was angry as much with him as with myself, angry with Jones as well in some classic, elemental way. Jones’s antecedents had owned slaves, they had decimated the peoples of ancient America from the sixteenth century onwards. An astonishing factor in all this was that Jones appeared to be the most angry one of us. No wonder he revered Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym. Such classics of anger seemed rooted in the cosmos itself.
Jones – in the Mask of the Whale into which he descended attimes – raged at the prejudices, the biases, the hypocrisy, that were visible everywhere. His anger therefore appealed to us. But it left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. I did not like the way he savoured anger as if it were the sweetest dish in the restaurants of San Francisco. Anger became the seed of his charismatic pursuit of eternity, eternity’s closure of time.
I feared the gross enlargement of emotion, the enlargement or complex pregnancy of the male charismatic priest. He hunted women in brothels everywhere. He sought to fuck them, to fuck himself, and to become a pregnant decoy in a pulpit for the annihilation of his age through mounting apparitional populations , mounting apparitional numbers to be weighed on the scales of time, blended pasts and futures.
Anger at injustice everywhere could turn nasty and become an involuntary ape of imperial hubris rooted in the despoliation of the laws of conquered peoples. Involuntary apes are the ‘ ill-begotten bridegrooms’ of deprived peoples led to the altar within military coups or rigged elections.
What was deeply alarming to me – in my crossing a chasm of years from dateless day in Trinity Street, New Amsterdam, back to San Francisco, United States, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour – was that such Jonesian anger, such common-or-garden apehood of hubris, appealed to us, fascinated us, fascinated both Deacon and me.
True, it also aroused a sensation of foreboding and Nemesis. But the fascination remained. A fascination rooted in an addiction to holocaustic sacrifice and rivalry that ran deep in antagonistic cultures around the globe. Jones, poor Jones, was as much their pawn as they were his.
When the first nuclear Bomb exploded and sent its dread beauty, its fantastic mushroom, into the sky above an American desert, long-sunken ships and coffins of the dead arose from their sea-bed.
A fleet arose to greet the constellation of the Argo encrusted on Jason’s head in the stars.
Mr Mageye held a Camera in his hand which he – as magus-Jester of history – had brought from the future as much as fromthe technologies in the past: a Camera stored with paradoxical archetypes, new-born yet old as the mysterious anatomy of time.
His apparitional figure stood on the deck of the Virgin Ship with the futuristic, ancient Camera in his hand.
He drew my eye to peer into the depths of archetypal oceans and skies.
‘Do you see Francisco?’ he asked.
At first I saw nothing but Chaos. I saw floating planks from the forests of King Midas, I saw floating cargoes of South American rubber bound for the Golden Man in the kingdom of El Dorado, I saw the mastheads upon broken slave-ships, I saw frail residue like the beard of Titans, I saw celestial mathematics written into rockets and sails upon space stations. An air of wreckage hung over them in the degree that civilizations had foundered but the fleet was now half-afloat upon ocean and sky.
‘The Virgin Ship’, said Mr Mageye, ‘transforms the fleet, converts the fleet, into a cradle of Bone fleshed by resurrectionary mathematics.
‘Bone is our innermost Cross that we scarcely countenance or understand.
‘It is as old as time.
‘On it hangs not only our flesh but the ragged flesh of populations and failed captaincies and heroes who are illumined nevertheless by the promise of a divine huntsman who hangs on the Cross in our flesh, our ragged flesh, to hold the Predator at bay when
Jones – in the Mask of the Whale into which he descended attimes – raged at the prejudices, the biases, the hypocrisy, that were visible everywhere. His anger therefore appealed to us. But it left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. I did not like the way he savoured anger as if it were the sweetest dish in the restaurants of San Francisco. Anger became the seed of his charismatic pursuit of eternity, eternity’s closure of time.
I feared the gross enlargement of emotion, the enlargement or complex pregnancy of the male charismatic priest. He hunted women in brothels everywhere. He sought to fuck them, to fuck himself, and to become a pregnant decoy in a pulpit for the annihilation of his age through mounting apparitional populations , mounting apparitional numbers to be weighed on the scales of time, blended pasts and futures.
Anger at injustice everywhere could turn nasty and become an involuntary ape of imperial hubris rooted in the despoliation of the laws of conquered peoples. Involuntary apes are the ‘ ill-begotten bridegrooms’ of deprived peoples led to the altar within military coups or rigged elections.
What was deeply alarming to me – in my crossing a chasm of years from dateless day in Trinity Street, New Amsterdam, back to San Francisco, United States, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour – was that such Jonesian anger, such common-or-garden apehood of hubris, appealed to us, fascinated us, fascinated both Deacon and me.
True, it also aroused a sensation of foreboding and Nemesis. But the fascination remained. A fascination rooted in an addiction to holocaustic sacrifice and rivalry that ran deep in antagonistic cultures around the globe. Jones, poor Jones, was as much their pawn as they were his.
When the first nuclear Bomb exploded and sent its dread beauty, its fantastic mushroom, into the sky above an American desert, long-sunken ships and coffins of the dead arose from their sea-bed.
A fleet arose to greet the constellation of the Argo encrusted on Jason’s head in the stars.
Mr Mageye held a Camera in his hand which he – as magus-Jester of history – had brought from the future as much as fromthe technologies in the past: a Camera stored with paradoxical archetypes, new-born yet old as the mysterious anatomy of time.
His apparitional figure stood on the deck of the Virgin Ship with the futuristic, ancient Camera in his hand.
He drew my eye to peer into the depths of archetypal oceans and skies.
‘Do you see Francisco?’ he asked.
At first I saw nothing but Chaos. I saw floating planks from the forests of King Midas, I saw floating cargoes of South American rubber bound for the Golden Man in the kingdom of El Dorado, I saw the mastheads upon broken slave-ships, I saw frail residue like the beard of Titans, I saw celestial mathematics written into rockets and sails upon space stations. An air of wreckage hung over them in the degree that civilizations had foundered but the fleet was now half-afloat upon ocean and sky.
‘The Virgin Ship’, said Mr Mageye, ‘transforms the fleet, converts the fleet, into a cradle of Bone fleshed by resurrectionary mathematics.
‘Bone is our innermost Cross that we scarcely countenance or understand.
‘It is as old as time.
‘On it hangs not only our flesh but the ragged flesh of populations and failed captaincies and heroes who are illumined nevertheless by the promise of a divine huntsman who hangs on the Cross in our flesh, our ragged flesh, to hold the Predator at bay when
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