I made my way now to the animal goddess and Virgin of Jonestown. I recalled her sculptured torso on the Day of the Dead. But this was the Day of Living Return of the Dead or pagan Spring in the calendar of the Maya. This was a Day of dark cross-culturalities and savage, purifying humour. She was my foster-mother in Jonah’s parlance of the puritan colonization of the Americas, his metaphor of intercourse with her to redeem my bastard progression into his Church of Eternity.
She was a surrogate queen, a tattooed mistress. No Virgin in his Christian, charismatic ideology but a useful frame or channel through whom to conscript orphans in his Church.
Intercourse with her was justified as a way for a puritan to absolve her of tainted antecedents, to accept unchanging human nature in himself and herself, to build the savage queen that she was in his eyes into a supreme colonial pawn or foster-wife, foster-mother of orphans, in his privileged embrace. Thus it was that an irredeemable continent was rendered sterile, it was voided of its pre-Columbian background, its legacies, its cultures, in a process of proselytization or conversion to charismatic Christianity.
As I approached her (my foster-mother) I saw her differently. His (Jonah’s) supreme pawn was holy in my eyes. Her compassion for him was a glancing backwards into a numinous paganism possessing unfathomable roots not in the purgation or erasure of mixed ancestries that he desired (despite his propaganda against racism) but in the purgation of violence from sex. The act of the penetration of space, of Virgin space, penetration of other worlds, was not in its mysterious origination an act of violence. It was an act of creation, the creation of living diversities, the living orchestration of differing spaces, ages, realities. It could prove an exposure of capacities for genuine freedom. But the Sorrowing Wound was inevitable. One’s masquerades of wholeness (the surrogacies, misinterpretations, misreadings of diversities-in-unities) fell far short of the origination of the penetrative act. So — in that exposure of numinous difficulties interwoven with the gift of freedom — violence became the price that humanity was driven to pay. It was a price that challenged the arts of the Imagination to their core. I had seen in my Dream-book the breakage of the sovereignty of violence into mystical dismemberments sustaining diversities and enlarging the capacity for disadvantaged cultures to change and grow and rediscover invaluable omens and roots …
As a consequence I knew I was on trial in Jonah’s eyes, in the eyes of the establishment. Where the establishment sought the sterility of a conformable realism, as its absolute goal, I sought intangible but real frontiers to cross within an open universe in which my foster-mother stood as one of three Maries. She was smiling at my Skeleton-twin as I came close to her. Skeleton-twin? Foster-son? Such is the family of recovered being-in-non-being in Carnival creation.
I said to her: ‘Why in God’s name did you come to Jonestown to suffer a horrible death?’ I stopped aghast. I dreamt I heard my Skeleton-twin whisper: ‘Mystical dismemberments, mystical wholeness, is the body of the pagan Virgin through all Carnival masquerades.’ I held my ear and twisted it as if it were a flute, an organ, the vagination or sheathing of sound in space. I continued quickly, repeating the question, ‘Why in God’s name did you come to Jonestown? I did not know you on the Day of the Dead. I saw you as Marie Antoinette (an acceptable face in European eyes for Virgins), not Circe, the terrifying, unpredictable compassion of an animal goddess such as Circe. Only now on my return from the future …’
The column of fire on her head had cooled. She dislodged it and placed it in the soil between herself and my Skeleton-twin who was her son, or foster-son, within the broken, archetypal fabric of the family of the Self.
She knew me instantly though she was grateful for the numinous link with her Carnival son, my twin or Skeleton in league with masked Bone, fleshed Bone. Such ramifications, or identity of Sorrows and Jests, were codes into a family of creation in the eyes of the Virgin of devastated Jonestown.
‘You pay a price, Francisco, in your return. I pay a price for my former connection with Jonah Jones. He was my lover. Now he’s in hell. Hell takes many forms upon the Virgin Ship that you are building. Your Skeleton-twin descended into hell. Even now he’s unwilling to embrace you! He has suffered not only in the pit of Jonestown into which he fell, in your place, but in wars everywhere, in famines everywhere, from which he released you to live and eat. You were as ripe to appear to have perished as he, you were as ripe for starvation as he. He is intimate to you yet alien. He is your epic familiar and inner double in the grave of flesh, in the cradle of flesh. And all this is instinctive to the price you pay, Francisco! To possess such knowledge on your return to this Carnival Spring Day is to acknowledge your ignorance in the future from which you have come. Should one be wiser as one progresses into the future from the past? I doubt it. You doubt it. One needs to come abreast of the past if the past is to yield a kinship with futurity …’
If I did not know of her compassion I would have dreamt she was mocking me. She continued:
‘I speak as a Carnival oracle, Francisco. Not Delphic oracle! Carnival oracle. Have you heard of it? Such curious speech is distressing for you I know only too well. Oracles are steeped in hidden texts that may scarcely be translated. But still translations in your own tongue (let me say), orchestrated fabrics imbued with music — are necessary. Again such translations are the price you must pay, Francisco, to see the Dead alive after knowing them Dead …’
I broke into the Oracle of space, as it were, when I cried: ‘You said Jonah Jones was your lover. And the price you must pay …’
I stopped with the overwhelming impression that in breaking into the Oracle of space I stood within a gigantic brothel at the heart of the Circus of civilization. But the impression receded until I was filled with awe and terror. Awe of freedom, the terror of freedom, that the animal goddess sought now to explicate to me in the Shadow of the great phallic tree.
There was implicit truth, implicit deception, in that tree.
Implicit self-deception conceived in the notion of a mastered female nature, a tamed female nature, implicit truth in balancing Sorrow and ecstasy, freedom and licence.
It was the searing conjunction of all such ambivalences and counterpoint that gave content to the price that my foster-mother paid in returning to Jonestown in my Dream-book.
She pointed to the great phallic member within the Circus. Jonah’s sweating body shone there now as he appeared to fall back into the river all over again and to climb the notched, sculpted log of wood floating above him, within him, beside him.
‘Does Jonah know he’s up there?’ I asked. ‘Is it an apparition, a Circus trick? I left him in his house a moment ago. Apparitions can be solid in that we grieve, genuinely grieve, for fleeting joys and pleasures, they can be hollow, without grief, technology without pain and grief. Does Jonah know he’s up there?’
‘Do you, Francisco?’
‘I see him,’ I said stubbornly. ‘I do not see myself.’
‘That’s easy,’ said the Virgin animal goddess. ‘Easy to see Jonah the charismatic, the tyrant. Not yourself, Francisco. Jonah was once an idealist. What chance do you have, Francisco, of seeing yourself not only in him but through him? I can help you. That is my burden, the price I must pay to enlighten you to the well-nigh extinct creature that you are …’
‘EXTINCT?’ I was stunned, bewildered. ‘How can a free man, a free, imaginative dreamer and writer, be extinct?’
‘Tell me,’ said the Virgin Oracle, ‘what in heaven’s or hell’s name do you really know of your long-vanished antecedents, Francisco? What do you know of the worlds and spaces they occupied or inhabited before the Conquest? Precious little. What do you know of the treaties they shaped with the Predator, the Wolf, the Beast, who spoke to them at the fireside? You call me holy foster-mother but what do you know of me? You are extinct, Francisco (in areas of yourself), as a species of bird or buffalo or animal that fell to the guns of the invading puritan in the Americas since the Conquest. You are the embodiment of lost tribes, or peoples, Atlantean peoples. It’s a tragedy as old as Plato’s Dream. Older perhaps. As old as the fates of Prisoner-Gods on Devil’s Isles.’