I stopped and then asked myself: ‘What link then exists between us and strangers?’
I thought I heard a faint reply — ‘In my body, in linked imprints, in still unwritten passages woven together from the brides and mothers of humanity! Build the Virgin Ship with the very instruments and terrors that plague you now, Franciso, but which you may convert into a new architecture born of profoundest self-confessional, self-judgemental nails and materials and fabrics …’
Thus it was that I drew my first nail in the construction of the Virgin Ship on which to sail from Jonestown into familiar strangers, unfamiliar friends in the body of the self.
First nail plucked from the sun, from the Tiger’s killing weapon. Convertible nail into energies of the Imagination to cross barriers and chasms in time. My fear of Jones lessened and I reached into the Clearing and drew from him a fiery claw, an emblem of his remorse.
Was he experiencing remorse? Was I deceiving myself?
Remorse is difficult, it tests all cultures to the core, the core of myself, the core of Joneself. Jone’s self, Bone’s self.
The claw became a fractured Bone in me. It was sharp as living, re-constructive steel. It was sharp as living blood, a fluid nail through ancients and moderns.
Remorse and repentance are not easy. All of a sudden in the darkening sky, sunset over Jonestown, he became a tall cloud-Tiger draped in blackness. The moon had not yet risen. His anger overshadowed me as I lay in the bushes and he sought to clothe me in his outstanding Night. But the Virgin intervened as the sun set. She broke the overwhelming texture of the tall Night and plucked a Bag of Nemesis from it which she placed over me.
I knew I would have been utterly demoralized in Jones’s tall Night but I could sustain a portion of it, I could learn, I could see in it, I could see through it, I could see through the blind eyes of the Priest who murders in the name of love or loyalty.
The tall texture of catastrophe is eroded, in some degree, is miniaturized, in some degree, to make a re-creative vision possible, bearable, even at the end of time (or what passes for the end of time).
I rose from the bushes. But the Bag of Nemesis provided me with one more sighting of Deacon on the Moon, it seemed, that was slowly rising over the dead bodies in Jonestown.
My eyes were faint but I saw Deacon’s wing and shawl, I saw him trail the wing in space, I saw its imprint on Moon-dust. Jonestown was on the Moon. It had levitated. It had become an apparition upon scales of past and future time, it was rising bright as a Bomb under the vast network of the Milky Way. It descended again, Jonestown descended again, in concrete measure. Jonestown’s Earth, Jonestown’s Moon.
Deacon skirted his way through the bodies around him. It was as if he had resumed his duel with Jones though Jones lay dead.
Perhaps he saw Jones through my eyes, tall black Cat, tall black Night. Bright Moon. Black Night.
He crossed the Clearing. He stood now above Jones. He placed a hidden boot under his wing upon Jones’s skull in which the moonlight nested. He drew his boot along Jones’s head and neck and spine. He rested his boot in a cushioned space beneath Jones’s body. And then with a dancing stroke of the Scavenger’s Eagle wing he kicked the body over and around. The eyes ceased to stare at me. They were drilling holes into the Moon. They were drilling a ladder to the Moon.
I turned at last and made my way through the Forest to the Cave of the Moon in a cliff above a Waterfall overshadowing the river of Jonestown. I climbed the ladder. The Virgin Ship was tied there and I knew I would embark upon it soon.
*
The ship took me back to my childhood in Albuoystown.
I sailed on the convertible claw of the sun as if I rode futuristic energy on the back of a Tiger.
A Tiger that could turn and rend me limb from limb in a storm but was harnessed in this instance into Virgin space within a mathematic possessed of the life of fractions to diminish the power of overwhelming seas in the sweep of time, black seas, uncharted regions from which the voices of nature goddesses broke into the human ear.
The ear mirrored a passage in the womb of space, the ear became a receptacle, a caveat, a curious vaginal receptacle instilled with the birth of consciousness to absorb and convert the music of the Sirens into guardian lighthouses.
Through the Sirens and the nature goddesses, and their linkage with the Virgin, consciousness hears itself in layered counterpointed rhythms as never before, consciousness sees itself, questions itself as never before.
I could not entirely rid myself of ancient fear of such voices but their apparitional weight informed me that time would slide into concrete harbours within blended spirit and fact.
To learn to weather apparition is to arrive at a destination enriched with the voyaging wisdom of Spirit.
So easy to lose one’s way as one sails back in time but the universe opens into unsuspected dimensions and I am back — yes, I am truly back — in Albuoystown: a child of nine. It is 1939.
‘Albuoystown is linked,’ I wrote in my log-book or Dream-book, ‘to the former estates of an eighteenth-century French landowner and slave-owner. They retain, to this day, the names he bestowed upon them: La Pénitence and Le Repentir (the latter a famous cemetery in Georgetown).’ I paused but soon continued:
‘An unsettling experience it is to return to the past from the bleak future, to return to 1939 from 1978.’ As I stood on the deck of the Ship before I landed I saw a man darting through a crowd in a skeleton’s costume. He was rehearsing for Carnival Night in Albuoystown. He could have been my grown-up twin. He was in his late forties, the same age as I was in Jonestown from which I had returned in a backwards sweep of time to Albuoystown … He had wrapped his head in a newspaper mask but I was able to read a skeleton headline, WAR COMING IN EUROPE. I was startled as if I had forgotten … I touched the Bag on my head that was invisible to everyone and felt it crackle like Nemesis newspaper.
I landed, aged nine, and made my way to my School in Albuoystown. Mr Mageye, the teacher, was giving a history lesson when I arrived.
‘Ah Francisco,’ he said, ‘you are late this morning.’
‘There’s a new ship in the harbour,’ I said, ‘I was having a look at it.’
Mr Mageye smiled, nodded, as I took my place on a bench under the blackboard.
He had written there the names of the Frenchman’s estates:
LA PÉNITENCE
LE REPENTIR
It was an old blackboard and I remembered it distinctly in the backwards sweep of time. There was a piece of chalk on the desk before me which I inadvertently rubbed on my face to acquire a slightly greyish unshaven look. A nine-year-old child with an ageing head on his shoulders within a Nemesis Bag invisible to all.
A jest that Mr Mageye appreciated, for he was laughing with me at the chalk-like apparition of a beard that I now wore.
I knew every dot and crack in the old blackboard. The School could not afford to purchase a new one.
Our ripple of mutual — almost ghostly — laughter subsided and Mr Mageye continued with his history lesson.
‘The eighteenth-century French land-owner came to Guiana from France not long before the French Revolution. He was an aristocrat. He was desolated when news came of the revolution. The beheading of poor Queen Marie Antoinette! No wonder he bestowed the name Marie on several of his black mistresses. Your mother is called Marie. Is she not, Francisco? An embodiment of our history lesson.’
‘I am told that the Frenchman is my great-great-grandfather,’ I almost boasted.
‘Quite so, quite so,’ said Mr Mageye.
I was a trifle crestfallen. ‘My poor mother claims that he’s her ghostly protector. A kind of surrogate husband in the early twentieth century. You see my father died when I was two years old. He may never have existed. I never knew him.’