Were the oceans to rise along the South American coastlands in future generations they would play havoc with the coastal shell of settlements already beneath mean sea level.
Sea defences and walls and foundations of villages and cities would be shaken to their innermost core.
Utopia was therefore a way of turning a world (while time was still an ally of creative possibility) into perceiving itself from within its future, shaken core of self: perceiving processional expeditions from one ocean to the North (the Atlantic) to another ocean to the South (the rainforests). Except that the latter ocean — however deep it seemed — was far above the reach of the Atlantic plundering tides that had once blossomed into pirate and conquistador.
Now the time had come to move … Depth was uncanny proportionality of Memory theatre, Memory’s lift, Memory’s height, upon which to view impending events, failed events, lost causes, futuristic ruins, as well as past events that are native to the wastelands of the future, past events that one may have buried in conventional complacency within the present moment that continues to ignore the Shadow of the future …
Jonestown was now a ruin in Memory theatre. It was rubble and wasteland on the Utopian Bridge from the coastlands of Guyana into the interior of the South Americas. Its leaking roofs and ruined or flattened walls became an imaginary station to be revisited through other imaginary stations and ghost trains in time.
In returning to 1939 (Marie’s childhood, Deacon’s childhood, my childhood) I stood on the Wheel of civilizations, and the Utopian Bridge, as upon a stage on which to assemble the poor people’s hospital, and its pathetic walls and leaking roof, that invoked the wastelands of 1978 in Jonestown. The sick who lay on their pallets on the ground were true Utopian characters in the Carnival of the future. Lord Death was already amongst them making a tally of their possessions as the grave-digger had done (or would do) above the pit or mass grave in Jonestown and theatre of the burial of the dead.
How does one build new architectures out of the rubble of traditions and out of diasporas across millennia?
Marie was weeping her heart out on the floor of the hospital in 1939.
Poor Marie. Rich, wilderness Marie. Virgin Marie. Queen Marie. Princess Marie. Peasant Marie. Child’s ancient heart. Bride of humanity. Mother of Gods. Child of Gods contesting their parentage of her. Biological magic? Adoptive, spiritual, medicinal magic?
Marie was weeping ancient tears until they formed a mysterious pool on the ground, or sea, or ocean. Refugees swam from Cuba and Haiti, climbed the Utopian Bridge, and began their futuristic trip into the heartland of the Guyanas. 2050? 2025?
Hungry masses pressed against the wall of the Mediterranean seeking entry into an overcrowded Europe. Jobless Mexicans fought to cross the border into lands once theirs now part and parcel of the United States.
The dying and the sick — assembled in South America from every race around the globe — lay on the floor of the hospital within the Shadows of the past and the future. They were masked actors of El Doradonne Utopia, a new Rome to be founded by apparitional Aeneas, or Lazarus ascending from the rubble of Troy; such founders were in my blood, and in Deacon’s blood, and in everyman’s blood within experimental nuclei of epic, resurrected consciousness.
I dreaded the mark of Lazarus tattooed on my arm as much as I dreaded the bite of the Scorpion on Deacon’s arm.
Deacon’s infant Lazarus — born of Marie in 1954 — was a deadly fortune or role that I would inherit in Memory theatre.
That fortune would unfold in Dreams long before it was conferred upon me. It would unfold in absurd, even humiliating, ribaldry, when Deacon taunted me in San Francisco. It would unfold by unforeseen stages into a honeymoon with bliss. I would be appointed — when Deacon vanished after Jonestown — to return in Memory theatre to his wedding feast. I would be appointed to read or scan the intricate, terrifying seed gestating in the womb of the Virgin of the Wilderness. I would be appointed to play the role of her bridegroom in order to know in myself how worthy, or dreadfully unworthy I was, to plant the seed of Lazarus once again across millennia in the womb of space …
Yes, I knew of the news of my appointment but it tended to fragment in my mind, it tended to slip from my mind as I awoke and wrestled with the Dream-book …
The patients in the hospital in Memory theatre 1939 (when World War Two lit up flares across the Atlantic which alighted on the Utopian Bridge) may have seemed divorced from Jones’s flock of the future in the 1970s. Divorced from Bosnia, or Rwanda, or Ethiopia in the 1990s… They were different at first glance but the fires of war lit up Carnival mirroring blood in feature and mask.
The finest cast of actors one could assemble to play at war, war with famine, war with plague and addiction, in the twentieth century. To play at holy wars, religious wars.
They ate cherries of blood in hopeful, hungry mask, hopeful, hopeless lip. They ate cherries of hope in the 1970s decade when Jones, Deacon and I visited the head of state in Guyana, obtained a generous lease, gave them their lines to read in the tragedy of Jonestown. They were our sheep. Brilliant actors on the world’s stage.
They ate cherries in 1939 when they lay on the hospital floor.
Each cherry — planted in the teeth of Masks, Bridges of Bone across generations, centuries, millennia — was a rounded thread coiling in Marie’s hair, upon Marie’s Wheel.
‘The unfinished Wheel is my father’s gift to you,’ said Marie. ‘Even as hair grows in the grave but vanishes on an infant’s brow.’
I felt no surprise at such an utterance. Marie was the queen of ghostly children as tall as Bone who flit in the Shadows and the Lights of wildernesses since time began.
Her tears were genuine. A dog resembling a lamb arose from the bedside of a patient on the floor and lapped at the pool as if it were milk.
I dived from the Utopian Bridge — on which I stood with Mr Mageye and his ancient, futuristic Camera imbued with elemental proportions of comedy and tragedy — into the pool of milk.
POOL OF MILK was a private joke between Deacon, Jones and myself when we were in San Francisco College and tended to swim in a hothouse, atmospheric, veiled pool not far from the Golden Bridge that arched across San Francisco Bay.
Men and women consorted and swam there in the misty, milky, hothouse, fleecy light that the theatre of the bath provided … They all seemed naked in the Camera’s Eye and immersed and preoccupied with sexual, underwater intercourse, instant milk-and-coffee. Black and brown bodies loomed in the milk to give coffee pigmentation to the scene.
‘It’s not true,’ I said to Deacon (as I arose from the Pool and joined him at the edge of the Milky Abyss, the consumer abyss), ‘it’s not true, they’re innocent actors abroad, surely no sexual games on Sunday in broad daylight. It’s a trick of Mr Mageye’s futuristic Camera.’
‘This isn’t broad daylight,’ said Deacon, ‘it’s the Milky Way, the white tears of the Virgin for every lamb or dog and for Leviathan. Look! the White Whale rises festooned with Ahab’s doomed voyagers.’ He was laughing. Jonah was displeased. I was unhappy.
‘Have a glass of rum, Francisco,’ said Deacon. ‘Rum mixed with poison. Or is it milk mixed with cyanide? No idea how the ridiculous thought flipped into my skull. Memories of the future when we build Jonestown! Where in God’s name is Jonestown? I’m drunk.’
I thrust the poisoned drink from me. But it was as if Deacon’s prophetic eyes stood in my head now and Ahab’s doomed voyagers were being toppled by a misty grave-digger into a mass-media pool.