Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  The Prisoner stared at me with what seemed a baleful eye.

  ‘Where in hell did you learn all this, Francisco?’ he cried. ‘Was it in hell or in San Francisco College? Or was it in the Nether World? You have touched me on the raw. My hands are bruised from battering against the Void. The Earth is flat in the Void. But it rears its flatness up into irredeemable structures, unchanging institutions, unchanging parliaments, unchanging human nature. I have battered my hands raw. So perhaps it’s time for me to die.’

  ‘So have I,’ I cried. ‘So have I. I bruised my fists when I arose from the Grave in Jonestown.’

  ‘Jonestown? Jonestown?’ said the bewildered Prisoner. ‘Where is Jonestown?’

  I almost bit my lip. I was in the past now, not in the future. I had returned to the past from the future. I was back in 1954. I had learnt to survey the breath-lines in living landscapes from my Skeleton-twin who made no bones about the articulation of ridges and watersheds and contours in the Paradise of the Rain God.

  ‘Oh nothing,’ I said quickly. ‘You of all Prisoners situated in the Void should know of mixed “futures” and “pasts”. After all they are but frames. We speak in the framed word of God but the unfathomable Creator, the untranslatable Creator, cannot be framed.’

  ‘I am a framed God,’ said the Prisoner. ‘Have I not uttered a dark sentence on myself? It’s time for me to die!’

  ‘Language is deeper than its frames or Gods who claim to be an absolute God.’ I stopped. Did I speak in arrogance or in simplicity’s faith in an untranslatable Creator? ‘The resources of a living language sustain a re-visionary dynamic. There is real continuity running out of the past into the future. But such continuity cannot be lodged absolutely in the frames and the dogmas of the past. For then the past becomes an invalid. Even the Doctor in the Hospital knows this if he is to see through the masks of his patients, pigmentations, creeds, whatever, to their essential disease … But he exploits them. He turns away from his daughter’s fiery glance when she plays at being a nursery princess in a sick world.’

  ‘What is the future, Francisco Bone? I know – or think I know – the past. The past becomes extinct unless we live it in the life of the future, freedom’s future – however disastrous freedom sometimes seems – and freedom’s reconnaissance of the past. A jealous man like yourself, Francisco (jealous of Deacon), who slips into cells, and hides in bushes, may have something priceless to offer. Your diminutive being is a recommendation of collective involvement with others yet divergence and capacity to see what others – even myself – may fail to see. What is the future, Francisco Bone?’

  The Prisoner was tempting me I knew, he was flattering and testing me I knew. He was seeking to discover whether an element of paranoia might not reside in a diminutive survivor such as myself. Is not paranoia another wall or factor in the prison of the Void?

  There were footsteps in the street below that seemed to whisper like lips of leather upon the soil. They rose to the walls of the cell with a faint, sinister momentum. They seemed to declare that the Prisoner had challenged me to become a seer, a journeyman, a prophet steeped in inventions of time, Eclipses, Bags, Nets, Nemesis, Fate.

  Curious how the traffic of an age runs in one’s blood with intimations of past and coming events, footsteps in the Nether World, unearthly ruins, collapsing, sighing walls and cities, a Wheel in space.

  The Prisoner’s life was in danger, the Old God was in danger.

  I knew for I had returned from the future to the past. So I brought within me from later decades knowledge of events in 1954 associated with the wedding of Deacon and Marie. But rack my mind now as I did, a blank fell out.

  Had I forgotten in the light of a wholly new element and pact that I knew – though I was uncertain how I knew – was looming between the Prisoner, Deacon and me? It evoked the pact between Jonah, Deacon and me but it was profoundly different.

  Whereas the pact with Jonah signified catastrophe – and this I remembered – the new pact planted in the past, the new shape to time within the past (in this revisitation from the future) signified a mathematic of decapitation in the re-shouldering of past and future in my body, upon my body, through Deacon’s absent body, and through the Prisoner’s potential sacrifice of his body.

  Mr Mageye had promised me that we would build Memory theatre. And now I began to see glimmeringly that Memory theatre is rooted in events one knows to have occurred even as it breaks the Void that imprisons one to create new pacts within lapses of memory within oneself when one revisits the past. Such strange lapses – that seem deeper than mere common-or-garden lapses – are motivated perhaps by a mystical crumbling of the Void … I was unsure. I could not truly say …

  I crossed to the window and looked down from the cell into the street. Looked down a dream-ladder in the anatomy of the cellular body of the Void that I shared with the Prisoner even as it seemed to crumble … I remembered Bonampak. I remembered Jacob’s ladder. I shuddered with the sensation that my bones walked in air with God’s …

  The dancing, ominous footsteps ceased, no one could be plainly seen in the street but Carnival Lord Death.

  He was staring up at the window as if he had become a transparent reservoir of subconscious/unconscious dis-memberment costumery and re-memberment masquerade within the Grave and the Body of Carnival.

  The footsteps had ceased as if the walking dead were more cunning than one realized. They were here for Marie’s and Deacon’s wedding. Did I hear Marie’s now, Marie’s footsteps approaching mine, though I had not moved an inch in the Prisoner’s cell from the moment I came to the window?

  How sensitive is the mind to read a walking epitaph and a walking marriage-bed and a walking cradle in the footsteps of humanity, ghostly humanity, bodiless humanity, bodily humanity?

  All were tokens of dis-memberment and re-memberment in the air of the Void, the uncertainty of the crumbling of the Void.

  Of one thing I was sure. There was danger everywhere. There was hypocrisy everywhere. There was injustice everywhere. Fiction was truth. Fact was polished and manufactured into lies. I trembled. I was a Jester of pasts and futures in the present moment. I was a Jester of chaos, I was susceptible to a transference of masks with giants of chaos, masks to be inserted within and upon familiar and unfamiliar footsteps. But I trembled. I trembled at the prospect of the wedding (Marie’s and Deacon’s). I trembled at the consummation of their union in the Void. This much I knew and remembered. I clung to the notion that my return into the past from the future was a phenomenon of changed time, new time, a phenomenon of the Imagination steeped in creative purpose despite every old hedge or blanket of terror.

  When one returns from the future into the past, and the past becomes once again the living present day or moment or year, one sees into the womb of time, the womb of Virgin comedy, as it adventures into intercourse with Fate and Dread inscribed into a bridegroom who lassoed the Horses and their riders on the Moon and who is claimed by them now as their leader, their hero promising salvation … Did I remember all this or had it been inserted into Memory theatre as a new invention however rooted in past time?

  Why should Time choose poor Virgin peasant Marie to marry the ruthless angel Deacon? Did one need to assess and reassess the mystery of Fate and Dread in new fictions of reality if one were to break moulds of complacency in the Void? Did Time seek to pour cold water on eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century portraits of the family? Fate and Dread are banished from such portraits in favour of a comedy of manners as the tincture or costumery of the moral family.

  The Void is converted into currency – comedy of manners currency – with which to purchase the furniture of an age carpentered from felled trees and forests or spun from the fur, or the horns, or the hide of extinct species, extinct flesh-and-blood.

  ‘A dash of cold water in one’s eyes in the tears of Paradise, the Paradise of the Rain God,’ said the Prisoner, ‘unfreezes Memory’s hollow currency as Fate and Dread revive to wed Vir
gin Marie of Port Mourant. Portrait of the Moral Family – in the novels of the past three hundred years which you were conditioned to read at college, Francisco – cannot sustain brides and bridegrooms now who have inherited the Void and the crumbling prospect of the Void. You see now, don’t you, why I fear for myself and for my daughter?

  ‘Let me tell you, Francisco – in the shape of the pact that you and I share with absent Deacon in this revisitation of past time – that I desire the crumbling of the Void – yes, I do – but one is not spared from scanning the Void (even as one desires a change) for the Void is in the ascendancy everywhere still masked by varieties of diplomacy in markets of culture. The dangers then that one continues to face in a cruel and hypocritical age cannot be underestimated.’

  He was standing in the middle of the cell behind me, as he spoke, even as Carnival Lord Death stood below in the street.

  They (the Prisoner and Carnival Lord Death) were still, all of a sudden, as if they had become eighteenth-century pieces of furniture in Church and State. A Jest of God. The cell and the street became an altar and an aisle. It was an odd apparition to flash into one’s mind. But then I remembered. Jonah had favoured such furniture and architecture in his Church in Jonestown.

  The Prisoner was bent as if in pain under a sensation – it seemed to me – of a coming blow.

  Carnival Lord Death looked like a clothes-horse in the aisle of the Church or the street. He too was motionless. But the garments on his back appeared to brood in carven suspension as if they could be worn or discarded at a moment’s notice in the prosecution of family rituals and celebrations.

  But then suddenly, and equally surprisingly, these flesh-and-blood furnitures began to breathe in a theatre of Dread. Dread imbued them with life to oppose a system of values that burdened them with picturesque inanimation.

  The Prisoner seemed to know that there was a price to the blow that he would receive in himself as an altar in humanity. Inanimation would break into genuine intercourse with Fate. He would appoint me to respond to the mystery of Fate, the trial of Fate. I saw it in his eyes as they sought to affirm the fatherhood of the Virgin. Do Prisoner-Gods pray to men to respond to a wholly different family of Being in creation?

  When one returns to the past from the future, one finds that the theatre of Money in the carpentered or sculpted Prisoner above or in the altar, in the robes upon the back of aisled Lord Death, changes in emotional subtlety and passion and immediacy. The Prisoner’s sacrifice cannot be measured in realistic or comedy-of-manners coin. Yet a price, involving an enormity of innermost change in all institutions, has to be paid for the gift of freedom, when Gods sentence themselves to death and pray to men to evaluate their gift …

  I knew that I stood in the greatest danger, that the Prisoner stood in the greatest danger, that there would be a rush into the cell that we occupied.

  Positions occupied by frozen actors and frozen actresses in the theatres of time move or shift and acquire a different emphasis in Memory theatre.

  For instance I had forgotten in my moving to the window of the Prisoner’s cell, and on looking down into the street, that I had perceived Carnival Lord Death dressed in a nobleman’s robes of a bygone age.

  I saw them now afresh as he stirred, discarding robes and replacing them with the suit or heirloom that my mother had given me and which I had lent to Jonah Jones. The grave-digger (who adopted the Mask of Carnival Lord Death in Limbo Land where I had met him) had acquired the suit when he ransacked Jonah’s house and sought to push it into the Jonestown river. Yes, these were the robes or the suit that I saw from the window of the cell. A wind blew on Lord Death’s back. I thought I heard the dead lace or fabric vibrate enlivened by Dread.

  Yes, there was no doubt now that Carnival Lord Death was clothed in rich attire, in my mother’s gift. The Prisoner, on the other hand, was in rags.

  I glanced back into the cell and dreamt that I saw once again – in Mr Mageye’s futuristic Camera – the Prisoner’s bones providing a shield over mine, over my head, my face. As though God’s death were my sacred life. An uncanny, almost savage, sensation! Intrinsic to Communion. Intrinsic to the eating of Bread and Wine.

  Within Bread, within Wine, is the mystery of Bone: Bone adorned with Flesh.

  I was subject to a dazzling glory and terror that I was unable to translate. Bone is a hieroglyph of sacrificial Phallus, sacramental sex, and contemplation of a honeymoon with the bride of humanity.

  Were these signals of the crumbling of the Void? Perhaps they were. But I had a far way to go to insert a key into the many doors within the Prison of the Void, a key – that one could so easily despise – for it had fallen out of the split, laughing side of the Law.

  Comedy is chastening therapy when one scans the Void, the intricate theatre of the Void, as one begins to unlock a variety of doors that are relevant to the pact between the Prisoner, absent Deacon and me.

  ABSENT DEACON. I had said it before but unthinkingly.

  Now the full force of his absence came home to me. Deacon had not returned for his wedding day. Did I hear the echo of laughter as the Law split its side all over again?

  Comedy is chastening therapy. Comedy sometimes portrays consequences born of hubris.

  Deacon had died in Jonestown. I had seen his body on a rock under the Waterfall beneath the Cave of the Moon in which I had sheltered on the Night of the Day of the Dead when I had fled into the Forest and narrowly escaped plunging headlong into the sawyers’ pit.

  Deacon’s body lay on the rock beneath the Cave. I saw it distinctly when daylight came.

  No laughing matter. Why then the echoing tracery of the laughter of the Law? Such laughter sometimes jars, it seems inappropriate, it seems irrelevant. But then for no graspable reason it becomes a shuddering music, it may break one’s heart. Deacon’s heart broke in his last moments, broke with inexhaustible tenderness, inexhaustible love for Marie, inexhaustible hope of heaven’s forgiveness …

  He (Deacon) had overcome Jonah when he fought him in the Mask of the Eagle and the Vulture Knight in Maya style.

  No one knows what circumstances of remorse brought such a winged career to its apparent close. Had it been a straightforward accident as my death in the sawyers’ pit would have been? Had he tripped into the ravine – as I nearly did – under the Cave at dead of Night?

  Heroes run in parallel sometimes with the vague footsteps of hapless multitudes murdered on the battlefield, or in concentration camps, or in Jonestowns around the globe, and are on occasion the victims of obscure Fate upon ladders and stairways into the Void.

  Deacon’s flying, falling ghost was alive I was sure within the crumbling of the Void, exposure in the Void, but he (or it) had not returned to Port Mourant to celebrate a replay of the wedding to Marie in Memory theatre. And yet in choosing an actor to play the part the Prisoner knew how compelling was the life of the ghost in the actor’s revisitation of truth. In choosing an actor to play the part – an actor such as myself – the Prisoner knew the turmoil of his or my emotions, my jealousy of Deacon, my love for Marie, my insight into his last moments when he slipped through space onto the rock. However apparently fictional those insights were they could make all the difference within imaginative truth to the motivation of the life of the ghost in me. I was to play absent Deacon in Memory theatre. I knew the ghost was alive in me, with me. I was alive, it was alive, in a strange concert of understanding to be sparked by the Prisoner and a multitude of shuffling footsteps around the globe.

  I suspected that though Deacon had not returned his ghost in me was also in Mr Mageye’s Camera …

  Absent Deacon – played by me as Present Deacon – would prove a formidable engagement with humanity, re-visionary specialities of humanity in heaven and upon earth in myself …

  He (Deacon) had dreamt of immunity to pain. No wonder he got along well with the Doctor and turned his back on the Prisoner on the day when a bonfire flared and the Prisoner was consumed and broken on a Wheel
of revolving arms and legs set in motion by Deacon’s constituency.

  Immunity, Deacon declared, should be a factor in godhead when humanity turns violent. Immunity was consistent with the humour of falling angels, perpetually falling, but immune to pain, because of inoculation with the political and economic venom of the Scorpion Constellation.

  No wonder Deacon possessed the ear of the very constituency he had buried in a Coffin but which arose from the Nether World to lift him shoulder-high on his wedding day.

  I did not believe a word of such immunity but it was a joke of sorts that raised a laugh in a gathering of tricksters who tricked Scorpions into play, biting play, with no ill effects. It was akin to walking with bare feet upon coals of fire. It was akin to feats of conquest upon earth and in heaven. Above all it was a foretaste of the Sleep of the Virgin on honeymoon day and night, a Virgin inevitably surrounded by tricksters of every culture and pigmentation, by furies real and deceptive, true and false, that climb into her arms and the arms of her bridegroom when she lies with him.

  Deacon’s investment in such humours of immunity empowered him, he declared, to go anywhere, to do anything. He was committed to climbing Roraima (which is infested with Scorpions) in order to unearth a great treasure for Marie’s first-born child and for his constituency. This was his boast in 1954. My mind was a furious, tormented blank about Marie’s first-born, my mind was tricked into lapses of Memory in playing the role of absent Deacon. But of one thing I was sure within the information that I received from Deacon’s ghost.

  Deacon, in his last moments, had experienced the pain of laughter in the body of the Law. And this filled him with Dread, filled him as well with an immensity of love for the child Marie had borne and whom he had equated with a great fortune or treasure to be secured by strategies of venom within his veins.