The Inspector did not hear a syllable or a word. If he had he would have labelled me a poor Jester in the image of Mr Mageye perhaps.
His rumbling mocking voice ran through the Prisoner’s cell. ‘I am one of three magi at the cradle of Francisco Bone’s Dream-book! Mr Mageye the Jester is another. And damn it all — who would believe it? — the Doctor in the Hospital is the other. Have you heard of Francisco Bone? I ask you, Prisoner of Devil’s Isle.’ The Prisoner bowed his head in consenting to the mystery of love and sacrifice that tied him to all cultures, species, imaginations in the name of the gravity of freedom.
The Inspector insisted: ‘Have you heard of Bone, you god-damn awful Prisoner? He and Deacon were Scholarship Boys. It’s a long fragmented archetypal narrative. Read the Dream-book! Can you read, Prisoner? They became friends in San Francisco. It’s recorded, I would imagine, in Jonah Jones’s log-book in the Whale of the sun in Jonestown. Francisco and Deacon returned to British Guiana every year to keep in touch with freedom fighters. A month’s holiday or so. Francisco and Deacon were American Guyanese — if one may distinguish them jokingly, self-mockingly, from English Guyanese who study at universities and colleges in England. Two different prisons you see within a fabric of broken archetypes. Sometimes English law seems alien to American law and vice versa. That’s how Deacon — an American Guyanese — wooed Marie. He’s been in love with her since childhood. So he claims. Jonah Jones of the Whale by the way signed himself in his log-book as a Prisoner of Classics of Anger! Yes, the ramifications of the broken archetype are startling but true when you ponder upon it. Perhaps they throw some light on why Jonah Jones and Francisco Bone and Deacon sought to build a new world they christened Jonestown in the Void of Guyana. As for Bone’s other magi … I have spoken of them, have I not? I am infected at times by amnesia from which the Dream-book suffers! I have mentioned Mr Mageye, I think, and Marie’s father, the Doctor in the Port Mourant Hospital …’
‘Putative father,’ the Prisoner interrupted. ‘Get your facts straight. Putative father.’
‘Putative then. Have it your own way. The fact or fiction remains that he’s another magus. The third, I repeat, is Mr Mageye, the head teacher from Albuoystown.’ He laughed to split his sides … And a key fell out into my hands (I was still hidden in the cell), a key to the prison of the Void. At last I was in possession of the magus-Inspector’s gift. Marie’s Wheel was the magus-Doctor’s, a futuristic Camera was Mr Mageye’s.
‘Eponymous magi are the foundations of a new world that takes its variable name from magus-Law, magus-Medicine, magus-Jest. Call the new world LAW/MEDICINE/JEST in an age of injustice, of a sickness of the soul, yet curiously redemptive and divine comedy. So I am told,’ said the Prisoner. ‘But tell me again,’ he said wryly, ‘how do you know all these things? Is it hollow folklore or is it the universality of a collective unconscious that secretes itself in the elements that we breathe or consume, in the sun’s blood as in our blood, in the elements that consume us in turn though we may be oblivious of the teeth of fire or air, of dread, dread companionships that loom unseen within us and around us until we see and change and become open to changes undreamt-of within the very fabric of things that we dread, a conversion of dread into a womb of imagination, moral twinships with all species and things? Such a conversion seems an impossibility yet it is the seed or grain of knowledge that anticipates unexpected varieties of knowledge, knowledge that recovers lost foundations of knowledge, wastelands, gravelands, Skeleton-twins, netherworlds, blocked they seem yet susceptible to innermost self-confessional convertibility, innermost, redemptive, self-judgemental vessel of resource … Yes, it is this. Such a conversion is this. Or it is nothing. It is hollow folklore. Is it hollow folklore?’
The Inspector grew uneasy all at once. He was cut to the bone by the taunt. ‘How does one know anything?’ he murmured in protest. Was it protest or was it uncanny, unselfconscious collusion? I wondered.
‘How does one know anything?’ the Inspector murmured. ‘How does one know of the genesis parting of the Red Sea? Was it the genesis of blood or of rain? Or the existence of El Dorado? Was it gold or was it straw? Or the flood upon Plato’s Atlantis? Was Plato a philosopher or a frustrated voyager? Or Toussaint’s letters to his generals in Haiti? He was an illiterate. Did he write in letters of fire? Were the sayings of Christ uttered by him or by voices in numinous rocks and trees? Were numinous rocks and trees mass-media television accompanying him as Mr Mageye’s Camera claims to circumnavigate Teresa of Calcutta? How does one travel with the speed of light that remains constant in all circumstances? Common sense falters. But the lame who extend their limbs into mystical faculties may know for sure.’
‘You are the magus-Law,’ said the Prisoner, ‘you should know. The Law is a star for all magi. The Law is an eponymous Shadow of Nemesis against which the light of a star — long extinct — still bends. Shadow is a caveat in the name of Light or long-vanished stars, of whose disappearance we do not yet know, across the light-years. Eponymous Shadow of Nemesis wears the name of apparitional and concrete heartlands of Light to address the materialism and cultural hubris of our age … Does Einstein’s ghost roll dice in mathematics of Chaos?’
The Inspector looked chastened but it was his turn — in the strangest collusion of lips between the Prisoner and himself — to taunt the Old God of Devil’s Isle. ‘We move and have our being in a Void,’ he said. ‘That is all we know and hope to know. So don’t knock folk legends, Prisoner, by pretending you are superior to them.’
‘I thought you were doing the knocking,’ said the Prisoner.
I listened with beating heart, mind and heart, to the conversation between the Prisoner and the Inspector.
Beating mind, beating heart, like a bird’s in the palm of the old Prisoner or God.
Equally his heart, his mind, beat in my three-fingered hand.
Were we both prisoners of the Void?
Not entirely. But I had to confess I was a feature of shadow myself with a Bag or a Hat over my head. Had I not returned from the future into the past — from Winter 1978 in Jonestown to March 1954 in Port Mourant and Crabwood Creek — from holocaust in Jonestown to Port Mourant’s and Crabwood Creek’s impending wedding of Deacon and Marie?
I had been here before in my Dream-book but I had returned again. The tragedy of Jonestown had left me stunned but I needed to revisit the scene and the entire environment — not only interior but coastal — in which it had occurred to learn of the foundations of doomed colonies, cities, villages, settlements, ancient and modern, by retracing my steps, by accepting my wounds and lameness and the speed of light with which one travels back into the past from bleak futures.
My view of the Void was different from the Prisoner’s. But I was unsure. The Void for me — perhaps for him — was open to pilgrimages and to pilgrims. It was a state of affairs that witnessed to uncertainties of Home: Home as I have attempted to define it upon a variety of bridges in my Dream-book … Uncertainty of Home sometimes seemed a state of permanency; except that eponymous Shadow implied a womb of hope, implied the triple, quadruple, even sevenfold name of the Womb of space; implied for me three folk Maries: Virgin peasant Marie of Port Mourant and Crabwood Creek whom the Prisoner claimed as his daughter in the teeth of the Doctor’s influence (and claim as well), the Doctor’s aspiration to clothe Marie in gold — if that were at all possible — when Deacon became her political consort; Virgin Marie of Albuoystown; Virgin Marie of Jonestown, the Animal Goddess, with her sculpted torso. Three Maries.