I prayed to the Scavenger of heaven that it would seize him in the twinkling of an eye before he fired. A Maya prayer!
His sharp ears however were sharpened as if the Tiger in the blind of his skull would win the Day after all, would claim me for Deacon on the altar of Jonestown; would claim me and encompass a circuit of enemy friendships around the globe. The trade in death, the trade in guns, was universal, friend competed ruthlessly with friend for the Tiger’s share, the lion’s share, in the marketplace or altar of industry …
I closed my eyes but continued to pray, to hope against hope …
And then I remembered the sensation I had had — at dinner on the eve of the holocaust — that Deacon held a bullet on his tongue or in his stomach as he ate. A Primitive morsel or bullet to be disgorged as a barn owl resembling an Eagle or a Scavenger disgorges a pellet … I remembered in the nick of time and my fingers clutched Deacon’s stomach, pulled forth the bullet or pellet, inserted it into his hand and gun. Thus I appeared to complete the deadly circuit between Jones, Deacon and myself.
DEACON FIRED. Answer to my prayer or quantum hallucination of a deadly circuit!
Out of the corner of my eye I saw him standing at the other end of the Clearing. He wore the Eagle/Scavenger mask that duels with a Tiger’s sun-mask in Maya Bonampak. Eagle, Vulture, Scavenger. He seemed all three in Maya, enigmatic triple portraitures, the mathematics of Chaos. Not one bullet but three pellets had been held on his tongue or in his stomach to be disgorged in a lightning flash.
The first bullet sent Jones reeling, sent the Tiger reeling. It blazed in the Tiger’s blind eyes as if to confirm a state of Eclipse, miniature blaze, miniature Eclipse in Jonestown.
Deacon fired again with a pointed beak that overshot the Tiger’s Carnival ammunition in the darkening whale of the sun.
How old is Jonah? How ancient is he? He was disgorged by the whale to launch a miniature atomic bomb in the rainforest desert of Jonestown. Does Jonah harbour unwritten oceanic texts — in paradoxes of sacred scriptures — when darkness envelops the sun in any corner of the globe, however apparently remote? Does a Tiger’s remorse affect the threatened species of the whale when humanity dons archetypal masks, creaturely masks, and begins to dislodge the hubris of an absolute, all-conquering divinity?
DEACON FIRED A THIRD TIME. The third random bullet sliced two fingers from my left hand. Or was it my right? I was too numb to know or to care. I felt nothing at all. Nothing even as Jones seemed to rise over me again and crash back to the ground for good. He was staring at me. The sun darkened in the sky of his eyes that seemed to shine, to grow bright with sight, then to be veiled in a state of Eclipse when they seemed blind in the skull of an ancient Priest.
I lay in a miniature storm of leaves and bushes that shook as I shook. He lay in a miniature, darkening storm of the sky.
I had prayed for his death. Had Deacon answered my prayer? I felt my numb phantom fingers pulling the trigger in his grasp and firing and firing again and again at Jones.
Prayer had anticipated Deacon’s random bullet as if my fingers were already sliced before they were sliced to lodge in his on the trigger of the gun. As though the future lived in bringing me insight into answered prayer that troubled and disturbed me immensely. I lived. I survived. But God knows … WHY SHOULD I LIVE? WHY SHOULD I SURVIVE ON SUCH TERMS? IS PRAYER A CONFIRMATION OF INTERCOURSE WITH VIOLENCE? I had prayed for a weapon with which to kill Jones.
There was a sudden, wholly unexpected, cry from the despoiled Virgin not far from where Jones lay. It was music. Perhaps a bird had lodged itself in her throat. I saw her broken body, I felt myself in that breach, in that terrible womb, I was drawn out into the shadowy resurrection of the child beside her. ME! That child and I seemed now closely knit together, he lying there, I here.
We lay within another prayer or traumatic dream-text prompted by grave extremity when the mind trips into the body, the body into the mind: a prayer-text to live but not through intercourse with violence. That other prayer released one awkwardly, with uncertainty, to visualize vistas stretching into ‘pasts’ prior to the genesis of violence, the genesis of conquest. An extreme prayer it was to the Virgin with a bird in her throat on the uncanny battlefield of Jonestown. An extreme prayer I dimly remembered now within the palimpsest of the womb, the intricate layers of the womb — more mysterious than the Brain’s — half-erasures, half-painted new visibilities within the temple (temple it was despite everything) of a mother’s, a bride’s, battered body …
A prayer I dimly remembered now that lay on my lips, one half of my lips, even as the deadly circuit or plea to Deacon lay on the other.
Did the child’s silenced utterance lie on one half of my lips? Did my call to his mother lie on the other half of his?
Such is the potency of language to make the dead speak through every diminutive survivor in the living body of humanity. Such language involves us in chasms that need to be crossed and explored … Intercourse with reality through the Virgin is shorn of violence …
Such is the impossible/possible womb of the Virgin from which Christ sprang, a womb that lay paradoxically in pre-Christian pasts, a womb prior to the genesis of history, the genesis of religion, a womb dimly perceived through a haze of hideous violence, a womb that encompasses — or responds to — a different prayer from circuits rooted in intercourse with violence …
The despoliation of mothers of humanity everywhere augments (what a paradox!) the necessity to break or erode compulsions to batter or rape …
To be born of the Virgin now, in a hideously violent world, is to glimpse within the numinous terror of the womb voices of hope that nest in the throat of the earth’s bombed towns, or cities, or famine-stricken theatres of Mankind …
I tried to assemble some measure of meaning as I dreamt all over again that I lay on my pillow of stone at the edge of the Clearing in Jonestown…
What is the meaning of history, what is meaning? It is null and void until one sifts varieties of prayer, some perverse, some desiring revenge for evils one has suffered, others steeped in non-intercourse with violence … Not easy to put! Except to say that a capacity prior to violence makes one see how tribal are pacts or institutions founded on coercion and conquest.
To glimpse this abhorrent tribalism is to begin to question all one’s premises and to look backwards into the mists of time for alternative creations, alternative universes, alternative parallels — so to speak — imbued with different weddings and marriages to reality.
‘True I cannot deny the difficulty in such alternative parallels in the mathematics of the Soul,’ I said to the Virgin as I prayed. ‘Yet you intervene to break or erode the charisma of catastrophe built on intercourse with absolute violence.
‘Such erosion, such intervention or breakage (however frail) of the forces of hell, may be all that we can hope for at this time …
‘But it is priceless, the intervention of the Virgin is priceless. Such intervention never sanitizes cruelty. I know. It almost breaks my heart to learn of my own ignorance, my own obstinacy, to learn how necessary it is to transform my age. My grasp of the miracle of life is faint. Life may exist far out in space and may suffer within the womb of time when we direct a blow at others, strangers, aliens in our midst even as they would sacrifice us on the altar of their creeds …’