Jones continued: ‘She (that bitch) said she felt pity for me. Imagine that! A whore and a bitch.’
I could not resist taunting Jonah. ‘Was Helen of Troy a whore and a bitch when she chucked the king her husband out of her bed?’
Jonah stared at me –
‘Helen was no animal …’ he cried. ‘You go too far, Francisco.’
‘What was she then?’ I asked. ‘Are not queens and princesses royal animals to teach us how invaluable is the Circus of civilization?’
‘Damn you, Francisco. You are not listening to me. Circe said she felt compassion for me. She said she was ready now to become a human animal. What the devil does that mean? She said she was ready to bring a re-visionary vista into the Circus. A protectress of animal species from every quarter of the globe. Such she claimed was the new legacy of queens! Or else the Circus would collapse around our ears.’
‘That’s why she’s called the Virgin of Jonestown. She tells of the hidden extensions of past doomed civilizations and of the fate that may await the entire environment of the Guyanas if we continue to be as blind and deaf and numb as we have long been.’
Jonah was outraged. ‘I do not need her pity, or her wisdom, or her compassion. Who is she to tell me what I should or should not do? Who is she to transgress against the frame of my Church? She is no Virgin. Who is she to tell me I am a pig?’ He stared at me in disbelief. But then — to my astonishment — he could not help laughing. ‘She said I was a threatened species and that I needed protection if I were to remain visible to posterity. Pigs she said were in danger of becoming a threatened species. Not extinct by any means. But still they needed protection.’
Jones was still laughing. But there was a hollow ring to his laughter. I was not amused yet imbued by a dark humour. Jones’s utterances seemed fragmented. They sprang from fabrics of Dream that floated into my Dream-book. I sought to translate them by placing them together in awkward yet pregnant collusion.
PIG rang a bell within the frame of the animal goddess as much as the torso of the Virgin of Jonestown on the Day of the Dead. Jonah Jones was a charismatic Pig within the shawl of the animal goddess and the Virgin. His brutal or coercive intercourse with nature, with a woman he deemed a whore, with a goddess who said she pitied him, was visible when he held a gun to Marie’s temple.
I recalled that Deacon, Jones and I had actually begun the construction of Jonestown in the early 1970s when students at universities in the United States plastered the word PIG on campuses everywhere — not far from famous churches, famous statues of the Mother of God — in their protests at the Vietnam War.
The implicit battleground of the campus threatened to invade the premises of the Church.
I saw it translated now into the Carnival lineaments of the animal mother of surrogate Gods, the animal human queen …
Yes, it dawned on me that the animal human goddess had been at work through those students. PIG rang a bell in Jones’s charismatic Church. PIG was the animal goddess’s denunciation of charismatic politics. Yet all species counterpointed in conflictual history were to be saved to make visible in profoundest Carnival our misunderstandings and misreadings of the past and the immensity of challenges that lay ahead of us in the future.
‘The early 1970s when we began to build Jonestown,’ I said to Jonah, ‘were a turning-point for us all. The Circus of civilization had been shaken to its Asian and American foundations. Ancient Troy and ancient Greece turned in their graves. We were still involved — if my memory in hell’s Carnival on this Spring day serves me aright — in a war to save civilization from the barbarities of communism. We all had our implicit or involuntary versions of the animal goddess of humanity and the Pig whom she had thrust from her bed. We had pin-ups of film stars, emancipated queens of the media, side by side at times with bombed women and children in villages in Vietnam. Pillars of fire crossed the ocean and the air spaces into exotic pageantry upon billboards everywhere. Soon it wasn’t barbarous communism that sent a chill down our spines. It was the deteriorating fabric of civilization everywhere. Drugged normality. Faster and faster cars. Illiteracies of the Imagination. It was then that we — you Jonah, Deacon and I — sought to build a new Rome in the South American rainforests within the hidden flexibilities of civilizations that had collapsed in the past. We brought all our prejudices and biases with us in half-ruined, half-intact form. How to visualize these, how to plumb innermost self-confessional, self-judgemental change in ourselves is a measure of truth that I seek in the wake of the holocaust that afflicts us all in a variety of overt or masked forms everywhere …’
‘Human nature never changes,’ said Jonah. ‘And let me correct you about one thing. You talk about the brothels I visited …’
‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t speaking absolutely of houses of prostitution but of a state of mind, a seeping promiscuity in which you hunted for fallen women and made them your mistresses. Circe became a curse. She enslaved you. Then she clung to you like salvation’s uncanny plague. Why she followed you to Jonestown …’
‘Ask her, ask her, you poor Fool, Francisco. I thought she would take me back into her bed so I let her come but she has foiled me at every turn. All this talk about the Virgin of Jonestown!’
‘Where,’ I suddenly cried, glancing through the window at the assembly of Carnival ghosts, ‘is the boy (her child) who lay beside her in the Clearing on the Day of the Dead? Do you remember the Day of the Dead, Jonah, now that we’ve returned from the future to this theatre of the past? Hell hath no fury as profound as the apprenticeship to truth that it offers.’
My Skeleton-twin may have heard my question. He looked up at me. I recalled my quantum and psychical transference into the dead child beside Marie on the Day of the Dead. I was he for a flashing moment within the trauma I experienced. Some portion of myself had lodged in him then, some portion of him had come into me. The bridges of Lazarus are unfathomable. How would I know him for sure on this Spring Carnival day? Not for sure. That was plain as bone. Would he not wear a Skeleton-mask to rid me of complacency in my quest for innermost shared archetype, innermost shared identity, innermost soul? The dead grow beyond fixed frontiers, do they not? A child may wear an adult Skeleton-mask in Carnival. Or may fall back into the cradle and may wear an infant mask of soil or stone. Or may remain apparently unchanging in a void of flesh. One is twinned to masquerades of the growing, maturing dead and the unageing dead.
Jonah was laughing his hollow, confused laughter. ‘Go to the Circus and see,’ he said to me. ‘I tell you, Francisco, human nature never changes.’
‘I tell you it does, Jonah. I tell you the sacred reality of the Circus is embodied in the layered, multi-faceted mosaic of genesis and the womb in the animal goddess who may enslave us yet release us from subjection to swinish fates, to the fate of immortal cattle in heaven ruled by a queen whose dreadful beauty keeps us alive as pawns of unchanging eternity.’
*
Jones was angry and he thrust me out of his house into the wilderness of the Circus of civilization in the wake of the holocaust. He placed a pen in my hand and told me to continue with my heretical Dream-book. I would be punished in due course. I would be put on trial. That was my theme now of Tropical Spring beset by many hazards, threatened landscapes, endangered species, threatened and mired riverscapes, threatened rainforests. Who was on trial I wondered? Was it I or was it civilization itself?