Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  Long-vanished texts secrete themselves everywhere in Aboriginal, fragmented theatres of place, in living (sometimes mutilated) landscapes, riverscapes, skyscapes, apparitional at one level, concrete at another …

  Elusive El Dorado (City of Gold? City of God?), whose masthead is consumed and refashioned on sacrificial altars in every century around the globe, may have a buried harbour in that compass or ‘land of waters’.

  Adieu my friend.

  Francisco Bone

  Virgin Ship

  I lay in a clump of bushes like a dead man. Scarcely breathing. My head rested on a cushion of stone. I dreamt of angels ascending and descending into Jonestown. Jonestown was above me in the skeletons of the stars. No stars now at midday. Only the sunlit dead on the ground. How incredibly soft is stone when one fears flesh-and-blood!

  Jonah Jones was still alive with a gun. He would appear, I knew, at any moment in the Clearing.

  There was a split leaf close to my nose through which – with slightly lowered head away from my pillow – I began to count the dead bodies on the ground. They lay not far from the rude church in which they had worshipped an hour or two ago. One swore one could hear their voices still rising into the heart of the South American Forest that seemed now in me, yet as remote from me, as the Milky Way blotted out by sunlight.

  I felt a mental splinter sharp as the nib of bone; and voiced my own lament in tune with their vanished voices. The voice of bone was the art of the Word, of sculpture, of painting within the holocaust.

  ‘Good God!’ the bone sang.

  The bone ceased for a while its tremulous, echoing tracery of scriptures of sorrow. It ceased yet never ceased for it continued to make silent pictures until the wordlessness of the sleeping choir of the dead in the Clearing welled up around me.

  A woman whose name was Marie Antoinette was clutching a mystical cup or grail of music from which she had drunk milk and sugar and deadly cyanide. Her head lolled on the ground. Her torso wore the blind sunlight of Carnival. It was the sheer ordinariness of the cup against the lips in the head that struck me to the heart, the lips communion with Silence.

  All at once the Reverend Jonah Jones, tall, commanding, came out of the rude Church of Eternity into the Clearing. His face wore an air of triumph like a general’s on the field of battle. He stopped above the eloquent lips and head and the communion cup. There was a child beside her I had not seen before. A child I knew all at once. Me! Me in another universe, a parallel universe to this. I was in that parallel child. Quantum hallucination. Quantum transference of psyche.

  Jones stood in the whale of the sun, he knelt, he placed a gun to Marie Antoinette’s temple that seemed in a state of divorce from the trunk of her body.

  What curious memorials a bone inscribes, draws, paints, builds, sings in the mind, the exiled mind, the solitary mind and soul on the margins of doomed civilizations.

  One is exiled when one refuses to obey the commandments of Conquest Mission, to think or write in a certain way, in conformity with the realism of Death. I was a sculptor of the bone in exile now, a writer of the bone in exile now, a painter, an architect, a poet of the bone in exile now upon the margins of the Conquest Mission established by the cult Master of Ritual, the Reverend Jonah Jones.

  Jonah and Jones are common-or-garden names which have gained ascendancy in the Forest of my age.

  I sensed the great danger I was in. I had deceived Jonah. I knew there was no persuasion or plea or dialogue on my part – dialogue I might have sought to exercise with him – that could have led him back out of the great white whale of the sun into which he was determined to go, sun or whale which he wished to inhabit as the throne of conquest, and in which he sought to secrete his followers. Could one begin to explain to him that such secretion, such a symbol of conquest, was a manifestation or a prelude to the extinction of all species within the insatiable stomach of eternity?

  Was this the inbuilt nature of our civilization that we scarcely understood, that we had scarcely begun to question?

  I had deceived him. I had been his comrade. I had been a close associate. But – at the last moment – had broken the pact in questioning my civilization, in questioning myself.

  He was sure I had been obedient and was lying there amongst the dead. I had disobeyed his command. Would I pay dear for such treason? Would I be thrust into a wilderness? Who was I to disobey? Had I saddled myself with the traumas of an age, the traumas of disadvantaged peoples around the globe bewildered by the commandments they were instructed to honour?

  At last the Reverend Jonah Jones was satisfied that the woman had been loyal. The subject of a revolution – in favour of the consolidation of conquest – that he wished to engineer, she had surrendered to his will, she had drunk her drink to the last drop … Or so it seemed … I was to learn differently later … No need to pull the trigger … He withdrew the gun from her broken body. Was it broken? Was it miraculously whole?

  He raised the cold steel, the icy metal – cold as my pillow – to his eyes. I dreamt I was in his blindness. We were already dead. We had already pulled the trigger! But he was alive. I was alive.

  Technologies and functions of life and death seemed the most ordinary things, banal commodities of conquest. And yet my fear was such I could have vomited. Vomited the stars! The moment had arrived – Jones knew – for him to join his flock. I could not help it. My limbs began to shake. Jonah and I had been close friends within veil upon veil of sun that hid us from each other even as we thought we knew one another. We were strangers. We were at war though we pretended otherwise.

  We had debated points in the world’s holy books, books of Rwanda, books of Palestine, books of the fall of Jerusalem, that bore on the end of Time.

  We had chosen South America, we had chosen Guyana, for our Conquest Mission.

  We had chosen – as the ancient Maya once did – the very heart of the jungle, in which to re-interpret the death of the arts, pyramidal epitaphs, painting-epitaphs, poetry-epitaphs. IMAGINATION DEAD IMAGINE.

  We had chosen the rainforest hinterland for our Conquest Mission because the Central and South Americas were a theatre of enigma.

  No place around the globe had so mirrored paradoxes of vanished cultures, abandoned settlements, from ancient Maya cities and causeways – long deserted, drowned, wreathed in jungle – to invisible Atlantean arches and bridges upon which migrating peoples had moved from the North to the South, the East to the West, and left behind but the morsel of a flute (as though music possessed the secret architecture of ages after the collapse of frames in which conquistadorial priests of old sought to conscript the Imagination) – a morsel, a flute, a fury akin to the bone or splinter in my mind.

  The Caribs ate a morsel of enemy flesh when the Spanish priests and conquistadors invaded their lands. They sought to know and digest the secrets of the enemy in that morsel. They hollowed the bone from which the morsel had come into a flute that is said to inhabit all species that sing.

  Does music inhabit a quest for self-knowledge beyond all conventional frameworks?

  Wherein lies the mystery of music in the densities of space, the live fossil solidity of music in the song of a blackbird or reflected rhythms and compositions in the mirrored throat of a South American apparitional mocking-bird? Did the bone in a wing of the mind, a wing of the brain, inhabit a treasonable space beyond fixtures which sanction extinguished species, poisoned landscapes?

  Jones did not approve of such questions but he humoured me, he tolerated me. He occasionally elected me to serve on panels in the church. He was convinced of my loyalty to the Conquest Mission whatever my unrest of conscience. We dined together – Deacon, Jones and I – on the eve of the holocaust.

  I was his left-hand man. Deacon was his right-hand angel. I could not deny it. We were associates. I was a traitor. I began to scorn the treasures of eternity in order to salvage a morsel of time.

  News had reached us that the Police were on Jonah’s trail. They claimed
he had defrauded the Bank of America.

  ‘The Caribs ate a ritual morsel,’ I said, ‘on the eve of battle. You Jonah know how important such ritual is to disguise bitter self-knowledge or bring it to light when our enemies – whom we would eat – bite into our own flesh. And now that we are on the eve of the holocaust, biter and bitten alike, priest and victim alike, time has become invaluable.’

  ‘We shall all die rather than surrender to the corruptions and lies of the Police,’ said Jones.

  ‘Die?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, die,’ he cried.

  My throat was dry. ‘It’s astonishing to have such a conversation.’

  My throat was dry but the Carib ritual morsel melted in my mouth as if I were consuming the flesh of a high priest to unravel the secrets in Jonah’s constitution. Food on such a day tastes like the meat of one’s commander or executioner, food at such a time brings terror, the terror of self-knowledge, the terror of knowing the greed in others in oneself.

  It was impossible to dismiss Jones as a fanatic. He was too solid, too bloody-minded, bloody-minded normality. He was as sane as a Napoleon of finance. DEFRAUD BANKS? I did not believe it. Pocket millions, yes, in a crusade against violence that recruits the selfsame violence in pursuit of its ends. In the light of such symmetry, violence cemented into violence, the morsel I ate burned into my tongue. Was it poison, had I already consumed violence in the name of the people, in the name of a pact with Jones? NO! A worm may turn and puncture the pages of dogma. It was the fracture of loyalty, the disruption of loyalty, it was treason. I knew now – with the morsel on my tongue – how delicate is the balance between loyalty and treason; treason may involve faith in the action of truth, time’s truths at variance with eternity’s command.

  I was joined to Jonah Jones in the delicacy of a bone – when one pretends out of fear to be one thing but knows one is something else – bone-flute music of anguish, a bone-morsel that I tasted deep as hell in heaven, heaven in hell, in the anatomy of linked pasts and futures.

  I was joined to him in the splintered disruption of a pact with eternity that I had sworn to honour at his command. I was joined to him now in the fear that I sensed on the eve of disaster. I knew more searchingly and agonizingly than I had ever known before – with the morsel on my tongue – the perversity of the harmony that he inspired in his people, the perversity of symmetry and dread closure underlying the death of the arts.

  Perhaps I had known it all along, perhaps I knew my age was dying. Perhaps that was why I joined the Jonestown Church. What I had not perceived was the curious salvage of a Primitive morsel of time sprung from treason, treason’s desire, treason’s a-symmetry when one breaks a pact with authoritarian virtue and dines with the enemy in a fearful but true longing to consume fortresses of hate in him and in oneself, cemented bias in him and in oneself, cemented violence in him and in oneself.

  ‘I thought they were bloody cannibals,’ said Jones. ‘These Caribs of whom you speak.’

  I had forgotten I had spoken of them in my conversion of a Primitive morsel into a feast of terrifying conscience within the furies of history. I had forgotten that the Caribs were the authors of the American feast beneath the Virgin statue of Liberty, authors of asymmetric hospitality granted to aliens and strangers despite their suspicion of, and antagonism to, one another …

  I had forgotten … Jones appeared to remember though he spat the memory on to his plate. He hated the Caribs. He tended to loathe the soil of pre-Columbian America though he was up to his eyes in it, in its species, whale and tiger and everything else, oil and gold and wealth. He would become, if not the Bank of America, a significant agent in the Bank of Memory when I began to shoulder the trauma I would experience the following day as I lay on my pillow of stone.

  His face was curiously livid, curiously bland, as he projected his rage upon the vanished Caribs in thinking of the Police. So easy to orchestrate the law into scapegoats one would murder at the drop of a hat.

  I turned to Jones with tears in my eyes but he did not see … My tongue was burning as well and I was unable to speak. The Dream-book anticipated the moment when I would start to write and spoke for me from the future –

  ‘Are we not subject to the vocabulary of death-dealing regimes? Do we not need to consume that vocabulary and change it, consume the battle-cries, the marching songs, drums that counsel assault? Death coins every phrase that spells conquest. Death’s vocabulary is rooted in human discourse …’

  ‘In counterpoint with the extra-human dissonances of the victim soul, the long suppressed, plaintive and wonderful music of the victim soul …’ said Deacon. He had been silent all through the meal as if he were nursing a bullet to be fired at Jones … The idea sprang into my head I knew not from where … A bullet, a morsel of a bullet in himself … ‘Is it not time – when time seems to be ending – to unravel that counterpoint, varieties of counterpoint, between priest and sacrificial victim, between huntsman and hunted species, between lovers and Virgins of the wild … God knows it’s too late for me, I have failed, but you, Francisco …’ He stopped. Was he laughing at me? Was he mocking me? Was Marie of Jonestown (with her dead child whom I was to identify with myself in a flashing moment on the morrow in the Clearing) a despoiled Virgin, a despoiled Liberty on the flag of Jonestown? I had helped to raise that flag on the day we began to build Jonestown. I was filled with anger at Deacon and at myself. I disliked Deacon then intensely as much as I feared Jones. Deacon was Jonah’s right-hand angel. He was – I dimly felt at this stage – a signal for me of the riddle of the huntsman – in the book I was to write when I survived Jonestown (a book possessing its own life to be entitled Imagination Dead Imagine) – the riddle of the huntsman, the riddle of the hunted creature, the enigma or counterpoint of shared Passion between spoilers and despoiled, the riddle of the feast when one dines with enemies who are also one’s close associates.

  After the holocaust, when I fled Jonestown, his self-mockery, his mockery of me, gave way to truths I wrestled with on every ladder between 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!

  B
ut 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.