The Maya were torn by the notion of eternity’s closure of time and another shape to time, blending pasts and futures to unlock closure or pact or plot.
The weight of charismatic eternity and a capacity to unlock closure became real and profoundly pertinent to me and to my age …
I drifted into what seemed an abnormal lucidity upon chasms of time. The price one pays for such voyages is far-reaching. One becomes, it seems, a vessel of composite epic, imbued with many voices, one is a multitude. That multitude is housed paradoxically in the diminutive surviving entity of community and self that one is.
All this emerges at its own pace in the Dream-book but the preliminary capsule that this letter is shows how vulnerable I still am some sixteen years after the Day of the Dead. The fabric of the modern world has worsened, it seems to me, in that span of time. The torments of materialism have increased …
It is essential to create a jigsaw in which ‘pasts’ and ‘presents’ and likely or unlikely ‘futures’ are the pieces that multitudes in the self employ in order to bridge chasms in historical memory.
To sail back into the past is to come upon ‘pasts’ that are ‘futures’ to previous ‘pasts’ which are ‘futures’ in themselves to prior ‘pasts’ ad infinitum. There is no absolute beginning, for each ‘beginning’ comes after an unwritten past that awaits a new language. What lies behind us is linked incalculably to what lies ahead of us in that the future is a sliding scale backwards into the unfathomable past within the Virgin womb of time …
The future brings terrifying challenges but it also brings foetal shapes, tender and young possibilities that enliven us to scan gestating resources in the womb of tradition that we have bypassed or overlooked or eclipsed …
As the severity of trauma began to break by degrees uncanny correspondences seemed to loom as I voyaged between Maya twinships of pasts and futures and the Mathematics of Chaos.
Chaos is misconceived as an anarchic phenomenon. Whereas it may be visualized as portraying an ‘open’ universe. Continuities running out of the mystery of the past into the unknown future yield proportions of originality, proportions of the ‘genuinely new’ …
Composite epic is rooted in the lucidity that fractions or fictional numbers, fictional multitudes, bring. The walls of ruined schools and houses and temples and hospitals and theatres are full with presences and voices though apparently void and empty. Such is the mystery of Chaos. The weight of Chaos is sometimes apparitional, sometimes concrete. Such mathematics enhance an intact mystery in time. Because it is intact yet beyond seizure it acts upon us in apparitional Old Gods or Prisoners (dogma, ideology) locked into the gaols of the past; acts again in dismemberments of such Prisoners who walk on water or in space beyond fixtures or unities of place.
‘Unity of place’ is a dogma or an ideology in some quarters. But my apprenticeship to the furies acquaints me with a different topography or map of the Imagination that breaches the human-centred cosmos that we have enshrined. There are extra-human faculties and voices that bring contours into play to lift place into both familiar and unfamiliar dimensions which fall outside of presumed norms or absolute models of fact and fiction.
The trauma that I suffered in Jonestown may have imprisoned me absolutely in a plot of fate. But thank God! it aroused me instead to contemplate a hidden mathematics within the body of language … Language is deeper than ‘frames’, it transgresses against the frames that would make us prisoners of eternity in the name of one creed or dogma or ideology.
Maya ‘twinships’ between the buried past and the unknown future — which are regarded as bewildering to the Western mind — seemed of burning and invaluable moment to me in their bearing on factors of originality and living time. I had no absolute model on which to base my Dream-book except that I sought to salvage unpredictable keys to tradition within the terrifying legacies of the past. I sought to be true to the broken communities, the apparently lost cultures from which I have sprung …
A word about New Amsterdam before I close this letter. I wandered for some seven years — sometimes in states of partial but acute amnesia — before I arrived there and began writing the Dream-book. I dreamt I was translating from a fragmented text or texts that already existed …
New Amsterdam is one of the oldest towns on the Guyana coastlands. It is a relic of the Dutch empire of the eighteenth century and was absorbed into British Guiana in the early nineteenth century. Its crumbling walls and roads witness to the erosion of townships and settlements and villages along the coastlands that stand as memorials to Spanish, French, Dutch, British colonization across the centuries.
Over the past half-century the population of Guyana has fallen from a million souls, it is said, to three-quarters of a million within a country almost as large as the United Kingdom.
This decline, which is due in large part to emigration, energizes the imagination into an apprehension of earlier peoples, Aboriginal ghosts whose presence is visible still in their nomadic living descendants.
Thus the mixed peoples of African or Indian or European or Chinese descent who live in modern Guyana today are related to the Aboriginal ghosts of the past of whom I spoke a moment ago: if not by strict, biological kinship then by ties to the spectre of erosion of community and place which haunts the Central and South Americas.
This over-arching Ghost throws some light on the play of ‘extinction’ within my Dream-book … I was driven in my flight from Jonestown to reflect on myself as an ‘extinct’ creature. I dreamt I had been robbed of my native roots and heritage. I suffered from a void of memory. I belonged to peoples of the Void … But there was a catch, a shock of breath, in this sensation … The shock of the ‘peopling of the Void’, the animals of the Void, the creatures of the Void, became so extraordinary that ‘extinction’ imbued me with breath-lines and responsibilities I would not otherwise have encompassed. I became an original apparition in my wanderings within over-arching Ghost in coming abreast of extremities of loss, in visualizing my own ‘nothingness’ as intangible ‘somethingness’. Memory theatre was born in such theatres of humility. ‘Extinction’ attired itself in many parts — as an actor may learn to play staggered roles and numinosities — it grew into bodily extensions, masks, limbs, prompted and sculpted by the comedy of ghosts within active traditions. A train of disturbing rehearsals and heart-searching conscience came into play …
Yet I was reminded that I lived in a world threatened by an explosion of numbers, not by declining populations. But this deepened, if anything, my inner experience of place and time. Without Memory theatre — and the art of self-rehearsed ‘extinctions’ in a series of stages upon which one retraces one’s steps into a labyrinth of deprivations and apparent losses — the ‘peopling of the Void’ in all its extremities of explosion and implosion will not embody heart-searching conscience, heart-searching caveat, but will cement predatory blockages, predatory coherence.
Keys to the Void of civilization are realized not by escapism from dire inheritances, not by political glosses upon endemic tragedy, but by immersion in the terrifying legacies of the past and the wholly unexpected insights into shared fates and freedoms such legacies may offer. In the death of politics (however ritually or conventionally preserved in the panoply of the state) may gestate a seed of re-visionary, epic theatre rooted in complex changes in human and animal nature …