Jonestown (25 page)

‘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 …

‘Look, Francisco! Look into the womb of my Virgin Camera.' Mr Mageye could not help laughing, despite the gravity of humour in his expression.

‘Look, Francisco,' he cried. ‘Deacon approaches within or upon or beneath the back-bone of the Whale. He now embodies the elemental furies of many an adventurer and explorer. He's the solid ghost who hangs under the Cave of the Moon. He's a submarine commander about to launch a hidden torpedo. He bundles his constituency into himself. He arrives at Jonah's house … It took me ages to film that bit … His face is black as thunder. He thunders at the door and sweeps into the dining-room where Jonah sits. Look and listen, Francisco.'

‘What in God's name is the matter, Deacon?'

‘News from home. Have you read last week's papers which arrived today? Bloody November is upon us I tell you! How can you stomach the end of the world, Jonah? This Whale has no back door into the Bank of America.'

Jonah crossed to the window and looked out upon the river.

‘There they are,' he said. ‘Floating high and dry. I knew there was something in the air. My house gave a slight tremor a
moment or two ago. Earthquakes do shake the region once in a while. Water is floating ash.'

Jonah was clearly disturbed. He felt the turbulence of dying fish in himself within the vista of futures. He felt the rape of species. He felt as if he were being choked by stocks and bonds.

Deacon was mad, Deacon was angry. ‘The papers say you have broken the law and defrauded the Bank, Jonah. The Inspector is on his way.'

Jonah moved – turbulent stomach and all – to the dining-table in the middle of the room and polished the shining table-top that the sawyers in the Mission had prepared.

‘It's as bright as a coffin,' he said. ‘We shall dine on table-top coffins, Deacon. Bring your constituency.' As he spoke Spider Anansi crept delicately out of the coffin. He danced upon coal.

Human Spiders, Anansi tricksters, were once the saviours of slaves transported through the Middle Passage from Africa. They secreted runaways in graveyards, in coffins.

But an irony came into being within the play of populations, the irony of sweet-tasting power that the political firebrand began to enjoy in himself as he roasted his followers.

Picture him dining now on the fish in Jonah's stomach: fish reserved for dignitaries in the banqueting hall.

‘What more intimate picture may I paint,' said the Jester Mr Mageye, ‘than to give Anansi access to his master's delicacies, stomach, temple? They are apparently equal now in the sight of the state. It's a figure of speech, mind you. Nothing sexual. I'm talking, remember, about populations that these archetypal tricksters represent, the epic embodiment of populations in crisis. Not individual indulgences. We know little of the collective, hidden ambivalences within mixed or heterogeneous societies, the inner trophies that one group may secure from another, the haunting sense of loss or retention of privilege or power, the greed, the longings, the ruses, the strategies, behind the façade of establishments.

‘When Anansi becomes as much a ruling appetite – in the banqueting hall of history – as the former missionary or ruler or master with whom he contended – then the establishment and the
trickster are equals. Listen, Francisco, to what Jonah is now saying to Deacon.'

‘There is some consolation,' Jonah said slowly, ‘in the thought that – as the end of my mission approaches – blacks and whites are equals. I have converted Anansi, have I not, to cast aside Doubt. He can trust me. His growing appetite for the good things of the world may kill not only revolutionary originality but bitterness at the injustices of the past. We are equals now, black and white.'

He knew he was lying in Deacon's teeth. Deacon wanted to say: ‘You are a bloody liar, Jonah,' but he kept silent.

Suddenly I was confronted by the ramifications of the Trickster in Mr Mageye's all-inclusive film. I was down here in the hall looking at Deacon, looking at myself acting up there. Was it Deacon's ghost up there, or was it me feeding upon his lips as he stifled his words?

Was it politic to sustain a traffic in lies?

I touched my flesh-and-blood Mask in order to sift the power of lies within the art of the Camera, lies that bear on Conscience, the trickster-Capacity of Conscience to question itself openly (yet hide itself all the more effectively), to spy itself in the speaking yet
self-gagging
roles that it plays in Aboriginal, archetypal theatre.

How integral is the lie in every evolution of collective theatre to know the truth yet kill it?

Jonah was lying to Deacon. Deacon accepted – or appeared to accept – the lie out of political necessity or fear. I was masked in Deacon in watching myself on the screen. Not myself! I had no desire to lie. Did the screen lie then? Or did I lie? Who am I? Where am I in a mass-media reductive age that Mr Mageye seeks to illumine and transform through the cellular chemistry of interwoven spectralities in others built into unique dialogue and response in oneself?

My head was spinning but I kept the Mask firmly in place as Mr Mageye's portrayals continued to unroll down here in the banqueting hall and up there on the screen.

‘It's a question of pride,' said Jonah. ‘Pride in God's will. I must win, Deacon, don't you see? At all costs. Nothing counts but winning. Even if I have to drag Jonestown into the grave. I must
teach Anansi to forget. Anansi populations must fuse into eternity. Eternity is a realm of forgetfulness. I shall persuade my people here in Jonestown to eat or drink whatever I dish out. Poison is palatable when it is braced with projected dominion over all species in a coming paradise or eternity when we shall be millionaires in devouring the planet. Not only doomed fish but doomed species of all sorts. It's not just cyanide in Coca-Cola or milk or champagne or whatever. It's the conquest of the lower orders. Don't you see, Deacon?'

Deacon wanted to shout NO but he lied to himself and nodded. He pretended all was well but he knew he would have to break the pact and shoot Jones on the Day of the Dead. Perhaps not before but certainly then. He would strengthen his fingers on the trigger by slicing mine off to assist his. Thus he would generate in me the sensation that when he fell under the Cave of the Moon I would shoulder his ambivalent, angelic, ruthless Mask and begin to play
him
up there in the sky or screen and down here in the soil of the banqueting hall.

The troubling dimensions of the lie were as pertinent as celestial mathematics. Mr Mageye knew that the self-confessional,
self-judgemental
arts of the Trickster were essential in laying bare a fallen, perpetually falling humanity. He prodded Deacon – as he swung in the sky between heaven and earth and under the Cave of the Moon – to make visible the Virgin Goddess Kali from whom sprang a multitude of arms that were reminiscent of the cosmic Spider.

‘A most challenging aspect of my film this is,' said Mr Mageye. ‘Look! There she is! A kind of lightning dance instigated by an angel.' He eyed me with his quizzical humour. Was I sufficiently paranoid (as brilliant actors need to be) to believe that
I
– in the Mask of Deacon – had invoked the slow-motion,
lightning-shawled
dance of Kali in my Dream-book embrace of the peasant Virgin Marie? The question staggered me in the dance, for my Dream-book was more real than the real world.