‘Why the Moon?’ I asked Mr Mageye. ‘Why not the Earth?’
‘In a Universe that quarrels with itself in Carnival sciences the Moon is a ripe theatre, the Moon drifts to Earth, drifts into a sphere of incredible theatre and gravity, a space-station, if you like, within a quarrel of dimensions that plague us …’
Marie was now under the hoofs of the Horses ridden by controversial, pathetic, victimized, victimizing, paradoxical self-judges and giants of chaos. She slipped through them unhurt but saw the danger to humanity in the triumph of the warrior-angel that Deacon was. She was now betrothed to him as the dance confirmed. It was too late to turn back. She was destined — according to folklore legends — to bear him a child, the people’s promised child that would herald his departure from her, in dread circumstances, to build a new Rome in South America in alliance with an American warrior-priest from San Francisco and left-handed Bone from Albuoystown.
It was a prophecy that was unclear to her. Unclear to me. I should have remembered the past in coming from the future but the trauma that I suffered in Jonestown had wiped a page or pages from my mind and those blank spaces or chapters filled my Dream-book with renewed foreboding.
‘Am I left-handed Bone?’ I cried. I should have known better than to indulge in self-pity. Mr Mageye did not reply. A Sphinx-like look came upon his face, a gentle hand on my brow…
Marie slipped through the Horses’ hoofs even as she saw the danger. She saw — within her untameable beauty — the grief in the Womb of Space (when space quarrels with itself and becomes a potential series of battlefields).
I drew close to her and succeeded in helping her secure a triangular seat within the Wheel even as it spun. I swore she saw me. She turned her mysterious and wonderful and grateful eyes upon me. She knew me. But then I wondered. Did she mistake me for Deacon whose shadowy Mask fell upon her? Winged, Shadowy Mask? Black? Yet pale and silvery as the feathers around his Beak?
I placed my shoulders to the Wheel and gave it an additional push. It flashed. It flashed through the limbs of the great Horses and their riders. And she was gone in a flash. Back to her nurse’s uniform in Port Mourant Hospital.
Deacon’s venom rose with Marie’s flight and helped to harden his heart for an enterprise that lay before him: the capture of the Horses of the Moon and their riders …
He had secured a long thread of hair from Marie’s head. The rain had ceased and he would need to take full advantage of the respite to perfect the task on which he was engaged and the lassoing of the Horses.
Their necks gleamed as he lifted the glancing hair from the bride of the wilderness. That hair was curiously part of the topography of the landscape. It had been plucked as much from the map of his Brain as from the Virgin’s body.
It glanced and stood before him as upon a draughtsman’s sliding scale of uprooted contours and tributaries, the slenderest, coiling fabric of recalled rain coursing alive after the long drought through the savannahs.
Coursing alive along the Crabwood Creek in the moonlight pouring through broken clouds.
‘I read in the Carnival Argosy in 1939,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘that engineers were contemplating diverting the tributary to the Courantyne River known as Crabwood Creek into an enclosure, or giant spatial lasso, so to speak, for horses and cattle to prevent them straying onto and grazing upon the rice fields.’
As he spoke to me I saw the extraordinary congruence of apparition and concreteness in the Camera of the mind within the Jester of history.
Deacon held the wilderness hair and lasso in his hand as if it were the sliding uplifted creek itself coiling upon its fragile, serpent’s tail.
He whipped the serpent in the air with an engineer’s bark, a peasant boy’s ambitious dream and cry and prayer for the marvels of technology.
The wilderness lasso fell around the Horses’ steaming necks in the moonlight. They shuddered and bundled themselves together uneasily but on the whole they were content to be mastered by an angel from the stars.
Mr Mageye studied — as upon a platform of invisibility separating him from the action of a rolling film — the amorphous, magical roles a child plays within the hidden uniform of a man already shaping itself into existence within him and around him. The amorphous magic in the psyche of a child is the sponge of growing pains, trauma, the trauma of deprivation, the trauma of acute longing for power, the power to rule, to execute gigantic projects that may symbolize glory or ashes in one’s mouth unless one learns to see deeply into the cinematic theatre of cells and blood in mind and heart.
‘Such a beautiful — however grief-stricken — theorem is the psyche of a child! Capsuled into childhood is the latent marriage of Brain and myth, feud and grace, terror and dance. Deacon’s obsession (which may also be yours, Francisco) surely was plain to you as a lucid dream when he studied engineering and politics in San Francisco College.’
Horses and Giants of Chaos came towards Deacon now. He lengthened his tributary lasso, he pulled hard.
It seemed as if it would snap into Virgin blood on the Moon but it held.
He relaxed his grip into a wide-angling — almost gentle — invocation of space and drew animals and riders across the perimeter of the Moon into the river catchment of Earth and along the line of the creek. It was a remarkable procession that invested the heights of the Moon with the qualities of a watershed upon which distant falling rain escalated upon a mountainous cloud and then glided on both flanks into space.
Horseflesh flanking the Moon and the creek became the shadow of a wall, or a dam, as the procession advanced towards the Courantyne River.
The projected new polder, or diversion, materialized as a gift of passion inherent in his betrothal to Marie, reined-in animal passion, curbed and manifest in engineering, wilderness genius.
It was as if Deacon were intent upon converting the Wheel upon which Marie had fled into a simultaneous asset of culture, into gradients and stages down which he drew the Horses of the Moon.
Celestial mathematics!
He drew the Horses along the lassoing hair — with or in the lassoing hair — in the Virgin’s body to the wide Courantyne River. He came upon a box koker or sluice at the point where the tributary entered the main body of the river. The wide estuary was vacant except for a schooner on the bar and the Virgin Ship which Deacon failed to see.
In his child’s mathematical, engineering, mythical eye, infused with wars and baggage trains and advancing, retreating armies, the box koker or Dutch culvert assumed the proportions of a giant coffin. He stood against it and lifted the lid. Then with a tug he propelled each beast and rider into its depths. The colour of new taxes he would propose (if he were prime minster) shone on each flank, money-flesh, political/economic flesh, ballot-box flesh, everything that was pertinent to the betrothal of a hero or a monster to the Virgin of the Wild. They were content to recline in darkness and await the fulfilment of his promise. He inscribed on the lid of the coffin Heracles strangling serpents — unleashing serpents — in his cradle and Hermes herding cattle, outwitting his brother Apollo on the day he was born …
Mr Mageye and I — even as Deacon propelled Horses and riders into a coffin — let our platform with its filming futuristic yet ancient Eye levitate in space. Such verticality, such a sliding scale, was native to blended time, past futures, future pasts. We saw Deacon’s procession along the creek in a new fictional, factual light of peculiar irony and folk indefatigability and deprivation. Conversion of folk deprivation into glorious cradles allied to coffins and taxation in the grave ran hand in hand with mundane, plodding existences. We saw Deacon’s processional wall in the lassoing of space change into apathy yet dogged hope.