All this was pertinent to my love for my mother, my dread of my mother. Did she instinctively know more than I gave her credit for? I thought I knew the facts of her coming death, they seemed unassailable to me. Why could I not save her? I wanted to pray but was unable to pray. I had had no language, it seemed, no word or utterance of prayer when, as an infant, I lay against her breasts and drew the sustenance of milk from her. And this lay at the heart of my faintness, faint infant body that I dreamt I placed upon hers as we moved through the processions towards her death. Not processions towards the Cross (in Christian textuality) but inwards and towards the body of a mother of humanity in which/on which one lay.
When one names death in oneself, death the hunter, death the hunted, the processions begin. A tension mounts between the institutionalization of violence as the absolute premise of the hunt — hunter in slain hunted, hunted in predatory hunter — and a capacity in the body of mothers to portray (within a palimpsest of layered ancestries) an opening into the evolution of a hunter who saves creatures, who holds at bay the predatory logic of the hunt …
I held my mother’s hand more tightly than ever.
She was leaning over me protectively. I felt her work-hardened, chapped hands upon the flesh above the bone of my arm. She had fought for me against invaders and tyrants — as an Amazon queen in a Carib mask — long before slavery began. Her limbs against mine trembled with paradoxical weakness, she was vulnerable, she was frail, she was ill (a doctor had said) with acute angina.
Her worn hands and fingers reminded me of the random shot that Deacon had fired which sliced two fingers from my left hand. I had felt nothing at the time. But now the numbness throbbed with pain. I had come abreast of the wound. I knew the sharp, acute pain now that I brought from the future into the past.
We were in an alleyway within a procession that I had not bargained for. The Moon descended and stood over us.
A tall Carnival evangelistic Cat fell upon us. Had it succeeded in crossing the chasm of the years in pursuit of me? Was it the perverse resurrection of Jones? Perhaps it had spotted the Nemesis Bag over my head which I swore was invisible to all. The blow it sought to direct at me fell upon my mother. I was dumbfounded. The facts I had accumulated on Carnival night 1939 had made no provision for this. One returns to the past, the facts are the same, yet nothing is the same. My mother saved my life. I understood it now for the first heartrending time. In my Lazarus-arm — with its missing fingers — she perceived a faint portent of an evolution of the hunt — long eclipsed in traditions we take for granted, in facts that we enshrine as absolutes — about which I would write in my Dream-book …
She saved my life. She intervened and took the blow on her own head and heart it seemed. I had no memory of praying to her in her transition from peace-loving slave to Blessed Fury. Had I not prayed to Deacon in Jonestown and to Marie of Jonestown? Two different forms of prayer I knew. But now there had been no form of prayer. The language of prayer is sometimes hidden, incalculable, formless, in the birth of consciousness.
Giants of Chaos
Three days had passed since the Day of the Dead when I lay on a pillow of stone at the edge of the Clearing in Jonestown.
I had made my way to the Cave of the Moon at nightfall.
The shock of events had been so great that I remained hidden in the Cave above a Waterfall descending into the Jonestown river.
This was three miles or so above the Mission. I lay hidden but my privacy was soon to be breached. I heard the bell of the Church of Eternity tolling a requiem mass for the dead with the arrival of the grave-digger and his crew. They were accompanied by Mr Mageye (the magus-Jester of history), a Doctor (the magus-medicine man and God of poor people’s hospitals), and an Inspector of Police (the magus-clown of the Law).
These were my three magi who were associated with the creation of a Dream-book or the cradle of Bone (as Mr Mageye called it).
The tolling of the bell may have been caused by my phantom-Lazarus arm when I sneaked into the Church the day they arrived but quickly withdrew back to my Cave. I was to discover later from Mr Mageye that no one knew who had actually rung the bell. There was talk of a high wind blowing the stench of dead bodies into the sky and invoking a chorus of bells or lighthouse messages. Some — who those were I do not know — swore they saw the great-great-grandmothers of the dead rise from the brothel of the grave to declare themselves nurses of infinity…
‘A sacred jest,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Slaves break every brothel in a sky of cloud, polluted cloud, in the teeth of their ancient masters to declare their love — despite everything — for their tragic, illegitimate progeny… Such is the vocation of a nurse in a poor man’s graveyard or hospital.’
My choice of Mr Mageye as magus-Jester of history was crucial to the creation of my Dream-book (or cradle of Bone) in the years that followed the catastrophe of Jonestown.
He gave apparitional weight and comedy, for instance, to the way I dressed, the wretched Nemesis Bag that I wore over my head.
‘Do you know Mr Mageye,’ I said, ‘you were at my mother’s funeral (her coffin was borne sky-high by beggars) when three threads sprang from the Nemesis Bag and sprouted into three blades of grass, the colour of velvet, on my mother’s grave? It was a relief, it was as if a ton had lifted from my head …
‘When I arrived in New Amsterdam, took up my abode in Trinity Street and began to write I was virtually in rags. But I felt light as a feather. The year was 1985.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘your mother’s death in Albuoystown caused quite a sensation. I have a yellowing newspaper with me. Carnival Argosy, dated 1939.’ He pointed to a headline which ran as follows: WOMEN OF THE BROTHEL AND BEGGARS IN PROCESSION TO GRAVE OF THE VIRGIN OF ALBUOYSTOWN.
‘I wandered in a state of limbo for seven years before I began to write,’ I said to Mr Mageye. ‘But all the time I was being written into the Dream-book with each thread that fell from the Bag on my head and from the garments that I wore. These became the substance with which to dress innermost Bone into the composite populace in my book. Is it my book? It’s as much yours, Mr Mageye. I am not even sure of the Day or the year I began to write. The Maya speak of Dateless Days that become a medium of living Shadows in which history retrieves an emotionality, a Passion, to unveil the facts and go deeper into processions into the body of the womb. Think of the Virgin of the ancient city of Palenque. She died resisting a Hger to save the life of her son. One of her arms was torn from her body. It gestated in space. It gestates still in forgotten traditions of fiction and grief in Beauty. There are many languages of the Imagination that affect us in the fibre of dismembered cultures that remain mysteriously whole in their resistance to the predatory coherence of fact that masquerades as eternity. The true fact is Love’s intervention in blended times within dreadful circumstances I grant. The true fact is the undying originality of such interventions. Without this art is dead. IMAGINATION DEAD IMAGINE.’
Mr Mageye applauded my wild outburst.
Emotionality and passion gave substance to his apparition in the Dream-book. It was as if one fed him with one’s blood and flesh to make him live. And an irony, a paradox, flashed into my mind. Tigers seek to live on the flesh of women. No wonder Jones had been addicted to brothels in San Francisco when Deacon and I met him there for the first time in 1942.