Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  How to transfigure, metamorphose such a backcloth into a sail upon the Virgin Ship! Not by social realism obviously, which is blind to the mystery of orchestrated imageries of parallel universes of the Imagination and to counterpoint … Blind to the music of counterpoint in fiction …

  The thought of such transfigured histories flickered in my mind but I was so downcast and ashamed that I blotted out the face of the animal goddess from my mind, from the wilderness of the mind. Not entirely, for I knew her. I knew that I needed to speak to her, to hear her voice, to attempt to translate her replies within a Dream-book susceptible to some degree of the convergence of the unconscious, the subconscious, the conscious …

  But Jonah Jones’s voice continued for the time being to ring in my ears.

  ‘She chucked me out of her bed, Francisco,’ Jonah said. ‘She chucked me out one Spring day. Imagine that!’ He was laughing and yet I sensed genuine disbelief in his mind. I sensed he was confessing within the pages of my Dream-book to something that he rarely acknowledged and of which he infrequently, if ever, spoke. A mystical riddle lay on his tongue, that a savage woman was capable now of thrusting him from her bed. Alas it was too late. Or was it? Would such an apparently inconsequential gesture – directed at Churches of Eternity – save doomed colonies, doomed cities, doomed landscapes, from charismatic gunfire, charismatic closures of time, charismatic fires, charismatic floods?

  Jones continued: ‘She (that bitch) said she felt pity for me. Imagine that! A whore and a bitch.’

  I could not resist taunting Jonah. ‘Was Helen of Troy a whore and a bitch when she chucked the king her husband out of her bed?’

  Jonah stared at me –

  ‘Helen was no animal …’ he cried. ‘You go too far, Francisco.’

  ‘What was she then?’ I asked. ‘Are not queens and princesses royal animals to teach us how invaluable is the Circus of civilization?’

  ‘Damn you, Francisco. You are not listening to me. Circe said she felt compassion for me. She said she was ready now to become a human animal. What the devil does that mean? She said she was ready to bring a re-visionary vista into the Circus. A protectress of animal species from every quarter of the globe. Such she claimed was the new legacy of queens! Or else the Circus would collapse around our ears.’

  ‘That’s why she’s called the Virgin of Jonestown. She tells of the hidden extensions of past doomed civilizations and of the fate that may await the entire environment of the Guyanas if we continue to be as blind and deaf and numb as we have long been.’

  Jonah was outraged. ‘I do not need her pity, or her wisdom, or her compassion. Who is she to tell me what I should or should not do? Who is she to transgress against the frame of my Church? She is no Virgin. Who is she to tell me I am a pig?’ He stared at me in disbelief. But then – to my astonishment – he could not help laughing. ‘She said I was a threatened species and that I needed protection if I were to remain visible to posterity. Pigs she said were in danger of becoming a threatened species. Not extinct by any means. But still they needed protection.’

  Jones was still laughing. But there was a hollow ring to his laughter. I was not amused yet imbued by a dark humour. Jones’s utterances seemed fragmented. They sprang from fabrics of Dream that floated into my Dream-book. I sought to translate them by placing them together in awkward yet pregnant collusion.

  PIG rang a bell within the frame of the animal goddess as much as the torso of the Virgin of Jonestown on the Day of the Dead. Jonah Jones was a charismatic Pig within the shawl of the animal goddess and the Virgin. His brutal or coercive intercourse with nature, with a woman he deemed a whore, with a goddess who said she pitied him, was visible when he held a gun to Marie’s temple.

  I recalled that Deacon, Jones and I had actually begun the construction of Jonestown in the early 1970s when students at universities in the United States plastered the word PIG on campuses everywhere – not far from famous churches, famous statues of the Mother of God – in their protests at the Vietnam War.

  The implicit battleground of the campus threatened to invade the premises of the Church.

  I saw it translated now into the Carnival lineaments of the animal mother of surrogate Gods, the animal human queen …

  Yes, it dawned on me that the animal human goddess had been at work through those students. PIG rang a bell in Jones’s charismatic Church. PIG was the animal goddess’s denunciation of charismatic politics. Yet all species counterpointed in conflictual history were to be saved to make visible in profoundest Carnival our misunderstandings and misreadings of the past and the immensity of challenges that lay ahead of us in the future.

  ‘The early 1970s when we began to build Jonestown,’ I said to Jonah, ‘were a turning-point for us all. The Circus of civilization had been shaken to its Asian and American foundations. Ancient Troy and ancient Greece turned in their graves. We were still involved – if my memory in hell’s Carnival on this Spring day serves me aright – in a war to save civilization from the barbarities of communism. We all had our implicit or involuntary versions of the animal goddess of humanity and the Pig whom she had thrust from her bed. We had pin-ups of film stars, emancipated queens of the media, side by side at times with bombed women and children in villages in Vietnam. Pillars of fire crossed the ocean and the air spaces into exotic pageantry upon billboards everywhere. Soon it wasn’t barbarous communism that sent a chill down our spines. It was the deteriorating fabric of civilization everywhere. Drugged normality. Faster and faster cars. Illiteracies of the Imagination. It was then that we – you Jonah, Deacon and I – sought to build a new Rome in the South American rainforests within the hidden flexibilities of civilizations that had collapsed in the past. We brought all our prejudices and biases with us in half-ruined, half-intact form. How to visualize these, how to plumb innermost self-confessional, self-judgemental change in ourselves is a measure of truth that I seek in the wake of the holocaust that afflicts us all in a variety of overt or masked forms everywhere …’

  ‘Human nature never changes,’ said Jonah. ‘And let me correct you about one thing. You talk about the brothels I visited …’

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t speaking absolutely of houses of prostitution but of a state of mind, a seeping promiscuity in which you hunted for fallen women and made them your mistresses. Circe became a curse. She enslaved you. Then she clung to you like salvation’s uncanny plague. Why she followed you to Jonestown …’

  ‘Ask her, ask her, you poor Fool, Francisco. I thought she would take me back into her bed so I let her come but she has foiled me at every turn. All this talk about the Virgin of Jonestown!’

  ‘Where,’ I suddenly cried, glancing through the window at the assembly of Carnival ghosts, ‘is the boy (her child) who lay beside her in the Clearing on the Day of the Dead? Do you remember the Day of the Dead, Jonah, now that we’ve returned from the future to this theatre of the past? Hell hath no fury as profound as the apprenticeship to truth that it offers.’

  My Skeleton-twin may have heard my question. He looked up at me. I recalled my quantum and psychical transference into the dead child beside Marie on the Day of the Dead. I was he for a flashing moment within the trauma I experienced. Some portion of myself had lodged in him then, some portion of him had come into me. The bridges of Lazarus are unfathomable. How would I know him for sure on this Spring Carnival day? Not for sure. That was plain as bone. Would he not wear a Skeleton-mask to rid me of complacency in my quest for innermost shared archetype, innermost shared identity, innermost soul? The dead grow beyond fixed frontiers, do they not? A child may wear an adult Skeleton-mask in Carnival. Or may fall back into the cradle and may wear an infant mask of soil or stone. Or may remain apparently unchanging in a void of flesh. One is twinned to masquerades of the growing, maturing dead and the unageing dead.

  Jonah was laughing his hollow, confused laughter. ‘Go to the Circus and see,’ he said to me. ‘I tell you, Francisco, human nature never chang
es.’

  ‘I tell you it does, Jonah. I tell you the sacred reality of the Circus is embodied in the layered, multi-faceted mosaic of genesis and the womb in the animal goddess who may enslave us yet release us from subjection to swinish fates, to the fate of immortal cattle in heaven ruled by a queen whose dreadful beauty keeps us alive as pawns of unchanging eternity.’

  *

  Jones was angry and he thrust me out of his house into the wilderness of the Circus of civilization in the wake of the holocaust. He placed a pen in my hand and told me to continue with my heretical Dream-book. I would be punished in due course. I would be put on trial. That was my theme now of Tropical Spring beset by many hazards, threatened landscapes, endangered species, threatened and mired riverscapes, threatened rainforests. Who was on trial I wondered? Was it I or was it civilization itself?

  I made my way now to the animal goddess and Virgin of Jonestown. I recalled her sculptured torso on the Day of the Dead. But this was the Day of Living Return of the Dead or pagan Spring in the calendar of the Maya. This was a Day of dark cross-culturalities and savage, purifying humour. She was my foster-mother in Jonah’s parlance of the puritan colonization of the Americas, his metaphor of intercourse with her to redeem my bastard progression into his Church of Eternity.

  She was a surrogate queen, a tattooed mistress. No Virgin in his Christian, charismatic ideology but a useful frame or channel through whom to conscript orphans in his Church.

  Intercourse with her was justified as a way for a puritan to absolve her of tainted antecedents, to accept unchanging human nature in himself and herself, to build the savage queen that she was in his eyes into a supreme colonial pawn or foster-wife, foster-mother of orphans, in his privileged embrace. Thus it was that an irredeemable continent was rendered sterile, it was voided of its pre-Columbian background, its legacies, its cultures, in a process of proselytization or conversion to charismatic Christianity.

  As I approached her (my foster-mother) I saw her differently. His (Jonah’s) supreme pawn was holy in my eyes. Her compassion for him was a glancing backwards into a numinous paganism possessing unfathomable roots not in the purgation or erasure of mixed ancestries that he desired (despite his propaganda against racism) but in the purgation of violence from sex. The act of the penetration of space, of Virgin space, penetration of other worlds, was not in its mysterious origination an act of violence. It was an act of creation, the creation of living diversities, the living orchestration of differing spaces, ages, realities. It could prove an exposure of capacities for genuine freedom. But the Sorrowing Wound was inevitable. One’s masquerades of wholeness (the surrogacies, misinterpretations, misreadings of diversities-in-unities) fell far short of the origination of the penetrative act. So – in that exposure of numinous difficulties interwoven with the gift of freedom – violence became the price that humanity was driven to pay. It was a price that challenged the arts of the Imagination to their core. I had seen in my Dream-book the breakage of the sovereignty of violence into mystical dismemberments sustaining diversities and enlarging the capacity for disadvantaged cultures to change and grow and rediscover invaluable omens and roots …

  As a consequence I knew I was on trial in Jonah’s eyes, in the eyes of the establishment. Where the establishment sought the sterility of a conformable realism, as its absolute goal, I sought intangible but real frontiers to cross within an open universe in which my foster-mother stood as one of three Maries. She was smiling at my Skeleton-twin as I came close to her. Skeleton-twin? Foster-son? Such is the family of recovered being-in-non-being in Carnival creation.

  I said to her: ‘Why in God’s name did you come to Jonestown to suffer a horrible death?’ I stopped aghast. I dreamt I heard my Skeleton-twin whisper: ‘Mystical dismemberments, mystical wholeness, is the body of the pagan Virgin through all Carnival masquerades.’ I held my ear and twisted it as if it were a flute, an organ, the vagination or sheathing of sound in space. I continued quickly, repeating the question, ‘Why in God’s name did you come to Jonestown? I did not know you on the Day of the Dead. I saw you as Marie Antoinette (an acceptable face in European eyes for Virgins), not Circe, the terrifying, unpredictable compassion of an animal goddess such as Circe. Only now on my return from the future …’

  The column of fire on her head had cooled. She dislodged it and placed it in the soil between herself and my Skeleton-twin who was her son, or foster-son, within the broken, archetypal fabric of the family of the Self.

  She knew me instantly though she was grateful for the numinous link with her Carnival son, my twin or Skeleton in league with masked Bone, fleshed Bone. Such ramifications, or identity of Sorrows and Jests, were codes into a family of creation in the eyes of the Virgin of devastated Jonestown.

  ‘You pay a price, Francisco, in your return. I pay a price for my former connection with Jonah Jones. He was my lover. Now he’s in hell. Hell takes many forms upon the Virgin Ship that you are building. Your Skeleton-twin descended into hell. Even now he’s unwilling to embrace you! He has suffered not only in the pit of Jonestown into which he fell, in your place, but in wars everywhere, in famines everywhere, from which he released you to live and eat. You were as ripe to appear to have perished as he, you were as ripe for starvation as he. He is intimate to you yet alien. He is your epic familiar and inner double in the grave of flesh, in the cradle of flesh. And all this is instinctive to the price you pay, Francisco! To possess such knowledge on your return to this Carnival Spring Day is to acknowledge your ignorance in the future from which you have come. Should one be wiser as one progresses into the future from the past? I doubt it. You doubt it. One needs to come abreast of the past if the past is to yield a kinship with futurity …’

  If I did not know of her compassion I would have dreamt she was mocking me. She continued:

  ‘I speak as a Carnival oracle, Francisco. Not Delphic oracle! Carnival oracle. Have you heard of it? Such curious speech is distressing for you I know only too well. Oracles are steeped in hidden texts that may scarcely be translated. But still translations in your own tongue (let me say), orchestrated fabrics imbued with music – are necessary. Again such translations are the price you must pay, Francisco, to see the Dead alive after knowing them Dead …’

  I broke into the Oracle of space, as it were, when I cried: ‘You said Jonah Jones was your lover. And the price you must pay …’

  I stopped with the overwhelming impression that in breaking into the Oracle of space I stood within a gigantic brothel at the heart of the Circus of civilization. But the impression receded until I was filled with awe and terror. Awe of freedom, the terror of freedom, that the animal goddess sought now to explicate to me in the Shadow of the great phallic tree.

  There was implicit truth, implicit deception, in that tree.

  Implicit self-deception conceived in the notion of a mastered female nature, a tamed female nature, implicit truth in balancing Sorrow and ecstasy, freedom and licence.

  It was the searing conjunction of all such ambivalences and counterpoint that gave content to the price that my foster-mother paid in returning to Jonestown in my Dream-book.

  She pointed to the great phallic member within the Circus. Jonah’s sweating body shone there now as he appeared to fall back into the river all over again and to climb the notched, sculpted log of wood floating above him, within him, beside him.

  ‘Does Jonah know he’s up there?’ I asked. ‘Is it an apparition, a Circus trick? I left him in his house a moment ago. Apparitions can be solid in that we grieve, genuinely grieve, for fleeting joys and pleasures, they can be hollow, without grief, technology without pain and grief. Does Jonah know he’s up there?’

  ‘Do you, Francisco?’

  ‘I see him,’ I said stubbornly. ‘I do not see myself.’

  ‘That’s easy,’ said the Virgin animal goddess. ‘Easy to see Jonah the charismatic, the tyrant. Not yourself, Francisco. Jonah was once an idealist. What chance do you have, Francisco, of seeing yourse
lf not only in him but through him? I can help you. That is my burden, the price I must pay to enlighten you to the well-nigh extinct creature that you are …’

  ‘EXTINCT?’ I was stunned, bewildered. ‘How can a free man, a free, imaginative dreamer and writer, be extinct?’

  ‘Tell me,’ said the Virgin Oracle, ‘what in heaven’s or hell’s name do you really know of your long-vanished antecedents, Francisco? What do you know of the worlds and spaces they occupied or inhabited before the Conquest? Precious little. What do you know of the treaties they shaped with the Predator, the Wolf, the Beast, who spoke to them at the fireside? You call me holy foster-mother but what do you know of me? You are extinct, Francisco (in areas of yourself), as a species of bird or buffalo or animal that fell to the guns of the invading puritan in the Americas since the Conquest. You are the embodiment of lost tribes, or peoples, Atlantean peoples. It’s a tragedy as old as Plato’s Dream. Older perhaps. As old as the fates of Prisoner-Gods on Devil’s Isles.’

  I knew now she was making Oracle fun of me. And yet a glimmering flock of wings – flash of wings – high on the phallic tree made me pause and consider the gravity of what I had been told.

  Were those the wings of extinct, foetal organs in the Womb of Virgin space?