Such sailing architectures in Memory theatre are a medium in which to dislodge closed structures within an open universe born of the arts and sciences of concentrated Chaos and its rebuttal of catastrophe and bias as all-consuming.
It was a tall order and laughter therefore — the involuntary laughter of the Law — could be aroused into a serious, cosmic asset.
There are intricate winding stairs within the lower anatomy of an upright Boar or a Pig and the Inspector sat under these in the banqueting hall enjoying the flavour of black pudding. Someone said that that seat had been reserved for Jonah Jones, but it did not seem to matter as Jonah sat somewhere else.
The Boar grunted like a base instrument, base instrumental laughter as the Inspector turned and dipped into curries, pepper-pots, roasted beef, dishes of rice and sweet potato and yam. A meal fit for a Roman emperor or a medieval king.
On such a day, or sailing coronation, the populace was prepared to fall ill in consuming a multitude of dishes. They sought medical aid and in so doing stuffed dollars into the Doctor’s pockets to pay for the banquet.
The Doctor possessed a prosperous private practice on the side. He advised his son-in-law Deacon to build a hospital in Jonestown that would be similar to the Port Mourant public hospital but in private hands. Perhaps also a great Cinema Wheel through which patients would slip on the day that they died. I thought of the huntsman and his dog slipping through the Wheel but this raised a serious ingredient in the Doctor’s half-joking plans in my Dream-book!
A hospital in spectral Jonestown in 1954?
Jonestown lay still submerged in the collective unconscious! It had not yet been built in 1954. This was true but I could see it lifting onto a wave of the future. Deacon and Jones and I were already taking fiery soundings with regard to a new Rome a star’s blaze or throw from old Devil’s Isle.
‘We shall build Jonestown in honour of Deacon’s first child. We shall print on its portals IMMUNITY TO PAIN.’
I felt an ominous shuddering sensation run through my limbs as the wave of the future struck the banqueting hall. But the magus-Doctor adjusted himself in his seat. He sat cross-legged like a Buddha under the prospect of medicine’s advance into IMMUNITY TO PAIN. The magus-Inspector sat under the Constellaton of the Boar and the Pig. Magi are susceptible to royal pageantry and to greed — royal illusion, royal greed — in order to know and to resist temptation. I saw at a glance that the Inspector had abstained from over-eating though he had had his fill. He sat in sober fear perhaps of the Jovian split in his sides …
The magus-Doctor agreed that soundings should be taken with regard to a new Rome in spectral Jonestown. The very spectrality of Jonestown, its existence yet non-existence, its cinematic river and forests, was an apparition of fire (as if one were visualizing a wave of light arriving from distant space as a star unseen begins to reveal itself on the back of the light-years). Such revelations could be profoundly challenging and creative or they could be riveted into complacency or Drought. Light-year Drought!
He looked around for me since he knew I was fearful of a liberty to break with the regime of Public Hospitals and to foster the practice of private Medicine or profit within escalating malaise in the settlements and cities of South America. I was a Fool, I was a captain of Jesters in Mr Mageye’s fleet. I sat under the Constellation of Prometheus. An eagle gnawed at my side as I recalled the honeymoon bed of the Virgin and the seed of conception planted in her by Vulture or Eagle. But no one truly saw me for I hid within Deacon’s lofty, fallen, perpetually falling Mask in the Circus of the banqueting hall.
The Doctor was relieved at my absence. It was not I however who was absent from the banqueting hall. But that was a private joke that I entertained with the ghost of Deacon who was to appear in Mr Mageye’s film. Time plays tricks in the womb of the Camera and the Cinema when one returns from the future into the past dressed in another body’s acting clothes. Hollow Masks act. Hollow clothes act when faces and hands and feet are daubed upon them, beside them, beneath them.
Jonah Jones was sitting across the hall under the Constellation of the Whale and the Tiger. But beneath these stood the Spider Anansi and a Goddess of India with several hands that sprouted from her side. He had arrived from San Francisco that very morning for the wedding in Crabwood Creek. Was he a ghost? Had he in fact sailed in upon a light-year star from his grave in spectral Jonestown?
The Whale was exquisitely painted as though it had been beached against a wave of the future and it seemed to shudder gently at times and to send a vibration through the limbs of the Spider.
Every grave and sensitive captain in Mr Mageye’s fleet scans the insides of Whales. Stand on the top of a wave with Captain Cook in 1770. Fallen, perpetually falling wave.
Cook was astonished when he fell around the globe to come upon Whales painted by Australian Aboriginal Old Gods in which had been sketched Spider houses. Jonah was to be seen. The houses were in the Whale, they were organs of the Whale, coal-black organs. The houses were inhabited by futuristic immigrants from Newcastle or Leeds or Liverpool or London. At first sight they were similar to the cell of the convicted Prisoner or Old God in French Guyana’s Devil Isle. But each splinter of coal glowed and enlarged itself into bedrooms, dining-rooms, drawing-rooms, and closets with Bibles.
The insides of Jonah Jones’s Whale were a theatre of Memory’s fire and I glued my eyes into Mr Mageye’s global Camera in order to see the detail of Aboriginal genius in sculpting the evolutions of mutated holocaust, altered spectres of holocaust into the sacrifices (voluntary and involuntary) that humanity makes in striking a chord linking Devil’s Isle to Botany Bay to Port Mourant to dread Jonestown.
Jones would look for a blazing woman in Port Mourant or New Amsterdam after the wedding. ‘They all love an American to put out the fire,’ he said; And it was true.
I held my Breath. A house in the Spider Whale was a Camera shot of Jonestown. The house stood on the river bank. I remembered the web of the past in the future. A high wire in the Brain, in Mr Mageye’s Camera, sends one sailing on a wave, sailing on fire.
Two cyclists were approaching the house in Mr Mageye’s curiously Aboriginal film. I swore I was one Aboriginal survivor (Aboriginals have been decimated on every continent around the globe) and that my Skeleton-twin was the other. It was the bundle of newspapers that we carried on our heads. But in fact the cyclists were Carnival Lord Death and his twin or likeness the grave-digger.
On arriving at Jones’s house they dumped the newspapers into the river. Then they turned on the house itself. They began to push. The house slipped inch by inch, foot by foot, towards the water’s edge. As it gained the bank I knew it would fall. But as it came upon the brink of toppling it was held or salvaged in the huntsman’s net; seized and converted into a play, fallen, perpetually falling Aboriginal theatre of the globe.
Mr Mageye’s humour was as unpredictable as that of ancient Jonah who adventured into the Whale in the Bible and from whom Jones borrowed his first name.
‘It is necessary, Francisco,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘to see that the perpetually falling Aboriginal globe promoted a dialogue between Deacon and yourself when it catapulted you (and Deacon before you) into the head and form of an angel (as old as Methuselah) even as it catapults Jones into a perverse dramatization of Jonah. I tell you this in order to make clear some of the premises of Aboriginal theatre in any area of the world. Kali — the many-armed Indian Goddess and guardian of Marie — is more, much more, than an individual pin-up or film star. Populations have been catapulted into her. They reside in her at various levels of perversity and virtue, danger and the promise of salvation. The same is true of black Anansi (an actor, as you shall soon see in my film) who arrived in the Guyanas with African slaves. The same is true — as you no doubt realize — of immigrants from Leeds and Liverpool and London who were bundled together into a faceless Prisoner and transported to Australia where for better and worse, in perversity and virtue, they confronted their Aboriginal Twin from whom they began to sculpt the resources of a new Paradise tainted alas by racism … I mention all this to make clear some of the intensive/extensive ground of my film as it proceeds …