A host of questions arose within me. I recalled the torso of the Virgin in the Clearing on the Day of the Dead. On this Spring day that torso or sculpture became a towering Ship reaching up to the nest of psyche in the Phallic tree: intervention or reach of savage grace: sudden Storm: orchestrated elements to break the unresponsive heart.
Perhaps the Oracle was angry at my questions spoken or unspoken. The climate of civilization began to change. Extinct ages began to come alive.
An ancient Storm (one would have deemed extinct) — such as I had never seen in all my life of wanderings and voyages — arose within the Circus. It arose and stood above Jonestown which lay now — in that ancient, revisited time — nameless under the sea. The Atlantic rolled far inland from the drowned Guyana coasts of South America to the base of the Kaieteuran escarpment.
The flood was as tall or taller than the Phallic tree. It was in itself a series of Phallic waves or mounds of water. I floated in the Ship or torso of the Virgin. I glimpsed the rape of Atlantis, Plato’s Atlantis, far beneath me. Rape of Virgin Atlantis. It encompassed Jonestown, nameless Jonestown, in the belly of the flood.
In that flood lay the lineaments of the drowned, pre-Columbian New World, since the European Conquest, in every mutilated landscape and catchment and lake.
Freedom and conquest were as old as Atlantis. Tall catastrophe.
How could such an ancient, extinct Storm be the intervention of grace in the Phallic tree of the elements? The Storm blew a leaf at last in the beak of an extinct bird. The leaf was lodged in a crevice of the flood. The flood broke, the chain of waters broke, as if to mirror a sliced, cross-sectional eruption and mend in the trunk of waters, a mound of waters, on which I sailed on the Virgin Ship from which a net descended to which Jonah clung.
Curious net! More akin to a nest that floated through the leaves of water upon which fish swam like birds that flew through the air as if defying gravity yet sustained by interleaved fractures in the body of gravity.
A chain of elements, water, earth, wood, broke. A prison of conformable natures broke. And the fate of Atlantis was laid bare as a counterpoint between rape or devastation and implicit freedom still to balance extinction with a renascence (or renaissance) of lost cultures whose vestiges and imprints could be orchestrated into the seed of the future.
I could scarcely gather together the immense orchestration of the Storm that I had evoked in the questions that I addressed, murmured questions as well as unspoken questions, to the Oracle; to the formidable ghost of the Animal Virgin who enslaves us yet pities and protects us and awaits our grasp of the nest of psyche in the broken, mended Phallic tree of universal element. Without that grasp freedom’s messengers perish. Sacrificial sculpture grows meaningless and the Virgin ship itself drowns.
I should have been swept away myself in the Storm except for the Virgin torso or Ship in which I sailed. I should have been pinned into the grinding cross-sectional wound of broken, mended pillars between Sky and Earth through which one sails into the Cave of the Moon upon the Phallic gravity/anti-gravity tree.
Instead I was left to ponder the Oracle’s proposition of sacrificial sculptures that break a prisonhouse of unchanging law and logic into innermost fabrics and scales on which to weigh and weigh again and again messengers that arrive and nest in the wounds of the Phallic tree.
I had seen in the Storm how those wounds grow larger and larger, steeper and steeper, when our response to message and messenger becomes adamant and insensible and numb.
On the other hand those wounds become the inimitably complex and sensitive sculptures of science and art when our response acquires re-visionary momentum and graces born of Spirit.
Freedom then turns into the servant of Spirit not the despoiler of worlds.
*
I was grateful to the Animal Goddess for a rare vision of equations of Chaos, mathematics of Chaos, that were in themselves profoundest, terrifying interventions of savage grace.
Not that grace was not tender and instinct with incalculable harmonies but humanity’s numbness made it essential that the orchestration of the elements, abused for generations and centuries, would acquire configurations of omen, within Storm and Fire and majestic Phalli, to which cultures clung paradoxically in seeking intricate gaps or room to manoeuvre, room for the renewal of Breath, in the grave and the cradle and the nest of space.
The chain was broken within terror itself, the prisonhouse was broken within violence itself, broken, it seemed, within long-neglected inscriptions and texts of the birth of memory itself: memory’s eruptive, marvellously fissured, spatial organ sprung from the unconscious into the subconscious into the conscious.
Each break was a form of primordial, sacrificial sculpture that one tended to eclipse, or lose again and again, within a proclivity to numbness, to a loss of depth and range and profoundest passion, to fixtures of bias.
The bird that nested its leaf in the flood came as a messenger of eclipsed freedom erupting again, the nested leaf broke the chain of the Storm to match extinction with the genius of recovered omen or insight into invaluable resources and species linked to us yet susceptible to freedom through us, as we were to freedom through them.
My eye was sharpened, renewed, reborn as I sailed in the sculpture or torso of the Virgin as in genius’s Ship of Breath.
A rhythm of equations linked the Ship to the Phallic tree to the leaf. Breath I dreamt I possessed — in which a leaf or a feather from long-extinct Atlantean forests and species circulated — but as the Storm subsided I was unable to translate the Oracle of Chaos and its equations. Perhaps the Oracle took pity on me.
*
The Animal Goddess sharpened my ears to catch the whisper of her voice on my Breath in the orchestra of the subsiding Storm.
‘When one slices a chain, Francisco,’ she said, ‘one builds another intangible series of relationships. The vestige of bone and feather — you do remember, don’t you — in the jointed Phallic tree is sacrificial seminal sculpture. Extinct wing possesses minute fractions that are memorialized into rocket-ships as this millennium draws to a close. Bone-Ship rocket, Feather-Ship rocket, are masks of science whose grain lies in the mended Phallic tree in its intercourse with the Sky. Rocket is in the bone’s and the feather’s hidden texts blown to us within counterpoints of creation. Simplicity itself I would say, Francisco, when one opens one’s life to freedom’s responsibilities but an enormous trial it remains alas that is set by me, by the three Maries, by Virgin Space …’
I wanted to press her with further questions. I was obsessed. But I did not wish to arouse her anger at — despite her pity for — my ignorance. The enormity of the trial was dismaying. Should I tear my Dream-book into shreds? Did not freedom signify — despite its intangible linkage with all things and species — terrorizing structures, exploited bodies, manipulated resources?
Was freedom obsolete? Had it ever existed?
Violence existed. And the ancient Gods who were steeped in sacrificial sculptures on the Phallic tree had become, it was said by charismatic philosophers, Prisoners of Devil’s Isles.
Despite my misgivings — and the unspoken weight of my questions to the Oracle — the Virgin replied. Her ears were as sharp as a pointed nail’s in the strangely moon-like eyes of Lazarus, Skeleton-twin Lazarus. Such is the orchestration of imageries in Oracle-Carnival to move and transfigure the numb heart of humanity!
‘You need to meet the Prisoner-God of Devil’s Isle, Francisco. You will quite soon. In due course. Time is sometimes vague in my mind. Better so than to succumb to the hubris of eternity in charismatic institutions. You need to experience through the Prisoner-God not the obsolescence of freedom but the premature gift of freedom to Mankind …’