The penetration of the Void by Legba was a feat that appealed to Hephaestus. How could an apparently poverty-stricken giant secure a Lingam to match that in Asian temples in India?
Sex is a religious industry in the Third World. Vast crowds of tourists flock to pay tribute to the technology of the Lingam. The Third World is no superpower in Western eyes but Legba closes the gap on the crossroads between Haiti, Africa and India.
He is able to solicit dollars and pounds and francs and currencies of every denomination. Poverty becomes almost glamorous in the eyes of rich, frustrated wives. They take Poverty’s giant into bed with them when they sleep with their husbands. When he appears too black they paint him golden-brown or white. Lame Legba is susceptible to varieties of paint as he dresses the wounds of his people and offers his back as a seat for the globe. Poverty’s Atlas — upon which the globe rests — is blind sex with heaven …
I could not help laughing as I pushed the ghost of Deacon out of bed and embraced Marie. But Deacon was back. He was shrewd enough to return with his blandishments of the madonna.
Lingams — Marie had been told — were the property of the giant Siva but Siva was Legba’s cousin within the orphanage of humanity.
I saw a wicked flash in Marie’s eye as she pulled a shawl over her breasts and sat up in bed.
On the shawl were inscribed the features of Kali, a pin-up for Indian peasants in Port Mourant.
Kali was a guardian for Marie, she was a dangerous Goddess in her own right. She scoffed at lame giants yet relished their long-standing trickeries and inventions. She knew they were virtually divine in the tales they spun, the promises they gave of renewed potency in suspended intercourse between heaven and earth, the anticipations they nourished that the gap would close between rich nations and poor nations.
She knew of Marie’s love of the Wheel but sorrow that the Wheel had been a toy in El Dorado (the richest kingdom of its age) and that it had never been employed in quarries where brutalized labour broke its body toiling for rocks and stones in the construction of palaces and of pyramids of the Moon and the Sun.
And as a consequence wheeling arms sprouted from her body as if they originated from the luminous circles of Marie’s breasts. She was not Marie. She was one of Marie’s guardians. She was the many-armed Goddess of antiquity that indentured peasants from India had brought to the Guyanas in the hope of finding El Dorado and renewing the potency of gold.
She placed Legba and Siva upon the Wheel in the Circus of trade everywhere and expectation of an economic miracle.
Thus in the re-visionary dynamic of Marie’s Wheel — as I rolled in bed with her as if such intercourse with fire were nothing but exhibitionist trade — I was able to set up a stall in the bedroom of the Virgin on which to sell a variety of wares and relics under the Drought of heaven. When heaven suffers from Drought, a variety of occult, sexual, technological practice alerts us to a vacuum in existence, North, South, East, West.
I was able to set up the mechanics of a scrutiny (Mr Mageye’s Cinema, Lord Death’s Carnival) of the natures of the rich and the poor, the gullible and the cynical, the hopeful and the hopeless, the strong and the weak, the trickster and the truth. In some incongruous consistency they supported each other, rich poor, poor rich, strong weak, weak strong, trickster truth …
They implied latently, sometimes openly, sometimes subconsciously or unconsciously, that a mystical Body was still alive however absurd its manifestations in a blind age, not wholly blind yet seemingly blind to originality, to the life of the Imagination and its ruses and unpredictable humours as well as its implicit collaborations between music and science and art.
At the heart of a bloody-minded age lay nevertheless a new semiology of concordance and dissonance and orchestrations of intimate and alien imageries in the quest for truth within the prison of human, aberrant love. Prison, yes, for freedom (in a profoundly self-questioning sense of a cellular chemistry linking apparition and concretion) was beyond a purely individual grasp. There was a community of selves akin to individual self yet other thanindividual self inthe genesis of the Imagination. The stress on purely individual character was an impoverishment of tradition. No wonder the cult of individual freedom was fast becoming a Lingam tourist rope around the globe. And yet that symptom of malaise in the rope was convertible in the huntsman’s net into the orchestration of gravities and anti-gravities in the salvage of institutions and bodies fallen, perpetually falling …
I arose from bed and moved to the window of the bedroom. I had heard Mr Mageye’s urgent voice. Our eyes met.
‘It’s time to visit the Banqueting Hall, Francisco, time to consider our grasp of Memory theatre that we have been building or salvaging. Nothing lasts forever in the mystery of time and yet the net is there even when it seems to elude us or deceive us. Time to see my film, Francisco. Time is upon us when I shall leave …’
‘No, no, Mr Mageye‚’ I cried.
‘It’s time, Francisco. We have covered some ground. Even as the Prisoner left you I too must go.’
‘But why, why?’
‘Dread has arrived, Francisco. You are in bed with the Virgin. And you must pay the price. You must look into the heart of the womb of the Camera. You must touch the seed of a conception that humanity has well-nigh forfeited. You must approach it by indirections in the labyrinth of space and time. My Camera is such a labyrinth, as you know already. And now it seeks to net the Whale afresh as a temple — shall I say — of Jonah’s repentance. That’s one inadequate way of putting it to draw you into this (shall I say final?) entertainment before I go. Remember, Francisco, there are linked signals, symptoms and convertibles in your Dream-book. The Prisoner is consumed. I shall vanish. There are the three Maries, three weddings. Linked motifs. There is the pact between Jonah, Deacon and yourself. Remember? You broke that pact. You converted the pact into other realms, the Nether World, Atlantis, the Waste Land, the Paradise of the Rain God … Another pact came into play Do you remember? A pact between the Prisoner, the Mask of Deacon, and yourself. The Prisoner vanished as a signal of sacrifice and the convertibility of sacrifice within Phallus and Lingam. The lame Gods became divine spinners of tales still awaiting another conversion into truth. For the genesis of the Imagination remains perpetually unfinished and open to unpredictable spheres of otherness.’ Mr Mageye was smiling. The most wonderful sacred Jester and teacher that I knew. Yet I wondered. Did I truly know him?
‘Francisco‚’ he cried. ‘There is another pact to consider. Now that you have slept with Marie in the name and head of Deacon — now that you transgress into a sublime trickster — you need to weigh transferable masks of truth and trickster in my film; and that involves you in a pact between me and yourself and the ghosts of Deacon and Jonah and Kali and Anansi and others. Anansi is Legba’s cousin. I have another card up my sleeve, Francisco. It’s the Sphinx. But more of that later before I take my leave of you …’
He turned. I stood at the window as though I were falling into the street. It was a most curious premonition …
*
A great banquet was launched by the Doctor on the Day of the Wedding. It taxes me now to remember the places where everyone sat, even though I had sailed from the future into the Banquet, sailed with the Memory of the past that one stores in the future. Sailed with the architectures of the future back into the past. It was necessary to extend the dining-room in which Jones and Deacon and I had eaten our last meal together, in Jonestown, on the eve of the holocaust November 1978, into Port Mourant 1954. Such an extension was rooted in Memory’s holocaustic fire and changes in spatiality within the crumbling of the Void. A submerged dining-room I felt in deceptive elements. It began to lift nevertheless backwards in space into the banqueting hall. Such is the architecture of Dream. I sought as well to bring the Prisoner’s cell, where I had eaten a slice of bread, into the banqueting hall.