‘Turn the key of Night and Day, built into yourself, and enter Jonestown.’ It was the huntsman who spoke but the voice may have been a whisper in the horn of a tree.
I hesitated. The nakedness of my skeleton-twin made me wonder if I (Bone) were naked too.
But then — as if to reassure me — the huntsman waved his horn. A cloud of particles arose in the ‘middle of the day’ as the sawyers sliced into the flesh of wood. Their rhythmic slicing spread a carpet of golden-white dust upon the ground from the spoil of the trees. I was clothed in that cloud in flesh or fleece. The dog at the huntsman’s heel became a frisky lamb.
I now slipped into the bustling throngs of Jonestown. Clouds rose overhead. A blue sky. So blue it seemed porous with the memory of Night. So easy it seemed, as people brushed past, to embrace everyone; to love everyone, to lose oneself in everyone. I stood still in the slow raining curtain of the sun’s blue shadow instinct with a coming Storm, a faint premonition in the dome of space, inner flesh of the middle of night I still remembered in counterpoint to fleecy cloud.
My skeleton-twin was beside me now on the rude pavement of the new town. It was a holiday in Jonestown. He was wheeling a bicycle on which were stacked two columns of newspapers, one on the saddle, one on the handlebar. I reached out to embrace him but he thrust my Lazarus-arm aside with a jarring rebuff.
It was so unexpected I was seized with chagrin. Was he not my twin? Was he a stranger?
I sought to cover my pain by pointing to the newspapers.
He interpreted this as an unspoken question.
‘The Carnival Argosy,’ he said. ‘You should know, Francisco.’
I said nothing.
‘Let me jog your wretched memory, Francisco. Yes, I shall! When I broke from you and fell into the pit I took part of your memory with me. Memory is archetypal. It is shared between fleshed Bone and twin-skeleton. Thus it is sometimes that a society sustains itself. One is in blessed ignorance of what the other suffers. I kept you going. I made survival a shade of flesh easier for you. But now it’s time. I have been in hell. And it’s time you knew. Every charismatic cult breeds hell. You were Jones’s left-hand man and close associate. To give you credit in an age of lies you have never hidden the fact! So when I broke out of your fleeing body on the day of the holocaust I took the rap. I took your hell with me to give you a Limbo chance to grow flesh upon our mutual grave. You see Francisco the truth is never static, it needs re-visionary momentum in all proportions of narrative convention or conviction, the truth can never set us free unless we are multifaceted and able to face our indebtedness not only to surrogate Gods but to obscure twins in the family of Skeleton and Bone …’
I was shaken. I was appalled. The assault took me by surprise. I thought I had been coming along well in my Dream-book. But I knew now that I had scarcely begun. I needed to dip into hidden texts of the grave to achieve some measure of translation of the hell that I had — perhaps unwittingly — helped to build when I joined Jones’s charismatic cult.
And the newspapers on the bicycle! Had my skeleton-twin taken them into the pit when he fell and left me at the edge of a lantern-lit Night in the darkness of the Forest?
‘I lay under the Carnival Argosy,’ he said, ‘until now. Newspapers were my perverse Virgin Ship, Francisco. I lay under them in the pit. A pillow of earth and stone and leaves under my head. Rich juicy scandal. The Virgin press is wed to bridegroom Money.’
He gave me his faint lightning smile that was harnessed to underground distant thunder.
‘We arranged, Francisco — you and I — when we planned a Carnival celebration for Jonestown to take place in the Spring, this Spring, to ride with the Carnival Argosy on our head upon a bicycle, distribute it to the cult membership of Jonestown, and pass Jones’s copies to him in his house at the edge of the river. I see you have forgotten, Brother.’
I tried to pretend I had not but my skeleton-twin, or brother of the grave, was sharp as a nail, a seeing nail in a hollow socket.
‘Let me jog your memory again, Francisco! Jones acceded to our request to stage the celebratory RETURN OF THE LIVING FROM THE DEAD such as is staged in Maya folkloric villages, South American settlements, and in Mexico City every year. As for another title … well, we debated several. Remember? UNDER THE CAVE OF THE MOON (into which you fled Francisco). UNDER THE STORM OF THE MOON. We even considered UNDER THE VOLCANO. But abandoned that …’
His tone was lighter perhaps, self-mocking, jesting. Perhaps he had glimpsed Mr Mageye. I was more drawn to him in this instant and I cried: ‘Good God! Did Jones really agree to such a Carnival? I remember he was totally against such pagan Memory theatre!’
The Skeleton’s Carnival lips crackled into a blissful smile riddled nevertheless with accusation.
‘You do remember something after all, Francisco! But let me continue to prod — is that the right word? — into the archetypal recesses of Memory theatre. Jonah felt that to give you what you wanted was to encourage you to keep your head well below the parapet of memory. Even as I kept mine in the pit. He knew that you could raise hell if you wished. And so you shall! But Jonah bargained on giving you a licence for hollow ritual. Carnival resurrection might become an end in itself, a hollow ritual in itself, hollow theatre in itself. The best thing he felt was to give you latitude for hollow Carnival year after year. You might then come to forget what it was all about. Play dead, play resurrection, to your heart’s content, until in the end the banner of conquest in his hand would prevail and seal hollow resurrection into the death of living memory, living archetype.
‘Yes, Jones’s brand of religion, Jones’s split between the dead past (so-called) and the future (so-called), Jones’s irredeemable universe, can prove a killing dogma, a killing manifesto directed at the heart of originality … Pity him by all means, Francisco, love him, yes, if you can, he is (or was) your associate — indeed a friend — as human as you are, as human as all fallible establishments. But remember it is hell that springs from the grave of memory where it has long slumbered and cries out to be portrayed in its true colours of intolerance and tyranny within dogmatic and charismatic cults.’
I was stunned but the ramifications were clear. The Christ of the conquistadores possessed a twin in the sick man who arose from a hospital bed and whom I followed through the Virgin’s Wheel into Jonestown. Sickness was a skeletal aspect of the hell into which Christ had descended. Health was flesh on the Bone within the split materialistic/spiritual mind of my age. Numinous paganism was a gleaming web or net or medium of a true resurrection of archetypal memory. It was a net in which to salvage a broken world and reclaim its bearing on a living future …
Hell was around the corner but we rode through heaven into the Carnival crowd which made way for us. My skeleton-twin held the Carnival Argosy on his head. He sat on the towing bar of the bicycle that ran from the pole of the saddle to the pole of the handlebar. I pedalled on the saddle and achieved a miraculous balance with a column of newspapers on my head. We distributed them into the crowd with amazing Circus sleight-of-hand.
The huntsman and his dog ran as lithe as Spirit beside us.
We were all upheld between parallel cloths and elements and were spinning along on surrogacies of the Virgin’s Wheel within blossom that rained on the futuristic grave of Jonestown, the futuristic grave of the globe.
Blossom and cloud and the foam of the sea were parallel Sleeps and Wakings.