Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  I tried to embrace him but he rejected me all over again. For a moment I dreamt that it was his Mask that I would come to wear in the near future. I touched the holes that had been driven into my neck and shoulders in Limbo Land in preparation for such a Mask. In his changed costume – drowned bones, sleight-of-Breath body – he acquired the air of an ancestor of mine, the air of lightning cooled Storm or Passion. He no longer breathed fire in arising from the sawyers’ pit and the sea.

  He may have sensed what I was thinking for he said:

  ‘Not my Mask shall be placed upon you, Francisco. Yet to be intimate with my descent into hell may prove a necessary initiation into the angel’s Mask that shall possess you …’

  ‘Angel’s Mask?’

  ‘Wait and see,’ said my Skeleton-twin.

  ‘When we rode on the bicycle to Jonah’s house,’ I cried, ‘I wondered if you would grow flames and burn me, reduce me to a handful of ashes. But now I think I know better. We are twins, yes, but you are also an ancestor of the lightning mind secreted in graves of space and in Bone (universal kith and kinship Bone) when it flashes in the Sky. Before evolution’s dawn Bone flashed as a relic of Spirit in a Circus. Circus animals bounce back into lightning in the Sky. The mystery is Breath! There are different layers of Breath in the architectures of space. Imagine Circus stairways, Circus architectures, in the elements. Without peculiar rhythms of Breath one could not leap onto a frontier upon which every flashing relic of Spirit marks a crossing from pre-evolution to evolution’s wasteland. And beyond evolution’s wasteland to post-wasteland graves steeped in the dance and the resurrection of consciousness. One crosses the wasteland and descends into the grave. So many lightning relics descend into the grave! So many peoples, so many houses, so many dancers …’ I stopped.

  ‘Weigh Breath in dancing feet in the grave as they strive to leap into the resurrection. There’s a key in the Breath-body when one unlocks a door into the Cave of the Moon. There’s a key in the sawyers’ pit and the dark moonlight fleece on the stars of the nether world,’ said my Skeleton-twin.

  ‘Let me embrace you,’ I cried. ‘You understand …’

  ‘I understand nothing,’ said my Skeleton-twin self-mockingly. ‘I stand above and below. So I can teach you a thing or two about the dance.’ He eyed me coldly. A faint flare in the sockets of his eyes deposited a key into the tattooed inscription of Lazarus on my arm.

  How could one tattoo the Breath-key of another upon one’s arm unless one invoked the cool lightning dance of wilderness space, night-dance that one’s flesh could bear, upon broken archetypal fabric that one shares with those to whom one is indebted, and who begin to take one into hidden architectures, the hidden lives, in the grave of the Circus?

  One needs to weigh every trickster of the cradle and the grave that one embodies yet sees as a separate entity in composite epic.

  Was the Skeleton-twin a sacred trickster? He was the shared Breath of a broken archetype, heaven and hell.

  We set out into the Forest of the Circus and I recalled the route that I had taken with Mr Mageye and the huntsman Christ.

  He kept me at arm’s length under the dark, tattooed inscriptions of the Forested Night. Skeleton-twin Lazarus! We walked on a frontier between pre-evolutionary darkness and evolutionary wasteland, a frontier that shone white with the Skeleton’s glowing body, a frontier on which my dancing feet and the Skeleton’s dancing feet were buried before they blazed afresh into primordial consciousness.

  I now heard the surfing rasp of the sawyers’ blade in the ghostland of the grave, a wave of sound breaking on the coast of the mind, my eyes floated into that wave, I was in the wave, in the dance of the Skeleton, unable to embrace him, but in the wave, in the dance, of the dance …

  The conversion of the ghost sawyers into architects of GRAVE LAND or the nether world into which I was descending took me wholly by surprise.

  The key was in the lock as I danced and soon the glowing Skeleton and I had arrived.

  Breath shone in the Sky. The sun of GRAVE LAND or the nether world was the Breath of fire.

  I turned to my Skeleton-twin. ‘Is this the Land of the Dead? The dancing figures before us wear the masks of Maya peasants. I know of such murals in the city of Bonampak and elsewhere. Abandoned cities flooded with murals of the happy dead …’

  I had stopped dancing but the field before me was alive with dancers in floating apparel as they encircled a mound. They danced in the field. They danced in open spaces. They danced past houses that were lodged it seemed in a net. Had they been lodged there, drawn up there, from a lake? The rasping surf of the blade struck my ears like waves breaking on the bank of a river, or coast, or shore.

  ‘It’s also called,’ said my Skeleton-twin, waving at the dancers, ‘the Paradise of the Rain God.’

  ‘Let’s join them and dance,’ I cried. ‘Let’s embrace them …’

  ‘A chasm exists between you and them.’

  ‘No chasm! They’re across a field, that’s all.’

  I heard the rasping surf of the sawyers’ blade again like the sea. But there was no sea except for the cinematic sensation on the coast of the mind, in the field of the mind beside an invisible lake or river or ocean or sea.

  ‘There’s the rub,’ said my Skeleton-twin. ‘You see a field, you see dancers, you hear an ocean but nothing’s there. Is the field really there? They dance in elements upon a borderline between the wasteland and the post-wasteland theatre from which they seek to leap …’

  ‘But that’s wrong,’ I protested. ‘The borderline’s between pre-evolutionary darkness and evolution. Did you not say so yourself when we were arriving?’

  ‘The two borderlines look alike in GRAVE LAND. I am your twin now and your ancestor then in the past. Such is the comedy of relics of Spirit.’

  ‘How do we know the difference?’

  ‘Variations of Breath, the land that breathes, the water that breathes, are in the difference. Hard to define. For instance the sound of the sea in the sawyers’ blade indicates substance that is used to build houses. Houses of the invisible sea. Houses with walls of solid water. Paradise of the Rain God. The dancers in the field then have settled for a while. As you appeared to settle on your Virgin Ship. Their houses are filled with the joy of rain. The Paradise of the Rain God. I would say they are primordial folk myself. Pre-evolutionary folk.’

  ‘Who am I? What are you?’

  My Skeleton-twin laughed.

  ‘It’s a good question, Francisco. You danced into GRAVE LAND on primordial feet. But in fact you are alive, you survived the holocaust, you possess – it is true – all the appearances of having died. But you belong to the living extremities of the WASTE LAND. You are almost in a post-wasteland grave. Almost in. Almost there. Not quite. That is why you are tattooed …’

  ‘And you?’ I cried. ‘Where do you belong?’

  ‘I am indisputably of the Circus. I fell into the pit and whilst you lived, whilst you grew flesh and I suffered in your place, I became a curious Skeletal animal of the WASTE LAND. I performed numerous tricks. Think of it this way. When I fell into the pit I left my inscription on your arm to remind you I was still there, I would arise, I walked in two worlds. GRAVE LAND. WASTE LAND.’

  I could not help protesting. ‘It,’ I said, ‘the inscription or tattoo, was done at Deacon’s instigation. He took me to a specialist. It was a Jest, his assumption of himself as my orphaned, peasant father. We were of the same age. A game we played, Deacon and Jonah and I. I found myself with two fathers, a schoolboy rag, nothing more, but serious as hell in a land of orphans, and slaveowners, and conquistadores, and puritans. Jonah – my puritan schoolboy father – slept with an Animal Goddess, and Deacon anticipated sleeping with the Virgin of Port Mourant. For some unearthly reason he projected me into her, upon her, he placed his fallen angel’s Mask upon my head, the Mask of the Virgin’s husband and the Virgin’s son. He said my epic would redeem a relic.’

  I stopped. Shattered by
the revelation. Dream-book revelation that made me into a stranger to myself, a multi-faceted stranger, a vessel of masks suspended in past futures coming abreast of future pasts.

  The pain of Memory theatre, of breaking trauma in the wake of the holocaust, was great.

  My Skeleton-twin reached out and almost held me but he desisted. Profoundest sympathy or empathy perhaps within which lay a chasm. Close to each other yet subject to broken archetypes that we shared but could never absolutely mend.

  ‘Likewise myself, Francisco‚’ he said at last. ‘I descended into the grave in your place. I anticipated the difficulty, the preternatural difficulty, immanence and transience combined, of your leaping up out of the grave to play your dual part, bridegroom-in-son, son-in-bridegroom, and beyond such duality intricate distinctions that would break a mould of incest within the mystery of freedom … Yes, I was aware of the immensity of the task. So I exercised my limbs as doubly supportive of you. In GRAVE LAND I suffered for you. In WASTE LAND I was close to you however apart from you. I created a chasm across which you would need to leap to fulfil your fate, to become free, to know love as you never dreamt to know it … Wait and see … A paradox of Breath-bodies I grant! You need, you see, to combine several keys into yourself. Wasteland key, post-wasteland key, primordial key. But the price you pay is the relinquishment of conquest! Your intercourse with Virgin Sorrowing space is the intangible but innermostly supportive embrace of many cultures living and dying upon the extremities of the WASTE LAND. So you see Francisco there are Deacon’s projections that you bear and relive as a survivor of the holocaust. Deacon did not survive in the extremities of the WASTE LAND as you do. There are Jonah’s projections that you bear and relive in ORACLE-Brothel. Jonah did not survive on the extremities of the WASTE LAND as you do. And there are my projections from within the grave and without the grave. I survived in a sense through you for whom I suffered and whom I assisted in the clothing of yourself with Flesh as you dance on the cradle and the grave of the globe. Wasteland extremity Flesh, evolution’s extremity Flesh, in the Circus of Mankind …’

  Flickeringly changing expressions swept across the Skeleton’s Mask that my twin wore in the Carnival Circus of GRAVE LAND.

  I swore I saw an expression of gravity. But as I scanned this it became a ripple of bones on his brow and across his high pointed cheeks like stricken sails in the Phallic tree. It may have been the Circus laughter of the relic of Storm within myself. My twin was known to ache with laughter. I attributed laughter to his fluid, however curiously rigid, flights of expression. But I may have been witnessing the genesis of some other nameless emotion. My Skeleton-twin caught the drift of my mood.

  ‘You see, don’t you Francisco, how mobile are other frontiers of emotion in GRAVE LAND? Am I sad, am I grave, am I smiling, am I mad, am I a fixture or a fluid personality of shadow and light? Do I sail with the turning globe, do I stand still? Am I susceptible to nameless emotions? Let me put in bluntly. Do I speak truths as clown, as trickster? All these borderlines between truth and trick!’

  He paused on perceiving my bewilderment.

  ‘Consider the key to hell within the grave. Is hell GRAVE LAND’S truths, is GRAVE LAND hell’s truths? You and I entered by the sawyers’ pit. We speak of a door through the sawyers’ pit to which we possessed a key. But reflect! There was nothing in the sawyers’ pit but a rusting lantern, some skulls, a rusting saw, rusting bolts and nuts, sodden leaves, sodden ground. How real is the key of the Imagination?’

  ‘It is invaluable to science and art,’ I cried.

  ‘It is, I do not deny it,’ my Skeleton-twin replied. ‘The reach of the Imagination! But note the cautions inserted into that reach.’

  ‘One’s vulnerability!’

  ‘Quite so, quite so,’ said my Skeleton-twin. ‘On every frontier that we seek to cross one needs to balance truth-makers, or truth-sayers, with tricksters. Frontiers are obdurate, believe me.’

  ‘I know.’ What did I know?, I wondered. ‘I am impressed at times by such obduracy.’ I stopped. ‘Frustrated at times.’ I admitted. ‘It’s a new language, a new inferno if we are to glimpse a wholly different archetype of heaven. What am I saying?’

  I stood on the brink of a chasm but pulled back in time to address my Skeleton-twin.

  ‘My frustrations are of a populist order. Is populism a new or an old conquistadorial heaven dressed up to please the greed of millions? Does populism mean grabbing what one sees and fancies and being grabbed by what one sees and fancies? You scratch my ass and I scratch yours. It’s called copycat love, copycat violence, copycat predator. It lays bare the hungry and illiterate body of our age.’

  My Skeleton-twin recoiled a little. But then he recovered. After all it was I who had endeavoured to embrace him, not he me.

  He wagged a severe finger at me.

  ‘The Cinema of GRAVE LAND, Francisco, jolts us – does it not? – even when we dream we know the blasted truth. Every blast invokes a spectre. That’s all WASTE LAND Cinema is about and GRAVE LAND makes it clear. It’s populist folly to think we can sleep with every woman or man in the world, we can seize or grab every dancer that we see, we can talk down each other’s tongue and throat across a chasm, we can bite each other’s ears off across oceans.’

  ‘I never said we can,’ I protested. But I knew I had entertained such follies in the WASTE LAND.

  ‘Frontiers are real until Love beyond all comprehension abolishes them. Chasms between us and the dancers in the field are real.’

  I protested:

  ‘It’s the obduracy of frontiers and the spectrality on the other side that frustrates and bewilders the heart and the mind. We must learn to cross …’

  ‘We must learn to embrace the Enigma of Spirit if we are to see its relics breathe again, live again. A spiritual evolution upon every frontier, a spiritual freedom, is the task to be renewed,’ said my Skeleton-twin.

  He saw my incredulity, he saw my desire to relinquish the task.

  ‘Ah, dear Francisco,’ he mourned. ‘You have so much to learn of the relics of Spirit. And of tricksters of Spirit. Charisma is not only the meat of tyrants, it is the meat of masses. And that’s a hard and bitter truth that hell engenders. Every trickster that you encounter may well seek to embrace you. I have not. Does that prove I am no trickster? Or am I cleverer than the rest?’

  It was odd. Had he not said that I might have despaired entirely of the immensity of the task that lay ahead for which I was so poorly equipped. He was eyeing me closely. He seemed to be calculating the effect of what he had said. I was glad that he had freed me to accept the possibility of failure. The genius of hell – his genius – lay in its capacity to relinquish cleverness, a talent for cleverness, in favour of sifting every obstacle to truth in the fabric of the Self.

  Failure that is built into Spirituality, the uncertainties of Spirituality, may endorse every relic with incalculable momentum beyond oneself. It may deepen the Compassion of hidden figures of grace across the frontiers of one’s life. It may deepen the severity of one’s hidden judges as well. But some miraculous reconciliation of the genius of Compassion and the genius of severity or judgement may breathe in one’s life when one confesses to failure …

  We are assisted by powers we cannot define. We are tried by powers we cannot define. And their reconciliation is a crossing of frontiers.

  ‘I fail to know them entirely. I fail to see them entirely. I am subject to self-deception. But they cross …’

  *

  ‘I used to play football in Albuoystown as a boy before I left for the United States in the 1940s,’ I said to my Skeleton-twin in the most matter-of-fact voice. Matter-of-fact Breath! Yet matter and fact had been imbued with immensity.

  ‘We played a rough game. Mr Mageye had told us in class of the ball games in the ancient Maya Circus. They played with a hard rubber ball like a boxer’s fist that they bounced on a wall in the Land of the Dead. It was a hard, bruising game of Death and Life in Bonampak. I fell on o
ne occasion and cut my lips. I wanted to go to my mother in her Leather Shop but I remembered her work-hardened hands. And I decided to bear the pain. I plastered my lips with Bread. I spent my pocket money bandaging my lips with Bread. I was determined not to worry her with my troubles. She had so many of her own. That night her work-hardened hands added an additional bruise to my lips. It was a dream. I dreamt that she became a judge. She could touch me across the frontiers of Dream but I could not touch her. She stood over my bed and sentenced me to leap at the ancient Bonampak wall as if I were a blunted infant in her womb. Bread was flesh-and-blood on my fists and lips. I awoke in a sweat that dripped into my mouth … My mother was a woman of Compassion.

  ‘Do you know,’ I cried to my Skeleton-twin, ‘that I have never understood that Dream until now on my descending with you into the inner Circus of the Grave?’

  We were strolling in pleasant fields and had stopped to watch the ghost-players of the Circus in the Paradise of the Rain God.

  Rain bruised their lips.

  A fleecy cloud descended and covered their head with Bread.

  ‘I understand the Dream now,’ I declared with Passion yet matter-of-fact Breath. ‘My mother – the gentlest, most caring woman in the world – became a severe muse or judge. I could not touch her in my Dream. She was looking at me with the eyes of Marie the Judge. She looked into my heart. I had never seen such eyes before. I had helped to make her into a Judge. When – out of love for her (was it love or was it fear?) – I did not go to her and ask her to wipe away the blood from my lips I condemned myself to eat the Bread of her sweat. She became a severe Muse or mother of humanity. She drove me to reflect on famines, on starving peoples who mask their hunger in a cloud that rains on Paradise still where dancing peasants are happy as larks. Do they dance now or do they dance in the long ago? I planted the seed of a game that hungry generations play. Sometimes they are driven by a destructive priesthood or statehood to swarm on battlefields, to lift the game into a killing spectacle. Thus it is that the Virgin gives birth through her son to the necessity to look deep into the furies, into love’s fury, into judgement day fury …’