Jonestown
Page 15
‘I am a free man,’ I insisted. ‘Am I not? I can travel everywhere. I can cross frontiers. Can I not?’
The Virgin animal goddess pointed to the great bunched head at the top of the erect phallic gland or leafless trunk, shorn tree where, it seemed, Jonah’s log broke into – or slid into – a belly of genesis-cloud and its flashing wings in the Womb of space.
‘Free, yes,’ said the Virgin Oracle, ‘in that extinction of so many areas of yourself may be viewed ironically, or tragically, or redemptively as a mystical unity with all creatures.’ Was she jesting, was she praying to dead Gods and living Gods in a curious sacramental orchestration of invisibles and visibles? ‘Extinction that leaves you cognizant of what is happening, or has happened, to yourself – extinction that erupts backwards and forwards into rare, epic solidity and ghosts of Carnival – imbues severances in a chain of natures, a binding chain, with a strange, obscure, tormenting faculty that we call freedom, a freedom that needs to be weighed and weighed again and again, considered, reconsidered, for the backward glance it may bring into losses that we have suffered.’
She gave a sudden, gasping laugh as Jonah’s log rose into the belly of the clouds.
‘The chain breaks,’ I thought I heard her say. ‘The chain loses itself to create a mystical self. Does not the Christian Church speak of losing one’s life to find it?’ I felt the slap of her voice in my voice. A long sighing pause continued at the top of the tree and then she continued. ‘Why am I telling you all this, Francisco? You write of it in your Dream-book when you emphasize mystical dismemberments. Have you forgotten or is it too painful to bear? Extinction of parts of yourself brings a terrifying message of catastrophe – progressive catastrophe – or of the reversal of such linear progression into changed inner lips, inner limbs, inner bodies in the evolution of the free man, the free Imagination cursed with profoundest self-knowledge. Human nature may change when it begins to comprehend the broken chains of Being in itself, a breakage that entails the gestation of freedom’s body to look back into overlapping texts of the birth of time and invoke vanished but long-suffering shapes and species within the seed and orbit of freedom’s self-knowledge …’
I shrank from the task, the trial, of Dream. I wanted to be unfree, I wanted to eclipse the rape of natures that freedom had imposed everywhere, the freedom of an Enlightenment (so different from the Virgin’s enlightenment) to send into exile all voices in nature and space that differed from a human-centred cosmos preoccupied with its own vested interests in power and wealth at any price.
I saw the animal goddess’s pitying eyes upon Jonah and upon me.
‘The future may still mother the spectral Carnival bodies of the past, Francisco. Not by purely linear progression but by proportionalities that bring us abreast of the living past in the womb of tradition.’
She pointed up to the erect head of the Phallus in the Brothel-Oracle of space.
Brothel. Oracle. I was close to despair but something was tremulously stirring, beyond the logic of fate, that I needed to pursue within the inner limbs, the inner bodies, of the Self.
It dawned on me all at once that the Phallus had broken on its penetration of floating wings in the belly of oceanic, riverain Cloud far above me but close to Jonah’s apparitional climb into self-deception of eternity’s closure of time.
A red rim or slice appeared beneath the lofty erection and mounted head, mounted by Cloud, in Jonah’s log. Waterfall log, rainfall log, that I saw through Jonah’s body? I was unsure. Within the slice of log or Phallus, feathered birds, white and dark as rain, seemed to pour like a river.
It was an incalculable spatial phenomenon or omen of genesis.
A river of feathers etched its insertion into cross-sectional sliced Phallus. The feathers flattened themselves into hair at the rim of the log to which Jonah clung, intercourse with the Sky, Sky-flesh of the Virgin Animal …
It was but a game, a perverse and derisive game at times – as I recalled it in San Francisco (ages ago it seemed) – that Jonah played in electing me as his foster-son through the Virgin Animal of the New World that he sought to invoke as a medium or theatre in which to damn yet save, slaughter and bind my antecedents into his Church, his future Church, his charismatic Church that he entertained in his subconscious in his College days.
That the Animal Goddess would return as a formidable ghost in the Circus of civilization to illumine not only how she had enslaved him but how she came to pity him was virtually unimaginable until now when I saw the broken, mended Phallus, the notched log floating in Jonestown river, leafless trunk (devastated forest that such a trunk could imply in its intercourse with the elements) … The truth was that I was at a loss now in the Circus for intimate, far-flung words to translate correspondences in what I saw: leafless trunk, hell, heaven, intercourse between Sky and Earth in Churches of Eternity.
I kept my eyes glued on the Phallic tree on which the apparition of the Reverend Jonah Jones ascended.
Was the Animal Goddess jesting (as Mr Mageye would have done) in revealing to me such Carnival Cinema of the playful, monstrous workings of the psyche?
In every Oracle a play of monsters brings us close to self-confessional, self-judgemental magic by which to come abreast of the terrifying responsibilities of freedom, freedom to liberate others in ourselves, freedom to crucify others in our hidden selves.
‘Look!’ said the Virgin, ‘the slice mends, it appears to mend or heal, it is a cross-sectional slice, it runs right through Jonah’s puritan member or log (and its surrogacies in exploited woods and rivers and forests). It mends itself – let us say, Francisco – but not absolutely, for do you not see vestiges of feather and bone protruding from it, phallic wound, climactic moment?’
I was startled or I would have laughed at such a seminal Jest planted in the elements.
I looked up and studied afresh (I had lowered my eyes for a moment when she spoke) the cross-sectional breakage, yet mended trunk, in the Phallic tree.
The vestige of wing or bone or feather within the mend, protruding narrowly at the edge of the mend, from within the mend, rushed into my mind like a sudden nest of psyche: I was privileged to see through the Animal Goddess’s eyes into a sudden nest of psyche, a labyrinth of branches and cells to which – in its inscription of sacrificial sculpture – Jonah was numb. And as a consequence he was unresponsive to the intervention of grace, the intervention of the subtlety of freedom that sacramentalized the embrace of others in their own right (without forfeiting their ancestral heritage) in a nest within the mended Phallus …
He was numb to everything except an everlasting divide between the damned and the saved in charismatic, brutalizing sex …
A host of questions arose within me. I recalled the torso of the Virgin in the Clearing on the Day of the Dead. On this Spring day that torso or sculpture became a towering Ship reaching up to the nest of psyche in the Phallic tree: intervention or reach of savage grace: sudden Storm: orchestrated elements to break the unresponsive heart.
Perhaps the Oracle was angry at my questions spoken or unspoken. The climate of civilization began to change. Extinct ages began to come alive.
An ancient Storm (one would have deemed extinct) – such as I had never seen in all my life of wanderings and voyages – arose within the Circus. It arose and stood above Jonestown which lay now – in that ancient, revisited time – nameless under the sea. The Atlantic rolled far inland from the drowned Guyana coasts of South America to the base of the Kaieteuran escarpment.
The flood was as tall or taller than the Phallic tree. It was in itself a series of Phallic waves or mounds of water. I floated in the Ship or torso of the Virgin. I glimpsed the rape of Atlantis, Plato’s Atlantis, far beneath me. Rape of Virgin Atlantis. It encompassed Jonestown, nameless Jonestown, in the belly of the flood.
In that flood lay the lineaments of the drowned, pre-Columbian New World, since the European Conquest, in every mutilated landscape and catchment and lake.
Freedom and conquest were as old as Atlantis. Tall catastrophe.
How could such an ancient, extinct Storm be the intervention of grace in the Phallic tree of the elements? The Storm blew a leaf at last in the beak of an extinct bird. The leaf was lodged in a crevice of the flood. The flood broke, the chain of waters broke, as if to mirror a sliced, cross-sectional eruption and mend in the trunk of waters, a mound of waters, on which I sailed on the Virgin Ship from which a net descended to which Jonah clung.
Curious net! More akin to a nest that floated through the leaves of water upon which fish swam like birds that flew through the air as if defying gravity yet sustained by interleaved fractures in the body of gravity.
A chain of elements, water, earth, wood, broke. A prison of conformable natures broke. And the fate of Atlantis was laid bare as a counterpoint between rape or devastation and implicit freedom still to balance extinction with a renascence (or renaissance) of lost cultures whose vestiges and imprints could be orchestrated into the seed of the future.
I could scarcely gather together the immense orchestration of the Storm that I had evoked in the questions that I addressed, murmured questions as well as unspoken questions, to the Oracle; to the formidable ghost of the Animal Virgin who enslaves us yet pities and protects us and awaits our grasp of the nest of psyche in the broken, mended Phallic tree of universal element. Without that grasp freedom’s messengers perish. Sacrificial sculpture grows meaningless and the Virgin ship itself drowns.
I should have been swept away myself in the Storm except for the Virgin torso or Ship in which I sailed. I should have been pinned into the grinding cross-sectional wound of broken, mended pillars between Sky and Earth through which one sails into the Cave of the Moon upon the Phallic gravity/anti-gravity tree.
Instead I was left to ponder the Oracle’s proposition of sacrificial sculptures that break a prisonhouse of unchanging law and logic into innermost fabrics and scales on which to weigh and weigh again and again messengers that arrive and nest in the wounds of the Phallic tree.
I had seen in the Storm how those wounds grow larger and larger, steeper and steeper, when our response to message and messenger becomes adamant and insensible and numb.
On the other hand those wounds become the inimitably complex and sensitive sculptures of science and art when our response acquires re-visionary momentum and graces born of Spirit.
Freedom then turns into the servant of Spirit not the despoiler of worlds.
*
I was grateful to the Animal Goddess for a rare vision of equations of Chaos, mathematics of Chaos, that were in themselves profoundest, terrifying interventions of savage grace.
Not that grace was not tender and instinct with incalculable harmonies but humanity’s numbness made it essential that the orchestration of the elements, abused for generations and centuries, would acquire configurations of omen, within Storm and Fire and majestic Phalli, to which cultures clung paradoxically in seeking intricate gaps or room to manoeuvre, room for the renewal of Breath, in the grave and the cradle and the nest of space.
The chain was broken within terror itself, the prisonhouse was broken within violence itself, broken, it seemed, within long-neglected inscriptions and texts of the birth of memory itself: memory’s eruptive, marvellously fissured, spatial organ sprung from the unconscious into the subconscious into the conscious.
Each break was a form of primordial, sacrificial sculpture that one tended to eclipse, or lose again and again, within a proclivity to numbness, to a loss of depth and range and profoundest passion, to fixtures of bias.
The bird that nested its leaf in the flood came as a messenger of eclipsed freedom erupting again, the nested leaf broke the chain of the Storm to match extinction with the genius of recovered omen or insight into invaluable resources and species linked to us yet susceptible to freedom through us, as we were to freedom through them.
My eye was sharpened, renewed, reborn as I sailed in the sculpture or torso of the Virgin as in genius’s Ship of Breath.
A rhythm of equations linked the Ship to the Phallic tree to the leaf. Breath I dreamt I possessed – in which a leaf or a feather from long-extinct Atlantean forests and species circulated – but as the Storm subsided I was unable to translate the Oracle of Chaos and its equations. Perhaps the Oracle took pity on me.
*
The Animal Goddess sharpened my ears to catch the whisper of her voice on my Breath in the orchestra of the subsiding Storm.
‘When one slices a chain, Francisco,’ she said, ‘one builds another intangible series of relationships. The vestige of bone and feather – you do remember, don’t you – in the jointed Phallic tree is sacrificial seminal sculpture. Extinct wing possesses minute fractions that are memorialized into rocket-ships as this millennium draws to a close. Bone-Ship rocket, Feather-Ship rocket, are masks of science whose grain lies in the mended Phallic tree in its intercourse with the Sky. Rocket is in the bone’s and the feather’s hidden texts blown to us within counterpoints of creation. Simplicity itself I would say, Francisco, when one opens one’s life to freedom’s responsibilities but an enormous trial it remains alas that is set by me, by the three Maries, by Virgin Space …’
I wanted to press her with further questions. I was obsessed. But I did not wish to arouse her anger at – despite her pity for – my ignorance. The enormity of the trial was dismaying. Should I tear my Dream-book into shreds? Did not freedom signify – despite its intangible linkage with all things and species – terrorizing structures, exploited bodies, manipulated resources?
Was freedom obsolete? Had it ever existed?
Violence existed. And the ancient Gods who were steeped in sacrificial sculptures on the Phallic tree had become, it was said by charismatic philosophers, Prisoners of Devil’s Isles.
Despite my misgivings – and the unspoken weight of my questions to the Oracle – the Virgin replied. Her ears were as sharp as a pointed nail’s in the strangely moon-like eyes of Lazarus, Skeleton-twin Lazarus. Such is the orchestration of imageries in Oracle-Carnival to move and transfigure the numb heart of humanity!
‘You need to meet the Prisoner-God of Devil’s Isle, Francisco. You will quite soon. In due course. Time is sometimes vague in my mind. Better so than to succumb to the hubris of eternity in charismatic institutions. You need to experience through the Prisoner-God not the obsolescence of freedom but the premature gift of freedom to Mankind …’
‘But freedom was present before time began,’ I cried.
‘That may be so,’ said the Virgin, ‘but we have come close – have we not? – to forfeiting such priorities in our misunderstandings of evolution. Evolution in its innermost unfathomable coherence within parallel universes is intangible. It serves hidden texts that we can never absolutely translate. Hidden priorities. Hidden beginnings prior to all beginnings. And these accumulate into a Jesting net that gathers up everything. The re-visionary truths of love, the re-visionary love of truth. Intangible as Breath.’
Breath
I am apprenticed to the Furies, apprenticed to Dread. How does one learn the complex arts and inter-related mysteries of the Furies across the ages yet see them in oneself and begin to turn them around by stages of incredible game into all-inclusive Love?
Francisco Bone
The Storm abated.
It seemed to arise within me all over again.
The relic of Storm within. It blew from some region within me that lay in a time before evolution was, in a time prior to evolution’s wasteland. How should a pilgrim such as myself, prone to bouts of amnesia in the wake of Jonestown, spell or paint or sculpt ‘wastelands’ or ‘gravelands’ and not make them excessively newsworthy in a violent age? Perhaps I should confess again to divergences built into numinous alphabets which witness to the unfathomable premises of creation. Is ‘wasteland’ a whisper of a nether world in THE WASTE LAND or in WASTE LAND, graveland in GRAVE LAND? Is ORACLE the heightened shout of brothel-oracle in Hollywood Limbo Land?
Subjectivity is the comedy of intangible objectivity that ignites the stars into the ash of genesis, black holes, fuels the sun with greed for blood in ancient sacrifice.
On such altars of lust and catastrophe unimaginable Love is born for all creatures. And Evolution turns in its grave of space into the mystery of trial and judgement each and all must endure in Memory theatre.
Evolution becomes the resurrection of spectres to confront themselves, to indict themselves in bleak play, bleak but redemptive theatre, Memory’s head on one’s shoulders, limbs sculpted in ancient arts in one’s limbs, dismembered Prisoners, Gods, woven into one’s extinction through which – as if by another unsuspected Genesis of the Imagination – one accepts Dread and the gift of freedom to travel beyond the dice of Light in one’s Skeleton-twins, the flesh of Darkness in one’s Skeleton-twins, to travel beyond all wastelands and gravelands into ultimate transfigured Bone in the wilderness of space …
The Storm abated and I descended the stairway of subsiding waters to the floor of the Circus.
There I jested with my drowned Skeleton-twin who arose from the floor with sleight-of-Breath skill. I jested in a theatre of Breath, relic of Storm.
‘Fiery customer and performer you are,’ I said to him, ‘despite your drowned bones. You have changed. Two deaths! One in an ancient sea, one in the sawyers’ pit or grave in the land. We are ghosts of the sea and ghosts of the land in ancient and modern America. I am changed too. It’s this business of relics. They bring a borderline between the oceanic lightning of the mind and vestiges of unearthly Passion that retain a spark from the blaze. One is equipped to wear another Mask on one’s head and shoulders, a fiery Mask that cools.’