A howl blotted out their operatic voices. It smote me like a calm, a howling calm that replaces a silent storm. My emotions were turned upside-down. It was the howl of the interchangeable masks in the crowds of ghost-actors, hollow shouting silent masks, around the Prisoner. He had thrown another round of dice.
I wormed my way to the wall of the Grave. Time to attempt to leave, to prepare myself, time to strengthen limbs, gain tissues, muscularity, to bear another head after a mystical decapitation.
The tone of the crowds began to change. I swore I heard rushing footsteps. Had they seen me? Were they intent on pulling me back? I clung to a ripple of muscularity in the wall. I clung to ribbed sculptures. The hands that sought to pull me back into the Grave imbued me with the fiercest energy to turn heaven’s brow upon them. Heaven’s brow in place of every skull. I flattened myself into a guest of heaven that the Prisoner had promised in the art of Bonampak.
I turned the Shadow of that brow, angel’s uncertain brow, upon them as they scrambled in the sculptures around me to pull me back. They hesitated. Their outstretched, carven hands upon the wall loosened their grip upon me. They seemed to see me differently from how I saw myself. I was still Francisco Bone. How hard to conceive of myself in a pagan mural of the LAND OF THE DEAD as a guest of heaven … I was veiled from myself within ruses of the Imagination that I could scarcely bear. They saw the veil that topped my Nemesis Hat as it began to descend upon my strengthened shoulders. They saw the rivets and the holes as well to take the new Mask. This was the key to my escape from the Grave. I had a key in the tattoo on my arm to gain entry. Now I possessed another key in ancient/modern sculpture to return to the upper air.
Roraima’s Scorpions
In the hollow of God – whether water or fire – there is no discrimination. Everyone arrives and departs in mutual body and mutual ghost. This is the ‘architecture of pilgrimages’. The pilgrims come and go ‘seven times in a minute’.
What is a minute or a number (whether seven or zero on the Earth)? It is above and below, it is diversity and uncanny twinships, in the creation and fall and rehabilitation of time.
Francisco Bone’s summary and translation of the Mayan Itzá or Izté Oracle at Chichén and other places of sacrifice
Marie of Port Mourant and Deacon were married in Crabwood Creek in the third week of March 1954.
A week or so before the wedding the Prisoner of Devil’s Isle arrived on the Courantyne coast and was promptly arrested by the Inspector of Police. It was not the first occasion that he had visited the Courantyne, been arrested and sent back to French Guyana. The first time he came an accident happened which resulted in the death of Marie’s Indian parents before her adoption by the Doctor at the Port Mourant Hospital. The Prisoner – despite all this – claimed that he was Marie’s true father.
On his arrest – a week or so before the wedding – I followed and slipped into the cell where he was taken.
‘We shall have to ship you back in chains to French Guyana from British Guyana‚’ said the Inspector.
‘I must see my daughter‚’ said the Prisoner.
‘Your daughter? Who is she?’
‘The nurse Marie at the Hospital.’
The Inspector pretended amazement.
‘Marie is the Doctor’s daughter!’
‘Not so, Inspector. Not so. The Doctor is her putative father. I am her father.’
‘The Doctor is a God‚’ said the Inspector softly. ‘He runs the Hospital. He’s a scientist. He sees through frames and codes of superstition.’
‘I am an old God‚’ said the Prisoner. ‘I am the embodiment of untranslated fiction, the embodiment of the Void. I need to see her before she marries a fallen angel. Angels are of the Void. They are the embodiment of an art that we should take seriously. Deacon was inoculated, wasn’t he, with the bite of the Scorpion.’
The Inspector stared at the Prisoner and became indulgent. He prided himself on being a tolerant man. Poor devil the Prisoner was! One should pity him … He could not resist murmuring however – with a taste or rumble of mockery in his voice: ‘One day I shall write a book of folk legends. You scrambled ashore with a rag on your back and now you claim to be a God. Fallen angels! Scorpions! I ask you. I have heard it all. Do you know I myself am written into the stars as the magus of the Law in these parts? …’
I was tempted to interrupt the Inspector – from my recess in the Prisoner’s cell – and to say: ‘There are prisoners and prisoners – we are all prisoners – sometimes it seems that we are all made in the image of an eternal Prisoner … Except that the gravity of freedom seems so real that freedom must be true … It’s a matter of broken archetypes that tests us sometimes beyond endurance and yet we must continue to be tested … Magus of the law, Inspector! What does it mean? What does this mean? Are not law and love parts of a whole archetype which baffles us as lightning baffles the sky? And yet we glimpse it as if by chance at times, within the immensity of a cosmic gamble which weaves together a diversity of sciences and traditions. These overlap within proportionalities of “music” in the “word”, well-nigh uncontainable word in music, uncontainable music in word, to revive the energy of endurance and sacrifice that would be incomprehensible without the gravity of freedom. Is freedom rooted in an obscure premise of evolution that bears on all being and indeed non-being, all dimensionalities (past and present and future) …? Perverse Reverend Jonah Jones of the Whale – who boasted that he fucked heathens as a stick with which to strike his civilization – is twin to the poor Prisoner in this cell who claims to be the father of Marie! It seems outrageous. It seems alien. Perversity in the family of gods and humans and all species is a measure of alienation that we embrace within the gravity of freedom. Is this not so, Inspector? How else may we begin to endure the mystery of love that prompts us to see ourselves differently within a whole universe, within parallel universes, within the holocaustic, nuclear games that we play with one another? Through such alienation we may plumb some grain of innermost repentance within a fabric of hostilities that “space” itself engenders, inner spaces, outer spaces, inner bridges, outer bridges, finities, and infinities … We may begin to be incredibly whole, a journey beyond fear …’
The Inspector did not hear a syllable or a word. If he had he would have labelled me a poor Jester in the image of Mr Mageye perhaps.
His rumbling mocking voice ran through the Prisoner’s cell. ‘I am one of three magi at the cradle of Francisco Bone’s Dream-book! Mr Mageye the Jester is another. And damn it all – who would believe it? – the Doctor in the Hospital is the other. Have you heard of Francisco Bone? I ask you, Prisoner of Devil’s Isle.’ The Prisoner bowed his head in consenting to the mystery of love and sacrifice that tied him to all cultures, species, imaginations in the name of the gravity of freedom.
The Inspector insisted: ‘Have you heard of Bone, you god-damn awful Prisoner? He and Deacon were Scholarship Boys. It’s a long fragmented archetypal narrative. Read the Dream-book! Can you read, Prisoner? They became friends in San Francisco. It’s recorded, I would imagine, in Jonah Jones’s log-book in the Whale of the sun in Jonestown. Francisco and Deacon returned to British Guiana every year to keep in touch with freedom fighters. A month’s holiday or so. Francisco and Deacon were American Guyanese – if one may distinguish them jokingly, self-mockingly, from English Guyanese who study at universities and colleges in England. Two different prisons you see within a fabric of broken archetypes. Sometimes English law seems alien to American law and vice versa. That’s how Deacon – an American Guyanese – wooed Marie. He’s been in love with her since childhood. So he claims. Jonah Jones of the Whale by the way signed himself in his log-book as a Prisoner of Classics of Anger! Yes, the ramifications of the broken archetype are startling but true when you ponder upon it. Perhaps they throw some light on why Jonah Jones and Francisco Bone and Deacon sought to build a new world they christened Jonestown in the Void of Guyana. As for Bone’s other magi … I have spoken of them, have I not? I
am infected at times by amnesia from which the Dream-book suffers! I have mentioned Mr Mageye, I think, and Marie’s father, the Doctor in the Port Mourant Hospital …’
‘Putative father,’ the Prisoner interrupted. ‘Get your facts straight. Putative father.’
‘Putative then. Have it your own way. The fact or fiction remains that he’s another magus. The third, I repeat, is Mr Mageye, the head teacher from Albuoystown.’ He laughed to split his sides … And a key fell out into my hands (I was still hidden in the cell), a key to the prison of the Void. At last I was in possession of the magus-Inspector’s gift. Marie’s Wheel was the magus-Doctor’s, a futuristic Camera was Mr Mageye’s.
‘Eponymous magi are the foundations of a new world that takes its variable name from magus-Law, magus-Medicine, magus-Jest. Call the new world LAW/MEDICINE/JEST in an age of injustice, of a sickness of the soul, yet curiously redemptive and divine comedy. So I am told,’ said the Prisoner. ‘But tell me again,’ he said wryly, ‘how do you know all these things? Is it hollow folklore or is it the universality of a collective unconscious that secretes itself in the elements that we breathe or consume, in the sun’s blood as in our blood, in the elements that consume us in turn though we may be oblivious of the teeth of fire or air, of dread, dread companionships that loom unseen within us and around us until we see and change and become open to changes undreamt-of within the very fabric of things that we dread, a conversion of dread into a womb of imagination, moral twinships with all species and things? Such a conversion seems an impossibility yet it is the seed or grain of knowledge that anticipates unexpected varieties of knowledge, knowledge that recovers lost foundations of knowledge, wastelands, gravelands, Skeleton-twins, netherworlds, blocked they seem yet susceptible to innermost self-confessional convertibility, innermost, redemptive, self-judgemental vessel of resource … Yes, it is this. Such a conversion is this. Or it is nothing. It is hollow folklore. Is it hollow folklore?’
The Inspector grew uneasy all at once. He was cut to the bone by the taunt. ‘How does one know anything?’ he murmured in protest. Was it protest or was it uncanny, unselfconscious collusion? I wondered.
‘How does one know anything?’ the Inspector murmured. ‘How does one know of the genesis parting of the Red Sea? Was it the genesis of blood or of rain? Or the existence of El Dorado? Was it gold or was it straw? Or the flood upon Plato’s Atlantis? Was Plato a philosopher or a frustrated voyager? Or Toussaint’s letters to his generals in Haiti? He was an illiterate. Did he write in letters of fire? Were the sayings of Christ uttered by him or by voices in numinous rocks and trees? Were numinous rocks and trees mass-media television accompanying him as Mr Mageye’s Camera claims to circumnavigate Teresa of Calcutta? How does one travel with the speed of light that remains constant in all circumstances? Common sense falters. But the lame who extend their limbs into mystical faculties may know for sure.’
‘You are the magus-Law,’ said the Prisoner, ‘you should know. The Law is a star for all magi. The Law is an eponymous Shadow of Nemesis against which the light of a star – long extinct – still bends. Shadow is a caveat in the name of Light or long-vanished stars, of whose disappearance we do not yet know, across the light-years. Eponymous Shadow of Nemesis wears the name of apparitional and concrete heartlands of Light to address the materialism and cultural hubris of our age … Does Einstein’s ghost roll dice in mathematics of Chaos?’
The Inspector looked chastened but it was his turn – in the strangest collusion of lips between the Prisoner and himself – to taunt the Old God of Devil’s Isle. ‘We move and have our being in a Void,’ he said. ‘That is all we know and hope to know. So don’t knock folk legends, Prisoner, by pretending you are superior to them.’
‘I thought you were doing the knocking,’ said the Prisoner.
I listened with beating heart, mind and heart, to the conversation between the Prisoner and the Inspector.
Beating mind, beating heart, like a bird’s in the palm of the old Prisoner or God.
Equally his heart, his mind, beat in my three-fingered hand.
Were we both prisoners of the Void?
Not entirely. But I had to confess I was a feature of shadow myself with a Bag or a Hat over my head. Had I not returned from the future into the past – from Winter 1978 in Jonestown to March 1954 in Port Mourant and Crabwood Creek – from holocaust in Jonestown to Port Mourant’s and Crabwood Creek’s impending wedding of Deacon and Marie?
I had been here before in my Dream-book but I had returned again. The tragedy of Jonestown had left me stunned but I needed to revisit the scene and the entire environment – not only interior but coastal – in which it had occurred to learn of the foundations of doomed colonies, cities, villages, settlements, ancient and modern, by retracing my steps, by accepting my wounds and lameness and the speed of light with which one travels back into the past from bleak futures.
My view of the Void was different from the Prisoner’s. But I was unsure. The Void for me – perhaps for him – was open to pilgrimages and to pilgrims. It was a state of affairs that witnessed to uncertainties of Home: Home as I have attempted to define it upon a variety of bridges in my Dream-book … Uncertainty of Home sometimes seemed a state of permanency; except that eponymous Shadow implied a womb of hope, implied the triple, quadruple, even sevenfold name of the Womb of space; implied for me three folk Maries: Virgin peasant Marie of Port Mourant and Crabwood Creek whom the Prisoner claimed as his daughter in the teeth of the Doctor’s influence (and claim as well), the Doctor’s aspiration to clothe Marie in gold – if that were at all possible – when Deacon became her political consort; Virgin Marie of Albuoystown; Virgin Marie of Jonestown, the Animal Goddess, with her sculpted torso. Three Maries.
I tried to slip out of the cell but the Inspectors caught sight of me and drew me back.
‘Not so quick, Francisco. I saw you crouching there in a corner. You can’t deceive the magus of the Law!’ He was smiling with self-mockery I dreamt as he spoke. Then he turned grave and cool – not harsh – as the key which had fallen out of his split, laughing sides. ‘You must confront the Prisoner, Francisco.’
I turned and saw the Prisoner’s calculating and extraordinary eye upon me. He was measuring me. Already I sensed he knew me differently from how I knew myself. My best tactic was to strike out boldly, to speak boldly.
How did I see him?
‘I see the Prisoner,’ I said, ‘as the eponymous hero of the Void which he has endured in all religions for ages. He swims, he is one-in-many, many-in-one, he is a Jester like Mr Mageye, he appears to escape, he runs, he appears to drown but he surfaces again and again. It is said that Jonah Jones is his perverse twin. Perverse, yes, that is true. He loathes cults. He is aware of the Virgin Ship and the huntsman Christ. They are new phenomena of Spirit in his aged sight I would imagine. That’s my guess. So much so he fears for the peasant Virgin Marie whom he claims as his daughter. He sees her as subordinate to the wealth of civilization and therefore liable to become a pawn in the game of religious freedom.
‘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 wou
ld 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!’
Jonestown Page 18