Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  I was possessed of a glimmering perception of the sacrifice of the Prisoner of Devil’s Isle, the sentence that he passed on himself in conceding freedom to Deacon’s constituency, the sentence to remove himself to another plane of re-memberment and self-understanding beyond predatory coherence. I began glimmeringly to perceive why Mr Mageye would vanish. The sentence he would pass on himself needed to be translated onto a page on the Predator’s skin if one were to leap backwards and forwards into the music of space … I perceived why the huntsman Christ held the Predator in his net when he saved my life. The dread, beautiful Predator needed to be stroked by a Child. Its markings and hieroglyphs and signatures needed to attune themselves to changing natures of nature, memorials of catastrophe, therapeutic Bone-fire, and the ultimate hoped-for withdrawal from lies in the ambiguous technologies of Prometheus.

  The surrender of frames of language to inner frames and still inner frames – in plumbing the illumination of the innermost Word – is the music and the variable orchestra of reality.

  *

  The ghost of Deacon suddenly stood on the stage. A ghost from within the framed ghost that had previously informed me of its wishes in my performance in the Mask I wore. It was tall and thin and dressed in a coat like the flake of rock. It stood in my Ear. It was an inner cloak within a cloak. I saw it. No one else did. I had never seen it before, though I knew Deacon well and wore his Mask. It was inner flesh within a flesh-and-blood Mask, inner ghost within an outer ghost that had previously informed me how to play the role. And now the role I was playing began to reveal an inner role, an inner flesh, though no one else saw it as the ghost-within-a-ghost spoke in the labyrinth of my Ear.

  It was a Voice in the phallic tree of space.

  ‘There’s a leaf in my side,’ said the Voice, ‘a leaf shaped like the face of Marie’s Child. Marie’s Child is both inner and outer seed. Your reconception or reconceptualization of the Child must release it from my outer grasp. That is why I now address you as a Voice that haunts your Ear. The Ear is the labyrinthine imagination of music. And my ghost-within-a-ghost tells of the song of the seed everywhere. Watch for the song, watch for the coming of the song and save the Child.’

  ‘The Child sings amongst ghost-children in the Dark,’ said the Voice. ‘On the Night of the Day of the Dead I followed you Francisco into the Forest. I contemplated the narrow shave that you experienced at the edge of the sawyers’ pit. I followed you to the Cave of the Moon with borrowed eyes that I had plucked from a Cat, from Jonah’s Tiger’s head. No wonder my eyes shone in your back and you turned for a moment fearful of predators but did not see me when I pulled the lid of the Night over the stars in my head.’

  The Voice within my Ear stopped again. I had no way of defining its innermost tread or illumination of the fabric of the seeing/hearing Brain. It was Deacon, I knew. I was sure now in the labyrinthine theatre of the Ear and in the muscularity of my back riven by starlight – through the dense ceiling of space – on the Night that I fled into the Forest.

  It was Deacon I was sure. And yet he came from within the familiar body or shape I knew, familiar ghost I thought I knew …

  Such is an actor’s torment when the role he plays becomes abysmally, spiritually true …

  ‘I was about to follow you up to the Cave, Francisco, when I received a blow. Imagine that blow! It was frail, it was the leaf on the wing of a tree, it was a Child playing up there! A Child’s blow. A frail wing of darkness in a tree. I stopped. In bodily hell I cannot describe. No! Let me qualify what I have just said. Not hell of the body, not that, pain of the Spirit. Is Spirit Body, Body Spirit? I do not know. You, Francisco, now wear my Mask, you act in my shoes. But remember the inner Mask, the inner shoes, the inner dark. For those are messengers of Song.’

  He was gone.

  *

  I made my way across the floor of the banqueting hall. A swirl of dancers swept around me, a river of Spirit running through a Church.

  I was a floating shell on that river, paper of flesh-and-blood. I was swept uncrushed into the arms of Kali, the wicked princess. She spared my head but broke female dolls on the brow of lame giants in her wheeling arms. It was a new style of entertainment to make the populace laugh. But laughter sometimes breeds sorrow and I extricated myself from the Wheel, from her wheeling arms.

  Kali’s embrace had imbued me with the substance of laughter and sorrow.

  In cracking the brow of lame giants with wheeling dolls, children, beggars, thieves crept out from the heart of such union into the banqueting hall.

  I was reminded of the Inspector from whose split sides of the Law laughter crept forth in the shape of a key to the Void.

  I was reminded of the Spider trickster who crept forth from a coffin-top table in Jonah’s dining-room.

  They crept from the brow of a lame humanity – in all its surrogates – when Kali wheels the living and the dead into her arms and appears to crush them all into nothingness (as she threatens the infant female or the nursery of the seed of future life, but relinquishes it despite all appearances of ultimate cruelty, ultimate violence).

  ‘The archetype of the Game, in the games of childhood, is disturbing,’ I murmured to the thieves and beggars around me. ‘It is fractured and broken in crises of civilization. Kali’s terrorized infant dolls are a species of the obscurity of the womb, the mourning lament that arises from the womb, as it contemplates, through Kali’s terrible eyes, the lost and the abandoned on the Wheel of time. Such are the games that children play who seek, in the dance of death and life, the archetype of the saviour-Child, Marie’s Child, my Child, the world’s Child.’

  I sought by indirection to converse with Kali through the children in the banqueting hall. But her lips were closed as if they were parallel eyes of Sleep. She spoke to me through a wealth of imageries that seemed paradoxical at times on the Wheel of death and life. She spoke in a forgotten language or chemistry of the re-visionary Word one needed to relearn step by step. Such wealth of imageries seemed light at this moment in contradistinction to material fortune or power.

  I was swept along with the children to Mr Mageye, who greeted me with his jesting, quizzical smile.

  ‘I see you are impressed, Francisco,’ he said, ‘by the new Computer, the Kali Wheel, it’s magnificent.’

  I was stunned by the news. I had not seen the Wheel as a Computer.

  Mr Mageye chided me gently. ‘Your Dream-book is a numinous Computer …’

  He saw my amazement and inability to reply.

  ‘Flash up any page, scan the imageries with care, flash up another, scan the selfsame imageries, selfsame I say but note the re-visionary dynamic (if I may so put it) that informs them. It’s a question all the time of the inner – the innermost – resources of the language (a living language) to address a framed, commanding surface that it is so easy to reinforce into an absolute. A Dream-book is a numinous Computer in this peculiar sense that the life of a language, its capacity in depth, empowers it to reflect upon itself, to re-vision the frames or dogmas that have such a commanding grip … Even as I say this – the very issue I have just raised – I am taken back to the nature of freedom that the Dream associates with the Prisoner of Devil’s Isle. Freedom, in this context, does not mean that anything goes or may masquerade as re-visionary dynamic. Not at all. For the Dreamer (or surrogate creator of all systems and universes) is pulled into profoundest concentration upon concretion and apparition. It is an extraordinarily demanding task. Such is the true work of freedom …’

  I was incredibly grateful to Mr Mageye, for his kind word, his encouragement. But I felt sad all the same. I sensed he was preparing me for his departure from the Dream-book of which he had been an architect as much as I was, indeed more so than I …

  ‘Are you sure, Mr Mageye,’ I asked with a kind of lameness in my voice, ‘that Kali – in this banqueting hall – is a Wheel-Computer? I have not seen such mechanics of Spirit before.’

  ‘I am,’ said Mr Mageye with a g
leam in his eye that sprang from the depths of his hidden laughter.

  The children – some wore greybearded masks – and the beggars were somersaulting and leaping in imitation of the Kali Wheel. Others hopped on sticks like Legba. Others shaped themselves into agile Anansi legs. Still others created a broken brow or cavern – streaked with the straw of dolls’ blood – through which they leapt.

  ‘These children live in Dream-computers, Francisco,’ said Mr Mageye as he turned his Sphinx-like brow upon me. The ghost-children achieved such leaps at times that it was as if he occupied a foothold or a handhold at the very base of the Wheel where nothing moved.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they live in computers as the twentieth century draws to a close. Their soul occupies computer games. They mimic wars in heaven and on earth in computers. They climb spiders’ web, they visit dragons. They fondle serpents. They are cycled and recycled in computers. They are children of the Wheel who die to themselves upon Venus and Mars and in the Milky Way. In an age when it is said that the ghost has fled the machine they are the returning ghost, the thieves and the beggars and the clowns who now inhabit the spirit of the game in the machine.’

  ‘What do they see from the Moon?’ I asked.

  ‘They see a black-out wilderness Sky above the Moon. They see the universal unconscious or the collective unconscious (as some Jungian bodies would put it).’

  ‘It’s alive, that unconscious,’ I said and felt like a Fool.

  ‘It’s alive,’ the Sphinx that resided under the Wheel confessed. ‘Yes, it’s alive for it is possessed of the rhythm of the spheres, or the music of the spheres, black-out music or song – if you like – in the rhythms of an apparently unconscious universe. We hang, don’t we, upon every flare for a signal of life from a far distant light-year planet.’ The Sphinx was jesting, it seemed, to imply bridges of space across vast distances between light-year suns, light-year planets, and planet Earth with its star or sun. ‘We hang, don’t we, upon orchestrations of death and life. For who knows whether light comes from extinct stars whose death or resurrection we are still to prove. The music of the spheres – as the ancients used to put it – is now black-out song upon the lips of living ghosts which blend concretion and apparition …’

  I was stunned as if I myself were unconscious yet inhabited in the great Dark of myself by singing ghosts as the voices of the children woke me and brought me back to life in the wheeling games that they created.

  I saw their black-out lips in the blistered shoes that they wore at the door of my mother’s Albuoystown shop. Their flesh crept through those holes, through their patched garments, as they stood on the Moon and sang with a hidden choir in the crumbling Grave of space.

  ‘They are children of a lame humanity in the computer of the Moon,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘on the Wheel of time.’

  ‘Do they seek a new Church,’ I asked, ‘a new Rome?’

  ‘They are possessed of a virus of Spirit,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘Make no mistake about this. They are involuntary explorers of numbers in every machine, joy-riding machines and fast computers, involuntary mathematicians of Chaos, lottery populations on the Wheel. Who is to live, who is to die, upon an overcrowded planet?’

  ‘Virus of Spirit?’ I demanded. ‘Virus is poison.’

  ‘Ah, Francisco,’ said the Sphinx Mr Mageye, ‘you startle me out of my wits.’ The children were bouncing upon him now as if he were Atlas with the Moon on his back. It was all he could do to recover his breath and speak.

  ‘Love is an ailment,’ said Mr Mageye at last. ‘We all know that, do we not? Love is ill. Love has become a kind of infection of the nerves, a disorder. We make love. What does it mean to make love? The nerves of lust become active. Love your enemies is the supreme commandment that breaks all other commandments in that one exposes oneself to be bombed, or blasted, or ridiculed, or loathed, or labelled a vile hypocrite. To love one’s enemies tends to signify that one desires their wives or husbands, that one is plotting to steal their possessions, their ass, their horse, their sacred property. To love one’s religion is to blow oneself up in a car in order to kill as many on the road as possible. To love one’s faith is to crusade that one’s faith is the only true faith and all other faiths misguided. To love one’s friends is a pretty hazardous business at times. Caesar loved Brutus. Brutus loved the people. He was a patriot. Love then is tainted by treachery and patriotism. When I speak of the virus of Spirit, Francisco – let me make this clear – I am implying a capacity in Spirit to endure torment in the name of Love, a Love that unravels tainted systems to orchestrate the illnesses that plague humanity into a numinous dispersal of fanatical absolutes.’

  He paused and I dreamt that I could perceive a curious fraying within the garment that he wore, as if threads had been loosened in his tussle with the children who still swarmed upon him, or clung to him, when they were not upon or in the Kali Wheel.

  ‘Deacon alas,’ said Mr Mageye – as he plucked a thread from within his garment – ‘equated the virus of Spirit with inoculation with the venom of the Scorpion Constellation when he fell into the folkloric Imagination of the people. He saw such inoculation as a shield against the bite of pain, he saw it as the shield of power. Whereas the virus of Spirit is a measure of access to the profoundest unravelling of the charisma of power, access to acute and innermost tormenting self-knowledge …

  ‘I prefer to die now, Francisco, than to become a vegetable institution on the sick-bed of the humanities …’

  ‘You are no vegetable institution, Mr Mageye,’ I cried. ‘How in God’s name could you say this? Stay with me.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘but the Sphinx in the desert of the Imagination that we tend to witness on every hand is becoming a Vegetable, and if one could begin to unravel that supreme Vegetable, to pass sentence of death upon oneself in Play or Dream-book, then, who knows, we might salvage a future from the ruins of the past. It is a worthwhile sacrifice, is it not Francisco?’

  The banqueting hall was now veiled in the mystery of past futures, future pasts, open to originality.

  Jonah Jones was now crossing the hall from the seat that he occupied under the Constellation of the Spider Whale and Anansi Tiger. Or so it seemed in the darkened hall. Constellations rise and fall and change their shape in black-out orchestras and music and song.

  ‘Jonah,’ I cried. ‘What has happened to you – I scarcely know you now – in the Grave of space? I knew who you were over there. You were large as a Titan. Now – as you cross the floor – you have shrunk. You’re a dwarf. You are – it’s difficult to describe it – a bubble which a child blows from bone or flute on the Moon into space. There’s a precipice in space that is black, but when it sings one dreams of universal repentance. Do dwarfs repent more easily than Titans? If so you are truly welcome, Jonah, to join the band of mischievous children that you see around you.’

  ‘Alas,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘society never forgives transgressors. One knows how obdurate one is. Repentance remains a bleak task in the face of one’s own obduracy and within an unforgiving world.’ He plucked a number of threads from his unravelling robe. I was reminded of the threads that had fallen from my Nemesis Hat upon his grave in Albuoystown and upon my mother’s grave. Was Mr Mageye an apparition, a solid ghost that had begun to shed its cloak? Of course he was. I had long been aware of this. What was astonishing were the bodies within the bodies, the ghosts within ghosts, tree within tree, that addressed one within black-out music of dissolving spheres, resurrectionary spheres. Deacon had trespassed into my Ear as ghost within ghost to inform me of the face of the Child within a leaf upon the phallic tree. Mr Mageye had spoken of the Vegetable Sphinx in the desert. Titan Jonah had become a dwarf …

  ‘Society is adamant. It rarely forgives. One has to start from within in order to bestow – as each garment falls – another page in Memory theatre’s Dream-book on which to assemble new traces or traceries of repentance in the fictionality and actuality of the Dark soul. That is
why, Francisco, I shall leave you the skin of the Predator when I go. Write upon it, Francisco. Write the last (or is it the first?) epic of repentance. Society tends to be unforgiving. Murderers never change, do they? They must be punished to the end of time. Under lock and key if not on the gallows or the electric chair. None exists to convince the social animal that the heart of the wild is susceptible to change! None except the Predator whose repentance is our only hope. I know in my innermost self and so do you. I am the Enigma of change. I live with predators. I am the Sphinx. The Lion is my dress and so is the Tiger and the Eagle and the Vulture and the Serpent’s grace and gentleness of the Dove. You are a diminutive survivor, Francisco, in whom live multitudes, prey and predators and victims alike. We are reflections of the Vegetable encounter with all species within paradoxes of evolution which may lay bare a resurrectionary, innermost consciousness which breaks the mould of the everlasting tyranny of the unconscious. We are unconscious of the debts we owe others in history, we are unconscious of the crimes that we have committed in ourselves or through our antecedents. No medium can help us except life in the Precipice of the Dark mind. No word can help us except another music that we blindly see or hear in the computerized grave of the globe or cage of rhythmic numbers.’