‘In counterpoint with the extra-human dissonances of the victim soul, the long suppressed, plaintive and wonderful music of the victim soul …’ said Deacon. He had been silent all through the meal as if he were nursing a bullet to be fired at Jones … The idea sprang into my head I knew not from where … A bullet, a morsel of a bullet in himself … ‘Is it not time — when time seems to be ending — to unravel that counterpoint, varieties of counterpoint, between priest and sacrificial victim, between huntsman and hunted species, between lovers and Virgins of the wild … God knows it’s too late for me, I have failed, but you, Francisco…’ He stopped. Was he laughing at me? Was he mocking me? Was Marie of Jonestown (with her dead child whom I was to identify with myself in a flashing moment on the morrow in the Clearing) a despoiled Virgin, a despoiled Liberty on the flag of Jonestown? I had helped to raise that flag on the day we began to build Jonestown. I was filled with anger at Deacon and at myself. I disliked Deacon then intensely as much as I feared Jones. Deacon was Jonah’s right-hand angel. He was — I dimly felt at this stage — a signal for me of the riddle of the huntsman — in the book I was to write when I survived Jonestown (a book possessing its own life to be entitled Imagination DeadImagine)— the riddle of the huntsman, the riddle of the hunted creature, the enigma or counterpoint of shared Passion between spoilers and despoiled, the riddle of the feast when one dines with enemies who are also one’s close associates.
After the holocaust, when I fled Jonestown, his self-mockery, his mockery of me, gave way to truths I wrestled with on every ladder between heaven and earth, the truths of fictionality in enemy and friend, Virgin space and animal bridegroom, animal masks worn by heroes and monsters when civilization is in crisis.
He was to don the mask of the Scavenger or Vulture or Eagle. Jonah, at the point of death, when Deacon shot him, was to achieve guilt and remorse in the metamorphosis of the whale into a sun-striped tiger swimming in space.
But all that lay in rehearsals and stages in the Dream-book in the future. In consuming such a rush of thoughts I am in the future now. I fear Jones but shall continue to wrestle with him. I dislike Deacon but shall continue to learn from him.
A rush of thoughts takes me into the opening chapters of Jonestown long before I begin to write. I see them, those chapters, in my mind’s eye, as I quarrel inwardly all over again — in Memory, in my state of trauma — with Jones and Deacon on the eve of the Day of the Dead. An infinite quarrel from which one’s pen is fashioned, heart’s blood, the setting sun’s ink on the eve of the Day of the Dead …
That coming Day already devastates my mind. I am driven to contemplate inconsolable grief, yes, but within a context of rare Beauty. Why Beauty? As though the dying of an age blends sunset in sunrise, inconsolable grief in Beauty.
WHY ME? WHY HAVE I SURVIVED? Dying ages do not entirely die when there are diminutive survivors.
Let me — in this opening chapter that rushes upon me with incredible urgency (am I already writing it, or living in it, being written by it?) — give a trace or a clue to the burden of inconsolable grief in Beauty …
*
Deacon had been abandoned as an infant child in the Courantyne savannahs of Guyana. A rice farmer (also a rearer of horses and cattle) and his wife adopted him. An infant, a peasant, fallen from the stars! Later he became the hero of the populace, a monster as well. He was inoculated by a medicine man of Mount Roraima with the venom of the Scorpion Constellation. He gained, or appeared to gain, immunity to pain!
But this was to prove the unmasking of the huntsman into the inner burden of unspoken grief suffered by victim cultures. The price of relief from pain, immunity to pain in a peasant angel, was to uncover all the more terrifyingly the helplessness of animals of fate destined to impart the rage of stone, or the venom of marble, into civilization for therapeutic, aesthetic purposes (it was alleged); the helplessness of animals of fate destined to labour in the promotion of privileges, but never to be accepted as. equal participants in sorrow or joy or ecstasy of flesh-and-blood.
Did he (the infant peasant fallen from the stars, the infant angel of the precipice of civilization) bring the venom when he fell, does the venom lie in him or in despised creaturely souls that map the earth and the heavens in the intricacy of laddered feet, antennae, the intricacy of wing or feather or scale, the miraculous grotesqueries in masks of God, the terror of God, the instinctualities-in-numinosities in the mind of God?
Grief lies in creation when creaturely, apparently dissonant Beauty — in its infinite, webbed or cellular or corpuscular particularities and voyaging ramifications — is so despised, so outcast into spare-part methodologies, that it offers little or no solace, and the therapies it provides become functional callouses or tools. Immunity to pain, within privileged orders, comes to mirror functional callouses framed into animal destiny.
Grief lies in Beauty when the unmasked priest Jonah Jones, the unmasked right-hand angel Deacon, the unmasked left-hand associate (myself, Francisco Bone) discover their animal, archetypal masks within the hunted creatures each pursues in himself. We are hunted, we are pursued by repetitive catastrophes, repetitive Nemesis, and our insight into Beauty — which we may gain at the heart of terror — deepens the trial of creation to bridge chasms in itself.
Or else we will continue to perpetuate hierarchies of brutality sponsored unwittingly perhaps by Privilege, hierarchies in which each theatre of inhumanity is placed on a scale to measure which is less horrendous or more hard-hearted than the last, the symmetry of hell …
The angels in my Dream-book — playing on harps like stringed skeletons — brought messages I needed to interpret and re-interpret into infinity, into parallel universes that seemed at times to touch, to jar against each other like quake organs or plates within the earth’s crust.
The music and the drama saturated my Dreams as I lay on my pillow of stone and the angels descended and ascended …
Yes, it was clear to me that dissonances in music lie in depth within all harmonies to acquaint us with unwritten relationships that disturb our Sleep. Or else harmony would consolidate itself into an illusion …
*
Jones withdrew the gun from Marie Antoinette’s temple. She had been loyal, she had swallowed the last drop of poison. He pointed the gun at the space between his eyes. Time to join his flock on the Day of the Dead. I could not stop my limbs — as I lay on my pillow of stone within the bushes at the edge of the Clearing — from shaking. They shook so hard that a miniature storm, it seemed to me, arose in the leaves and bushes where I lay.
Jones stopped. His ears were sharp as claws. He could not see who actually lay in the bushes, but suddenly he roared — ‘It’s you, blast you Deacon. It’s you — who else would dare to disobey? — hiding there. You thought to escape. I see it now. God damn you Deacon. You’re dead.’ He turned his gun and aimed at the heart of the shaking storm of leaves. He mistook the vestige of a garment protruding from the bushes for one of Deacon’s cloaks. Indeed it was no mistake. I had borrowed it from him. It had lain beside the table on which we dined the previous day. Jones’s ears seemed to pick up the sight of the blowing garment. They were sharp as a Tiger’s seeing claws.
In that instant of miniature Chaos that made my limbs shake and tremble I seemed to fly or run back into primordial memories of Maya drawings and sculptures of Tiger-knights, Tiger-priests. And Jones’s blind eyes but sharp seeing claws loomed above me in the Clearing. He was a Priest above his sacrificial victim, above an altar. Altar of death. My death? His death? His blind eyes gave me hope that he — in some unimaginable way — would collapse into darkness before he fired.