‘The Prisoner or Old God places a question-mark against the extravagant gift of freedom. Is freedom anarchy? Is freedom reserved for the strong, does freedom nurture crime, does it come when we are not ready for it? At what age are we equipped to bear the burden of freedom? Do we need to cultivate wholly different philosophies of the Imagination to bring us on a wave of the future from which to discern how free or unfree we were in the past and still are in the present, how just or unjust to others we remain, how prone to exploit ourselves and others in the name of high-sounding lies?’
I could not help voicing a protest — ‘Kings need to be forced, do they not, into granting freedom to their subjects?’
‘And they pay a terrible price,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘their heads roll. Force — in such a context — may be an explosion of conscience in the King or Old God himself. He knows without quite knowing (he knows in the collective subconscious and unconscious) that he has failed in the problematic authority that he exercises. He is as much condemned as self-condemned. And without that tension of visionary, interior condemnation and trial by others at the heart of composite epic, epic populace, epic king, art dies, philosophy dies, faith in truth perishes. Freedom needs to weigh, examine, re-examine its far-flung proportions which radiate from a core of the Imagination, it needs to promote a variety of cautions in the body politic, freedom is not a gross or even a subtle indulgence of public appetite; or else it deteriorates into cynical diplomacy, it becomes a tool, a machine, a gravy train, a sponsor of a rat-race.’
I was appalled and aghast at all this. I felt as if I had been dealt a blow by an apparition, a solid apparition arisen from a coffin, the coffin of ancient kings that empowered the magus-philosopher-jester of history that Mr Mageye was.
‘Where does it all start?’ I demanded. ‘If Old Gods and Prisoners are a sphere within ourselves, acting and running more deeply than the mechanics of political sovereignty, where does it start?’
‘Deacon would say it starts with wars in Heaven,’ said Mr Mageye. He was jesting but his face seemed straight as a bat in the hands of a weirdly gifted cricketer of genius. He had umpired many a game in Albuoystown. His apparitional nose seemed to have flattened itself. But then it grew again, it straightened itself into the colour of sculpted soil in Deacon’s Courantyne savannahs.
‘Let us,’ he said, ‘prepare the ground of theatre, the ground of folklore in the ancient savannahs. First the infant Deacon falls from the baggage train of routed angels. He falls to earth and is given a home by the savannah folk.’
I was angry. I was jealous.
‘Is Deacon a bloody king?’ I demanded.
‘He is an adversary of Old Gods. He sustains on Earth an age-old quarrel in Heaven. When is the gift of fire to be exercised and bestowed upon humanity? When is the gift of freedom to be exercised and bestowed upon humanity? That is in large part the substance of the quarrel. Should humanity claim freedom? Perhaps it has with detrimental consequences on every hand! Should humanity claim freedom in the teeth of obstinate and uncertain regimes? Where does authority truly reside? We may think these questions are old-hat but they are not. They are more savagely pertinent to human affairs than we care to admit. Should we pursue our adversaries, should they turn on us at every opportunity? Should we perpetuate forms of punitive logic to punish those who punished us when we rebelled? I tell you all this, Francisco, for it is pertinent to your visitation of the childhood of Deacon in the folklore, archetypal theatre of the Courantyne savannahs.’
The scales of blended times had changed in the half-apparitional, half-concrete fabric of my Dream-book and arrival on the Virgin Ship in the Courantyne River from which we made our way into the savannahs.
‘Deacon had been affianced to Marie of Port Mourant before he left to take up his scholarship in San Francisco,’ said Mr Mageye.
‘Yes I know. He told us so.’
‘But he met her for the first overwhelmingly intimate yet expansive time (that fires both love of art and science, and greed for fame) at the age of nine,’ said Mr Mageye, peering into his Camera as if it were a computer of chasms in creation and visionary years. ‘That meeting was the fulfilment of an age-old prophecy for the savannah folk. An infant child would fall from the stars in 1930. Carnival has its calendric humour, has it not, Francisco? The child — in his tenth year 1939 — would encounter a wonderful maid, a dangerous maid, a Virgin, in the savannahs at the end of a drought season when the first, torrential rains broke the walls of heaven.
‘This would confirm the adversarial destiny of the angel fallen from the baggage train of the stars. It would confirm the venom of the Scorpion in his veins. The mark of a great hero …’
‘Monster,’ I cried.
‘You need to see it happening all over again in your Dream-book. It is pertinent, believe me, Francisco, to a discovery and rediscovery of the depth of your own passion and emotion which you may have eclipsed or hidden from yourself until the tragedy of Jonestown brought you face to face with the accumulated spectres of years, the dread spectre of the twentieth century as it addresses the psyche of ageless childhood.’
I adjusted the Nemesis Bag on my head even as I looked into Mr Mageye’s Camera.
‘Deacon ran into the maid in the torrential rain. She seemed utterly changed from a child he knew! Had he not seen her before at school? Human magic dazzles the eyes of a fallen angel when destiny declares itself. Such is the precocity of love, the precocity of feud as well. Marie was known to be the adopted daughter of the Doctor at the Port Mourant hospital. Doctors are Gods to peasant folk in poor people’s hospitals. But there was an ominous side to Marie’s parentage. One report claimed that her parents had been killed in a car crash and that — above the debris of the car — an Old God, or escaped Prisoner, materialized. Escaped from Devil’s Isle. The Inspector of Police seized him. Escaped prisoners from French Guiana were an occasional feature on the British Guiana coast. Carnival fastened on the event. The Old God claimed that he was Marie’s father and that the Doctor was not to be trusted.’ Mr Mageye was smiling.
‘No laughing matter,’ I said. ‘Carnival is no laughing matter.’
‘Indeed not,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘In the reaches of great windswept, rain-swept, sun-swept savannahs, the most ancient feuds between heaven and earth are revived in villages and upon roads that may seem jam-packed at times but are insubstantial and frail against an immensity of sky and land and sea that borders the coastlands. The peasantry and the people are native to, yet tormented by, such extremity. They long for a saviour, for authority, for truth. Where does authority reside? Does it reside in European empires whose presence they feel? Does it reside in the new power-hungry politicians? Does it reside in upper worlds, nether worlds? Tell me, Francisco. Feed my apparition in your book.’
I hesitated for a long while and then I found the confidence to speak.
‘I would say,’ I began hesitantly, pulling a loose thread from my Nemesis Bag and letting it fall to the ground, ‘that all the ingredients of uncertainty that you stress, Mr Mageye, are woven into a car crash — as into the wreck of the Argo — into …’ I hesitated … ‘into wars and rumours of war across the sea, into submarines and the shadow of fleets patrolling the Atlantic seaboard of South America. No wonder the Old God hovers in space only to be seized by the Inspector and placed in a cell.’ I stopped, but then it occurred to me to lay bare my heart to Mr Mageye. ‘That Prisoner or Old God wrestles with the Doctor and the Inspector to claim Marie as his Virgin daughter …’
There was much more that I wished to say, my desire for Marie even before I met her, my jealousy of Deacon, but Mr Mageye interrupted — ‘Look! there they are.’