‘Intervention by divine powers,’ I said at last to Mr Mageye, ‘is a challenge to the responses it seeks to invoke.’
He sensed my bewilderment as I faced him, two-in-one dual being he seemed, apparition and frozen spectre, frozen into solidity.
He said darkly to me: ‘I shall break, I shall break into many extensions, I shall appear to dissolve, a necessary trick.’
‘No, no.’ I cried in desperation. ‘I need you, Mr Mageye. What would I do without you?’
Mr Mageye gave his warm and magical smile. ‘It’s not yet time for me to depart from your Dream-book, Francisco. A warning that’s all. We have much still to do together. Have we not? We are still erecting a Memory theatre.’
‘But why break, why leave me?’
Mr Mageye touched me without appearing to touch me. He was deeply moved in himself by my need of him.
‘One guesses in the dark, Francisco, about the nature of the Creator as a subject to be taught in the history of creation. Should we not perceive creation itself as an extraordinary fiction susceptible to varieties of hidden texts …?’
‘Translations of the untranslatable that move us to look through and beyond ourselves?’ I could not help laughing at myself.
‘Quite so, quite so, Francisco. Without a sensation of uncharted realms, extra-human dimensions, I am inclined to feel that one is destined to freeze or burn in an absolutely human-centred cosmos inevitably promoting dominion and lust as its hidden agenda. It’s simple really, though some will insist it is difficult. The paradox of extra-human characterization in your Dream-book which brings surrogate Gods, surrogacies of a Creator, is that the surrogates (kings or Gods or angels or phenomenal Jesters or Judges or whatever) may appear to stand on platforms in space, to walk on a wave or a vortex, or whatever, but they surrender a hidden agenda of dominion in fiction which takes its cue from uncharted reflexes built into space. Those reflexes are akin to the wilderness music of the Word. Thus the agenda of absolute command over all species and things breaks, and surrogate Gods — whether they are fully conscious of it or not — disperse their apparently broken limbs into supportive organs of disadvantaged cultures and a sick humanity everywhere.’
I was so excited I could scarcely speak.
‘It seems to me, Mr Mageye,’ I said at last, ‘that there is a sacred Wound built (if I may so put it) into the Creator, a confessional deity-Wound which matches the reflexes of uncharted space. The Wound is so mysterious that it cannot be measured … But it is this which authorizes at some level of hidden grace — in counterpoint to orders of dominion — the dismemberment of Gods into supportive organs everywhere.’
For some uncanny, emotional reason — some uncanny wound within philosophy that brings ecstasy and pain — I found myself laughing with Mr Mageye. But laughter ceased and we began to consider terrorizing and terrorized regimes, cruel natures. How does the intervention of the Creator apply? Can we read or translate such intervention within the dismemberment of Gods?
‘One is in the dark, Francisco. But I would venture to say that this is a question that runs beyond all man-made frames or realisms or commandments. We need to adventure into intangible graces in counterpoint with terrors in nature. Not beauty for beauty’s sake, or realism for social realism’s sake. These are often disguised kingdoms of dominion that we would chart in nature and in history. There are intangible graces that we cannot seize but whose tracery exists in a web or a vein or the music of a bird or some other creature. These may suddenly illumine the intensity and extensity of a shared Wound within live, fossil realities of space, the psychicality of the living fossil … Such traceries are of immense archetypal significance and they break through absolute predatory coherence or plot …’
I glanced around within the chasm of space, in which the Earth revolved, and back through veils and intangible resources into the Port Mourant hospital in which the sick man was arising from his bed with his dog or lamb at his heels.
‘Shared Wound! I understand, Mr Mageye. Tell me more please! Is the imprint or tattoo on my Lazarus arm an aspect of that shared Wound?’
‘If it is,’ said Mr Mageye warily, cautiously, ‘it means that you, Francisco — as you wrestle with the severity of trauma — need to revisit Jonestown. You cannot do so without the horn of the huntsman and the sound of the flute. The huntsman wears the mask of Christ. The horn and the flute are branches of the archetype of a numinous and pagan Christ who summons Lazarus from the grave. That summons will take us through the Wheel of Virgin space. Your fate — if I may so put it as I read the signs, Francisco — is to venture into the music that addressed Lazarus, the music of the womb of space, the music of remarriage — in your case, Francisco — to the people of Jonestown. How can one break the trauma of the grave and not find oneself involved in a remarriage to humanity? I do not envy you the task. It is a terrifying embrace to remarry a perverse humanity, a bitter task, a bitter threshold or re-entry into Jonestown. And yet it has to be done. I can promise you a genuine ecstasy nevertheless, before I depart, and the trial that lies before you — however tormenting — will prove a liberation … I cannot say more for, in some ways, as I read the signs, I am as much in the dark as yourself, Francisco. Let me say however that your projection of sickness upon the Christ-archetype is an unspoken cry for help, a cry from the grave into which you dreamt you fell when you lay on a pillow of stone on the Day of the Dead.’
How could I feel anything but sorrow and anguish in the light of such remarks? And yet I would not have relinquished the challenge even if I could.
‘None can respond to your cry, the unspoken cry of humanity, save the Christ-archetype upon which you project the sickness of an age, a sickness rooted in an eclipse of orchestrated imageries that bear on the enigma of the hunt, the enigma of genesis, the enigma of birth, the enigma of savage numinosity as much as phenomenal summons through dissonances and consonances to the dead … LOOK! THERE HE GOES, FRANCISCO. The horn sounds in the branch of a tree. The flute cries in creatures that we consume. Do you hear, Francisco?’
‘Yes, I do,’ I said quietly. ‘He also bears the net from the Virgin bride’s hair. And he holds a door ajar in the Wheel, a door between worlds, between ages, between times. That door cannot be seized. It is untranslatable space …’
*
Mr Mageye and I followed the huntsman through the door in the Wheel into Jonestown, early 1978, tropical Spring. We heard the noises of the town, a living town, unconscious of being hauled up from the grave in which it lay since the day of the holocaust.
‘I remember clearly,’ I said to Mr Mageye. ‘Would you believe it?’
‘Believe what?’ said Mr Mageye matter-of-factly. ‘Believe that the huntsman accepted statistical pay when he was employed by Jones around this time? This time! When one voyages back from the future into the past it is not just time that changes, it is the spatialities inserted into time that are different. He accepted statistical pay to mask himself as a Nobody.’
Yes, I saw now in Memory theatre that there had been something odd about the huntsman when he accepted the job in Jonestown back in the future from which I had returned to this Dream-book changed spatiality.
I remembered now the way his hands moved to articulate a spiralling touch upon the dollars that he received. He touched his pay as if it were sampled money in a pool of numbers justifying astronomical rewards to the managers of privileged companies and religious, sweatshop pay to someone like himself. Statistical justice in the pool of the marketplace! On occasion I had seen him come to the Carnival Circus that Jonah sometimes sponsored. I had seen him wave a single dollar in the air and convert it into a huge bunch of fluttering pieces of paper.