When the first nuclear Bomb exploded and sent its dread beauty, its fantastic mushroom, into the sky above an American desert, long-sunken ships and coffins of the dead arose from their sea-bed.
A fleet arose to greet the constellation of the Argo encrusted on Jason’s head in the stars.
Mr Mageye held a Camera in his hand which he — as magus-Jester of history — had brought from the future as much as from the technologies in the past: a Camera stored with paradoxical archetypes, new-born yet old as the mysterious anatomy of time.
His apparitional figure stood on the deck of the Virgin Ship with the futuristic, ancient Camera in his hand.
He drew my eye to peer into the depths of archetypal oceans and skies.
‘Do you see Francisco?’ he asked.
At first I saw nothing but Chaos. I saw floating planks from the forests of King Midas, I saw floating cargoes of South American rubber bound for the Golden Man in the kingdom of El Dorado, I saw the mastheads upon broken slave-ships, I saw frail residue like the beard of Titans, I saw celestial mathematics written into rockets and sails upon space stations. An air of wreckage hung over them in the degree that civilizations had foundered but the fleet was now half-afloat upon ocean and sky.
‘The Virgin Ship’, said Mr Mageye, ‘transforms the fleet, converts the fleet, into a cradle of Bone fleshed by resurrectionary mathematics.
‘Bone is our innermost Cross that we scarcely countenance or understand.
‘It is as old as time.
‘On it hangs not only our flesh but the ragged flesh of populations and failed captaincies and heroes who are illumined nevertheless by the promise of a divine huntsman who hangs on the Cross in our flesh, our ragged flesh, to hold the Predator at bay when humanity is in the greatest danger.
‘The Cross in the mirror of celestial mathematics is sometimes a net that salvages all wreckages of time in which to build the Virgin Ship anew.
‘Remember Francisco there is a curious fragility to your Dream-book, the log-book of the fleet. But its true spiritual capacity lies therein. It wreathes itself in the collapse of high-sounding garments and punishments and glories to illumine Bone or Cross.
‘Celestial mathematics of space! That is how I see the evolution of the divine huntsman in our ragged flesh. That is how I see a procession of brothels and wrecked architectures and wrecked fleets and marketplace cathedrals backwards into the stark Womb of the Virgin — shorn of intercourse with violence — from which the true, compassionate huntsman may yet evolve and arise … Remember all this, Francisco.’
Deacon had caught the drift of Mr Mageye’s conversation with me. He seized upon ‘celestial mathematics’ as a platform for his own ambitions, his own perverse longing for glory.
‘Celestial ambition,’ he said to me and to the apparition of Mr Mageye, ‘fires a peasant like me to perform great deeds, to fight unimaginable duels, to frame arenas for impossible (yet I believe possible) duels in space. Think of the Moon! What an arena for duels and commerce and sport. We shall fight on other planets, believe me! Buy yourself a ringside seat now, Francisco, before the price soars. Shall I — a mere peasant — dwarf Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan? Why not? I am born from the obscurity of the stars as they were! Poor Jonah believes in eternity. And that is why I have forged a pact with him. He will bring me the chance to duel with eternity. And if I fail then celestial mathematics will provide me with a ladder to climb back into heaven, to wrestle all over again with the Titans, the Tricksters of heaven. Yes — remember Francisco — civilizations fail and perish and begin all over again in some remote forest … As for you, Francisco, I shall give you a taste of my fallen angel’s blood when or if I fail. I shall clamp my Mask into your head. I — and an Old God you shall meet (you love epic theatre, don’t you?) — shall imbue it with conviction and lifelike appearance. Carnival’s great Francisco.’ He was laughing uproariously.
I said nothing. I was familiar with his taunts. I was familiar with his mockery of others and his self-mockery. Self-mockery was a moral fable, a moral truth, that fuelled peculiar underground sympathies between us though at another level we scorned or hated each other. Such self-mockery illumined hypocritical patriotisms, hypocritical loyalties, and it strengthened the pact between us and Jonah Jones. We seemed to eat our own mutual flesh in order to expose salutary lighthouse or Bone or Cross.
Mr Mageye eyed me with the oddest approval, the approval of self-questioning conscience, self-questioning imagination. He relished Deacon’s joke — if joke it was — about Tricksters of heaven. Sacred Jest! It appealed to him as a nourishing resource of comic flesh-and-blood: comic, yes, but curiously divine in flesh-and-blood’s ambition to equate itself with Gods.
Such comic divine equation enlivened the apparition that he was in my Dream-book. He had died in Albuoystown the very year that I left for San Francisco to take up my scholarship. I recalled standing over his grave on the eve of my departure. He was my beloved schoolteacher, the wisest, strangest man I had ever known. He saw all his pupils as potential tyrants, potential liberators, potential monsters, potential saints. He roamed all texts, all worlds, all ages to help them see themselves as stripped of everything yet whole and majestic and comical (all at the same time). I visualized myself sailing with him into futures and pasts. I visualized the Nemesis Bag on my head. Three more threads fell from it and took root on his grave. This had happened on my mother’s grave as well.
‘I am no ill-begotten son of a French Catholic ghost,’ I cried. ‘I am Mr Mageye’s South American pupil. He is my magus. I wish he were my father. But I — a nameless orphan really — must respect the wishes of my poor mother who saw herself on the Cross as the bride of a slave-owning, masquerading, divine imperialist.’
Having nourished itself on comic divine flesh-and-blood the apparition of Mr Mageye was able to feed my imagination in turn.
He stepped from his coffin into a classroom in San Francisco College and looked across the water to the famous prison of Alcatraz.
Why are prisons famous? What secrets do they keep?
Are they the abode of apparitions across the ages, legendary kings of crime, legendary Napoleons, Bastilles, legendary pirates knighted by queens?
My eye flicked into Mr Mageye’s Camera and I saw the prison of Devil’s Isle, French Guiana. A prisoner or Old God was housed there. He was as old as Quetzalcoatl (the most ancient king of the Americas), he was as young as the French Revolution.
‘Kingship is a sphere within us,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘that dazzles and tricks our senses again and again. We hunger for romance, or chivalry, or knights in shining armour, or Scandal (with a capital S), or pageantry (with a common p as processions line the streets).
‘But all this is an evasion of the complex necessity for kingship. At the core of kingship resides a true embattled reality that we forfeit or lose sight of at our peril. Kingship witnesses to the agonizing problematic of freedom, the gift of freedom to ourselves within ourselves yet bestowed upon us by some incalculable design in heaven and upon earth …’
I raised my hand, but Mr Mageye rushed on, a rush yet a peculiar deliberation — ‘I know, I know… Freedom is seen as the achievement of the common people …’
‘Is it not?’ I demanded.
‘At the heart of the common people exists an invisible fortress in which a Prisoner or Old God or King is held as a guarantee, a half-compulsive, half-spiritual guarantee that some principle lives in the Primitive mind (surviving Primitive archetype) to sift the problematic resources of freedom.’
‘I do not follow,’ I said. But in myself I knew or thought I knew.