Sex therefore for the charismatic missionary Jonah Jones is purification and an atrophy of origins by way of eternity which kills time. It is a ritual and practised laceration of hollow flesh, it is a map of blood.
Poor Jonah Jones is tormented in hell that he has elected for others! Sex is closure in his eyes, it is a frame, it is the predicament of mixed ancestries, animal ancestry, human ancestry, divine ancestry. Mixed races as well! His addiction to brothels therefore is a demonstration of his privileged status. He is privileged to loathe and to enjoy the promiscuity he condemns. How else would he gain experience of what he preaches … Eternity’s closure of time in the brothels of civilization, doomed time … Such is his sermon.
I saw all this through Jonah’s eyes with tears in my eyes. We were both mixed in the spirit of hell and heaven and earth and other nameless spheres of creation. I saw his subjection to anger, to a kind of authoritarian fixture of wrath, as the hell he had created for himself and for me in this Carnival moment of my return from the future to the past …
Except that I dreamt of converting such anger in him and in myself into transgression against the forces of absolute damnation.
Was I capable of creating freedom within the content of visionary losses I had endured?
Was I capable of converting such losses into chasms of the self that would take me beyond the split mind of my age? Was I capable of leaping into the arms of Love, Love so terrifying (in height and depth and range) and all-inclusive it imbued me with dread? Was I capable of dying yet living in order to sustain a vessel or vessels of living time, living ghosts, Memory theatre …?
Was I capable of such staggered fiction, broken trauma, in the hell of remembered Jonestown, revisited Jonestown?
Memory theatre indeed! I laughed with tears still in my eyes. I had forgotten so much.
I looked out of the window upon my Skeleton-twin. I was chastened. A column of fire arose on his Carnival skeleton head. It matched other columns upon the Carnival masquerading queens of Arawak and Macusi women whom Jones had had in his bed.
‘There they are, Jonah,’ I said at last. ‘Spring’s hofting up.’
‘Heathen savages,’ said Jones.
‘Perhaps they would like to tip you, Jonah, into a labyrinth of fire such as you experienced …’
‘Tip me? You are at sea in the elements, Francisco. I experienced a labyrinth or net of currents when I struck my head in the river …’
‘Rivers burn in South America today, Jonah. Fire spouts rain. Charisma and hubris, human-centred cosmos, despoil our planet. And yet the omens are visible. Fire’s speech lives in its counterpoint with rain and river. There are other voices, extra-human voices in angry living landscapes that we refuse to hear or see. To hear what one sees erupts in the senses and what is other than the senses in a language of counterpoint …’ I spoke from a depressed mind and heart.
But then I was utterly startled, utterly astonished, to see a woman, named Circe by Jonah, standing in the crowd of ghost-revellers beside the ominous Jonestown river. I could not believe this.
I knew her now.
I had seen her on the Day of the Dead with her child in the Clearing but had not recognized her as Circe. Marie Antoinette. I knew her by that name. The Virgin of Jonestown. What a transgression of boundaries one takes for granted. What a transfiguration of animal goddess into Virgin.
Yes, I remembered in hell. Hell’s truths …
She had been Jones’s mistress in San Francisco. He swore — when he returned from one of his drunken orgies — that she had tattooed his face and his penis on her buttocks, he was her whale, her submarine, her tiger.
A terrible sadness invaded my heart and mind.
Memory theatre in hell bites deep.
In the games that we played — Deacon, Jones, and I — Deacon had claimed me as his Carnival Lazarus-son in order to project upon me a bewilderment in womb and tomb (as he used to put it). Who were his parents? He had been exposed as an infant-child in the Courantyne savannahs. He could easily have died there. His adoption by cattle-farmers and horse-rearers was a kind of resurrection, a buoy to which he clung. I had been born in Albuoystown. I was Bone and Flesh upon which to project his state of orphanage. He seized me as a canvas upon which to paint his bedevilled condition of a fallen angel, fallen from the womb of space, arisen from the grave of the earth.
Orphans tend to play at parenting the globe, the grave of the globe, the cradle of the globe. Orphans tend to play at parenting other orphans. I was his Albuoystown orphan upon whom he was tempted to place his father-mask, his sonship mask as well. Composite epic!
In the same token — as if to appoint intangible distinctions and crossed frontiers as well in composite epic — Jones claimed that he was the puritan father of invisible savages — invisible to him and therefore ripe for blind salvation in his Church as orphans. Heathens and savages and colonial peoples were damned but once converted into orphans they could be claimed by any parent, or state, or university, and baptized afresh: indeed baptized for the first time in wasteland fire and water.
‘Circe’s your foster-mother, Francisco,’ he used to say when he returned from one of the brothels that he patronized in San Francisco. ‘She’s an animal goddess from Rio, Brazil in the United States and I shall take her with me wherever I go. Like a fucking masthead on a bloody ship. Fire in her veins that spout to heaven. She resembles you, Francisco. Epic nonsense in a Christian age. A dash of French blood perhaps, English, German, and tainted African and Arawak. Let’s claim that when I fuck her I save you Francisco from taint. I recruit you in her into the Church. It’s the sanctification of the beastly brothel, is it not? The art of colonialism. Give every Colony a civilized foster-mother, foster-son face.’ He was drunk as a lord, drunk as an aristocrat, drunk as a conquistador. But I was bitterly crestfallen. I was bitterly ashamed to confront such theories in hell, seductive theories of the conversion of colonials and bastards within a liberal, charismatic, imperial backcloth.
How to transfigure, metamorphose such a backcloth into a sail upon the Virgin Ship! Not by social realism obviously, which is blind to the mystery of orchestrated imageries of parallel universes of the Imagination and to counterpoint … Blind to the music of counterpoint in fiction …
The thought of such transfigured histories flickered in my mind but I was so downcast and ashamed that I blotted out the face of the animal goddess from my mind, from the wilderness of the mind. Not entirely, for I knew her. I knew that I needed to speak to her, to hear her voice, to attempt to translate her replies within a Dream-book susceptible to some degree of the convergence of the unconscious, the subconscious, the conscious …
But Jonah Jones’s voice continued for the time being to ring in my ears.
‘She chucked me out of her bed, Francisco,’ Jonah said. ‘She chucked me out one Spring day. Imagine that!’ He was laughing and yet I sensed genuine disbelief in his mind. I sensed he was confessing within the pages of my Dream-book to something that he rarely acknowledged and of which he infrequently, if ever, spoke. A mystical riddle lay on his tongue, that a savage woman was capable now of thrusting him from her bed. Alas it was too late. Or was it? Would such an apparently inconsequential gesture — directed at Churches of Eternity — save doomed colonies, doomed cities, doomed landscapes, from charismatic gunfire, charismatic closures of time, charismatic fires, charismatic floods?