to reality.

‘True I cannot deny the difficulty in such alternative parallels in the mathematics of the Soul,’ I said to the Virgin as I prayed. ‘Yet
you
intervene to break or erode the charisma of catastrophe built on intercourse with absolute violence.