Jones kept many horses which I had christened the horses of the Moon because of their glowing mane, their flowing mane, that encircled my brow and my head at times when I mingled with them.
And now as I recovered myself in the Shop to which I had returned from disaster-ridden 1978 to Albuoystown 1939 — heavy-hearted at the prospect of my mother’s coming death — I inspected the crew of leather-purchasers and shoe-purchasers. If only I could seize the pendulum of the Clock ticking away remorselessly, as if it were a horse’s cosmic phallus, phallic twisted ladder pointing to the Moon, or Venus, or Aphrodite, I might startle my mother’s sobriety with the temperament of pagan goddesses.
‘Don’t leave the Shop tonight, Mother. Stay here until the full Moon drowns in the sky of dawn. The mind’s anxiety-ridden full Moon on the darkest of nights. One lives in two universes at the same time. Apparitional full moon. Concrete Earth. I shall stay with you until tomorrow. Whenever tomorrow is! We shall voyage to the Moon at the bottom of the sky. We shall climb Jones’s ladder. Blast him!’ I spoke through lips shaped in a child’s head upon a child’s body that had nevertheless returned from the age of the future.
As darkness began to fall Marie began to close the windows and doors of the Shop. It was a meticulous business. There were bars to be placed on the windows. Padlocks on the doors.
‘I shall break through these one day,’ my mother said with a laugh. ‘How could we spend the night here, Francisco? It would be gaol.’
‘Break through and go where?’ I asked.
Marie looked at me sharply. She seemed to know I was testing her when I asked the question. I was seeking to confirm … What was I seeking to confirm? That the invisible Bag over my head was real? I had seen her coming death within the hour. But now I was unsure. Why should I not be able to stop her from leaving the Shop? How did one convert the gaol of fate into freedom? I wanted to say: ‘If you stay here you will live.’ But I was confused. Does the gaol of fate mean life or the postponement of death, freedom death or the beginning of unimaginable life?
There was a back door to the Shop that seemed to fall into a pit. An odd kind of sensation when one revisits the past! The door of space itself seems on the edge of falling out of its hinges. It is the knowledge one possesses — or dreams one possesses — that provides an inkling of a chasm in creation across which one voyages.
When one stood at the back door the Shop was tilted upwards, as on a wave, or upon a higher plane to the street below in which faces glimmered like spray in a deceptive sea of moonlight.
Faces glimmered up out of the pit. Black faces seemed white. They had acquired the prize of whiteness. They were white. A desperate whiteness. A desperate illusion of immortality or eternity. White faces glimmered black, a desperate illusion that they were being swamped by immigrants. Brown faces were stained with the salt of blood, neither black nor white. How red is blood, how pale or dark is salt beneath the Ship of the Virgin? Beneath the Shop of Bread?
We left the Shop through the front door that led straight into the silver blood of the Moon. I saw it all through the invisible Bag of Nemesis over my head. I saw my mother’s coming death written into the sacred nerves and the fibre of her body, written into the shoes she wore that the dead woman, with her child beside her in the Jonestown Clearing, had worn.
It was as if I saw her walking above me on a wave as before I had seen black and white and brown faces walking below me in a pit. I saw the soles of her feet dance above me like bone in the mind clad in brown leather, white leather, black leather.
Then in a flash she was beside me again and we were walking in the street that led from the front door into throngs of passersby.
Funny the things one remembers! She had bolted the door securely behind her with a green, spongy-looking padlock and deposited the key in the purse with her weekly wage. The sound of a drum reached our ear with a curious ecstatic sigh and yet a funeral note. It was so muffled, so deep, so disturbing in low range yet ferocity of pitch I tried to seal my ears against it …
I clung to my mother’s hand but the sound seemed to reverberate faintly in her peaceful, peace-loving body. It was as if I sensed her transition into a Blessed Fury … I placed my mind against the drum of her womb, so peaceful yet suddenly so mysterious … I thought I heard battle songs in the distance addressed however by the counterpoint in the Blessed Fury.
How strange, how terrifying, how disturbing are the ramifications of the birth of truth in the Victim Soul that my mother seemed to me in this instant … Was this a measure of the counterpoint of which Deacon spoke on the eve of the holocaust when he and Jones and I dined in Jones’s house? He had confessed to his own failure as right-hand angel in the construction of the Mission. He had charged me to address the tragedy of Jonestown when he departed. He had nursed a Primitive morsel or bullet with which to slay Jones.
I heard it all in my mother’s transition from peace-loving slave to Blessed Fury. I heard the music that Jones had sealed his ears against when he spat the Primitive morsel onto his plate.
That music had sounded again in the miniature storm in the bushes where I lay on the Day of the Dead with shaking, fevered limb …
Was this the very sound that Jones heard in the bone-flute, when we dined, even as he sealed his ears against it in order to prosecute the pact forged with the members of the Conquest Mission?
Easy to blame Jones, but with the birth of truth — as I lay against my mother’s body — I knew we had all been reluctant to open our minds to the Virgin Sirens in the pre-Columbian bone-flute, Virgin regenerative Sirens, Virgin regenerative furies that we hid from ourselves, denied ourselves, everywhere in nature.
Had Jones listened on the eve of the holocaust would he have named death in himself, would he have sought to cancel an equation between eternity and the conquest of all species that he harboured in himself as sacrificial victims?
‘Death’s essentialist vocabulary is conquest,’ I thought I heard the Blessed Fury say, but I was unsure of everything. ‘One needs to break the charisma of conquest in oneself if one is to build a new Virgin Ship.’
Where lay the roots of my uncertainty about everything? NAME DEATH IN YOURSELF.
Does the regeneration of oneself and one’s civilization, one’s uncertain age, lie through new translated rhythms of well-nigh unbearable counterpoint to complacent symmetry?
The Virgin is a blessed fury when she secretes her involuntary and pagan Shadow-music in the bone of Mankind and in the torso and sculpture of mothers of humanity upon every battlefield.
NAME DEATH IN YOURSELF.
A terrifying commandment that breaks all commandments one associates with Privilege and Conquest.
Virgin Sirens! Bone-flute in the cradle of mankind.
How strange.
Regeneration through Virgin Sirens.
How strange to entertain the regeneration of oneself through the furies one has long feared. How steeped has one been — without quite knowing it — in uncanny dread of the masks one’s dead mother wears, or has worn, across centuries and generations, the mystical wilds or wildernesses, the mystical brides? How profound is the fall in one’s faint body at the heart of Carnival, one’s fall that breaks such charisma, one’s fall into a new birth of consciousness?
I held my mother’s hand as I slipped in the throng and recovered my footing. I was suddenly faint. Suddenly apprehensive. Faint child’s body, child of humanity beneath my greybeard, fallen from a wave of the future back into the past. Wave-labyrinth and stairway of the Brain, ladder of the Brain? Wave-labyrinth and stairway of Spirit?
I loved my mother, I stood in dread of her nevertheless, in dread of the masquerade of the womb, and its submission to death, even as she stroked my Lazarus-arm as a portent of a resurrectionary text in my Dream-book on my returning across a chasm from Jonestown to Albuoystown.