Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  As I held her in my arms I sought to evaluate Deacon’s blindness in my seeing intercourse without her, within her. Exterior body, interior body of the Virgin. But I knew I would need to see without always seeing, experience without always understanding, the cellular transferences of involuntary desire that brought misreadings into the masquerading features of love within ourselves that lay far back in the uncharted genesis and genius of imaginary time. I was but a minor apprentice of such ghosts and Gods and furies which were themselves major apprentices of an unfathomable Creator.

  As I held Marie in my arms I knew – peasant bride though she was – that she was the daughter of science and of ancient art, the Virgin of modern science and of ancient tradition. Peasant widows, dressed as brides, had accompanied their ghost-husbands onto funeral pyres in ancient India. Modern India as well. They were to be seen again in the traffic of hell in modern Europe in World War Two. The tragedy of humanity – in its blindness, in its misreadings of the genius of fire – had become visible to Deacon, the perpetually falling angel, in his last suspended moments on earth.

  Visible to him, yes, but the fact remained that he had been a ruthless hero, a tyrant, and I was still clothed in his blindness. Not entirely, for I had also inherited the suspension of death that he endured upon a rock beneath the Cave of the Moon. No wonder the ghost of Einstein – from whom fallen, falling angels draw some of their mathematical equations as engineers – had arrived in the Prisoner’s fiery cell through which I had come.

  The riddle of celestial mathematics occupied my mind as Deacon fell upon Marie again and again in their honeymoon bed and I embraced her simultaneously. How was I to account for a strange lameness in Deacon with each successive fall upon his bride? Angelic potency should keep one perpetually whole, or uninjured, or beak-like in each encounter with fire.

  I seized upon Deacon’s lame member. It gave me support as a mere mortal survivor still unequipped to die and yet not die, to fall and yet remain perpetually falling. I recalled my Lazarus-arm – as if it were indeed separable from my body – as I seized Deacon’s member.

  The truth was – the mystical extensive wholeness of the Body that one tended to misread and misunderstand – that he had fallen upon her so continuously and wastefully and lustfully that a portion of Breath in his body and mine tended to edge into uncontrollable flame.

  The member that he used in penetrating his bride tended to cut loose in the Void. Sex became senseless, predatory, the equipment of rapists. It became nothing but technology, technology in the conquest of love.

  The conquest of Love was Death’s immortal ambition …

  I glimpsed such hideous perversity as I seized Deacon’s member. I was filled with Dread but at least I knew what I was, where I was. I was visited then by a knowledge of technology’s deprivations in the human prison of love. I knew that love could easily become a mass-media technology and that freedom – so-called freedom – could conspire with a liberty to chain millions into the exhibitionism of their grossest appetites.

  The fascinations of lameness in sexual encounters were legion. Especially in the light of the orphanage of angels, the orphanage of humanity by sundered generations, separated parentages. Thus one’s cousins, one’s unacknowledged or unknown brothers and sisters, were legion.

  Hephaestus – the ancient Olympian God – was lame. He was the father of technology. He was Deacon’s cousin. They had fought shoulder to shoulder in wars in heaven prior to Deacon’s fall to Earth. He had armed Achilles – another of Deacon’s cousins – with a shield Carnival Lord Death would have envied. He deceived millions with promises of eternal peace inscribed into the shield: pastoral scenes, running brooks, sheep, lambs, grazing …

  I had seen Hephaestus falling from Heaven on many an occasion when Deacon and I and Jonah had quarrelled in the construction of Jonestown.

  And now I saw him again in my Dream-book as Deacon netted his bride again and again. A perverse net. A curiously impotent net. Not the huntsman’s net which had saved me from the Predator in Limbo Land! A jealous net. Was I jealous of him or was he (his ghost) jealous of me, though it was he who had urged me into bed with his wife?

  Deacon, in his blindness, was shrewd enough nevertheless to seek to deceive Marie. He elevated her in bed into a tourist madonna who fancied Poverty as a realm inhabited by giants of sex. Anticipation was enough. Anticipation became a refuge in which the madonna waited, as it were, for the coming of her giant.

  He adopted the walking stick of a Vulture in the shape of the prestigious giant Legba of Haiti.

  Legba’s brand of exotic lameness had long secured a large constituency in the Caribbean and the American black South. He was a tourist attraction. Voodoo was a giant’s business.

  The penetration of the Void by Legba was a feat that appealed to Hephaestus. How could an apparently poverty-stricken giant secure a Lingam to match that in Asian temples in India?

  Sex is a religious industry in the Third World. Vast crowds of tourists flock to pay tribute to the technology of the Lingam. The Third World is no superpower in Western eyes but Legba closes the gap on the crossroads between Haiti, Africa and India.

  He is able to solicit dollars and pounds and francs and currencies of every denomination. Poverty becomes almost glamorous in the eyes of rich, frustrated wives. They take Poverty’s giant into bed with them when they sleep with their husbands. When he appears too black they paint him golden-brown or white. Lame Legba is susceptible to varieties of paint as he dresses the wounds of his people and offers his back as a seat for the globe. Poverty’s Atlas – upon which the globe rests – is blind sex with heaven …

  I could not help laughing as I pushed the ghost of Deacon out of bed and embraced Marie. But Deacon was back. He was shrewd enough to return with his blandishments of the madonna.

  Lingams – Marie had been told – were the property of the giant Siva but Siva was Legba’s cousin within the orphanage of humanity.

  I saw a wicked flash in Marie’s eye as she pulled a shawl over her breasts and sat up in bed.

  On the shawl were inscribed the features of Kali, a pin-up for Indian peasants in Port Mourant.

  Kali was a guardian for Marie, she was a dangerous Goddess in her own right. She scoffed at lame giants yet relished their long-standing trickeries and inventions. She knew they were virtually divine in the tales they spun, the promises they gave of renewed potency in suspended intercourse between heaven and earth, the anticipations they nourished that the gap would close between rich nations and poor nations.

  She knew of Marie’s love of the Wheel but sorrow that the Wheel had been a toy in El Dorado (the richest kingdom of its age) and that it had never been employed in quarries where brutalized labour broke its body toiling for rocks and stones in the construction of palaces and of pyramids of the Moon and the Sun.

  And as a consequence wheeling arms sprouted from her body as if they originated from the luminous circles of Marie’s breasts. She was not Marie. She was one of Marie’s guardians. She was the many-armed Goddess of antiquity that indentured peasants from India had brought to the Guyanas in the hope of finding El Dorado and renewing the potency of gold.

  She placed Legba and Siva upon the Wheel in the Circus of trade everywhere and expectation of an economic miracle.

  Thus in the re-visionary dynamic of Marie’s Wheel – as I rolled in bed with her as if such intercourse with fire were nothing but exhibitionist trade – I was able to set up a stall in the bedroom of the Virgin on which to sell a variety of wares and relics under the Drought of heaven. When heaven suffers from Drought, a variety of occult, sexual, technological practice alerts us to a vacuum in existence, North, South, East, West.

  I was able to set up the mechanics of a scrutiny (Mr Mageye’s Cinema, Lord Death’s Carnival) of the natures of the rich and the poor, the gullible and the cynical, the hopeful and the hopeless, the strong and the weak, the trickster and the truth. In some incongruous consistency they supported each other,
rich poor, poor rich, strong weak, weak strong, trickster truth …

  They implied latently, sometimes openly, sometimes subconsciously or unconsciously, that a mystical Body was still alive however absurd its manifestations in a blind age, not wholly blind yet seemingly blind to originality, to the life of the Imagination and its ruses and unpredictable humours as well as its implicit collaborations between music and science and art.

  At the heart of a bloody-minded age lay nevertheless a new semiology of concordance and dissonance and orchestrations of intimate and alien imageries in the quest for truth within the prison of human, aberrant love. Prison, yes, for freedom (in a profoundly self-questioning sense of a cellular chemistry linking apparition and concretion) was beyond a purely individual grasp. There was a community of selves akin to individual self yet other than individual self in the genesis of the Imagination. The stress on purely individual character was an impoverishment of tradition. No wonder the cult of individual freedom was fast becoming a Lingam tourist rope around the globe. And yet that symptom of malaise in the rope was convertible in the huntsman’s net into the orchestration of gravities and anti-gravities in the salvage of institutions and bodies fallen, perpetually falling …

  I arose from bed and moved to the window of the bedroom. I had heard Mr Mageye’s urgent voice. Our eyes met.

  ‘It’s time to visit the Banqueting Hall, Francisco, time to consider our grasp of Memory theatre that we have been building or salvaging. Nothing lasts forever in the mystery of time and yet the net is there even when it seems to elude us or deceive us. Time to see my film, Francisco. Time is upon us when I shall leave …’

  ‘No, no, Mr Mageye‚’ I cried.

  ‘It’s time, Francisco. We have covered some ground. Even as the Prisoner left you I too must go.’

  ‘But why, why?’

  ‘Dread has arrived, Francisco. You are in bed with the Virgin. And you must pay the price. You must look into the heart of the womb of the Camera. You must touch the seed of a conception that humanity has well-nigh forfeited. You must approach it by indirections in the labyrinth of space and time. My Camera is such a labyrinth, as you know already. And now it seeks to net the Whale afresh as a temple – shall I say – of Jonah’s repentance. That’s one inadequate way of putting it to draw you into this (shall I say final?) entertainment before I go. Remember, Francisco, there are linked signals, symptoms and convertibles in your Dream-book. The Prisoner is consumed. I shall vanish. There are the three Maries, three weddings. Linked motifs. There is the pact between Jonah, Deacon and yourself. Remember? You broke that pact. You converted the pact into other realms, the Nether World, Atlantis, the Waste Land, the Paradise of the Rain God … Another pact came into play Do you remember? A pact between the Prisoner, the Mask of Deacon, and yourself. The Prisoner vanished as a signal of sacrifice and the convertibility of sacrifice within Phallus and Lingam. The lame Gods became divine spinners of tales still awaiting another conversion into truth. For the genesis of the Imagination remains perpetually unfinished and open to unpredictable spheres of otherness.’ Mr Mageye was smiling. The most wonderful sacred Jester and teacher that I knew. Yet I wondered. Did I truly know him?

  ‘Francisco‚’ he cried. ‘There is another pact to consider. Now that you have slept with Marie in the name and head of Deacon – now that you transgress into a sublime trickster – you need to weigh transferable masks of truth and trickster in my film; and that involves you in a pact between me and yourself and the ghosts of Deacon and Jonah and Kali and Anansi and others. Anansi is Legba’s cousin. I have another card up my sleeve, Francisco. It’s the Sphinx. But more of that later before I take my leave of you …’

  He turned. I stood at the window as though I were falling into the street. It was a most curious premonition …

  *

  A great banquet was launched by the Doctor on the Day of the Wedding. It taxes me now to remember the places where everyone sat, even though I had sailed from the future into the Banquet, sailed with the Memory of the past that one stores in the future. Sailed with the architectures of the future back into the past. It was necessary to extend the dining-room in which Jones and Deacon and I had eaten our last meal together, in Jonestown, on the eve of the holocaust November 1978, into Port Mourant 1954. Such an extension was rooted in Memory’s holocaustic fire and changes in spatiality within the crumbling of the Void. A submerged dining-room I felt in deceptive elements. It began to lift nevertheless backwards in space into the banqueting hall. Such is the architecture of Dream. I sought as well to bring the Prisoner’s cell, where I had eaten a slice of bread, into the banqueting hall.

  Such sailing architectures in Memory theatre are a medium in which to dislodge closed structures within an open universe born of the arts and sciences of concentrated Chaos and its rebuttal of catastrophe and bias as all-consuming.

  It was a tall order and laughter therefore – the involuntary laughter of the Law – could be aroused into a serious, cosmic asset.

  There are intricate winding stairs within the lower anatomy of an upright Boar or a Pig and the Inspector sat under these in the banqueting hall enjoying the flavour of black pudding. Someone said that that seat had been reserved for Jonah Jones, but it did not seem to matter as Jonah sat somewhere else.

  The Boar grunted like a base instrument, base instrumental laughter as the Inspector turned and dipped into curries, pepper-pots, roasted beef, dishes of rice and sweet potato and yam. A meal fit for a Roman emperor or a medieval king.

  On such a day, or sailing coronation, the populace was prepared to fall ill in consuming a multitude of dishes. They sought medical aid and in so doing stuffed dollars into the Doctor’s pockets to pay for the banquet.

  The Doctor possessed a prosperous private practice on the side. He advised his son-in-law Deacon to build a hospital in Jonestown that would be similar to the Port Mourant public hospital but in private hands. Perhaps also a great Cinema Wheel through which patients would slip on the day that they died. I thought of the huntsman and his dog slipping through the Wheel but this raised a serious ingredient in the Doctor’s half-joking plans in my Dream-book!

  A hospital in spectral Jonestown in 1954?

  Jonestown lay still submerged in the collective unconscious! It had not yet been built in 1954. This was true but I could see it lifting onto a wave of the future. Deacon and Jones and I were already taking fiery soundings with regard to a new Rome a star’s blaze or throw from old Devil’s Isle.

  ‘We shall build Jonestown in honour of Deacon’s first child. We shall print on its portals IMMUNITY TO PAIN.’

  I felt an ominous shuddering sensation run through my limbs as the wave of the future struck the banqueting hall. But the magus-Doctor adjusted himself in his seat. He sat cross-legged like a Buddha under the prospect of medicine’s advance into IMMUNITY TO PAIN. The magus-Inspector sat under the Constellaton of the Boar and the Pig. Magi are susceptible to royal pageantry and to greed – royal illusion, royal greed – in order to know and to resist temptation. I saw at a glance that the Inspector had abstained from over-eating though he had had his fill. He sat in sober fear perhaps of the Jovian split in his sides …

  The magus-Doctor agreed that soundings should be taken with regard to a new Rome in spectral Jonestown. The very spectrality of Jonestown, its existence yet non-existence, its cinematic river and forests, was an apparition of fire (as if one were visualizing a wave of light arriving from distant space as a star unseen begins to reveal itself on the back of the light-years). Such revelations could be profoundly challenging and creative or they could be riveted into complacency or Drought. Light-year Drought!

  He looked around for me since he knew I was fearful of a liberty to break with the regime of Public Hospitals and to foster the practice of private Medicine or profit within escalating malaise in the settlements and cities of South America. I was a Fool, I was a captain of Jesters in Mr Mageye’s fleet. I sat under the Constellation of Prometheus. An eagle
gnawed at my side as I recalled the honeymoon bed of the Virgin and the seed of conception planted in her by Vulture or Eagle. But no one truly saw me for I hid within Deacon’s lofty, fallen, perpetually falling Mask in the Circus of the banqueting hall.

  The Doctor was relieved at my absence. It was not I however who was absent from the banqueting hall. But that was a private joke that I entertained with the ghost of Deacon who was to appear in Mr Mageye’s film. Time plays tricks in the womb of the Camera and the Cinema when one returns from the future into the past dressed in another body’s acting clothes. Hollow Masks act. Hollow clothes act when faces and hands and feet are daubed upon them, beside them, beneath them.

  Jonah Jones was sitting across the hall under the Constellation of the Whale and the Tiger. But beneath these stood the Spider Anansi and a Goddess of India with several hands that sprouted from her side. He had arrived from San Francisco that very morning for the wedding in Crabwood Creek. Was he a ghost? Had he in fact sailed in upon a light-year star from his grave in spectral Jonestown?

  The Whale was exquisitely painted as though it had been beached against a wave of the future and it seemed to shudder gently at times and to send a vibration through the limbs of the Spider.

  Every grave and sensitive captain in Mr Mageye’s fleet scans the insides of Whales. Stand on the top of a wave with Captain Cook in 1770. Fallen, perpetually falling wave.

  Cook was astonished when he fell around the globe to come upon Whales painted by Australian Aboriginal Old Gods in which had been sketched Spider houses. Jonah was to be seen. The houses were in the Whale, they were organs of the Whale, coal-black organs. The houses were inhabited by futuristic immigrants from Newcastle or Leeds or Liverpool or London. At first sight they were similar to the cell of the convicted Prisoner or Old God in French Guyana’s Devil Isle. But each splinter of coal glowed and enlarged itself into bedrooms, dining-rooms, drawing-rooms, and closets with Bibles.