Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  Jones – in the Mask of the Whale into which he descended at times – 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 from the 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 humanity is in the greatest danger.

  ‘The Cross in the mirror of celestial mathematics is sometimes a net that salvages all wreckages of time in which to build the Virgin Ship anew.

  ‘Remember Francisco there is a curious fragility to your Dream-book, the log-book of the fleet. But its true spiritual capacity lies therein. It wreathes itself in the collapse of high-sounding garments and punishments and glories to illumine Bone or Cross.

  ‘Celestial mathematics of space! That is how I see the evolution of the divine huntsman in our ragged flesh. That is how I see a procession of brothels and wrecked architectures and wrecked fleets and marketplace cathedrals backwards into the stark Womb of the Virgin – shorn of intercourse with violence – from which the true, compassionate huntsman may yet evolve and arise … Remember all this, Francisco.’

  Deacon had caught the drift of Mr Mageye’s conversation with me. He seized upon ‘celestial mathematics’ as a platform for his own ambitions, his own perverse longing for glory.

  ‘Celestial ambition,’ he said to me and to the apparition of Mr Mageye, ‘fires a peasant like me to perform great deeds, to fight unimaginable duels, to frame arenas for impossible (yet I believe possible) duels in space. Think of the Moon! What an arena for duels and commerce and sport. We shall fight on other planets, believe me! Buy yourself a ringside seat now, Francisco, before the price soars. Shall I – a mere peasant – dwarf Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan? Why not? I am born from the obscurity of the stars as they were! Poor Jonah believes in eternity. And that is why I have forged a pact with him. He will bring me the chance to duel with eternity. And if I fail then celestial mathematics will provide me with a ladder to climb back into heaven, to wrestle all over again with the Titans, the Tricksters of heaven. Yes – remember Francisco – civilizations fail and perish and begin all over again in some remote forest … As for you, Francisco, I shall give you a taste of my fallen angel’s blood when or if I fail. I shall clamp my Mask into your head. I – and an Old God you shall meet (you love epic theatre, don’t you?) – shall imbue it with conviction and lifelike appearance. Carnival’s great Francisco.’ He was laughing uproariously.

  I said nothing. I was familiar with his taunts. I was familiar with his mockery of others and his self-mockery. Self-mockery was a moral fable, a moral truth, that fuelled peculiar underground sympathies between us though at another level we scorned or hated each other. Such self-mockery illumined hypocritical patriotisms, hypocritical loyalties, and it strengthened the pact between us and Jonah Jones. We seemed to eat our own mutual flesh in order to expose salutary lighthouse or Bone or Cross.

  Mr Mageye eyed me with the oddest approval, the approval of self-questioning conscience, self-questioning imagination. He relished Deacon’s joke – if joke it was – about Tricksters of heaven. Sacred Jest! It appealed to him as a nourishing resource of comic flesh-and-blood: comic, yes, but curiously divine in flesh-and-blood’s ambition to equate itself with Gods.

  Such comic divine equation enlivened the apparition that he was in my Dream-book. He had died in Albuoystown the very year that I left for San Francisco to take up my scholarship. I recalled standing over his grave on the eve of my departure. He was my beloved schoolteacher, the wisest, strangest man I had ever known. He saw all his pupils as potential tyrants, potential liberators, potential monsters, potential saints. He roamed all texts, all worlds, all ages to help them see themselves as stripped of everything yet whole and majestic and comical (all at the same time). I visualized myself sailing with him into futures and pasts. I visualized the Nemesis Bag on my head. Three more threads fell from it and took root on his grave. This had happened on my mother’s grave as well.

  ‘I am no ill-begotten son of a French Catholic ghost,’ I cried. ‘I am Mr Mageye’s South American pupil. He is my magus. I wish he were my father. But I – a nameless orphan really – must respect the wishes of my poor mother who saw herself on the Cross as the bride of a slave-owning, masquerading, divine imperialist.’

  Having nourished itself on comic divine flesh-and-blood the apparition of Mr Mageye was able to feed my imagination in turn.

  He stepped from his coffin into a classroom in San Francisco College and looked across the water to the famous prison of Alcatraz.

  Why are prisons famous? What secrets do they keep?

  Are they the abode of apparitions across the ages, legendary kings of crime, legendary Napoleons, Bastilles, legendary pirates knighted by queens?

  My eye flicked into Mr Mageye’s Camera and I saw the prison of Devil’s Isle, French Guiana. A prisoner or Old God was house
d there. He was as old as Quetzalcoatl (the most ancient king of the Americas), he was as young as the French Revolution.

  ‘Kingship is a sphere within us,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘that dazzles and tricks our senses again and again. We hunger for romance, or chivalry, or knights in shining armour, or Scandal (with a capital S), or pageantry (with a common p as processions line the streets).

  ‘But all this is an evasion of the complex necessity for kingship. At the core of kingship resides a true embattled reality that we forfeit or lose sight of at our peril. Kingship witnesses to the agonizing problematic of freedom, the gift of freedom to ourselves within ourselves yet bestowed upon us by some incalculable design in heaven and upon earth …’

  I raised my hand, but Mr Mageye rushed on, a rush yet a peculiar deliberation – ‘I know, I know… Freedom is seen as the achievement of the common people …’

  ‘Is it not?’ I demanded.

  ‘At the heart of the common people exists an invisible fortress in which a Prisoner or Old God or King is held as a guarantee, a half-compulsive, half-spiritual guarantee that some principle lives in the Primitive mind (surviving Primitive archetype) to sift the problematic resources of freedom.’

  ‘I do not follow,’ I said. But in myself I knew or thought I knew.

  ‘The Prisoner or Old God places a question-mark against the extravagant gift of freedom. Is freedom anarchy? Is freedom reserved for the strong, does freedom nurture crime, does it come when we are not ready for it? At what age are we equipped to bear the burden of freedom? Do we need to cultivate wholly different philosophies of the Imagination to bring us on a wave of the future from which to discern how free or unfree we were in the past and still are in the present, how just or unjust to others we remain, how prone to exploit ourselves and others in the name of high-sounding lies?’

  I could not help voicing a protest – ‘Kings need to be forced, do they not, into granting freedom to their subjects?’

  ‘And they pay a terrible price,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘their heads roll. Force – in such a context – may be an explosion of conscience in the King or Old God himself. He knows without quite knowing (he knows in the collective subconscious and unconscious) that he has failed in the problematic authority that he exercises. He is as much condemned as self-condemned. And without that tension of visionary, interior condemnation and trial by others at the heart of composite epic, epic populace, epic king, art dies, philosophy dies, faith in truth perishes. Freedom needs to weigh, examine, re-examine its far-flung proportions which radiate from a core of the Imagination, it needs to promote a variety of cautions in the body politic, freedom is not a gross or even a subtle indulgence of public appetite; or else it deteriorates into cynical diplomacy, it becomes a tool, a machine, a gravy train, a sponsor of a rat-race.’

  I was appalled and aghast at all this. I felt as if I had been dealt a blow by an apparition, a solid apparition arisen from a coffin, the coffin of ancient kings that empowered the magus-philosopher-jester of history that Mr Mageye was.

  ‘Where does it all start?’ I demanded. ‘If Old Gods and Prisoners are a sphere within ourselves, acting and running more deeply than the mechanics of political sovereignty, where does it start?’

  ‘Deacon would say it starts with wars in Heaven,’ said Mr Mageye. He was jesting but his face seemed straight as a bat in the hands of a weirdly gifted cricketer of genius. He had umpired many a game in Albuoystown. His apparitional nose seemed to have flattened itself. But then it grew again, it straightened itself into the colour of sculpted soil in Deacon’s Courantyne savannahs.

  ‘Let us,’ he said, ‘prepare the ground of theatre, the ground of folklore in the ancient savannahs. First the infant Deacon falls from the baggage train of routed angels. He falls to earth and is given a home by the savannah folk.’

  I was angry. I was jealous.

  ‘Is Deacon a bloody king?’ I demanded.

  ‘He is an adversary of Old Gods. He sustains on Earth an age-old quarrel in Heaven. When is the gift of fire to be exercised and bestowed upon humanity? When is the gift of freedom to be exercised and bestowed upon humanity? That is in large part the substance of the quarrel. Should humanity claim freedom? Perhaps it has with detrimental consequences on every hand! Should humanity claim freedom in the teeth of obstinate and uncertain regimes? Where does authority truly reside? We may think these questions are old-hat but they are not. They are more savagely pertinent to human affairs than we care to admit. Should we pursue our adversaries, should they turn on us at every opportunity? Should we perpetuate forms of punitive logic to punish those who punished us when we rebelled? I tell you all this, Francisco, for it is pertinent to your visitation of the childhood of Deacon in the folklore, archetypal theatre of the Courantyne savannahs.’

  The scales of blended times had changed in the half-apparitional, half-concrete fabric of my Dream-book and arrival on the Virgin Ship in the Courantyne River from which we made our way into the savannahs.

  ‘Deacon had been affianced to Marie of Port Mourant before he left to take up his scholarship in San Francisco,’ said Mr Mageye.

  ‘Yes I know. He told us so.’

  ‘But he met her for the first overwhelmingly intimate yet expansive time (that fires both love of art and science, and greed for fame) at the age of nine,’ said Mr Mageye, peering into his Camera as if it were a computer of chasms in creation and visionary years. ‘That meeting was the fulfilment of an age-old prophecy for the savannah folk. An infant child would fall from the stars in 1930. Carnival has its calendric humour, has it not, Francisco? The child – in his tenth year 1939 – would encounter a wonderful maid, a dangerous maid, a Virgin, in the savannahs at the end of a drought season when the first, torrential rains broke the walls of heaven.

  ‘This would confirm the adversarial destiny of the angel fallen from the baggage train of the stars. It would confirm the venom of the Scorpion in his veins. The mark of a great hero …’

  ‘Monster,’ I cried.

  ‘You need to see it happening all over again in your Dream-book. It is pertinent, believe me, Francisco, to a discovery and rediscovery of the depth of your own passion and emotion which you may have eclipsed or hidden from yourself until the tragedy of Jonestown brought you face to face with the accumulated spectres of years, the dread spectre of the twentieth century as it addresses the psyche of ageless childhood.’

  I adjusted the Nemesis Bag on my head even as I looked into Mr Mageye’s Camera.

  ‘Deacon ran into the maid in the torrential rain. She seemed utterly changed from a child he knew! Had he not seen her before at school? Human magic dazzles the eyes of a fallen angel when destiny declares itself. Such is the precocity of love, the precocity of feud as well. Marie was known to be the adopted daughter of the Doctor at the Port Mourant hospital. Doctors are Gods to peasant folk in poor people’s hospitals. But there was an ominous side to Marie’s parentage. One report claimed that her parents had been killed in a car crash and that – above the debris of the car – an Old God, or escaped Prisoner, materialized. Escaped from Devil’s Isle. The Inspector of Police seized him. Escaped prisoners from French Guiana were an occasional feature on the British Guiana coast. Carnival fastened on the event. The Old God claimed that he was Marie’s father and that the Doctor was not to be trusted.’ Mr Mageye was smiling.

  ‘No laughing matter,’ I said. ‘Carnival is no laughing matter.’

  ‘Indeed not,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘In the reaches of great windswept, rain-swept, sun-swept savannahs, the most ancient feuds between heaven and earth are revived in villages and upon roads that may seem jam-packed at times but are insubstantial and frail against an immensity of sky and land and sea that borders the coastlands. The peasantry and the people are native to, yet tormented by, such extremity. They long for a saviour, for authority, for truth. Where does authority reside? Does it reside in European empires whose presence they feel? Does it reside in the new power-hungry politicians? Does it reside in upp
er worlds, nether worlds? Tell me, Francisco. Feed my apparition in your book.’

  I hesitated for a long while and then I found the confidence to speak.

  ‘I would say,’ I began hesitantly, pulling a loose thread from my Nemesis Bag and letting it fall to the ground, ‘that all the ingredients of uncertainty that you stress, Mr Mageye, are woven into a car crash – as into the wreck of the Argo – into …’ I hesitated … ‘into wars and rumours of war across the sea, into submarines and the shadow of fleets patrolling the Atlantic seaboard of South America. No wonder the Old God hovers in space only to be seized by the Inspector and placed in a cell.’ I stopped, but then it occurred to me to lay bare my heart to Mr Mageye. ‘That Prisoner or Old God wrestles with the Doctor and the Inspector to claim Marie as his Virgin daughter …’

  There was much more that I wished to say, my desire for Marie even before I met her, my jealousy of Deacon, but Mr Mageye interrupted – ‘Look! there they are.’

  It suddenly occurred to me – as in a Jest of Dream – that my jealousy of Deacon had helped to flesh out the occasion, to give content to both Deacon and Marie in the backward sweep of years since I began to write. There they were indeed, large as life, within the raining, mist-filled savannahs in which Mr Mageye and I stood invisible to them.

  We were I calculated halfway between Crabwood Creek and Port Mourant.

  Deacon was naked. The tattooed Scorpion Constellation shone darkly on his child’s arm. On the other monstrous, heroic arm stood the double star Aldebaran associated with Taurus, but the Bull had been overturned into Horses on the Moon. I was able to draw close to him with Mr Mageye’s assistance and to read every pore in his body.

  Deacon had abandoned his school uniform to come into his own as the masterful child-bridegroom who secures the Virgin of the Wild on her appearance at the end of every long, searing drought when the rains commence.

  Deacon had paused as if locked into the thread of my glance. But he shot forward again in my Dream-book. Mr Mageye (Camera in hand) was out of sight – as on a film set – and I (in my Nemesis Hat) kept in touch (though I was invisible to him). Such are the wonders of technology and science within futuristic strategies of the Imagination.