Once again I wanted to leap but instead I flung my visor into space. Skin and Bone throbbed where the shield had grazed my countenance and I was conscious all at once of punctures on my head and neck and shoulders. Holes had been imprinted there. The subtlest holes into which futuristic nails would lodge as if they were new bones to uphold another Mask of flesh-and-blood in Memory theatre. Perhaps the huntsman’s net in its range and sweep — as it bore the Predator away — had inflicted wounds from which new bone would grow to uphold the Mask when it came … I was confused and bewildered by the prospect …
Dawn light brought me to the ground again. No visionary leap this! Problematic descent, problematic feet … I felt faint and leaned against the trunk of the tree. I placed the Bag of leaves over my shoulder and set out for New Amsterdam.
Problematic feet implied problematic stages of implicit surrender to the huntsman’s net. But the hiatuses and gaps in Memory theatre remained to be reconnoitred afresh in my Dream-book, the fears, the uncertainties, of pilgrimage, of departure, arrival. Who was I? Where was I?
Were there perverse resurrections, death-dealing regimes and crushing labour, that one would need to re-vision and come abreast of, in order to break a numbness and paralysis of the Imagination everywhere?
Were there amazing truths of unfinished genesis and resurrectionary consciousness that one would glimpse through the Wheel of civilizations within the turning globe in the Womb of space?
Hospitals, El Dorados, colonial possessions, Dutch, French, British, within a web of ancient vanished empires in the Americas, apparitions of the dead-in-the-living (of all races) in the wake of imperial Limbo and Jonestown, banqueting halls, circuses, would haunt me as I wrote. Yet from their debris I became a diminutive cosmic architect of a Virgin Ship and of Memory theatre. All were stages for, and initiations into, my trial at the bar of time.
Foundations of Cities
I tipped the leaves from my Dream-pillow and came upon the hieroglyph of the betrothal of Marie and Deacon in the savannahs, their dance on the Mirror of the Moon … It should have occasioned me joy — however tinged with jealousy — but it brought me sorrow.
Inscribed into the dance were re-traceries of horses and cattle that Jones had stabled in Jonestown (or Jonah City as I was inclined to name it).
Jones, Deacon and I had been the architects of Jonah City within the huge, forested belly of South America, the new Rome afloat upon sea (a sea of leaves) as upon land branching into space.
Marie, the Virgin of the wilderness, fled from the dance on a Wheel, and I followed her into Port Mourant hospital. Marie was but a slip of a child. She extricated herself from the Wheel in which I had lodged her. She was naked, wet, dripping with the glass of rain through which she had run. So it was a miracle that I salvaged the imprint of the Wheel on a leaf. It was less a question of running and more of securing herself in the Wheel like a reflection of time: the Wheel of civilizations that corresponds to the Virgin’s circular leap in space!
Fractions and circles are profoundest mathematics that one needs to weigh and reassess with the greatest care in returning to the foundations of lost cities: riverain fondations, falling or rising whale’s belly Atlantis, Plato’s Cave, light, space, earth-cradle foundations, sky foundations that dripped on the Virgin Marie’s body.
Four-square leaps, triangular leaps, vertical leaps, horizontal leaps, are a measure of the dance that one equates with lost, revisited cities, villages, homes …
The sky dripped through the leaking roof of the Port Mourant hospital into which I had come with Marie. Hospitals and Ships within the Wheel of civilizations are symbols of the globe. The dance of the Wheel brings one intimate knowledge of bombed villages and churches and hospitals and houses.
Jonestown. The sky dripped upon Limbo and upon Jonestown. Jonah saw himself in the belly of the White Sky or Whale of American legend as a saddened Aeneas afloat upon coffin and cradle.
‘Do ghosts cradle themselves in tree-tops above their graves? You lucky devil! You survived, Francisco.’ I thought I heard his voice in my ears in Port Mourant hospital as I stood amongst the sick on pallets on the floor.
I had been one of Jones’s lieutenants, his left-hand man. In the 1970s when we were busy erecting the new Rome, afloat on the back of Atlantis in the South American rainforest, I used to play music on a Maya drum. I possessed five fingers then.
But in my sorrowing resurrection backwards in time from 1978 to 1939 Albuoystown, Crabwood Creek and Port Mourant, I found myself with only three. Yet I continued to play with two phantom fingers as a memorial of Soul, apparitional grasp, apparitional reach into Soul, Soul’s design of invisible triangles, parallels, and spaces.
Memory theatre has no fixtures. One exercises a riddle of proportions as one writes of time and times, in time and times, through time and times, as if blended times are the solid and elusive foundations of holocaustic Jonestown … The lives and limbs of those who have perished need to be weighed as incredible matter-of-fact that defies the limits of realistic discourse. Fallen angels become engineers and architects on the death of a child to whom they build citadels and memorials on earth and in heaven. Babes such as Marie are replete with the eloquence of the Virgin. Fiction’s truths are absurdity’s common sense, absurdity’s revelations of composite epic heart in the ancient and the modern.
Deacon occupied a privileged station when we began the construction of Utopian Jonestown in the 1970s. It won the approval of the head of state in Guyana. Jones appeared to cherish Deacon. He was the great evangelist’s right-hand peasant angel and engineer. No one knew (and I myself forgot within lapses in my Dream-book) that he nursed a fear of the Predator after the death of his son Lazarus born of the Wilderness Virgin Marie in December 1954. One forgets. One remembers. Such lapses and bridges between memory and non-memory are native to the trauma of cultures … No one knew that he nursed a fear of the Scorpion Constellation that brought him immunity to pain and wealth and fortune with which to build a memorial township to Lazarus.
Jonestown was a memorial to Lazarus, a memorial of deadly fortune that was to catapult me into space in due course. As if dream-rockets are sometimes founded on the slaughter of infants or twins or brothers. Had not the eighteenth-century Frenchman’s fortune — founded on repentance that drove him overseas to El Doradonne Guiana after the slaying of his brother (whom he nourished in his imagination as he aged as a composite son, composite slave and son) — granted me a scholarship to San Francisco in the twentieth century?
Had not Herod’s slaughter of infants — when Christ was born — cemented a resurrrectionary Bank of Fortune in Christendom?
So does civilization question itself, in dread at its foundations, through composite epic survivors of feud, or conflict, or genocide, or death-dealing regimes.
Composite epic parents itself, parents its Gods, parents humanity, in order to answer at the core of the self for the shape of things everywhere. Yet the apparently random choice of diminutive being, a frail Imagination here and there, to bear this burden of multi-faceted collective, multi-faceted community, is unfathomable …
I was a South American Utopian in the 1970s. It was a peculiar burden to carry. Utopia was less an absolute place, absolute society, absolute theatre, and more a Bridge festooned with ruins … Utopia signified a Bridge of collective genius, yet dread for me, from the coastlands of Guyana (into which people are chained) into the hazards of capacity within the interior of the South Americas: a wholly different architecture, a wholly different Imagination from the politics and the institutions of economic fixture and habit.