One novel element lives dies, another dies lives …
Spring springs eternal but it is broken in the subtle and changing, quintessentially flexible organs of time.
Such are the harbours and investitures that I wear with my twin.
Blossom, sea, river, land, space are Bone’s flesh that I wear in a Skeleton’s waking heaven arisen in the grave of space.
Spring and Bone voice together the rhythms and veins in the music of a tree. Time is the precipitation of sleight-of-hand eternities in masks and sculptures, the masked, etched bloom of forests, the winged traceries of cloud, blending, re-forming, reshaping into unfinished web, unfinished catastrophe or unfinished regeneration, heaven …
Heaven was an omen. It could not be taken for granted. Beauty was heartrending mystical truth. Every idyll carried an edge of harshness to awaken the palate of memory. I had travelled in the very processions on the road — largely unseeing then in the future from which I had returned to the past-in-the-present — towards the holocaust that lay across mist-ridden, wonderful vistas into the heart of the town. Now I knew (or thought I knew) the rhythms of a universe rooted in unconscious and subconscious interventions of grace that stimulate a tapestry of response possessed of its ominous grain as well as its primordial ecstasy.
I had been akin to a soldier marching through a living, paradisean landscape embroidered in the labyrinths of the rainforest. A paradise that was to assume with hindsight the fabric of a terrifying, haunting, indeed monstrous beauty in that one was marching into horror, into gunfire, into murder.
The fabric of catastrophe dwelt in Carnival heaven as paradoxical intervention of grace that prepared me now to respond at many levels within the composite epic imagination in my Dream-book. I steeled myself for my encounter with the formidable solid ghost of the Reverend Jonah Jones in my return from the future into the present-in-the-past, return from futuristic winter 1978 to spring 1978 and the crowd of Carnival ghosts through which I rode to Jonah Jones’s house at the edge of the Jonestown river.
I arrived with Jones’s copies on my head of the Carnival Argosy, covering the news of a fortnight and more.
Jonah had been swimming before I arrived and had received a glancing but heavy blow to his head from a hidden log just under the surface of the stream.
He felt like a log himself. The twin-wood or log which struck him may have slipped into a tributary to the main Jonestown river, a tributary that ran close to the sawyers’ pit.
It had floated into the main river, notched and broken in places, a phallic organ, a phallic tree or ladder, such as South American legend associates with the body and cell of a great Prisoner in Devil’s Isle, French Guyana, bordering Dutch, British, Spanish, Portuguese Guyanas. One could place other titles and masks upon them if one wished — Surinam, Brazil, Venezuela …
Jonah Jones was the Prisoner’s perverse twin-brother! Unconscious twin-brother to the great Prisoner as he descended into the river beneath his house.
I had never dreamt of this far-flung archetypal relationship before but was prompted into doing so by my jesting Skeleton-twin who stood on the river-bank with the bicycle rattling slightly against his bones as a gentle wind blew.
I had never seen Jones in this Carnival light until now — until this revisitation of Spring, Tropical noonday Spring.
The Prisoner was possessed of the hell of memory, budding, frozen, scorched, reviving memory in Spring, the hell of a descent into elements that chained him to an eternity he loathed, chained him into misgivings of the reality of freedom in an irredeemable universe. Yet he wanted to reach out to his fellow prisoners everywhere and bestow freedom upon them through the dismemberment of his limbs that would gain them unsurpassed agility. A Dream! Nothing more. It was a risky matter when Prisoner-Gods entertained the gift of freedom in themselves, a gift from an unfathomable Creator. Such a gift seemed whole, but it broke in its passage through the barriers and walls of circumstance, the prisons of circumstance, in its passage into an unresponsive and perverse humanity. All archetypes are broken in their intercourse with humanity. Broken yet active …
Jonah was the other side of the fabric or the coin that charismatic Gods may bestow upon Mankind. He had settled for non-redemption for outsiders. Heaven was barred against the damned even as it locked into itself the saved in all eternity. Freedom of soul or body was a blood-soaked mirage.
Charismatic Jonah Jones had indeed suffered a close shave, he had narrowly escaped drowning in the river beneath his house. That was historical fact. What was not historical fact was his unconscious and awakening subconscious, tormenting glimpse into the Prisoner-God in himself as he rose upon a net or current to embrace the log and pull himself up by the dazed skin of his teeth in nail and hand.
He suffered a mystical dismemberment but was largely unaware of it. Still a seed of remorse, repentance, uncertainty was born, a seed he sought to disperse into nothingness.
His house stood on the bank of the river as if grounded yet floating in its reflection in the river.
It possessed a fine view upriver and downriver.
One could even glimpse — through Jonah’s ghost eyes — as if one eye remained in the log in the river, the other rose above into a window in the house — rippling sun-shadow slipping around a bend (at least a mile away) beyond which, another couple of miles or so, stood the Cave of the Moon high up on a steep bank or cliff.
‘Francisco, I am morally confused,’ Jonah Jones said to me, when he came to the door, upon my knocking, and led me into the house, as if we were conversing on the bed of the river yet high up on reflected timbers, within reflected walls, architectures, in hell.
Difficult to record what he was actually saying.
Did he say ‘morally confused’ or was it ‘mortally confused’?
When one revisits the past from the future memory does not conform to fixed patterns of space. Memory troubles the pit of conscience in which prisoners and living skeletons lurk, in which a phallic ladder lurks secreted with messages of the split mind of an age, moral confusion, mortal confusion.
I was fully into Jones’s ghost-fractured house now, I was in the river, I was above the river.
Spring was a fracture in the phallic log or ladder to which Jonah had clung. But the question of the net remained. He had climbed up to the floating head of the log glancing down upon him through a rippling belly of water: glancing down upon him as if it were a severed, sexual eye drawn from his own head or global stick with which to beat his cult membership.
The house had become an extraordinary seminal bubble. I saw the calculating grave-digger, digger into the flesh of the earth, whom I had met in Limbo Land, reflected in it. He swore he had pushed the house into the river when he arrived in Jonestown three days after the Day of the Dead. He had ransacked the house for ticking bombs, watches, explosive money, twisted earrings of gold that Jones gave to his mistresses. He had come upon an eighteenth-century suit or heirloom that I had lent to Jones. He had put it on his own frame intending to return it to me.
I saw Carnival Lord Death’s administration of hell in the grave-digger’s cunning politics.
‘The river here is safe as you know, Francisco,’ said Jonah Jones all of a sudden. The house shook. The grave-digger’s hands were upon it all over again though Jones had surfaced and gained a respite.
‘No electric eels or perai hereabouts. Higher upriver perhaps but not here. That is one reason why we chose this site. Do you remember, Francisco? As I sank from the blow I received I had the sensation of a bullet in my head and my limbs grew heavier and heavier.’