Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  Or else we will continue to perpetuate hierarchies of brutality sponsored unwittingly perhaps by Privilege, hierarchies in which each theatre of inhumanity is placed on a scale to measure which is less horrendous or more hard-hearted than the last, the symmetry of hell …

  The angels in my Dream-book – playing on harps like stringed skeletons – brought messages I needed to interpret and re-interpret into infinity, into parallel universes that seemed at times to touch, to jar against each other like quake organs or plates within the earth’s crust.

  The music and the drama saturated my Dreams as I lay on my pillow of stone and the angels descended and ascended …

  Yes, it was clear to me that dissonances in music lie in depth within all harmonies to acquaint us with unwritten relationships that disturb our Sleep. Or else harmony would consolidate itself into an illusion …

  *

  Jones withdrew the gun from Marie Antoinette’s temple. She had been loyal, she had swallowed the last drop of poison. He pointed the gun at the space between his eyes. Time to join his flock on the Day of the Dead. I could not stop my limbs – as I lay on my pillow of stone within the bushes at the edge of the Clearing – from shaking. They shook so hard that a miniature storm, it seemed to me, arose in the leaves and bushes where I lay.

  Jones stopped. His ears were sharp as claws. He could not see who actually lay in the bushes, but suddenly he roared – ‘It’s you, blast you Deacon. It’s you – who else would dare to disobey? – hiding there. You thought to escape. I see it now. God damn you Deacon. You’re dead.’ He turned his gun and aimed at the heart of the shaking storm of leaves. He mistook the vestige of a garment protruding from the bushes for one of Deacon’s cloaks. Indeed it was no mistake. I had borrowed it from him. It had lain beside the table on which we dined the previous day. Jones’s ears seemed to pick up the sight of the blowing garment. They were sharp as a Tiger’s seeing claws.

  In that instant of miniature Chaos that made my limbs shake and tremble I seemed to fly or run back into primordial memories of Maya drawings and sculptures of Tiger-knights, Tiger-priests. And Jones’s blind eyes but sharp seeing claws loomed above me in the Clearing. He was a Priest above his sacrificial victim, above an altar. Altar of death. My death? His death? His blind eyes gave me hope that he – in some unimaginable way – would collapse into darkness before he fired.

  I prayed to the Scavenger of heaven that it would seize him in the twinkling of an eye before he fired. A Maya prayer!

  His sharp ears however were sharpened as if the Tiger in the blind of his skull would win the Day after all, would claim me for Deacon on the altar of Jonestown; would claim me and encompass a circuit of enemy friendships around the globe. The trade in death, the trade in guns, was universal, friend competed ruthlessly with friend for the Tiger’s share, the lion’s share, in the marketplace or altar of industry …

  I closed my eyes but continued to pray, to hope against hope …

  And then I remembered the sensation I had had – at dinner on the eve of the holocaust – that Deacon held a bullet on his tongue or in his stomach as he ate. A Primitive morsel or bullet to be disgorged as a barn owl resembling an Eagle or a Scavenger disgorges a pellet … I remembered in the nick of time and my fingers clutched Deacon’s stomach, pulled forth the bullet or pellet, inserted it into his hand and gun. Thus I appeared to complete the deadly circuit between Jones, Deacon and myself.

  DEACON FIRED. Answer to my prayer or quantum hallucination of a deadly circuit!

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw him standing at the other end of the Clearing. He wore the Eagle/Scavenger mask that duels with a Tiger’s sun-mask in Maya Bonampak. Eagle, Vulture, Scavenger. He seemed all three in Maya, enigmatic triple portraitures, the mathematics of Chaos. Not one bullet but three pellets had been held on his tongue or in his stomach to be disgorged in a lightning flash.

  The first bullet sent Jones reeling, sent the Tiger reeling. It blazed in the Tiger’s blind eyes as if to confirm a state of Eclipse, miniature blaze, miniature Eclipse in Jonestown.

  Deacon fired again with a pointed beak that overshot the Tiger’s Carnival ammunition in the darkening whale of the sun.

  How old is Jonah? How ancient is he? He was disgorged by the whale to launch a miniature atomic bomb in the rainforest desert of Jonestown. Does Jonah harbour unwritten oceanic texts – in paradoxes of sacred scriptures – when darkness envelops the sun in any corner of the globe, however apparently remote? Does a Tiger’s remorse affect the threatened species of the whale when humanity dons archetypal masks, creaturely masks, and begins to dislodge the hubris of an absolute, all-conquering divinity?

  DEACON FIRED A THIRD TIME. The third random bullet sliced two fingers from my left hand. Or was it my right? I was too numb to know or to care. I felt nothing at all. Nothing even as Jones seemed to rise over me again and crash back to the ground for good. He was staring at me. The sun darkened in the sky of his eyes that seemed to shine, to grow bright with sight, then to be veiled in a state of Eclipse when they seemed blind in the skull of an ancient Priest.

  I lay in a miniature storm of leaves and bushes that shook as I shook. He lay in a miniature, darkening storm of the sky.

  I had prayed for his death. Had Deacon answered my prayer? I felt my numb phantom fingers pulling the trigger in his grasp and firing and firing again and again at Jones.

  Prayer had anticipated Deacon’s random bullet as if my fingers were already sliced before they were sliced to lodge in his on the trigger of the gun. As though the future lived in bringing me insight into answered prayer that troubled and disturbed me immensely. I lived. I survived. But God knows … WHY SHOULD I LIVE? WHY SHOULD I SURVIVE ON SUCH TERMS? IS PRAYER A CONFIRMATION OF INTERCOURSE WITH VIOLENCE? I had prayed for a weapon with which to kill Jones.

  There was a sudden, wholly unexpected, cry from the despoiled Virgin not far from where Jones lay. It was music. Perhaps a bird had lodged itself in her throat. I saw her broken body, I felt myself in that breach, in that terrible womb, I was drawn out into the shadowy resurrection of the child beside her. ME! That child and I seemed now closely knit together, he lying there, I here.

  We lay within another prayer or traumatic dream-text prompted by grave extremity when the mind trips into the body, the body into the mind: a prayer-text to live but not through intercourse with violence. That other prayer released one awkwardly, with uncertainty, to visualize vistas stretching into ‘pasts’ prior to the genesis of violence, the genesis of conquest. An extreme prayer it was to the Virgin with a bird in her throat on the uncanny battlefield of Jonestown. An extreme prayer I dimly remembered now within the palimpsest of the womb, the intricate layers of the womb – more mysterious than the Brain’s – half-erasures, half-painted new visibilities within the temple (temple it was despite everything) of a mother’s, a bride’s, battered body …

  A prayer I dimly remembered now that lay on my lips, one half of my lips, even as the deadly circuit or plea to Deacon lay on the other.

  Did the child’s silenced utterance lie on one half of my lips? Did my call to his mother lie on the other half of his?

  Such is the potency of language to make the dead speak through every diminutive survivor in the living body of humanity. Such language involves us in chasms that need to be crossed and explored … Intercourse with reality through the Virgin is shorn of violence …

  Such is the impossible/possible womb of the Virgin from which Christ sprang, a womb that lay paradoxically in pre-Christian pasts, a womb prior to the genesis of history, the genesis of religion, a womb dimly perceived through a haze of hideous violence, a womb that encompasses – or responds to – a different prayer from circuits rooted in intercourse with violence …

  The despoliation of mothers of humanity everywhere augments (what a paradox!) the necessity to break or erode compulsions to batter or rape …

  To be born of the Virgin now, in a hideously violent world, is to glimpse within the numinous
terror of the womb voices of hope that nest in the throat of the earth’s bombed towns, or cities, or famine-stricken theatres of Mankind …

  I tried to assemble some measure of meaning as I dreamt all over again that I lay on my pillow of stone at the edge of the Clearing in Jonestown…

  What is the meaning of history, what is meaning? It is null and void until one sifts varieties of prayer, some perverse, some desiring revenge for evils one has suffered, others steeped in non-intercourse with violence … Not easy to put! Except to say that a capacity prior to violence makes one see how tribal are pacts or institutions founded on coercion and conquest.

  To glimpse this abhorrent tribalism is to begin to question all one’s premises and to look backwards into the mists of time for alternative creations, alternative universes, alternative parallels – so to speak – imbued with different weddings and marriages to reality.

  ‘True I cannot deny the difficulty in such alternative parallels in the mathematics of the Soul,’ I said to the Virgin as I prayed. ‘Yet you intervene to break or erode the charisma of catastrophe built on intercourse with absolute violence.

  ‘Such erosion, such intervention or breakage (however frail) of the forces of hell, may be all that we can hope for at this time …

  ‘But it is priceless, the intervention of the Virgin is priceless. Such intervention never sanitizes cruelty. I know. It almost breaks my heart to learn of my own ignorance, my own obstinacy, to learn how necessary it is to transform my age. My grasp of the miracle of life is faint. Life may exist far out in space and may suffer within the womb of time when we direct a blow at others, strangers, aliens in our midst even as they would sacrifice us on the altar of their creeds …’

  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 blackb
oard.

  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.’

  ‘We all have ghosts in this country for fathers,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Fathers tend to vanish when their common law spouses (as it’s now called in English parlance) conceive. It’s a legacy of slavery. Mothers rear children invariably without help. And ghosts add a cubit or two to the stature of vanished fathers.