The mystery of the Virgin-archetype in the ‘peopling of the Void’ implies a form virtually beyond comprehension, a form shorn of violence in its intercourse with reality, but — as with all archetypes — it comes to us in its brokenness to activate nevertheless, it seems to me, a reach of the Imagination beyond all cults, or closures, or frames …
I suddenly realize that I should not close this letter without a comment on variations in the spelling of ‘Guyana’ or ‘Guyanas’ or Guianas’ …
I appeal to your tolerance, W.H. — when you edit my Dream-book — to accept these deviations or distortions as meaningful in the context of partial amnesia and confusions that I endured in the great forest.
My fluctuations of memory, in my wanderings for seven years in the wake of the ‘tragedy of Jonestown’, are rooted as well, I am sure, in the amnesiac fate that haunts the South and Central and North Americas across many generations overshadowed by implicit Conquest.
Hidden textualities of pre-Columbian and post-Columbian place are hinted at in the word ‘Guiana’ which British colonizers framed, for political convenience, when they came into possession of the Colony in the early nineteenth century.
‘Guiana’ springs from a variable Amerindian root-text which means ‘land of waters’. It is as if one becomes aware of fragmented page after page in a volume or book long suppressed or hidden. How apparitional is ‘British Guiana’ or ‘French Guiana’ or ‘Dutch Guiana’? How concrete are ‘Guyanas’ in vowel or innermost anatomy of flexible texts extending backwards into pre-Columbian age?
‘British Guiana’ became ‘Guyana’ in 1966. A link was implied with an older frame one may perceive in Spanish maps of the region encompassing the ‘Guianas’ and Venezuela and South Brazil. Cross-culturalities running through ‘Guianas’ and ‘Guyanas’ are invoked, it would seem, in the Dream-body of history, and in implications of the indebtedness of one convention to another through layers of space and time.
It may seem inevitable or convenient to submit to one frame or name but, in so doing, cultures begin to imprison themselves, involuntarily perhaps, in conquistadorial formula that kills alternatives, kills memory. Not only were Africans who came through the Middle Passage deprived of their names by slave-masters but in the twentieth century Arawaks and Macusis and Warraus and others have begun to adopt English or Portuguese or French or Spanish names and to suppress their native place names or animal names … There may be no harm in such adoption provided an inner/outer masquerade or Carnival lives in the imagination and is susceptible to many worlds, to parallel universes of sensibility, in Memory theatre. And what is Memory theatre but an acceptance of amnesiac fate that diminutive survivors begin to unravel …?
Long-vanished texts secrete themselves everywhere in Aboriginal, fragmented theatres of place, in living (sometimes mutilated) landscapes, riverscapes, skyscapes, apparitional at one level, concrete at another …
Elusive El Dorado (City of Gold? City of God?), whose masthead is consumed and refashioned on sacrificial altars in every century around the globe, may have a buried harbour in that compass or ‘land of waters’.
Adieu my friend.
Francisco Bone
Virgin Ship
I lay in a clump of bushes like a dead man. Scarcely breathing. My head rested on a cushion of stone. I dreamt of angels ascending and descending into Jonestown. Jonestown was above me in the skeletons of the stars. No stars now at midday. Only the sunlit dead on the ground. How incredibly soft is stone when one fears flesh-and-blood!
Jonah Jones was still alive with a gun. He would appear, I knew, at any moment in the Clearing.
There was a split leaf close to my nose through which — with slightly lowered head away from my pillow — I began to count the dead bodies on the ground. They lay not far from the rude church in which they had worshipped an hour or two ago. One swore one could hear their voices still rising into the heart of the South American Forest that seemed now in me, yet as remote from me, as the Milky Way blotted out by sunlight.
I felt a mental splinter sharp as the nib of bone; and voiced my own lament in tune with their vanished voices. The voice of bone was the art of the Word, of sculpture, of painting within the holocaust.
‘Good God!’ the bone sang.
The bone ceased for a while its tremulous, echoing tracery of scriptures of sorrow. It ceased yet never ceased for it continued to make silent pictures until the wordlessness of the sleeping choir of the dead in the Clearing welled up around me.
A woman whose name was Marie Antoinette was clutching a mystical cup or grail of music from which she had drunk milk and sugar and deadly cyanide. Her head lolled on the ground. Her torso wore the blind sunlight of Carnival. It was the sheer ordinariness of the cup against the lips in the head that struck me to the heart, the lips communion with Silence.
All at once the Reverend Jonah Jones, tall, commanding, came out of the rude Church of Eternity into the Clearing. His face wore an air of triumph like a general’s on the field of battle. He stopped above the eloquent lips and head and the communion cup. There was a child beside her I had not seen before. A child I knew all at once. Me! Me in another universe, a parallel universe to this. I was in that parallel child. Quantum hallucination. Quantum transference of psyche.
Jones stood in the whale of the sun, he knelt, he placed a gun to Marie Antoinette’s temple that seemed in a state of divorce from the trunk of her body.
What curious memorials a bone inscribes, draws, paints, builds, sings in the mind, the exiled mind, the solitary mind and soul on the margins of doomed civilizations.
One is exiled when one refuses to obey the commandments of Conquest Mission, to think or write in a certain way, in conformity with the realism of Death. I was a sculptor of the bone in exile now, a writer of the bone in exile now, a painter, an architect, a poet of the bone in exile now upon the margins of the Conquest Mission established by the cult Master of Ritual, the Reverend Jonah Jones.
Jonah and Jones are common-or-garden names which have gained ascendancy in the Forest of my age.
I sensed the great danger I was in. I had deceived Jonah. I knew there was no persuasion or plea or dialogue on my part — dialogue I might have sought to exercise with him — that could have led him back out of the great white whale of the sun into which he was determined to go, sun or whale which he wished to inhabit as the throne of conquest, and in which he sought to secrete his followers. Could one begin to explain to him that such secretion, such a symbol of conquest, was a manifestation or a prelude to the extinction of all species within the insatiable stomach of eternity?
Was this the inbuilt nature of our civilization that we scarcely understood, that we had scarcely begun to question?
I had deceived him. I had been his comrade. I had been a close associate. But — at the last moment — had broken the pact in questioning my civilization, in questioning myself.
He was sure I had been obedient and was lying there amongst the dead. I had disobeyed his command. Would I pay dear for such treason? Would I be thrust into a wilderness? Who was I to disobey? Had I saddled myself with the traumas of an age, the traumas of disadvantaged peoples around the globe bewildered by the commandments they were instructed to honour?
At last the Reverend Jonah Jones was satisfied that the woman had been loyal. The subject of a revolution — in favour of the consolidation of conquest — that he wished to engineer, she had surrendered to his will, she had drunk her drink to the last drop … Or so it seemed … I was to learn differently later … No need to pull the trigger … He withdrew the gun from her broken body. Was it broken? Was it miraculously whole?