Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  Jonah Jones was the Prisoner’s perverse twin-brother! Unconscious twin-brother to the great Prisoner as he descended into the river beneath his house.

  I had never dreamt of this far-flung archetypal relationship before but was prompted into doing so by my jesting Skeleton-twin who stood on the river-bank with the bicycle rattling slightly against his bones as a gentle wind blew.

  I had never seen Jones in this Carnival light until now – until this revisitation of Spring, Tropical noonday Spring.

  The Prisoner was possessed of the hell of memory, budding, frozen, scorched, reviving memory in Spring, the hell of a descent into elements that chained him to an eternity he loathed, chained him into misgivings of the reality of freedom in an irredeemable universe. Yet he wanted to reach out to his fellow prisoners everywhere and bestow freedom upon them through the dismemberment of his limbs that would gain them unsurpassed agility. A Dream! Nothing more. It was a risky matter when Prisoner-Gods entertained the gift of freedom in themselves, a gift from an unfathomable Creator. Such a gift seemed whole, but it broke in its passage through the barriers and walls of circumstance, the prisons of circumstance, in its passage into an unresponsive and perverse humanity. All archetypes are broken in their intercourse with humanity. Broken yet active …

  Jonah was the other side of the fabric or the coin that charismatic Gods may bestow upon Mankind. He had settled for non-redemption for outsiders. Heaven was barred against the damned even as it locked into itself the saved in all eternity. Freedom of soul or body was a blood-soaked mirage.

  Charismatic Jonah Jones had indeed suffered a close shave, he had narrowly escaped drowning in the river beneath his house. That was historical fact. What was not historical fact was his unconscious and awakening subconscious, tormenting glimpse into the Prisoner-God in himself as he rose upon a net or current to embrace the log and pull himself up by the dazed skin of his teeth in nail and hand.

  He suffered a mystical dismemberment but was largely unaware of it. Still a seed of remorse, repentance, uncertainty was born, a seed he sought to disperse into nothingness.

  His house stood on the bank of the river as if grounded yet floating in its reflection in the river.

  It possessed a fine view upriver and downriver.

  One could even glimpse – through Jonah’s ghost eyes – as if one eye remained in the log in the river, the other rose above into a window in the house – rippling sun-shadow slipping around a bend (at least a mile away) beyond which, another couple of miles or so, stood the Cave of the Moon high up on a steep bank or cliff.

  ‘Francisco, I am morally confused,’ Jonah Jones said to me, when he came to the door, upon my knocking, and led me into the house, as if we were conversing on the bed of the river yet high up on reflected timbers, within reflected walls, architectures, in hell.

  Difficult to record what he was actually saying.

  Did he say ‘morally confused’ or was it ‘mortally confused’?

  When one revisits the past from the future memory does not conform to fixed patterns of space. Memory troubles the pit of conscience in which prisoners and living skeletons lurk, in which a phallic ladder lurks secreted with messages of the split mind of an age, moral confusion, mortal confusion.

  I was fully into Jones’s ghost-fractured house now, I was in the river, I was above the river.

  Spring was a fracture in the phallic log or ladder to which Jonah had clung. But the question of the net remained. He had climbed up to the floating head of the log glancing down upon him through a rippling belly of water: glancing down upon him as if it were a severed, sexual eye drawn from his own head or global stick with which to beat his cult membership.

  The house had become an extraordinary seminal bubble. I saw the calculating grave-digger, digger into the flesh of the earth, whom I had met in Limbo Land, reflected in it. He swore he had pushed the house into the river when he arrived in Jonestown three days after the Day of the Dead. He had ransacked the house for ticking bombs, watches, explosive money, twisted earrings of gold that Jones gave to his mistresses. He had come upon an eighteenth-century suit or heirloom that I had lent to Jones. He had put it on his own frame intending to return it to me.

  I saw Carnival Lord Death’s administration of hell in the grave-digger’s cunning politics.

  ‘The river here is safe as you know, Francisco,’ said Jonah Jones all of a sudden. The house shook. The grave-digger’s hands were upon it all over again though Jones had surfaced and gained a respite.

  ‘No electric eels or perai hereabouts. Higher upriver perhaps but not here. That is one reason why we chose this site. Do you remember, Francisco? As I sank from the blow I received I had the sensation of a bullet in my head and my limbs grew heavier and heavier.’

  He stopped.

  ‘My brain ceased to function. And yet I remember sinking into a wilderness of currents, a kind of chasm, a Virgin Ship from which a net descended.’

  ‘You were dreaming my Dream of survival,’ I said quietly under my breath. ‘There’s room to accommodate hell and a passage to heaven on the Virgin Ship.’

  ‘What’s that? What’s that, Francisco?’

  ‘There’s freedom of the press and of the Word on the Virgin Ship when charismatic establishments repent. So my mother used to say of the eighteenth-century ghost of a slave-owner whom she saw in her shop in Albuoystown.’

  ‘Believe it or not, Francisco, a net of light fell around me. Talk about the game of space and constellations. Your talk, not mine! But now I’m unsure as we meet again in the light and the shadow of a running stream. Forgive me, Francisco, I’m dazed after the blow. All that stuff you talk about. It’s as if you’re dreaming me or I you.’ He was glaring at me accusingly.

  ‘Damned if I know, Francisco.’

  ‘Damned if I know,’ he repeated, ‘how one returns into a book – such as you’re busy writing – and into language that transgresses against one’s vested interests, one’s desire to seize time in the name of tradition and bring it to an end. Have not great prophets desired the end of the world? I am rambling again. It’s your fault! How did it fall, that net of which I speak? A blend of currents perhaps. Strange things happen in these South American rivers that bear the ghosts of Atlantis. Circumnavigation and all that by drowned ships upon the bed of oceans. The rebirth of Conquest in the sixteenth century may have possessed its root in a map in Plato’s cave.’

  Strange utterance to put on Jones’s ghostly lips in my Dream-book. Ghosts of Atlantis! But they were a form of hell’s truth.

  Hell’s truths are branded into the mystical dismemberments of charismatic leaders when one revisits them in shapes of fractured time within the Spring of the year preceding the Winter of the holocaust.

  They speak in the active, reactive, speculative, aggressive, uncertain tongue of shared ghost-psyche within writer and written that one inhabits with them. Repentance required a new language, a new archetypal tongue in a century of abnormal cruelties inflicted by humanity upon humanity.

  My repentance as well! I had been Jones’s left-hand man and close associate. When he received the blow in the river I felt that I had received it too in composite epic. Except that I had survived the holocaust and the burden of hell’s truths was inscribed into me.

  Jonah and I fenced with each other in the Dream-book, in a new Circus, New World, New Carnival of savages and heathens, pre-Christian resurrected paganism that Jones despised in his charismatic Church of Eternity. He had almost infected me with his prejudices.

  He and Deacon and I would eye the Arawak and Macusi women who passed through Jonestown occasionally. Jones eyed them, one eye in the belly of river beneath the reflected timbers of his house, the other in his bedroom window … Save their souls, embrace their bodies! Hell’s missionary truth.

  Were they not – these women and their silent menfolk – ghosts of Atlantis? Had they not come precariously close to extinction across the centuries since the Conquest? Had they not seen their
pre-Columbian continent, South and Central and North, fall into a veil akin to an oceanic grave as their bones, their cemeteries, their sacred places were pillaged, uprooted, cast aside? Atlantis was here in the Americas, North, Central and South. It was in the belly of a veiled ocean within the forests, the mountains, the valleys, within the dry land and the rivers.

  ‘Heathen savages,’ said Jonah, ‘you may think what you like, Francisco. I am liberal enough in my School here in Jonestown to teach them good English when they send their children to me out of the Bush. Teach them to read Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and to write in the same true vein …’

  ‘But when we were in College in San Francisco you told me,’ I said, ‘that you loved the American classics of anger in which the heathen – as you put it – feature so strikingly …’

  ‘True, true,’ said Jonah. ‘The heathen are a stick with which to beat my cursed society. Use the heathen savage as a clarion call when you wish to upbraid your civilization. Pretend to be black or red or yellow. Say you understand what black South Africans have suffered under apartheid regimes. Eskimos, South Sea islanders, whatever. I was addicted to classics of anger. I am an American charismatic preacher. But let me tell you this, Francisco. Human nature never changes. I never doubted that the heathen savage is damned. I preach salvation to the saved who must forsake time and aim at eternity.’

  He spoke to me, his close associate, as if I were not there. I was no savage! I was invisible in my Dream-book.

  How peculiar are the proportions of the split mind of my age, hell … How peculiar are the challenges ingrained into original epic, modern epic … My invisibility – his difficulty to see me for what I was, who I was, neither damned nor saved but drifting somewhere between the two realms in their archetypal intercourse – was the price I must pay to suffer the anguish of addiction to American classics of anger that ran through my mixed ancestries and his puritan logic. I was linked to him in self-understanding within my Dream-book because of the humour, the elemental humour, of savage gods and goddesses though he was unaware of it.

  I could see Jonah in myself, suffer him in myself, with a dark humour. I could write him into organs of fire and water even as he sought to mould me (or my heathen kith and kin) into liberal Dickensian flesh-and-blood. A liberality that made me invisible to him and ripe therefore (who knows) for salvation! Such is the predicament of savage conscience in seeking to lay bare the transgression and transfiguration of anger that I sought to achieve in my Dream-book, the transgression of anger’s compulsive frame to damn and use others forever; transgression and transfiguration into a mystical dismemberment empowering a Virgin Ship, that I had begun to build, in order to cross (or contemplate crossing) every divide in hope of a third or fourth or fifth dimension beyond pure salvation or pure damnation …

  Hell’s truths make us wary of complacency in ourselves and in others, wary of charismatic institutions, wary of fascism in any disguise within ourselves, within others.

  It was a complex, yet profoundly simple, self-revelation … But simplicity often signifies difficulty to the bloody-minded heart. So I needed to state again, from another angle, what I had been saying about the ‘proportions of the split mind of my age’. I was so prompted by my Dream-book … The Reverend Jonah Jones (I wrote) conversed with me in hell – which I have revisited with my Skeleton-twin on this Carnival Day – about heathens and savages. He seemed blind to the fact that I am descended from such savages, that my savage conscience knows him so intimately in itself it endorses his predicament, his anger, even as it seeks to breach such endorsement, to transgress against categories of absolute damnation, absolute salvation … This riles him for he thinks he is offering me a great prize in making me – or electing me – into a pawn ripe for salvation.

  His championship of me, the erstwhile savage, is a ‘liberal’ exercise in which ‘liberalism’, or ‘conservatism’, becomes a medium to upbraid his civilization for the impurities it houses. Likewise he harnesses heathens who have not yet attained my invisibility, who have not yet shed their savage pigmentation in his eyes, by sleeping with their sisters and mothers.

  He sleeps with heathen women (in brothels and elsewhere) in order to gain through intercourse a vicarious measure of consanguinity with the age-old blood of the savage that he has forgotten he carries in his veins. Such forgetfulness is the bliss of eternity that he espouses. His tool of blood is intent on exercising a sanction that nullifies mixed ancestries, mixed origins. It is a privileged tool, privileged technology of sex, that violates women into a collective map of place to be conquered, to be saved, to be purified.

  Sex therefore for the charismatic missionary Jonah Jones is purification and an atrophy of origins by way of eternity which kills time. It is a ritual and practised laceration of hollow flesh, it is a map of blood.

  Poor Jonah Jones is tormented in hell that he has elected for others! Sex is closure in his eyes, it is a frame, it is the predicament of mixed ancestries, animal ancestry, human ancestry, divine ancestry. Mixed races as well! His addiction to brothels therefore is a demonstration of his privileged status. He is privileged to loathe and to enjoy the promiscuity he condemns. How else would he gain experience of what he preaches … Eternity’s closure of time in the brothels of civilization, doomed time … Such is his sermon.

  I saw all this through Jonah’s eyes with tears in my eyes. We were both mixed in the spirit of hell and heaven and earth and other nameless spheres of creation. I saw his subjection to anger, to a kind of authoritarian fixture of wrath, as the hell he had created for himself and for me in this Carnival moment of my return from the future to the past …

  Except that I dreamt of converting such anger in him and in myself into transgression against the forces of absolute damnation.

  Was I capable of creating freedom within the content of visionary losses I had endured?

  Was I capable of converting such losses into chasms of the self that would take me beyond the split mind of my age? Was I capable of leaping into the arms of Love, Love so terrifying (in height and depth and range) and all-inclusive it imbued me with dread? Was I capable of dying yet living in order to sustain a vessel or vessels of living time, living ghosts, Memory theatre …?

  Was I capable of such staggered fiction, broken trauma, in the hell of remembered Jonestown, revisited Jonestown?

  Memory theatre indeed! I laughed with tears still in my eyes. I had forgotten so much.

  I looked out of the window upon my Skeleton-twin. I was chastened. A column of fire arose on his Carnival skeleton head. It matched other columns upon the Carnival masquerading queens of Arawak and Macusi women whom Jones had had in his bed.

  ‘There they are, Jonah,’ I said at last. ‘Spring’s hofting up.’

  ‘Heathen savages,’ said Jones.

  ‘Perhaps they would like to tip you, Jonah, into a labyrinth of fire such as you experienced …’

  ‘Tip me? You are at sea in the elements, Francisco. I experienced a labyrinth or net of currents when I struck my head in the river …’

  ‘Rivers burn in South America today, Jonah. Fire spouts rain. Charisma and hubris, human-centred cosmos, despoil our planet. And yet the omens are visible. Fire’s speech lives in its counterpoint with rain and river. There are other voices, extra-human voices in angry living landscapes that we refuse to hear or see. To hear what one sees erupts in the senses and what is other than the senses in a language of counterpoint …’ I spoke from a depressed mind and heart.

  But then I was utterly startled, utterly astonished, to see a woman, named Circe by Jonah, standing in the crowd of ghost-revellers beside the ominous Jonestown river. I could not believe this.

  I knew her now.

  I had seen her on the Day of the Dead with her child in the Clearing but had not recognized her as Circe. Marie Antoinette. I knew her by that name. The Virgin of Jonestown. What a transgression of boundaries one takes for granted. What a transfiguration of animal goddess into Virgin.

/>   Yes, I remembered in hell. Hell’s truths …

  She had been Jones’s mistress in San Francisco. He swore – when he returned from one of his drunken orgies – that she had tattooed his face and his penis on her buttocks, he was her whale, her submarine, her tiger.

  A terrible sadness invaded my heart and mind.

  Memory theatre in hell bites deep.

  In the games that we played – Deacon, Jones, and I – Deacon had claimed me as his Carnival Lazarus-son in order to project upon me a bewilderment in womb and tomb (as he used to put it). Who were his parents? He had been exposed as an infant-child in the Courantyne savannahs. He could easily have died there. His adoption by cattle-farmers and horse-rearers was a kind of resurrection, a buoy to which he clung. I had been born in Albuoystown. I was Bone and Flesh upon which to project his state of orphanage. He seized me as a canvas upon which to paint his bedevilled condition of a fallen angel, fallen from the womb of space, arisen from the grave of the earth.

  Orphans tend to play at parenting the globe, the grave of the globe, the cradle of the globe. Orphans tend to play at parenting other orphans. I was his Albuoystown orphan upon whom he was tempted to place his father-mask, his sonship mask as well. Composite epic!

  In the same token – as if to appoint intangible distinctions and crossed frontiers as well in composite epic – Jones claimed that he was the puritan father of invisible savages – invisible to him and therefore ripe for blind salvation in his Church as orphans. Heathens and savages and colonial peoples were damned but once converted into orphans they could be claimed by any parent, or state, or university, and baptized afresh: indeed baptized for the first time in wasteland fire and water.

  ‘Circe’s your foster-mother, Francisco,’ he used to say when he returned from one of the brothels that he patronized in San Francisco. ‘She’s an animal goddess from Rio, Brazil in the United States and I shall take her with me wherever I go. Like a fucking masthead on a bloody ship. Fire in her veins that spout to heaven. She resembles you, Francisco. Epic nonsense in a Christian age. A dash of French blood perhaps, English, German, and tainted African and Arawak. Let’s claim that when I fuck her I save you Francisco from taint. I recruit you in her into the Church. It’s the sanctification of the beastly brothel, is it not? The art of colonialism. Give every Colony a civilized foster-mother, foster-son face.’ He was drunk as a lord, drunk as an aristocrat, drunk as a conquistador. But I was bitterly crestfallen. I was bitterly ashamed to confront such theories in hell, seductive theories of the conversion of colonials and bastards within a liberal, charismatic, imperial backcloth.