Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  The holocaust is a vision of famine, the famine of the Soul imprinted on breath as much as bread that living skeletons bite or choke upon or devour…

  I wanted to leap and forget everything that had happened …

  But then I saw the faint outline of a body on the rock or loaf of bread. I broke my visionary teeth upon it. My pleasant rice and fruit in the Cave seemed straw for cattle.

  Bone is tough, a spirited survivor in the wilderness of civilization.

  Was it Deacon lying there far below?

  Had he collapsed there and died after shooting Jones? Or was he asleep forever in the wake of the procession that he had led as a child?

  His head lay on rock or seeming wood as mine had lain upon a pillow of stone. I resisted the temptation to fling myself down beside him and began instead to contemplate the construction of a Virgin Ship made of wood, of bread, stone, everything, times past and present and future.

  Such a Ship begins to create itself upon a land and a sea of Limbo memory, Limbo chameleon memories upon which diminutive survivors such as myself feed in order to clothe themselves with the terrors of history that one may still convert into rare however flawed consciousness, indestructible hope. Such was my Limbo initiation into the writing of my Dream-book. I was to wander far and wide – uncertain of the steps I took – before I came to lodgings in Trinity Street, New Amsterdam.

  Home is multi-dimensional space. And Limbo is the chameleon of home into which one reaches self-deceptively and endlessly in order to face truth when one comes abreast of the masquerades of the past that one has sustained voluntarily or involuntarily.

  I left the Cave of the Moon and adventured into Limbo where I came upon the handsome, beautifully dressed grave-digger who had profited from the burial of the dead in Jonestown which he supervised.

  ‘Did you bury them all,’ I said, ‘in a mass grave?’

  In asking the question I could not help recalling Deacon and his child’s heroic, monstrous incarceration of common-or-garden folk who were nevertheless giants and dwarfs, weak and strong, in the Eye of Mr Mageye’s Camera. They would return to judge me, to put me on trial. Why me? Why not Deacon? Such are the paradoxes of judgement day, dateless day, theatre of Limbo – within the unacknowledged interstices of Purgatory, Hell, and Heaven – when one is recast to answer for another, when the embattled folk are recast into embodiments of self, oneself’s trial is theirs, they are judges arisen from the living and the dead. One may. know then under their terrible hand – considerate and inconsiderate hand – a flicker of the injustices inflicted by others upon their peers and subjects across the ages.

  The grave-digger eyed me with a quizzical look: as if he were weighing every stitch I wore. My Nemesis Hat had deposited a few threads on my mother’s grave, on Mr Mageye’s grave, and on the Moon when Marie danced. The Hat or Bag was lighter now. It could be weighed on the scales of future pasts, past futures, radiating out from an apparitional core of composite self.

  ‘Lost a few threads, Francisco,’ he confirmed. ‘Each could be auctioned no doubt for a bite of bread. I fancy sweet bread myself. Made from currants and lemon, Demerara sugar, and rich flour. I found quite a store in Jonestown. We split it between ourselves, me and the Inspector and that Doctor-God chap who is popular with the peasants of Port Mourant. They say he cares for the sick who lie on pallets on the floor. All well and good but your shirt and trousers are in tatters. A disgrace! Those would fetch nothing at all in the marketplace. I can see clean through to Bone, Francisco. Ah! but there’s your shoes. I like those. Jolly good leather. I pulled off quite a few like yours from the heels of the dead in Jonestown. Gave me quite a turn. It was as if they were ready to run, to sprint. Well you can do it for them, Francisco. Just as well you got away, Bone. You’re worth but a bite or two of meat and potatoes to me. Imagine my having to cart you into the grave for virtually nothing. I’m glad you got away.’

  He laid out at least five hundred watches in the Limbo forest. He tied them to the branches of trees. He laid out earrings, women’s purses, and men’s linen shirts, men’s vests, short pants and long pants and baby clothes.

  A curious business, a curious self-addictive satire, a curious mockery and self-mockery rooted in despair, it was that the grave-digger conducted in charting his evolution into millionaire Carnival Lord Death.

  The robes on his back had been borrowed from the dead and the living. The baby clothes seemed dead baby clothes too small for the giant of Death. Who knows how small or large Death is? He possessed a scarf, on the other hand, around his neck that had been mine. I had wrapped it around my hand when blood oozed from the wound I received and left it on the bushes beside the Clearing. Nothing! I felt nothing at all when I lost two fingers from Deacon’s random bullet … Carnival Lord Death wore the bloodstained scarf now with style that was a wonderful gloss upon numbness.

  What was bizarre and charismatic in his style was the strangely lifeless but majestic, ritualistic folds of his dress. He possessed the aplomb of an astronaut on the Moon in Limbo theatre.

  This was fascinating stuff. Charismatic aplomb was in fashion. Tradition bouncing on surfaces but bereft of depth, Brain shorn of mind or philosophy, life shorn of unpredictable Spirit or originality.

  The array of goods – far beyond the range I have described – confirmed his majestic skills as an entrepreneur par excellence of Limbo Land.

  But there were other considerations and moral fables in Carnival Lord Death’s pitiless barter of the numb word, numb lips, numb ears and eyes for treasurers that he pulled from the pockets of the living and the dead, from their running feet, or reluctant hands, from their frames and bodies, to adorn his kingdom.

  The quality of Justice! What sort of Justice did Carnival Lord Death administer? He was a just man: as just as any man could be in the Mask of Death. What are the foundations of Justice as the twentieth century draws to a close?

  I looked around but there was no help from Mr Mageye in this instance. Carnival Lord Death loomed over me as I uttered a silent prayer, an unorthodox prayer that was more an awkward statement than a request for enlightenment.

  ‘To feel nothing,’ I dreamt inwardly, ‘except the possession of privileged immunity to famine or to hell, to feel nothing but a licence that is granted in Carnival jump-ups and crusades, in an age of the mechanical death of the soul, is justice. Justice is the tautology of the death of the soul. Justice is the prosecution of spare-parts methodologies, spare-parts bodies. Or so it seems everywhere. I know for mechanical ornamentation, buttocks and breasts and all, in pleasure palaces, is the structure of a wound that forgets it is a wound.

  ‘God forgive me (as I pray awkwardly) but I know. I was shot in Jonestown and lost all feeling in my hand. It became a tool, an insensible tool.

  ‘Perhaps Lord Death (you are in my prayer, for who knows what Carnival omens Death employs in an age of the death of the soul in the machine?) were you to permit me to reach up and unloose the scarf around your neck, feeling would invade my absent fingers at last which were blown like cigarette ends in the wind.

  ‘The scarf or noose is mine. That very rich scarf that you wear. Poor man’s, beggar man’s, thief’s, scarf of kings! It sings of soul’s blood and the genesis of pain all over again. It sings of an apparitional or phantom grasp of reality that may resurrect the elusive lineaments of the Soul.

  ‘And this brings me to the mystery of injustice that the Soul expresses in my wounds. To suffer injustice is to see the Soul within every small creature that cries out for pity against pitilessness. Can we fathom the enduring, insubstantial cry of pity? Pity’s sake can neither be bought nor sold. Compassion is beyond price.’

  Another form of prayer it was that involved me not in a plea for justice but enduring, creative capacity to suffer the mystery of injustice if the Soul were to live, phenomenal fellow-feeling, despite predatory games and uniform insensibility to crisis …

  I feared Carnival Lord Death but he appeared to acknowledge –
in some recess of himself – the mystery of prayer and he returned the scarf to me.

  ‘You poor devil, Francisco‚’ he said, ‘if it gives you some comfort have the bloody scarf. It went well with my daring dress. I came upon the eighteenth attire I now wear in Jones’s house …’

  I wanted to tell him that this too was mine. I had loaned it to Jones for a fancy dress occasion in Jonestown. It was a kind of heirloom or legacy that I had been given by my mother.

  The travail for me in the grave-digger’s evolution into a capitalist and into Carnival Lord Death lay in the chasm it illumined between mechanical Justice and the extraordinary numinosity of Injustice and in every trial one is called upon to endure at the bar of time. How to come abreast of the past one believes one has forfeited or killed is more self-searching than knowledge of current affairs. For if one fails to come abreast of dead time (or what seems to be dead time) a Predator in the future will destroy us. And time past, the living texture and spirituality in time past, would have become too weak to stand at our side and assist us.

  Limbo Justice involved an equation between numbness and immunity to hell. To be just then in Limbo Land was to serve one’s vested interests absolutely, whether pleasure or profit, to sublimate or suppress or eclipse one’s wounds in favour of strengthening a wall between oneself and the inferno that rules elsewhere in many dimensions of one’s age.

  Injustice, on the other hand, bore on a coming abreast of wounds one has suffered in the past through which one knows pain in oneself and others, pain of mind that revives the Soul of Compassion beyond all machineries of the law of Death or of the state of embalmed institutions.

  Without the mystery of Injustice – when one suffers with others to whom the world is unjust – the soul would vanish entirely and leave behind the mechanical futility of knowledge in the besieged Brain in the crumbling Body …

  I had never meditated on morality in this light and I needed to emphasize and re-emphasize, rehearse and rehearse again, what I had learnt from my encounter with the capitalist Carnival Lord Death.

  I needed a Dream-book that would take nothing for granted within the prayer I had attempted to address to an unfathomable Creator of worlds and universes. I needed to embrace ‘pity’s sake’ though such an embrace of the Word made me infinitely vulnerable.

  I was now convinced that Limbo Land was a trap from which it was unlikely I would ever escape to view the open cities of Paradise. I had failed in building a new Rome in Jonestown’s web of abandoned and lost cities arching back into pre-Columbian mists of time.

  All well and good to have escaped from the holocaust into Limbo Land but a variety of enormous and subtle dangers now encompassed me. Foremost amongst these was the menace of the Predator who lurked in the giant forests of Day and Night.

  I was infinitely vulnerable. How could I withstand such a menace? In a sense I felt easier with the grave-digger now – when I ran into him in my wanderings after the Day of the Dead and prior to my arrival in Trinity Street – I accepted his new role (with the death of the conventional Church) as Lord Death. Perhaps he and I possessed a secret understanding about the omens of Carnival.

  Nothing however could forfeit or erase the scent – the backwards, forwards scent – of the Predator. I knew I was hunted, pursued, or stalked in Limbo Land. Stalked as a commodity to be devoured by mighty institutions, great Banks, great systems that ransacked and devoured privacy: but such systems were but one feature in the unnameable menace of the Predator.

  I wondered, as my mind tended to lapse and to lose reflection in the bark of a tree to which I clung, in shed leaves of memory here and there or cracked branches of trees into which I occasionally climbed (as my Carib or African or Arawak ancestors – runaway European antecedents as well – had done in the sixteenth century when slavery and persecution ruled the Americas), whether the Predator was Carnival Lord Death after all despite our secret treaty or understanding. A part of that understanding was to inform him of flying or running strangers in Limbo Land.

  I had no intention of doing so but I humoured him, especially when he assured me that the Inspector would take me to see the Prisoner or Old God of Devil’s Isle who claimed to be the father of the Virgin of the Wilderness, Marie of Port Mourant.

  BUT NO! The Predator was older than Death itself. The Predator possessed a curious weight that lay beneath gravity’s Skull, beneath every falling or fallen creature, a curious violence that subsisted on nuclear deadlock, or perversity, or cosmic devastation, on meteorites colliding with Jupiter, on the manipulation of elegant mathematics into spectacles of beauty that kill, random bullets in space, or from space, that strike the Earth from time to time. The Predator’s craft and skill and range in Limbo Land was immense and I felt his breath (unlike the breath of resurrectionary organs of Compassion) rearrange the grain of the hair on the back of my neck.

  The tickling sensation of the hair on my neck and head aroused in me a contrary sensation to absolute fear that the Predator sought to instil in me. I broke my Nemesis Hat or Bag into two containers. One I retained as a Hat and this I replaced on my head. The other I adopted as a Bag. I retraced my steps in Limbo Land and collected the fallen leaves of memory from cracked branches or trees into which I had climbed. They possessed the numinous texture of a book and I promised the three Virgins (Jonestown, Albuoystown, Port Mourant) that I would write a Dream-book should I gain Trinity Street in New Amsterdam …

  How much did I know, how much remember – within composite epic – of ages prior to Death, ages in which the Predator’s regime of violence seemed both immanent and transient, ages in which nevertheless the Womb of Virgin Space seemed shorn of violence, shorn of intercourse with reality that was violent?

  Within that implicit and terrifying opposition how wounded were the parameters of genesis – the genesis of the Imagination to cope with terror and grace – how wounded the Virgin herself as she broke into a trinity of Masks, the three Maries?

  I scanned each leaf as I placed it in my Bag. A variety of inscriptions appeared upon leaf after leaf. Faint light-year vistas … Were they progeny of the Virgin driven by a quest to minimize violence in a world in which Death had appeared? Were they progeny of the Predator to augment or absolutize violence in a world in which Death had appeared?

  Such vistas lay beyond absolute translation into certainty.

  They were resources of uncanny drama, resources of uncanny rehearsals of the genesis or unfinished genesis of the Imagination …

  The Scorpion Constellation shone in the eyes of the Tiger-mask of the sun. Which blinded which, who whom, it was difficult to say. The Scavenger swooped. The Eagle dealt the Jaguar a blow on the Moon and on the walls of abandoned Maya cities. But all such manifestations were curiously hieroglyphic: self-deceptive and true within the partialities of genesis. They bore on the mystery of injustice that runs hand in hand with the resurrection of the Soul of Compassion for all wounded creatures whether born of the Predator or of the Virgin.

  A further complication lay in another well-nigh indescribable imprint, a huntsman who seemed to stand within the Womb of Virgin space. I sensed that he had no illusions about the might of the Predator. As I listened to the whisper or rustle of each leaf within my phantom fingers I dreamt that I heard his voice seeking to instil the strangest wisdom everywhere, into creature and constellation, however prone these were to linkages with the Predator, into heroes and angels, however prone these were to linkages with monsters. I sensed his tread at Night in the footprint of the Predator.

  The gathering menace broke into a Storm and I felt it was useless running from the Predator any longer. My desire had been to destroy him by hook or by crook. So much so that unconsciously, subconsciously, I was driven to contemplate poisoning the air everywhere that he breathed, the seas and oceans and lakes and rivers in which he swam, the environments and places that clothed him. ‘Kill him even if it means killing yourself‚’ Carnival Lord Death had said to me. Death’s freedoms encompassed
the advocacy of Suicide. ‘Walk with a Bomb of environmental disasters under your shirt to blow up the globe.’

  But the huntsman in the footfall of the Predator – close on the heels of the Predator – possessed a different tune.

  ‘Leap‚’ he said (in the gathering menace of the Storm), ‘into my net and help me to hold the heart of the Predator at bay within rhythms of profoundest self-confessional, self-judgemental creativity. The leap into space I grant is dangerous. It is a kind of surrender to an unfathomable caring Presence that seems absent in a cruel age. It is the leap of the unfinished genesis of the Imagination that may bring to light unpredictable resources in an open universe that nets, in some paradoxical way, creature and creation. LEAP …’

  But I was unable to do so. Nevertheless my desire to poison or slay the Predator loosed its grip on my unconscious, unconscious motivation, motivation of disaster. I settled myself on a tree-platform instead and created a pillow with the Bag of memory leaves and pages. The Storm blew a further volume of leaves upon me. The Predator knew of my lofty hiding place. He knew of my inner Dream-pillow or book. He knew of the outer volume that the Storm had granted me, the raining blanket of leaves in circulation, cross-circulation, rehearsal, re-visionary momentum … I was lost. I was convinced I was lost. It was finished. I lay in the Predator’s bed and he knew.

  And then the huntsman threw his net. I knew without knowing how I knew that the net fastened itself upon the limbs of the Predator even as it appeared to release me, leaving me still to leap …

  ‘I cannot leap‚’ I said. ‘Not now. But thank you huntsman for saving me from madness, from being devoured by an appetite for violence that grows everywhere.’

  I wondered in a flash of lightning whether the huntsman would now seize and destroy the Predator forever. I listened and my heart virtually ceased to beat. BUT NO. The huntsman held the Beast at bay, he lifted him in his net. And I was privileged to gain, with another flash, a glimpse of terrifying beauty. I was bewildered, confused. Heartrending grief arose in myself at the sight of such stripes of beauty. Such was the inimitable hide of the Predator. As the huntsman turned in the lightning Storm with the Beast in his net I dreamt I was free to surrender myself at last, not to leap now but to contemplate surrendering myself to an omen of Beauty that I needed to turn inside out for hidden graces, hidden sorrows, in creatures one despised because they appeared to lack the might, the power, the charisma, of the Predator.