Their voices grew blunt as if they had reversed their killing knives into self-confessional relics of terrifying Spirituality, terrifying necessity to change the music at the heart of the Sun, the heart of creation.
‘So Francisco!’ A drum in my senses throbbed.
‘So Francisco!’ they repeated. ‘We know the danger you are in. Yet the possibilities of a re-visionary surgery of Spirit! An old/new head. A new/old responsibility. You descended into the Grave with your twin even as we were pushed there by Deacon when he lassoed the Horses of the Moon. And believe me our protean reflections — inbuilt reflected exploiters, inbuilt reflected exploited — will pursue you should you escape from the Grave …’
The odd way they put it — ‘our reflections will pursue you should you escape from the Grave’ — was a blow that I could not fathom. As though they had sliced my head from my body with their sharp/blunt knives and I would need to strengthen my frame, my tissues, my muscles to replace it with another. ‘Believe us!’ they cried. ‘You will see. We shall elect Deacon …’ Was it a threat? Was it a promise?
A howl blotted out their operatic voices. It smote me like a calm, a howling calm that replaces a silent storm. My emotions were turned upside-down. It was the howl of the interchangeable masks in the crowds of ghost-actors, hollow shouting silent masks, around the Prisoner. He had thrown another round of dice.
I wormed my way to the wall of the Grave. Time to attempt to leave, to prepare myself, time to strengthen limbs, gain tissues, muscularity, to bear another head after a mystical decapitation.
The tone of the crowds began to change. I swore I heard rushing footsteps.Had they seen me? Were they intent on pulling me back? I clung to a ripple of muscularity in the wall. I clung to ribbed sculptures. The hands that sought to pull me back into the Grave imbued me with the fiercest energy to turn heaven’s brow upon them. Heaven’s brow in place of every skull. I flattened myself into a guest of heaven that the Prisoner had promised in the art of Bonampak.
I turned the Shadow of that brow, angel’s uncertain brow, upon them as they scrambled in the sculptures around me to pull me back. They hesitated. Their outstretched, carven hands upon the wall loosened their grip upon me. They seemed to see me differently from how I saw myself. I was still Francisco Bone. How hard to conceive of myself in a pagan mural of the LAND OF THE DEAD as a guest of heaven … I was veiled from myself within ruses of the Imagination that I could scarcely bear. They saw the veil that topped my Nemesis Hat as it began to descend upon my strengthened shoulders. They saw the rivets and the holes as well to take the new Mask. This was the key to my escape from the Grave. I had a key in the tattoo on my arm to gain entry. Now I possessed another key in ancient/modern sculpture to return to the upper air.
Roraima’s Scorpions
In the hollow of God — whether water or fire — there is no discrimination. Everyone arrives and departs in mutual body and mutual ghost. This is the ‘architecture of pilgrimages’. The pilgrims come and go ‘seven times in a minute’.
What is a minute or a number (whether seven or zero on the Earth)? It is above and below, it is diversity and uncanny twinships, in the creation and fall and rehabilitation of time.
Francisco Bone’s summary and translation of the Mayan Itzá or Izté Oracle at Chichén and other places of sacrifice
Marie of Port Mourant and Deacon were married in Crabwood Creek in the third week of March 1954.
A week or so before the wedding the Prisoner of Devil’s Isle arrived on the Courantyne coast and was promptly arrested by the Inspector of Police. It was not the first occasion that he had visited the Courantyne, been arrested and sent back to French Guyana. The first time he came an accident happened which resulted in the death of Marie’s Indian parents before her adoption by the Doctor at the Port Mourant Hospital. The Prisoner — despite all this — claimed that he was Marie’s true father.
On his arrest — a week or so before the wedding — I followed and slipped into the cell where he was taken.
‘We shall have to ship you back in chains to French Guyana from British Guyana‚’ said the Inspector.
‘I must see my daughter‚’ said the Prisoner.
‘Your daughter? Who is she?’
‘The nurse Marie at the Hospital.’
The Inspector pretended amazement.
‘Marie is the Doctor’s daughter!’
‘Not so, Inspector. Not so. The Doctor is her putative father. I am her father.’
‘The Doctor is a God‚’ said the Inspector softly. ‘He runs the Hospital. He’s a scientist. He sees through frames and codes of superstition.’
‘I am an old God‚’ said the Prisoner. ‘I am the embodiment of untranslated fiction, the embodiment of the Void. I need to see her before she marries a fallen angel. Angels are of the Void. They are the embodiment of an art that we should take seriously. Deacon was inoculated, wasn’t he, with the bite of the Scorpion.’
The Inspector stared at the Prisoner and became indulgent. He prided himself on being a tolerant man. Poor devil the Prisoner was! One should pity him … He could not resist murmuring however — with a taste or rumble of mockery in his voice: ‘One day I shall write a book of folk legends. You scrambled ashore with a rag on your back and now you claim to be a God. Fallen angels! Scorpions! I ask you. I have heard it all. Do you know I myself am written into the stars as the magus of the Law in these parts? …’
I was tempted to interrupt the Inspector — from my recess in the Prisoner’s cell — and to say: ‘There are prisoners and prisoners — we are all prisoners — sometimes it seems that we are all made in the image of an eternal Prisoner … Except that the gravity of freedom seems so realthat freedom must be true… It’s a matter of broken archetypes that tests us sometimes beyond endurance and yet we must continue to be tested … Magus of the law, Inspector! What does it mean? What does this mean? Are not law and love parts of a whole archetype which baffles us as lightning baffles the sky? And yet we glimpse it as if by chance at times, within the immensity of a cosmic gamble which weaves together a diversity of sciences and traditions. These overlap within proportionalities of “music” in the “word”, well-nigh uncontainable word in music, uncontainable music in word, to revive the energy of endurance and sacrifice that would be incomprehensible without the gravity of freedom.Is freedom rooted in an obscure premise of evolution that bears on all being and indeed non-being, all dimensionalities (past and present and future) …? Perverse Reverend Jonah Jones of the Whale — who boasted that he fucked heathens as a stick with which to strike his civilization — is twin to the poor Prisoner in this cell who claims to be the father of Marie! It seems outrageous. It seems alien. Perversity in the family of gods and humans and all species is a measure of alienation that we embrace within the gravity of freedom. Is this not so, Inspector? How else may we begin to endure the mystery of love that prompts us to see ourselves differently within a whole universe, within parallel universes, within the holocaustic, nuclear games that we play with one another? Through such alienation we may plumb some grain of innermost repentance within a fabric of hostilities that “space” itself engenders, inner spaces, outer spaces, inner bridges, outer bridges, finities, and infinities … We may begin to be incredibly whole, a journey beyond fear …’