Jonestown

by Wilson Harris

  My Skeleton-twin stared at me with his mourning glance. It was he who – in bringing me to descend into the depths of the Circus that he knew so well – had opened my eyes to a Passion for truth upon all obdurate frontiers between the Inferno and Paradise.

  He almost regretted it now but it was too late to turn back.

  ‘The hidden figures who assist us,’ he said, ‘the hidden judges who appear to condemn us, are at every wedding feast of the Virgin that is attended by the rich and the poor. They rub shoulders in hope of honeymooning in heaven. Do you recall the Animal Goddess and Jonah in the Oracle-Brothel?’

  ‘That was no wedding feast,’ I cried.

  ‘It was an affair of the charismatic heart in which an enslaving Goddess or Judge turned into a figure of Compassion. Jonah was upheld on a log and a net and given a chance to repent. Mr Mageye will film him once again at Deacon’s (and your) wedding feast. Repentance is hollow and meaningless without Muses and Virgins. Let me tell you a secret that you may have already guessed! Even as the Animal Goddess is the seer of the Brothel I am the seer of GRAVE LAND! And Francisco I see Kali of Port Mourant …’

  ‘Who is Kali?’ I cried.

  ‘She is a pin-up Goddess for the peasants of Port Mourant. She came from India with indentured servants in the nineteenth century who are amongst Marie of Port Mourant’s antecedents. She is a severe and terrifying judge who walks in the shadow of Marie. There again one comes upon a frontier between caring love and judgement shawl that Kali wears. These shall be visible at Deacon’s (and your) wedding feast when you both wed the Virgin of Port Mourant: concretely (in Deacon’s tragic marriage to her), apparitionally (in your retrial of the wedding and of Deacon’s hubris of immunity to pain in planting the seed of foetal majesty and great but illusory fortune in her). These are riddling terms but you shall see. A seer tests the Imagination to re-examine all “futures” in the light of “pasts”. You shall see I trust.’

  *

  What was visible to me now in the Circus of the nether world was the game of PRISONERS in ‘futures’ and ‘pasts’… The game was in full swing in Bonampak’s Paradise of the Rain God.

  The players were installed at a great gambling table in the middle of a field.

  It was a sacred game set in a curiously pagan yet modern context that I could not easily define and which prompted me to ask my Skeleton-twin about ‘futures’ and ‘pasts’ … I heard him grumbling in response to my question: ‘There’s no short-cut for orphans like yourself, Francisco – born at the extremities of many cultures and civilizations in South America – with regard to “futures” and “pasts”. You are immersed in motherships, brideships, twinships, games of every complexion. No short-cut! Each riddle that I offer in the Circus of the Grave is a promise of immersion in experienced truth – the experience of truths to be borne by you within the blending of ages and times – not a recourse to formula or plot …’

  He raised a bony cautionary finger into the air and I was reminded of my mother’s work-hardened hands and of the mystery of pain. I touched my lips as though they bled in the school ground of long ago yet of which I was conscious again as an ingrained callous in this instant within my present age. Dream callous! Dream-conscience and the labyrinthine ruses of love and fear through which one may seek to short-circuit pain. Had my mother’s work-hardened hands touched my lips they might have bled all the more. An extraordinary game!

  One field of the past overlaps another riddling future in the Circus of the Grave when the dice are cut from Bone. Cut from my Skeleton-twin’s cautionary finger.

  ‘Cut also,’ said my Skeleton-twin, ‘from the bone beneath the flesh of the two fingers sliced from your hand, Francisco, in Jonestown from Deacon’s apparently random bullet.’

  ‘Do you mean,’ I cried, ‘that the dice are cut from me? And from you?’

  ‘And from the Virgin’s work-hardened nails as well …’

  It was a cunning Jest of the crucifixion of the globe that Mr Mageye would have envied.

  ‘The ancestry and progeny of the dice in the Paradise of the Rain God – in a pagan Grave as much as a Christian Grave – are the substance of new riddles of the mystery of pain and the hubris that we now entertain of immunity to pain.’

  I studied the players closely as they threw the dice which bounced it seemed in my own flesh upon the table. I felt I was in danger of being torn to shreds by Maya peasants and savages. But a Prisoner came forward. He was surrounded by a crowd of dancers who shuffled up to him and touched him.

  ‘They should be unable to touch him,’ I cried in alarm.

  The Game in the Nether World had now become a battle: passions, emotions, spectres, realities, crossings, recrossings, judges, graces. But by and large the Game was steeped in terrors and uncertainties. Fear lit the Circus of the Grave. And I feared for my life. Grave Land. Nether World. Uncanny Circus. Staggered identities or names of Fear. Fear ran riot on the field. I would be unable to return to the Virgin Ship. Would I make it? Would I escape? Fear cooled a little within me. The riot seemed to subside. But all the danger signals remained.

  No sign of my guide, seer, Skeleton-twin.

  I looked for him at the heart of the scrum but he was not to be seen. The battle that ensued was fought, or played, at the gambling table in the field of the Paradise of the Rain God.

  It was a battle over the Pagan Body (its susceptibility to the elements), Pagan Sport, Pagan Riot, Pagan Economies in Third Worlds, Second Worlds, First Worlds …

  The Pagan Body had long seemed irrelevant to Western and Eastern, Northern and Southern ideologies. Yet one caught a glimpse of intrinsic paganism in the embalmed frames of charismatic warriors or revolutionaries or saints. One caught a glimpse of a family of Skeleton-twins fleshed with natural-seeming, unnatural flesh within the gloom and the glitter of sarcophagi open to tourists: Moscow, Vietnam, ancient and modern Egypt and Rome.

  Such glimpses led me to fight for Breath to save my own life. And yet I was convinced of the complexities of resurrectionary pulse within the wrappings of the Pagan Body.

  I heard the sudden clamour of giants of chaos that Deacon had embalmed in a coffin in Crabwood Creek when he lassoed the Horses of the Moon and the riders on their backs. Were Third World Presidents and Prime Ministers of Guyana and Brazil in that Coffin?

  Could they spring up and seize me? They were here. Sudden clamour, for now I knew the masked players at the table! Not only Presidents and Prime Ministers but Bankers and Peasants played at the table. They belonged to all parties across the generations of colonial and post-colonial histories. Some looked as Mayan or as Chinese as Lenin in the guise of a Pope gambling with millions of followers at the table of Latin American history. All well and good to mock them I thought, but I knew they knew me as one of the involuntary architects of the Jonestown holocaust.

  It almost took my Breath away again, for they gambled with the dice of my bones, a benumbed survivor’s bones …

  Carnival has many wrappings in the Circus of the Grave and Breath becomes an essential mystery for survivors who descend into ‘futures’ and ‘pasts’.

  Politicians and Peasants – in their embalmed masquerade – are also Bankers: quite ordinary folk whom Deacon had indeed thrust into the Coffin: ordinary, extraordinary Coffin. Was it the death of politics around the globe and in Guyana?

  I repeated to myself again and again: ‘They are the ghost-players at the gambling table and my heart rises into my mouth.’

  I fell on my knees in the scrum of worlds ancient and modern. I could not hold the players but they seemed capable of crushing me to smithereens.

  I could not hold them but I was suddenly sensitive to my pagan lips bruised on the playing fields of Boyhood. I was sensitive to the Carib bone-flute within the natural, unnatural flesh that Deacon had bitten, it seemed, with his gun in Jonestown. Bitten from my hand! I was sensitive to the ground in which my mother’s body lay in Albuoystown. Two or three blades of grass from my Nemesis Hat still s
prang there. They resembled rain in the Paradise of the Rain God.

  The difficulty in identifying the Pagan Body in Christian currencies, in Marxian money, or in any other Political or Religious cash denomination, lay – I felt – in the weight one gave to the blood of apparitions which sit on chests of treasure, embalmed treasure, that have been secured in the teeth of battle. The apparitions wave like flags on the Moon upon which Deacon and Jonah fought so fiercely on the day and night of the holocaust.

  On the face of it such treasure was of museum value but blood was as real as dice. It dried (this was true) on one’s lips and left its stamp there. But its imprint, its labyrinth of love and fear, was a miraculous toss of chance or fate … Was Breath a matter of chance or of fate? Did freedom lie between chance and fate?

  I looked up at the Prisoner who stood at the heart of the mysterious battle in the Nether World. Pagan surrogate God? Solid apparition on the treasure chest of the globe? Christian surrogate God? I could not be sure. But I grieved with all my heart (as if it were the world’s heart) for him. The crowd closed in on him, it touched him, they touched him, but he seemed still set apart and able to withstand assault. An extraordinary Game!

  ‘Real rain, real blood, runs in his veins,’ I cried. ‘He is as real as the Breath in my body. I know only too well now – as I stand or kneel in danger beside him – how pitiless is the crowd that surrounds him. Should they succeed in genuinely seizing him …’ I stopped. There were tears in my eyes that dropped like fluid dice in the Paradise of the Rain God. ‘Should they seize him it would be a phenomenal event in the Nether World. Should they – this beastly crowd of savages – cross the frontier between themselves and him, it would be a phenomenal seizure …’ Seizure of God, the killing of God, surrogate Prisoner-God?

  The ghost-players and Bankers and Peasants and Teachers and Politicians at the table – giants of chaos they were – dressed in natural, unnatural flesh like embalmed figures, underpinning ideologies and dogmas, looked up at me. They gave an incredible smile that shook me on my knees until the pain I felt broke into my joints. But I remained precariously whole and free to fight my way up from the Nether World of the Circus.

  They threw their dice at the same instant that our eyes met. Diced eyes. I gasped as each die revealed a limb, an organ imprinted upon it, a splinter on my lip imprinted on it, eyes in my lips. Dream Body. Pagan Body. They were gambling on behalf of the crowds that surged around the Prisoner.

  They piled the dice into a corner of the field or the table and secured another handful from their pockets to fling again upon table or field.

  But it was the Prisoner’s turn now to throw. I gasped as he threw his lot on the table. The Players and the crowds leaned over – they shook their heads – when each die cast by the Prisoner proved as blank as a slate. Black slate. White slate.

  ‘Tell him,’ the giants of chaos said to me, ‘that he might as well surrender himself of his free will. Give himself freely to the crowds.’

  I was heartbroken at the price that the Prisoner was asked to pay to reveal to the blind throng the jointed nests in the Phallic tree of space. ‘It is unjust,’ I said. ‘It is the mystery of injustice.’

  There was a lull in the Game.

  ‘Here in Bonampak,’ they said to me, ‘we secure Prisoners and treat them as guests of heaven. If they want choice maidens they may have them. If they want banquets they may have them. All we ask in return is that when we bring them to trial at the gambling table they surrender their organs, heart and limb, to be given to the Sun. It’s an honourable vocation. To serve as a Prisoner taken in battle! In that way we light the Breath of the Sun in the sky.’

  ‘Barbarous, barbarous,’ I cried. ‘Barbarous, barbarous.’

  ‘Is the Sun barbarous, Francisco? The Sun requires sacrifice. It’s up to the Prisoners! If they give of themselves freely – few if any in our experience have so far – then they will be spared the assault of the crowds (we will carve them up gently like foxes in the field, that’s all); the crowds see them as the fountainhead of fortune and prosperity! They must give all they possess. Not only their body but the children of their body if they have any. For one of those children may prove to be a king or a saviour. If they hold back, if they claim that the gift of freedom under the Sun is premature, that Mankind is still unfit to carry the burden of freedom, then alas the bonfire of passion in the crowds awaits them, there is nothing we can do but roll dice and wait. We are Bankers, Teachers, Politicians. We please the crowds even as we make them subservient to Money and to Propaganda.’

  I was tempted – God knows! – to applaud their cynical jesting at the state of my corrupt age but I knew I was witnessing an unforgettable counterpoint between ancient savage ritual and mystical dismemberment scarcely understood as the twentieth century drew to a close. Unforgettable yet scarcely understood! Did a chasm exist between Memory, the history of Memory, and the genesis of mystical dismemberments as a redistributive focus of variable supports not only for Suns and planets but for disadvantaged cultures in need of sustenance and Breath everywhere? Such a chasm – and its reconnaissance – was pertinent to the Nether World in which we confront ourselves, our spectral selves, our inbuilt peasants and exploiters, prosecutors, inbuilt victims that we are in the scrum of the Game …

  I could scarcely speak but I managed to whisper: ‘What throw of the die from him – this Prisoner – do you wait for?’

  ‘A moment will come,’ they cried, ‘when a face or a Mask will appear on a die that he throws …’

  ‘What face? What Mask?’

  ‘Who knows? The Mask of an angel-bridegroom.’ They hesitated, then they were emboldened by the operatic mystery of the Nether World.

  ‘Yes,’ they cried, ‘this is a trial that he cannot escape. And sooner or later the bridegroom will appear on a die: one destined to marry his daughter whom he is unwilling to surrender. The crowds will break him then, Francisco.’

  With this alarming pronouncement they shuffled together the dice that they had thrown and proceeded to expose them to my gaze. My head rested on its chin at the edge of the table.

  I knew of the imprinted organs and limbs but there was another die that I had missed entirely. It was a cross-sectional exposure of the Prisoner’s body in which Deacon sat as upon a pillow of leaves or stone.

  ‘Is this the die of which you speak?’ I cried. I could not believe my eyes. ‘What does it mean?’

  At long last they replied.

  ‘Deacon gaoled us in a Coffin. You do remember, don’t you? You and Mr Mageye were there filming the event.’ They spoke almost accusingly. ‘He is destined to be our liberator. Gaoler. Liberator. What a paradox. We bank on him. We teach his name. Deacon fell from the stars to expose centuries and generations in conquistadorial regimes in which populations were decimated and buried yet liberated in colonial history books. The legacy is strong. It encompasses all our presidents, prime ministers, etc. It encompasses the business of politics, industry, statecraft, education, everything. Burial. Liberation.’

  ‘Everything depends,’ I said, poking my head onto the gambling table, ‘on how we shoulder such legacies in order to take responsibility for our own fate enmeshed into the fate of others in ourselves. We need to go beyond politics and history …’

  They eyed me severely as if my head had been draped in a veil. Then they put their lips against my ears which were plainly visible.

  ‘Let us put it like this, Francisco. Deacon is a cross-sectional apparition, at one level, of our residences in the Prisoner, our fate in the Prisoner, the gift of freedom bestowed upon us by the Prisoner.’

  The smooth run of their voices filled me with misgiving.

  ‘You, Francisco,’ they declared, ‘may see us as thieves or tricksters but remember! we play interchangeable roles. Savage. Civilized.’ There was a hiss now to their voices. ‘We play voices in a crowd. We play that we fall on our knees, as you do, beside the Prisoner.’ I swore they were surreptitiously changing the
ir masks as they leaned closer to my veiled or shadowed head on the table before them. ‘How can the rich save the poor,’ they demanded, ‘the poor the rich, the thief the saint, the saint the thief, the judge the judged, the judged the judge, unless they discard contentment, or self-righteous creed, self-righteous parasitism, and build dimensions of self-confessional, self-judgemental art, that take them into recesses and spaces that may pull them into and beyond themselves? Unless this happens in the theatre of civilizations evolution remains a WASTE LAND and religion contracts into a Void. Yes, the Prisoner sometimes seems the architect of the Void in his uncertainties as to the nature of freedom in art, in science.’

  Their voices grew blunt as if they had reversed their killing knives into self-confessional relics of terrifying Spirituality, terrifying necessity to change the music at the heart of the Sun, the heart of creation.

  ‘So Francisco!’ A drum in my senses throbbed.

  ‘So Francisco!’ they repeated. ‘We know the danger you are in. Yet the possibilities of a re-visionary surgery of Spirit! An old/new head. A new/old responsibility. You descended into the Grave with your twin even as we were pushed there by Deacon when he lassoed the Horses of the Moon. And believe me our protean reflections – inbuilt reflected exploiters, inbuilt reflected exploited – will pursue you should you escape from the Grave …’

  The odd way they put it – ‘our reflections will pursue you should you escape from the Grave’ – was a blow that I could not fathom. As though they had sliced my head from my body with their sharp/blunt knives and I would need to strengthen my frame, my tissues, my muscles to replace it with another. ‘Believe us!’ they cried. ‘You will see. We shall elect Deacon …’ Was it a threat? Was it a promise?