Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  He ran with a miraculous stride. Amazing to maintain his stride on the slippery path that he had taken. But the long drought had hardened the ground. The water table was low and it would take a day or two at least for the soil to change into an ankle-deep rich overflowing sponge.

  The rain swept all around as if sky and cloud had been broken in cosmic theatre to provide a Waterfalling shower in the eye of the Camera down which Deacon had floated and come when he fell as an infant in space. Now he was in his tenth cosmic year and destiny was to equip him with a lasso to seize the Horses of the Moon and bring them showering and hoofing their way to Earth.

  I saw the affianced child-bride in the corner of my eye. The rain swung into an encircling perimeter around her, the rain lessened, the ground acquired the look of a mirroring, flat wave as if a portion of the sky had fallen to the ground.

  Deacon saw her now clearly. She was naked as he was. She too had abandoned her uniform, a child’s nurse’s uniform which the Doctor, her adoptive father, had given her to wear when she assisted him in the Port Mourant hospital after school.

  Deacon stopped upon the perimeter. Carven into momentary astonishment. He had not seen her naked before. He knew her from school but she was not the same child that he took for granted when the Doctor-God and his savannah parents met to seal the promise of selves (savannah-self, Godself) in marriage.

  His lithe body responded to hers by sheathing itself all at once in wings that blew around him as if a bird, an eagle, a fluid eagle, perched on his head in a fountain of mist as the rain appeared to boil around his ankles in the rising heat of the soil.

  Marie began to dance on the mirror. She danced upon a portion of sky, skin of the shining rain on the ground. Her feet were suddenly and lightly and mysteriously laced with three threads that fell from my Nemesis Hat. They were the colour of velvet. Yet the springing grass of slenderest blades of rain were silver. The blades of grass from my mother’s grave levitated and fell from the sky. The blades of grass from Mr Mageye’s grave levitated and fell from the sky. Despite such beauty I was stricken by heart-rending grief. I felt the strangest foreboding. And I would have fired a bullet – if I had possessed one – at Deacon and swept his affianced bride into my arms.

  Deacon moved and edged his wings into the mirror on which the Virgin of the Wild was dancing. A long plait of loose hair fell down her back from the nape of her neck to her waist. It was the colour of the mane of a Moon-horse that shook itself and encircled my head. Why me? How was I tied to her? By what fate, or trial of spirit, or torment of freedom?

  Deacon seemed to glide and reach for her hair upon the fantastic mirror. He swept it from my brow even as – with a mocking glance – he seemed to nail it into the space where I stood invisible to him. The nail pierced me to the Bone. I cried for immunity to pain such as Deacon appeared to possess.

  Marie swirled and the nail fell from my head into Deacon’s wing. He may have felt no pain in the Shadow of the Scorpion but he stumbled and was unable to bind her to him in this instant of a doubling of stars in the sky or mirror on the ground, Aldebaran’s twin stars in which I played an invisible role, twinned to a fallen angel.

  The lessening rain and slightly clearing sky brought the pool of the Moon onto the ground. Deacon darted forward as if he flew or danced on water – his wing free again – and he held the Virgin’s hair at last. But when he sought to draw her to him, in the theatre of the Moon, she dazzled him and thrust him away. They encircled each other, sometimes upon the perimeter within which they danced, sometimes upon an upright Wheel as though the flat circle or perimeter inclined itself into a vertical dimension, a wheeling dimension.

  Step by step the Horses of the Moon materialized as a turbulent extension of the Passion of the dance. A haunch grafted itself into the archetypal momentum of cavalry of fate. Such apparently insoluble archetypes were native to ancient and modern civilizations and they drew Marie’s Wheel in the dance.

  Horses akin to Cortez’s troop fleshed themselves into a scale of grafts within apparitions on the Moon.

  Horses akin to Genghis Khan’s hillsides rose into shoulders and necks around the edges of the Moon.

  Eyes of flashing, poisoned gold sprang from the bodies of Alexander’s infantry upon Darius’s wheeling chariots beneath Marie’s fleet foot.

  From every corner of legend and history arose an assembly of the parts of engines of flesh, jigsaw cavalries, ribs, equine muscularities, bunched muscles, grapelike memories of blood, tanned, leathern proportions, giving substance to the terrible Horses of the Moon within which Deacon and Marie pursued each other in their dance.

  No horses in Chichén Itzá but the dreaded Chac Mool possessed the countenance of a Chimera, half-human, half-horse. Chac Mool was a signal of militaristic atrocity in the Maya world and it foretold the decline of a civilization.

  Who were the riders, who were the giants of Chaos upon such Horses? Were they Deacon’s kith and kin in heaven and upon earth? Were they Marie’s dangerous host and accompaniment of furies? Furies are omens, signatures of uncanny foreboding, and they tend to arrive hand in hand with Virgins of the Wilderness whose untameable spirituality in nature is misconceived for brute violence.

  Were the riders princes of Carnival Lord Death’s regime in theatres of history, were they dictators in South America, were they solid, stable riggers of elections in Nigeria and elsewhere, were they Amens or Amins, were they gagged priests, gagged popes, gagged bishops, bankers, statesmen, scientists, crusaders, evangelists?

  Or were they shepherds from times immemorial, poor labouring folk in the savannahs of Guyana since El Dorado fashioned its whip to encircle the slaves who dug the earth, rode the earth from cradle to grave with an eye on the stars for the coming of a saviour, a saviour susceptible to miscasting in the theatres of Church and State, miscast as warrior-crusader-priest?

  The poor, labouring, awkward folk seemed to Mr Mageye and to me to combine dictatorship and feudal features in themselves as they rode the Horses. They were also uncanny judges of themselves and others. They were submissive to Deacon now as they rode the Horses, rode the lotteries on the Moon, rode expectations of fortune on the Moon, but I felt – as though I were on trial – that they were capable of breaking themselves, melting themselves, reshaping themselves, in order to judge him in themselves, bring him before them on the Moon.

  ‘Why the Moon?’ I asked Mr Mageye. ‘Why not the Earth?’

  ‘In a Universe that quarrels with itself in Carnival sciences the Moon is a ripe theatre, the Moon drifts to Earth, drifts into a sphere of incredible theatre and gravity, a space-station, if you like, within a quarrel of dimensions that plague us …’

  Marie was now under the hoofs of the Horses ridden by controversial, pathetic, victimized, victimizing, paradoxical self-judges and giants of chaos. She slipped through them unhurt but saw the danger to humanity in the triumph of the warrior-angel that Deacon was. She was now betrothed to him as the dance confirmed. It was too late to turn back. She was destined – according to folklore legends – to bear him a child, the people’s promised child that would herald his departure from her, in dread circumstances, to build a new Rome in South America in alliance with an American warrior-priest from San Francisco and left-handed Bone from Albuoystown.

  It was a prophecy that was unclear to her. Unclear to me. I should have remembered the past in coming from the future but the trauma that I suffered in Jonestown had wiped a page or pages from my mind and those blank spaces or chapters filled my Dream-book with renewed foreboding.

  ‘Am I left-handed Bone?’ I cried. I should have known better than to indulge in self-pity. Mr Mageye did not reply. A Sphinx-like look came upon his face, a gentle hand on my brow…

  Marie slipped through the Horses’ hoofs even as she saw the danger. She saw – within her untameable beauty – the grief in the Womb of Space (when space quarrels with itself and becomes a potential series of battlefields).

  I drew close to her and succ
eeded in helping her secure a triangular seat within the Wheel even as it spun. I swore she saw me. She turned her mysterious and wonderful and grateful eyes upon me. She knew me. But then I wondered. Did she mistake me for Deacon whose shadowy Mask fell upon her? Winged, Shadowy Mask? Black? Yet pale and silvery as the feathers around his Beak?

  I placed my shoulders to the Wheel and gave it an additional push. It flashed. It flashed through the limbs of the great Horses and their riders. And she was gone in a flash. Back to her nurse’s uniform in Port Mourant Hospital.

  Deacon’s venom rose with Marie’s flight and helped to harden his heart for an enterprise that lay before him: the capture of the Horses of the Moon and their riders …

  He had secured a long thread of hair from Marie’s head. The rain had ceased and he would need to take full advantage of the respite to perfect the task on which he was engaged and the lassoing of the Horses.

  Their necks gleamed as he lifted the glancing hair from the bride of the wilderness. That hair was curiously part of the topography of the landscape. It had been plucked as much from the map of his Brain as from the Virgin’s body.

  It glanced and stood before him as upon a draughtsman’s sliding scale of uprooted contours and tributaries, the slenderest, coiling fabric of recalled rain coursing alive after the long drought through the savannahs.

  Coursing alive along the Crabwood Creek in the moonlight pouring through broken clouds.

  ‘I read in the Carnival Argosy in 1939,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘that engineers were contemplating diverting the tributary to the Courantyne River known as Crabwood Creek into an enclosure, or giant spatial lasso, so to speak, for horses and cattle to prevent them straying onto and grazing upon the rice fields.’

  As he spoke to me I saw the extraordinary congruence of apparition and concreteness in the Camera of the mind within the Jester of history.

  Deacon held the wilderness hair and lasso in his hand as if it were the sliding uplifted creek itself coiling upon its fragile, serpent’s tail.

  He whipped the serpent in the air with an engineer’s bark, a peasant boy’s ambitious dream and cry and prayer for the marvels of technology.

  The wilderness lasso fell around the Horses’ steaming necks in the moonlight. They shuddered and bundled themselves together uneasily but on the whole they were content to be mastered by an angel from the stars.

  Mr Mageye studied – as upon a platform of invisibility separating him from the action of a rolling film – the amorphous, magical roles a child plays within the hidden uniform of a man already shaping itself into existence within him and around him. The amorphous magic in the psyche of a child is the sponge of growing pains, trauma, the trauma of deprivation, the trauma of acute longing for power, the power to rule, to execute gigantic projects that may symbolize glory or ashes in one’s mouth unless one learns to see deeply into the cinematic theatre of cells and blood in mind and heart.

  ‘Such a beautiful – however grief-stricken – theorem is the psyche of a child! Capsuled into childhood is the latent marriage of Brain and myth, feud and grace, terror and dance. Deacon’s obsession (which may also be yours, Francisco) surely was plain to you as a lucid dream when he studied engineering and politics in San Francisco College.’

  Horses and Giants of Chaos came towards Deacon now. He lengthened his tributary lasso, he pulled hard.

  It seemed as if it would snap into Virgin blood on the Moon but it held.

  He relaxed his grip into a wide-angling – almost gentle – invocation of space and drew animals and riders across the perimeter of the Moon into the river catchment of Earth and along the line of the creek. It was a remarkable procession that invested the heights of the Moon with the qualities of a watershed upon which distant falling rain escalated upon a mountainous cloud and then glided on both flanks into space.

  Horseflesh flanking the Moon and the creek became the shadow of a wall, or a dam, as the procession advanced towards the Courantyne River.

  The projected new polder, or diversion, materialized as a gift of passion inherent in his betrothal to Marie, reined-in animal passion, curbed and manifest in engineering, wilderness genius.

  It was as if Deacon were intent upon converting the Wheel upon which Marie had fled into a simultaneous asset of culture, into gradients and stages down which he drew the Horses of the Moon.

  Celestial mathematics!

  He drew the Horses along the lassoing hair – with or in the lassoing hair – in the Virgin’s body to the wide Courantyne River. He came upon a box koker or sluice at the point where the tributary entered the main body of the river. The wide estuary was vacant except for a schooner on the bar and the Virgin Ship which Deacon failed to see.

  In his child’s mathematical, engineering, mythical eye, infused with wars and baggage trains and advancing, retreating armies, the box koker or Dutch culvert assumed the proportions of a giant coffin. He stood against it and lifted the lid. Then with a tug he propelled each beast and rider into its depths. The colour of new taxes he would propose (if he were prime minster) shone on each flank, money-flesh, political/economic flesh, ballot-box flesh, everything that was pertinent to the betrothal of a hero or a monster to the Virgin of the Wild. They were content to recline in darkness and await the fulfilment of his promise. He inscribed on the lid of the coffin Heracles strangling serpents – unleashing serpents – in his cradle and Hermes herding cattle, outwitting his brother Apollo on the day he was born …

  Mr Mageye and I – even as Deacon propelled Horses and riders into a coffin – let our platform with its filming futuristic yet ancient Eye levitate in space. Such verticality, such a sliding scale, was native to blended time, past futures, future pasts. We saw Deacon’s procession along the creek in a new fictional, factual light of peculiar irony and folk indefatigability and deprivation. Conversion of folk deprivation into glorious cradles allied to coffins and taxation in the grave ran hand in hand with mundane, plodding existences. We saw Deacon’s processional wall in the lassoing of space change into apathy yet dogged hope.

  The empolderment of the savannahs had been shelved when the War in Europe began in 1939. Money was short in the Colony. Posters advertising the Crabwood Creek Scheme (as it was called) began to loosen into tattered newspaper flags on the walls of buildings and in schools.

  Deacon read the scraps and pieces nevertheless in his school. They flapped like wings of a noble scavenger or vulture or eagle that he attempted to draw within and around them into popular graffiti. One day he would come to power. One day his offspring would ensure an indefatigable cradle … Such were his larger- than-life thoughts as he led his plodding, smaller-than-life procession of horses from upriver Courantyne to downriver Crabwood Creek now that the drought was over.

  Not giants in cradles to Mr Mageye and me on our platform and ladder in space but processions of hardy, ant-like creatures on the globe beneath us, as ant-like and enigmatic as the moving stars with feet in shadow above us.

  Deacon’s dwarf-like substance, the dwarf-like procession that he led – dwarf-like train of giants in the comedy of the wilderness – was nothing unusual in the life of the peasant folk. Peasants as young as Deacon were initiated into the savannahs virtually from the day they began to crawl. Mere lads – in the eyes of the Gods who contested the parentage of wilderness Marie – were skilled herders of cattle. It was a tough, dangerous life. As tough and as dangerous as it had been in ancient Palestine and ancient Greece where hardship was the name of the game.

  Where were the new Biblical lands, the new Classical lands, but where exoduses and diasporas, and the threat of drought, of famine, prevailed in variable, unsuspected forms?

  Where were the new ships, the new Aeneid, but in a web of ancient, conflicting cultures, modern Romes and Jonestowns overshadowing space even before they were built? Such overshadowing drove us forwards and backwards simultaneously into celestial mathematics. Deacon and Mr Mageye and Jonah Jones and Bone (myself) and the Prisoner and the Doctor a
nd the Inspector and giants of chaos were witnesses to the diminutive composite epic that drove us into trial and error betrothal to fates and furies and dangerous maids, trial and error gestations in the Womb of space, infinite tragedy yet hope of divergence from absolute plot, absolute doom.

  Deacon and his procession below us in the savannahs was a subconscious miniaturization of collective mystery, miniaturization of Classical Palestine, Classical Greece, Classical Maya in dwarf-like substance, true, unsuspected intercourse with complex, cross-cultural tradition …

  Deacon had propelled himself upwards as he led his father’s beaten horses, beaten by sun and drought, ribbed cages on which weak members of the family sat, from upriver Courantyne to downriver Crabwood Creek.

  Propelled himself upwards into a Shadow beside Mr Mageye and me on the Platform of the Camera where we sat.

  He was exhausted after the long journey. He seemed naked Shadow as I was naked Bone and Mr Mageye was naked spiritual Jester. We pushed him down again as he had pushed his train into the darkness of a coffin. He was exhausted. He settled in sleep on the lid of the coffin. The sigh of the river against the bank resembled buried souls in the wood of the box koker on which his head lay. Then he arose at last and made his way home.

  *

  HOME. Home is as elusive as it is real in Memory theatre. I remembered the Cave of the Moon into which I had fled from Jonestown on the Night of the Day of the Dead. It seemed home in a high cliff or bank from which a Waterfall fell beneath me into the Jonestown river. Was that Waterfall beneath me or did it spring from an opposite cliff or bank into which my Shadow reached as if it sought to bridge a chasm in creation? My stomach was hollow and I fed Bone with bread and rice and tinned fruit, tinned vegetables that I had stored in the Cave. Bone ate ravenously. So much so I was tempted to leap down the ladder of the Waterfall onto a rock far below shaped like a loaf of bread. Bone was universal me. I was universal Bone.