I knew now she was making Oracle fun of me. And yet a glimmering flock of wings — flash of wings — high on the phallic tree made me pause and consider the gravity of what I had been told.
Were those the wings of extinct, foetal organs in the Womb of Virgin space?
‘I am a free man,’ I insisted. ‘Am I not? I can travel everywhere. I can cross frontiers. Can I not?’
The Virgin animal goddess pointed to the great bunched head at the top of the erect phallic gland or leafless trunk, shorn tree where, it seemed, Jonah’s log broke into — or slid into — a belly of genesis-cloud and its flashing wings in the Womb of space.
‘Free, yes,’ said the Virgin Oracle, ‘in that extinction of so many areas of yourself may be viewed ironically, or tragically, or redemptively as a mystical unity with all creatures.’ Was she jesting, was she praying to dead Gods and living Gods in a curious sacramental orchestration of invisibles and visibles? ‘Extinction that leaves you cognizant of what is happening, or has happened, to yourself — extinction that erupts backwards and forwards into rare, epic solidity and ghosts of Carnival — imbues severances in a chain of natures,a binding chain, with a strange, obscure, tormenting faculty that we call freedom, a freedom that needs to be weighed and weighed again and again, considered, reconsidered, for the backward glance it may bring into losses that we have suffered.’
She gave a sudden, gasping laugh as Jonah’s log rose into the belly of the clouds.
‘The chain breaks,’ I thought I heard her say. ‘The chain loses itself to create a mystical self. Does not the Christian Church speak of losing one’s life to find it?’ I felt the slap of her voice in my voice. A long sighing pause continued at the top of the tree and then she continued. ‘Why am I telling you all this, Francisco? You write of it in your Dream-book when you emphasize mystical dismemberments. Have you forgotten or is it too painful to bear? Extinction of parts of yourself brings a terrifying message of catastrophe — progressive catastrophe — or of the reversal of such linear progression into changed inner lips, inner limbs, inner bodies in the evolution of the free man, the free Imagination cursed with profoundest self-knowledge. Human nature may change when it begins to comprehend the broken chains of Being in itself, a breakage that entails the gestation of freedom’s body to look back into overlapping texts of the birth of time and invoke vanished but long-suffering shapes and species within the seed and orbit of freedom’s self-knowledge …’
I shrank from the task, the trial, of Dream. I wanted to be unfree, I wanted to eclipse the rape of natures that freedom had imposed everywhere, the freedom of an Enlightenment (so different from the Virgin’s enlightenment)to send into exile all voices in nature and space that differed from a human-centred cosmos preoccupied with its own vested interests in power and wealth at any price.
I saw the animal goddess’s pitying eyes upon Jonah and upon me.
‘The future may still mother the spectral Carnival bodies of the past, Francisco. Not by purely linear progression but by proportionalities that bring us abreast of the living past in the womb of tradition.’
She pointed up to the erect head of the Phallus in the Brothel-Oracle of space.
Brothel. Oracle. I was close to despair but something was tremulously stirring, beyond the logic of fate, that I needed to pursue within the inner limbs, the inner bodies, of the Self.
It dawned on me all at once that the Phallus had broken on its penetration of floating wings in the belly of oceanic, riverain Cloud far above me but close to Jonah’s apparitional climb into self-deception of eternity’s closure of time.
A red rim or slice appeared beneath the lofty erection and mounted head, mounted by Cloud, in Jonah’s log. Waterfall log, rainfall log, that I saw through Jonah’s body? I was unsure. Within the slice of log or Phallus, feathered birds, white and dark as rain, seemed to pour like a river.
It was an incalculable spatial phenomenon or omen of genesis.
A river of feathers etched its insertion into cross-sectional sliced Phallus. The feathers flattened themselves into hair at the rim of the log to which Jonah clung, intercourse with the Sky, Sky-flesh of the Virgin Animal …
It was but a game, a perverse and derisive game at times — as I recalled it in San Francisco (ages ago it seemed) — that Jonah played in electing me as his foster-son through the Virgin Animal of the New World that he sought to invoke as a medium or theatre in which to damn yet save, slaughter and bind my antecedents into his Church, his future Church, his charismatic Church that he entertained in his subconscious in his College days.
That the Animal Goddess would return as a formidable ghost in the Circus of civilization to illumine not only how she had enslaved him but how she came to pity him was virtually unimaginable until now when I saw the broken, mended Phallus, the notched log floating in Jonestown river, leafless trunk (devastated forest that such a trunk could imply in its intercourse with the elements) … The truth was that I was at a loss now in the Circus for intimate, far-flung words to translate correspondences in what I saw: leafless trunk, hell, heaven, intercourse between Sky and Earth in Churches of Eternity.
I kept my eyes glued on the Phallic tree on which the apparition of the Reverend Jonah Jones ascended.
Was the Animal Goddess jesting (as Mr Mageye would have done) in revealing to me such Carnival Cinema of the playful, monstrous workings of the psyche?
In every Oracle a play of monsters brings us close to self-confessional, self-judgemental magic by which to come abreast of the terrifying responsibilities of freedom, freedom to liberate others in ourselves, freedom to crucify others in our hidden selves.
‘Look!’ said the Virgin, ‘the slice mends, it appears to mend or heal, it is a cross-sectional slice, it runs right through Jonah’s puritan member or log (and its surrogacies in exploited woods and rivers and forests). It mends itself — let us say, Francisco — but not absolutely, for do you not see vestiges of feather and bone protruding from it, phallic wound, climactic moment?’
I was startled or I would have laughed at such a seminal Jest planted in the elements.
I looked up and studied afresh (I had lowered my eyes for a moment when she spoke) the cross-sectional breakage, yet mended trunk, in the Phallic tree.
The vestige of wing or bone or feather within the mend, protruding narrowly at the edge of the mend, from within the mend, rushed into my mind like a sudden nest of psyche: I was privileged to see through the Animal Goddess’s eyes into a sudden nest of psyche, a labyrinth of branches and cells to which — in its inscription of sacrificial sculpture — Jonah was numb. And as a consequence he was unresponsive to the intervention of grace, the intervention of the subtlety of freedom that sacramentalized the embrace of others in their own right (without forfeiting their ancestral heritage) in a nest within the mended Phallus …
He was numb to everything except an everlasting divide between the damned and the saved in charismatic, brutalizing sex …