Jonestown Read Online Free Page A

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