Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  Was it a statistical hoax, or caveat, or illumination of the fraud perpetrated on the Bank of America of which Jonah Jones was accused by the Police?

  Eventually Jones’s suspicions were aroused that the huntsman was some kind of underground agent. He sent him packing straightaway. He did not relish such a warning to his flock. I had not understood or perceived the warning myself – executed it seemed now with a curiously dismembered hand – until I followed the huntsman through the door in the Wheel … The dog or the lamb at his heels invoked the invaluable life of the species of genesis. Nobody’s dog, Nobody’s lamb, imbued the huntsman’s pace, the latitude of his grasp, with a watchful eye for all species, care, scrupulous measure of instinct to put numinous flesh in the shape of living masks, plucked from Carnival Lord Death, upon the Bone of wasted lives that survivors of holocaust harbour in themselves.

  *

  Space was intrinsic to re-visionary narratives of changed time. I followed the huntsman and his dog or lamb in the music of space into the elusive foundations of Jonestown which lay, I knew, in the hidden vistas of modern and pre-Columbian civilizations.

  We were walking in two forests, parallel forests, parallel universes. I shook myself at the thought of such trespass.

  We were on the margins of Jonestown (or Jonah City) …

  I concentrated on the silvery-grey bark of tall, skyscraper greenheart out of which the Port Mourant hospital had been built and which we employed in the construction of Jonestown in the 1970s up to 1978.

  A delicate balance needed to be struck, a delicate clock of space, ticking space. The Reverend Jonah Jones was insistent that the treasury of the lofty trees – in which Jonestown was set – must be nurtured even as we made use of it. He had – to give him credit – issued the strictest instructions of which Deacon and I approved. For a Forest is akin to a Bomb. When it blows apart birds cease to sing.

  ‘It is Spring 1978,’ I said to the huntsman. ‘The prospects look blight for the new town.’

  The giant leaf of parallel ages shivered under my feet, whispered.

  The shadow of the grave with its rubbled door through which we had come cracked a vein in my mind within the music of the raining, sun-bathed leaves settling on the ground like a pillow resembling stone.

  I heard the shivering leaf again and remembered how I had ignored it in the future from which I had come. I had ignored its intervention in seeking to warn me of the poisoned cup against the shattered lips of the woman in the Clearing; in seeking to warn me of the shaking bushes as well in which I hid from Jones.

  The Forest opened all at once and we had arrived at the edge of a sawyers’ pit. Stalwart sawyers they seemed in the raining shadow and light of the leaves as they sliced limbs and planks from the fallen living body of trees.

  I felt the sawyers’ living breath upon me in the lungs of the trees.

  There were three pairs of active sawyers in the long wide pit to which I had come. Each pair operated a formidable saw with rhythmic precision.

  A faintly mesmeric and profound shadow of music – sprung from the huntsman’s horn in a tree – enveloped the sawyers and myself.

  Mr Mageye whispered that this was a portent of my remarriage to the people of Jonestown.

  The sawn timber echoed the sound and dismemberment, the depth of dismemberment, of ancient tree-gods in the service of humanity.

  They (those tree-gods) shone with the mysterious, alarming light of aroused flesh-and-blood, trembling flesh-and-blood wood that steamed, it seemed, as it arose from the pit.

  The light in the incalculable glow and gloom of the Forest seemed to boil everywhere within the pit, within the noises of bustling Jonestown that one could hear through curtains of leaves, bustling Jonestown arisen from its grave; it floated within and above the implements that the sawyers used like a mist in vein and artery to be traced in trunk or tool or body. It seemed to differentiate inwardly and outwardly – as it flocked within the sawyers’ arms – a range of perverse resurrections within an alchemy of true resurrections in our apprehension of the daily tasks that we perform and the materials that we use …

  The timber and limbs and sawn material stacked beside the pit possessed an uncanny patience. Yes, they were the gift of the tree-gods to Jonestown. One legend has it that the Creator created Man from dust.

  Dust – when it arises into archetypal bodies and branches and horns and flutes – embraces tree-god wood as much as live, fossil stone or pillow of rock. Beds, chairs, desks, walls, windows are patient receptacles for flesh to lie upon, or move within, in its arousal from dust. Thus the equation between tree-god wood and flesh (animal and human) is shaped upon intangible frontiers between inanimate and animate, legendary worlds and ages …

  Those frontiers secrete different pulses, different rhythms, and the pulse of the inanimate (however apparently remote or hidden) is as real as the pulse of animal creatures … One is possessed by shock when one flees from the dead and discovers a measure of disguise they possess in instruments and furniture that one had long ignored as passive features of nothingness. That shock is implicit in the shadow of music upon frontiers of being and non-being that begin to levitate and change places. I remembered the Day of the Dead when I arose from the bushes and fled into the Night of the Forest.

  I remembered the bodies piled everywhere from which I fled.

  I remembered their effort to dance to shadow music in the leaves of the whispering Forest, shadow orchestra of dust, as they half-crouched, half-lay, half-stood leaning against a wall, half-knelt with their head in the flattened bowl of the sun.

  I remembered the black-lit grave yawning at the heart of the Night when I came upon the sawyers’ pit. The sawyers had fled. There was a glowing lantern in the pit or I would have fallen headlong into it. I paused at the edge with beating heart. Tools, garments of all shapes and colours, were scattered helter-skelter in the pit. The bodies that I had seen in the flat bowl of the sun lay here as well in the circling lantern light as the wind blew. Their heels were chiselled, their ankles were bolts and nuts, and their brow of the sun – the windblown, flattened, shadowy, bowl of the sun – addressed them as awakening lantern light, in the pit, anticipating my return to bustling Jonestown in the middle of the day.

  I could not however quite rid myself of the memory of the grave into which I had come so close to falling in November 1978.

  I could not quite rid myself of ‘middle of the night’ November 1978 – when I came close to falling into the sawyers’ pit – though I knew I had returned to ‘middle of the day’ Tropical Spring in the selfsame year. I stood on the frontier between shapes of time, past future, future present.

  I prided myself that I had not fallen in the ‘middle of the night’ and yet on that frontier between ‘middle of the day’ and ‘middle of the night’ I sensed another shape to myself that had fallen.

  That shape was a key I felt to unlocking another door into Jonestown, a key that the huntsman provided. He had been there in that ‘middle of the night’ and had caught the other shape of myself that fell.

  ‘Your skeleton-twin!’ Mr Mageye whispered. ‘You need that twin to orchestrate Bone – the Bone or survivor that you are – into the Carnival news of a further re-entry into Jonestown.

  ‘On that day of the holocaust you survived, Francisco Bone, but something integral to the fabric of yourself remained behind within the trauma of the grave. A skeleton-twin! You saw it fall though you did not fall! You saw the gleaming net (or perhaps it is visible only now in the “middle of the day”) that held it as it fell. Held it to return it to you as a companion-key to coming events (or past events?) as you tread a frontier between shapes of time.’

  ‘Turn the key of Night and Day, built into yourself, and enter Jonestown.’ It was the huntsman who spoke but the voice may have been a whisper in the horn of a tree.

  I hesitated. The nakedness of my skeleton-twin made me wonder if I (Bone) were naked too.

  But then – as if to reass
ure me – the huntsman waved his horn. A cloud of particles arose in the ‘middle of the day’ as the sawyers sliced into the flesh of wood. Their rhythmic slicing spread a carpet of golden-white dust upon the ground from the spoil of the trees. I was clothed in that cloud in flesh or fleece. The dog at the huntsman’s heel became a frisky lamb.

  I now slipped into the bustling throngs of Jonestown. Clouds rose overhead. A blue sky. So blue it seemed porous with the memory of Night. So easy it seemed, as people brushed past, to embrace everyone; to love everyone, to lose oneself in everyone. I stood still in the slow raining curtain of the sun’s blue shadow instinct with a coming Storm, a faint premonition in the dome of space, inner flesh of the middle of night I still remembered in counterpoint to fleecy cloud.

  My skeleton-twin was beside me now on the rude pavement of the new town. It was a holiday in Jonestown. He was wheeling a bicycle on which were stacked two columns of newspapers, one on the saddle, one on the handlebar. I reached out to embrace him but he thrust my Lazarus-arm aside with a jarring rebuff.

  It was so unexpected I was seized with chagrin. Was he not my twin? Was he a stranger?

  I sought to cover my pain by pointing to the newspapers.

  He interpreted this as an unspoken question.

  ‘The Carnival Argosy,’ he said. ‘You should know, Francisco.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Let me jog your wretched memory, Francisco. Yes, I shall! When I broke from you and fell into the pit I took part of your memory with me. Memory is archetypal. It is shared between fleshed Bone and twin-skeleton. Thus it is sometimes that a society sustains itself. One is in blessed ignorance of what the other suffers. I kept you going. I made survival a shade of flesh easier for you. But now it’s time. I have been in hell. And it’s time you knew. Every charismatic cult breeds hell. You were Jones’s left-hand man and close associate. To give you credit in an age of lies you have never hidden the fact! So when I broke out of your fleeing body on the day of the holocaust I took the rap. I took your hell with me to give you a Limbo chance to grow flesh upon our mutual grave. You see Francisco the truth is never static, it needs re-visionary momentum in all proportions of narrative convention or conviction, the truth can never set us free unless we are multifaceted and able to face our indebtedness not only to surrogate Gods but to obscure twins in the family of Skeleton and Bone …’

  I was shaken. I was appalled. The assault took me by surprise. I thought I had been coming along well in my Dream-book. But I knew now that I had scarcely begun. I needed to dip into hidden texts of the grave to achieve some measure of translation of the hell that I had – perhaps unwittingly – helped to build when I joined Jones’s charismatic cult.

  And the newspapers on the bicycle! Had my skeleton-twin taken them into the pit when he fell and left me at the edge of a lantern-lit Night in the darkness of the Forest?

  ‘I lay under the Carnival Argosy,’ he said, ‘until now. Newspapers were my perverse Virgin Ship, Francisco. I lay under them in the pit. A pillow of earth and stone and leaves under my head. Rich juicy scandal. The Virgin press is wed to bridegroom Money.’

  He gave me his faint lightning smile that was harnessed to underground distant thunder.

  ‘We arranged, Francisco – you and I – when we planned a Carnival celebration for Jonestown to take place in the Spring, this Spring, to ride with the Carnival Argosy on our head upon a bicycle, distribute it to the cult membership of Jonestown, and pass Jones’s copies to him in his house at the edge of the river. I see you have forgotten, Brother.’

  I tried to pretend I had not but my skeleton-twin, or brother of the grave, was sharp as a nail, a seeing nail in a hollow socket.

  ‘Let me jog your memory again, Francisco! Jones acceded to our request to stage the celebratory RETURN OF THE LIVING FROM THE DEAD such as is staged in Maya folkloric villages, South American settlements, and in Mexico City every year. As for another title … well, we debated several. Remember? UNDER THE CAVE OF THE MOON (into which you fled Francisco). UNDER THE STORM OF THE MOON. We even considered UNDER THE VOLCANO. But abandoned that …’

  His tone was lighter perhaps, self-mocking, jesting. Perhaps he had glimpsed Mr Mageye. I was more drawn to him in this instant and I cried: ‘Good God! Did Jones really agree to such a Carnival? I remember he was totally against such pagan Memory theatre!’

  The Skeleton’s Carnival lips crackled into a blissful smile riddled nevertheless with accusation.

  ‘You do remember something after all, Francisco! But let me continue to prod – is that the right word? – into the archetypal recesses of Memory theatre. Jonah felt that to give you what you wanted was to encourage you to keep your head well below the parapet of memory. Even as I kept mine in the pit. He knew that you could raise hell if you wished. And so you shall! But Jonah bargained on giving you a licence for hollow ritual. Carnival resurrection might become an end in itself, a hollow ritual in itself, hollow theatre in itself. The best thing he felt was to give you latitude for hollow Carnival year after year. You might then come to forget what it was all about. Play dead, play resurrection, to your heart’s content, until in the end the banner of conquest in his hand would prevail and seal hollow resurrection into the death of living memory, living archetype.

  ‘Yes, Jones’s brand of religion, Jones’s split between the dead past (so-called) and the future (so-called), Jones’s irredeemable universe, can prove a killing dogma, a killing manifesto directed at the heart of originality … Pity him by all means, Francisco, love him, yes, if you can, he is (or was) your associate – indeed a friend – as human as you are, as human as all fallible establishments. But remember it is hell that springs from the grave of memory where it has long slumbered and cries out to be portrayed in its true colours of intolerance and tyranny within dogmatic and charismatic cults.’

  I was stunned but the ramifications were clear. The Christ of the conquistadores possessed a twin in the sick man who arose from a hospital bed and whom I followed through the Virgin’s Wheel into Jonestown. Sickness was a skeletal aspect of the hell into which Christ had descended. Health was flesh on the Bone within the split materialistic/spiritual mind of my age. Numinous paganism was a gleaming web or net or medium of a true resurrection of archetypal memory. It was a net in which to salvage a broken world and reclaim its bearing on a living future …

  Hell was around the corner but we rode through heaven into the Carnival crowd which made way for us. My skeleton-twin held the Carnival Argosy on his head. He sat on the towing bar of the bicycle that ran from the pole of the saddle to the pole of the handlebar. I pedalled on the saddle and achieved a miraculous balance with a column of newspapers on my head. We distributed them into the crowd with amazing Circus sleight-of-hand.

  The huntsman and his dog ran as lithe as Spirit beside us.

  We were all upheld between parallel cloths and elements and were spinning along on surrogacies of the Virgin’s Wheel within blossom that rained on the futuristic grave of Jonestown, the futuristic grave of the globe.

  Blossom and cloud and the foam of the sea were parallel Sleeps and Wakings.

  One novel element lives dies, another dies lives …

  Spring springs eternal but it is broken in the subtle and changing, quintessentially flexible organs of time.

  Such are the harbours and investitures that I wear with my twin.

  Blossom, sea, river, land, space are Bone’s flesh that I wear in a Skeleton’s waking heaven arisen in the grave of space.

  Spring and Bone voice together the rhythms and veins in the music of a tree. Time is the precipitation of sleight-of-hand eternities in masks and sculptures, the masked, etched bloom of forests, the winged traceries of cloud, blending, re-forming, reshaping into unfinished web, unfinished catastrophe or unfinished regeneration, heaven …

  Heaven was an omen. It could not be taken for granted. Beauty was heartrending mystical truth. Every idyll carried an edge of harshness to awaken the palate of memory.
I had travelled in the very processions on the road – largely unseeing then in the future from which I had returned to the past-in-the-present – towards the holocaust that lay across mist-ridden, wonderful vistas into the heart of the town. Now I knew (or thought I knew) the rhythms of a universe rooted in unconscious and subconscious interventions of grace that stimulate a tapestry of response possessed of its ominous grain as well as its primordial ecstasy.

  I had been akin to a soldier marching through a living, paradisean landscape embroidered in the labyrinths of the rainforest. A paradise that was to assume with hindsight the fabric of a terrifying, haunting, indeed monstrous beauty in that one was marching into horror, into gunfire, into murder.

  The fabric of catastrophe dwelt in Carnival heaven as paradoxical intervention of grace that prepared me now to respond at many levels within the composite epic imagination in my Dream-book. I steeled myself for my encounter with the formidable solid ghost of the Reverend Jonah Jones in my return from the future into the present-in-the-past, return from futuristic winter 1978 to spring 1978 and the crowd of Carnival ghosts through which I rode to Jonah Jones’s house at the edge of the Jonestown river.

  I arrived with Jones’s copies on my head of the Carnival Argosy, covering the news of a fortnight and more.

  Jonah had been swimming before I arrived and had received a glancing but heavy blow to his head from a hidden log just under the surface of the stream.

  He felt like a log himself. The twin-wood or log which struck him may have slipped into a tributary to the main Jonestown river, a tributary that ran close to the sawyers’ pit.

  It had floated into the main river, notched and broken in places, a phallic organ, a phallic tree or ladder, such as South American legend associates with the body and cell of a great Prisoner in Devil’s Isle, French Guyana, bordering Dutch, British, Spanish, Portuguese Guyanas. One could place other titles and masks upon them if one wished – Surinam, Brazil, Venezuela …