Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  Mr Mageye saw my distress. ‘See the funny side of the sacred, Francisco,’ he said. He spoke softly for my ear alone on the Bridge with the Camera. ‘See the funny side of Deacon. Alas he knows that from birth, and his exposure in the savannahs, he began to play the role model of Fate. You have been tied to him as a Fool to be taunted and insulted and reviled. You (and the society to which you belong) must suffer his bouts of arrogance, and drunkenness, and bad behaviour. It’s Fate, it’s the role model of Fate, in the theatre, in the duelling arena, in sport, everywhere, when a civilization is addicted to violence as ours is. Only a Fool may absolve Deacon of the burden he carries …’

  Mr Mageye saw my incredulity, my dislike of the label Fool …

  ‘Look at it this way, Francisco. You are an apparition in time on the Bridge above the Pool. You stand beside me. You are an apparition in time down there beside the Pool. So you may entertain the comedy of having many fathers. The Frenchman’s Catholic ghost for instance. Your mother’s great-great-grandfather and husband. Carnival theology. And why not? Such surrogacies break the spell of divine human incest and bring us into the mystery of freedom … Freedom confesses to the partiality of all parenting dogma which it entertains as sacred, human theatre …

  ‘When the sky falls treat it as manna from heaven and crumbs from the bodies of role models (Jones is a cult model, isn’t he?), the heroes, the monsters, that we feed upon in our gluttony for abuse at the hand of Fate …’

  I was filled with fear, comic fear, uncanny fear, the fear of creation, of the possibilities of creation, the possibilities of fiction. Models of fiction cemented in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century are sacred in the twentieth. Sacred eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century linearity. But I was attempting to rewrite the past from the funny side of sacred, imperial time, from a futuristic angle that breached linearity. One drew one’s characters from the grave of time, they migrated backwards from the future nevertheless into the past, susceptible to one’s knowledge now (however flawed) of the past futures to which one belonged. The funny side of time in the future. Such is the resurrectionary, comic consciousness of the Fool Lazarus whom I sought to invoke in my texts though I knew without a shadow of doubt that Church and State showered him with fortunes and riches to keep him safely dead … This was the substance of my fear, my uncanny fear, as I wrote my Dream-book, as I sought to build Memory theatre …

  There was no way around such fear except divine comedy and the acceptance of Fate, the abuse of Fate, the abuse of Prejudice, the abuse of Predator.

  ‘Is Lazarus – you call me Lazarus Deacon – a Colonial Fool in a so-called post-colonial, post-imperial age? I do not know. If he is he must die and die again and again and each resurrection will prove abortive … Unless … Unless …’

  Deacon was outraged. He had been drinking rum and Coca-Cola all afternoon at the swimming pool with its misty embracing bodies.

  He had also caught the drift of Mr Mageye’s conversation with me.

  ‘Fuck the Frenchman’s ghost,’ he cried. ‘Fuck you, Francisco. You are a Fool. Your mother was a Fool.’

  ‘It’s the Frenchman’s fortune which brought you here on a scholarshp in the twentieth century.’

  ‘I am the peasant, legendary father of the Americas. Folkloric father. Ask Marie to whom I am betrothed. We need a different Economy …’

  Jonah Jones had had enough. He knit his brow like an ancient thunderer and struck the frame of the Milky Way until it shuddered as if to the rumble of an earthquake.

  ‘Nonsense Deacon,’ he cried. ‘Blue-blooded puritans are the fathers of the Americas. I am your father and every fucking bastard’s.’

  He had been drinking too and swallowing the women in the Pool with his drink. Their reflected bodies sprawled on the glass in his hand. His rage melted and he laughed in Deacon’s smiling teeth.

  ‘You Francisco, you Deacon, are my sons. Together in the New World we will forge a new pact and build a new Rome unlike the Pope’s Rome. I nearly said Poe’s Rome. Poe was a racist. But never mind. He’s a genius all the same! Would you not agree, Francisco? Troy, believe me, has been sacked and Rome turned its back on the Jews when Hitler marched into Poland. Berlin and Paris and London have suffered bouts of racism and fascism. Fascism is the death of the Imagination. IMAGINATION DEAD IMAGINE.’

  I wanted to shout to him from the Utopian Bridge. I wanted to shout a rain of questions at him as he swallowed the women in the Pool. I wanted to shout across a chasm of generations but my tongue froze, and his ear – for all I knew – was sealed.

  I wanted to shout within my own grave of memory – as though I too lay on the sick bed of civilization in Port Mourant hospital. But I was a diminutive survivor and my voice was weak and small. Though I sailed into the past with knowledge I had gained from the future, the queer and the funny side of knowledge served to show how much – beyond reckoning – I still had to learn.

  I wanted to shout to him – within my own grave of memory – as though I too had died in Jonestown: ‘Have you, Jonah, rid yourself of the disease of fascism?’

  I wanted to shout: ‘I know little or nothing except that I survived …’

  ‘How is it,’ I said to Mr Mageye, ‘that one knows so little yet dares to write fiction’s truths, the hardest truths to garner?’

  Mr Mageye laughed. ‘Fiction is not tautology. Fiction,’ he murmured, ‘must diverge within itself from itself to be true to itself. Or else it becomes the mimicry of fact, the shell of fact …’

  ‘How do you see my Dream-book, Mr Mageye? You are my magus-Camera Man, you transcribe my Dream-book into cinematic dress, into ghost-theatre – you are a ghost yourself – but I have no idea whether it’s simply a technological or cannibal appetite in ghosts, capitalism’s ghosts, when they swallow fictions indiscriminately; or whether there’s more, there’s freedom, there’s liberation for fiction in the Camera.’

  Mr Mageye acquired his peculiar air of the Sphinx with which I was familiar. But this time a new element tended to emerge. I perceived an almost calculated look of interwoven spectres upon him as he placed his hand upon the Camera.

  ‘Who can say what may prove to be the role of the Camera in future ages?’

  ‘But yours is a futuristic Camera …’

  ‘Ancient visage of time as well, Francisco, in hidden chambers of the heart and mind where figures peer at us dressed as mystical astronauts. That’s in my Camera as well. Deacon would call it celestial mathematics.’

  I was startled by the Jest which gave me food for thought as one glimpsed a rare temple of the human body …

  Mr Mageye was smiling with a deceptive gravity, a kind of inner levitation of the imagination lifted his features as if his smile took him up into a laurel wreath above his grave in Albuoystown.

  ‘But to be serious,’ he continued, ‘the Camera is possessed of an organ that cannot – in all honesty – encompass all the textualities of your Dream-book. It measures its limits nevertheless – I speak now in purely technical terms – within those variable boundaries. It pictorializes concrete happenings but imbues these at the same time with far-reaching and meaningful hiatuses and gaps that speak for themselves. The tears that the Virgin weeps, for instance, in poor people’s hospitals become an eloquent pool of milk at which dogs lap and in which rich men and women swim. Eloquent pool! Not straightforward eloquence. Dogs lap, their teeth flash into famine-stricken multitudes that we harbour in our unconscious. Feed my sheep. Feed my dogs. Even as you gorge yourselves on sex. Do you recall the creation of loaves of bread and fish in the Gospels from scraps and crumbs? A multitude was fed. The wonders of mystical science and hungry spirit, hungry ghosts, that can take many shapes around us and in our bodies, shapes that breed excess, or shapes that address us within the gaps of self-centred technology.

  ‘A hiatus lives within all models of technology. A chasm exists. We tend to turn our backs on this within patterns of realism that we reinforce into absolutes. But the hunger of the s
pirit grows, the hunger of ghosts everywhere, and excess may turn by degrees into death-dealing prosperity …’

  *

  The Pool of Tears – into which I had dived – faded and I was back in the poor people’s hospital.

  Marie was dressed in a nurse’s uniform. It was too large for her and her head rose above it with the eagerness and pathos of living, carven wood from an El Doradonne tree, wilderness flesh-and-blood child and twentieth-century peasant child. It was the custom or inbuilt tradition of the Golden Man or King of El Dorado to open doors in the oxygen bodies of trees (this was ancient El Doradonne Cinema) and to sculpt emerging Shadows into the retinue of his court, his civil servants, the members of his family, the labourers in the fields …

  Marie was playing a princess of ancient El Dorado in a hospital play. The patients were enlivened by the sight of a nurse’s uniform as the robe of royalty.

  I was overjoyed to see that her tears had ceased. The dog had lapped the milk and retreated to the side of his master who lay on the floor. The incongruity of the over-size uniform brought the occasion alive as though the princess’s large dress sheltered a multitude of workers who were kith and kin to royalty.

  Such was the game of El Doradonne Cinema, ancient, modern synaesthesia.

  There was a cradle on a table beside the chair in which Marie sat. The cradle was empty save for a beautiful toy, a wheeled chariot (each wheel one-eighth of an inch in diameter) within which lay a minute cherry from a flake of blood-wood in a Christmas tree.

  ‘The Wheel is the gift of my father to civilizations,’ said Marie.

  I was invisible but a part of the Play and I spoke aloud from a corner of the hospital under the Shadow of Mr Mageye’s Camera.

  ‘El Dorado never possessed the Wheel or the Christmas tree. Labour was hard as nails. Bare hands pulled rocks and stones into pyramids.’

  The Doctor-God arrived on the stage above Marie.

  ‘It’s true,’ he confirmed, ‘I am the ghost of an ancient medicine-king in olden times. My voice is scarcely heard nowadays. I am a king, a ruined king, yet I am worshipped in this hospital as a free spirit. Science is a free spirit. The Wheel remained a toy in my ancient kingdom. I never found the means to make it available to brutalized labourers. Indeed the labourers in El Dorado may well have been on another globe or planet. Cherries and Circuses were my promise to them, bountiful drugs and prescriptions and harvests and games to come. But alas the gap between heaven and hell continued to widen. Why this was so I could not tell. I knew there would be an uprising sooner or later. El Dorado was paradise on earth, it was heaven … War in heaven and upon earth! But I brushed this aside as rubbish. And even if it happened the cradle remained my enduring hope. It would fly through the air on hidden wings, hidden wheels. Yet I remembered I had reduced the cradle and the Wheel to a toy that the princess played with. I had never found the means to employ them differently. And future generations, it occurred to me, might do the same. Thus it was that I grew a blood-red Christmas tree in El Doradonne forests. Are not ghost-kings – such as myself – the true originators of Christmas? They appear in your Dream-book, Francisco, as magi of medicine, of law, and of the Camera. My dream now – which you may share in this hospital (I do not know) – is that medicine (the science of medicine) may extract the venom from brutalized species and brutalized labour through intercourse with the Scorpion Constellation. That venom would be converted into a serum or a medium of inoculation to achieve immunity to pain.’

  I shook my head in fervent disagreement. But his eyes were upon the Princess Marie. Was I visible to him, to his X-ray eyes? A shudder ran through Marie’s frame. She clutched the cradle to her heart. No tears in this instance. Yet hollow tears of Beauty are sometimes the most heartrending of all.

  I felt her anguish in myself. It was bitter as hell. I loved her with all my heart. No tears, in this instance, scalded my eyes. No tears, in this instance, were consistent with an inner, unconsumable fire in the wilderness Virgin, a fire one could understandably misconceive as hell. Not hell but a mirror reflecting uncrushed Spirit in the teeth of adversity. Uncrushed Spirit and hell sometimes seemed to walk hand in hand in the wilderness Virgin …

  I sought to hide my eyes, and hers – as if they were wed together – in the Shadow of the Camera. Was this a heretical wedding? Had I taken Deacon’s place? A Dream. Nothing more.

  One sees but is blinded in seeing …

  ‘Blinded less by Beauty than by what the apparition of Beauty begins to signify for the age in which you live, Francisco,’ I thought I heard the Virgin say. ‘Beauty can easily be framed by mass-media churches and states and cynical marketplaces. But when fire weeps yet does not seem to weep it breaks the frame. That breakage is misconceived as hell. For it plunges the world into mental anguish, it disrupts planetary hypocrisy, it disrupts the trade in commodities of framed Beauty, commodities of pigmentation that mask a void. God is dead! God is a Prisoner on Devil’s Isle. The truth is that the Apparition of Beauty within the hollow eyes of a child brings innermost fire that may sustain us to question all frames, all partialities, all literalities that we enshrine as absolutes …’

  At last she arose from her chair draped in the Shadow of Mr Mageye’s Camera. I dared not feast my eyes upon her terrible, childlike loveliness.

  I seemed to gaze upon her within the fragmentation of my own composite, epic body. She approached the framed cherry tree in the kingdom of the Golden Man of El Dorado. She moved upon the Utopian Bridge into that ruined kingdom. The tree was wounded, her Apparition was wounded, her eyes were wounded, the numinous child in the cradle that I could not see was held by her to her breast in the game that she played with the Gods in her nursery in El Dorado.

  I could not bear to look but I saw it all nevertheless through Mr Mageye’s fragmented Camera with its ancient, futuristic lenses.

  She moved in her apparitional, royal nursery to another tree.

  This resembled the ornamental branches in a Japanese garden. I swore now that I saw Prisoner-Gods, Prisoners of War hanging from it. Were they weak, were they mutilated? They held the Atom Bomb in their fingertips. At last she moved to the Christmas tree. She placed the cradle of a sick God beneath it. Was it possessed all at once of the lineaments of the patients in the hospital?

  I bowed my head still further but I could not rid myself of the Virgin’s eyes, the Virgin Princess’s childlike fiery eyes.

  They burnt a hole into the Camera.

  I had sailed in that hole into the vanished kingdom of El Dorado. I had sailed East, I had sailed West, I had sailed North, I had sailed South, to sight the Golden sick Man in a village hospital in Port Mourant.

  ‘Marie,’ I cried, ‘the king at your breasts whom you rock invisibly in your arms has left the stage and become a child in your arms, a child at your breasts. A sick king. A patient in this hospital. What a bridge across ages! If only I could tread upon it. So many bridges to cross. There he is! The Doctor is back. Your father is back. He does not perceive the game that you play. He thinks he is well. He leans over the patient with the dog resembling a lamb lapping milk. He does not see that you have pooled his reflection into the North and the South, into the East and the West, into a collective desire for gold everywhere, gold without pain. He does not see. Do I truly see? Do I truly understand? Let me lift him from your imaginary cradle and address him as the ghost of gold and medicine and science.

  ‘Doctor,’ I cried, ‘you are the Virgin’s son and father in this riddle of theatre. She sees you playing many parts, she sees me playing many parts, she sees us with the eyes of uncrushed Spirit.

  ‘Doctor,’ I cried again, ‘you are blind, you need her eyes to see in this hospital. Her eyes are the fire of uncrushed spirit.’

  I held up my left hand with its phantom fingers. They were possessed of music even as the Virgin’s childlike being was possessed of ancient wisdom. Had I not heard her speak in an impossible tongue that had long vanished from the face of the earth?

/>   The Doctor turned his back on me and made his way off the stage. Was he displeased with his daughter? Words seemed pointless now against the displeasure of a God. To whom should I pray?

  ‘Pray to uncrushed Spirit in every newborn child with whom you share an apparently empty cradle,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Pray to the heart of the Wilderness. Pray in silence, pray to invisibility’s wounds. All wounds, all stigmata, carry a silent and invisible counterpoint in the orchestra of ages. Silence speaks nevertheless, invisibility surfaces nevertheless, through you into a community of selves. One knows yet does not know one’s wounds in all their range and particularity; yet they are stored in some private mystery or theatre of music that animates oneself to come abreast of deprivation and numbness in humanity across the ages. One sees it in some unforgettable moment or glimpse into the temple of the human body as much as in the forlorn possessions in Carnival Lord Death’s Limbo marketplace. One strikes an exquisite chord or lament in the orchestra of ages with absent fingers upon a piano in a pawnshop, or on a beach against a golden flood of hollow materialism, or on the wave of a desert. The apparently irredeemable structure and plot of a civilization breaks …’

  I waited within what seemed the displeasure of God (or of the Doctor-God). And it dawned on me to my astonishment that my unspoken prayer to uncrushed Spirit had been answered within the net of the Virgin’s hair.

  Marie – the nurse – in her oversize, slightly ridiculous uniform, had turned from El Dorado in Guyana to the patient with the dog. I turned myself to Mr Mageye in further astonishment – ‘Is it possible?’ I cried. ‘He holds a long strand of her hair in his hand. Not to employ as a lasso for the Horses on the Moon as Deacon did or as Alexander the Great may have desired to do when El Dorado was an empire. No – look Mr Mageye – he coils it into a net. Have I not glimpsed that net before? In Limbo Land! I remember. The huntsman and his dog! He saved my life.’ I stopped to consider the extremities of response to unspoken prayer in wilderness theatre, wilderness orchestra.