Wilson Harris - Jonestown

‘Good God,’ I cried. ‘It’s impossible. She is the guardian of the Virgin.’

‘She is,’ said Mr Mageye. ‘We all are, aren’t we? Up and down streets and highways and in the byways — in planes that sail in the sky, in trains, in buses, in saloons, in brothels for that matter — the Virgin resides protected in someone’s handbag or pocket or wallet. Is it superstition, or is it a promise of welfare, or is it an insurance? Yes, we are all guardians … But economic necessity is a plague. Hell is everywhere around us despite heaven. Kali kills out of brutal economic necessity. The male child is privileged, the female is sometimes a liability. I know it’s hideously perverse. Kali is associated with the guardianship of the Virgin yet kills infant females! It’s a bleak parable, civilization fuels Kali, civilization sustains her, when economic necessity incorporates violence into itself and Love, the Virgin’s Love, becomes an ornament . The chasm between necessity and love needs to be bridged ceaselessly … Unless it is bridged the male child freezes into stone, the saviour-archetype is blunted. All this runs deeper than gender. Archetypes run deeper than gender. Their manifestation is partial at the best of times. We need to read them in their broken fabric, we need to read differently. Remember Herod slew male infants in panic and cold-hearted self-interest at the thought of the coming of a saviour that might shake the walls of his kingdom. When one reads reality differently from slavish alignment to literal frame or code, when one reads by way of indirections that diverge from formula or frame, by way of weighing another text (a hidden text) in a given text, then the privileged male discloses privilege as a form of perversity, a trauma, that cracks open to hint at the saviour-archetype dressed in partialities and biases that civilization should never absolutize or it is forever trapped in the venom of history.

‘Likewise the pathetic female infant on Kali’s wheel may still break the shell of brute economic necessity to reveal the Virgin-archetype on the Cross of the Wheel. The chasm between gender, male and female, is momentarily bridged …’

I listened silently and was nudged by my Dream-book into contemplating American Indian peoples that were decimated since the Conquest. Was this decimation driven by brute economic necessity?

‘God help children if we succumb to the tyranny of gender and expunge mixed origins in the body of the archetype, saviour-archetype, Virgin-archetype.’

‘Children? What children, Deacon?’ Jones demanded.

Jonah Jones was a naturalist in accepting changeless vice, changeless virtue, the naturalism of the charismatic pulpit, the charismatic preacher pledged to incorrigible eternity.

He seemed oblivious of the cosmic Spider (the Carnival attire of a Child) on the dining-room coffin. He seemed oblivious of its subtle Carnival metamorphoses as it hopped on the floor and crept out of the room onto the riverbank and into the fabric of Mr Mageye’s Camera. Its eyes gleamed, light-year eyes within the cradle of humanity in the soil of the Earth; light-year eyes sensitive all at once in a peculiar and unexpected way to the wheeling presence of Kali. I felt my phantom fingers move on my hand that had been despoiled by Deacon’s bullet on the Day of the Dead even though they were alive now, it seemed, in the cosmic Spider.

Jones’s addiction to changelessness made him oblivious of such sensitivity attuned to a changing nature of natures within myself and within a cosmic Child or saviour-archetype or Spider quest in the stars and upon the Earth.

The Spider knew how unprepossesing it was, it knew the terror it could infuse into others. He (or It) knew it had edged itself into the lineaments of the nightmare guardians of the Virgin. But, on the other hand, its attunement to the mystical technology of the Gods, exercised in my phantom fingers, gave it a grasp or hold on the Virgin’s unconditional love …

Outcast from heaven it seemed to be (yet so was Prometheus). It dined at its master’s table in the rafter of coffins, it instigated worms and fishes to transmute themselves into stars beside the Scorpion signature of lightning that breaks the door of the tomb.

I could scarcely believe the multi-layered, redistributive focus of Carnival which I dreamt or thought or visualized in my Dream-book. Spider-metamorphosis enveloped the cradle and the grave and a resurrection of consciousness through the door of space, a resurrection steeped in caveats, bitter counsels not to be deceived by lies (an age of lies) even when nature appears to change, when human nature in animal natures appears to change, to acquire attunement to a redemptive, evolutionary capacity within a universal creation.

There was craft, there was daemonic, self-mocking humour in the Spider’s Eye, Spidery ape of Christ, ape of Prometheus. And so — in becoming aware of lies as I gazed into the depths of cosmic Tricksters reflected in a Child’s masquerade in the womb of space, Spider Carnival masquerade in earth and in heaven — I was seized with sorrow, with a conviction of truth one must pursue within the innermost recesses of the living Word.

I was suddenly aware of the magnetic charm and beauty of the Predator born less of the Virgin and more from the shamanic lore of Tricksters. The Spider itself was unprepossessing and without apparent beauty. Except for his brilliant Eye that mirrored the door of the tomb split asunder by lightning.

I looked up suddenly as though lightning indeed had flashed through counterpointed immovable and movable doors of the Void. LEAP … LEAP … But I held my ground in fear of counterpointed imageries and spaces, orchestrated paradox … I was fearful still of my capacity to leap backwards/forwards in space and time.

I looked up at Mr Mageye’s Cinema where I was playing the role of Deacon (Masked actor Bone as Deacon’s ghost-flesh on the screen). I was confronting Jonah in the whale of the sun upon the screen or stage.

A terrifying role to play, terrifying Mask to wear on my sculpted yet frail shoulders. Was Deacon satisfied with my performance? Was he pleased with my split performance as I sat in the banqueting hall and looked up at myself/himself up there in space, in the Void of cinematic heaven?

Such conflict of conscience on my part (which led me to breach or cancel the pact with Jones), such conflict in Deacon’s psyche (which led him to duel on the Moon with Titan Jonah) did not appear to arouse Jonah Jones’s apprehensions. He was firm in his allegiance to unchanged natures since time began, in his mind, its slippage into eternity.

As such he was less tormented — if at all — by the lie that I had perceived in the perversity of saviours which haunted the womb of space. How to accept responsibility — I asked myself — for a lie (an age of lies), which taints creation, yet submit oneself to the trial and judgement of truth one still (however precariously) embodies …?

I sat and dined now under the constellation of Trickster-Prometheus in the banqueting hall as if a coffin had been raised over my head from which I would awaken, or had awakened, when I ascended from the Nether World.

Prometheus, quite rightly, broke a pact with the Titan of eternity. But in so doing — out of fear perhaps (fear such as I had felt when I broke with Jonah Jones) — he invoked the lie in the Trickster’s heart. Deacon and I had lied to Jones on the eve of the holocaust. We had pretended to be one with him when we dined … Prometheus lied to cover his rebellion. He lied in order to conceal himself, in order to plot. Violence was born out of apparent necessity, necessary rebellion, necessary lies. Why did he lie? Why had he not rebuked the Titan openly and inscribed his heart as a token of life in outer space, a token of therapeutic angelic blood to revive creative spirit in a fallen, human race? He saw his chance to rule. That was it! He would rule with the gift of fire though fire was an incalculable element and from its ash would spring birds of prey and predators and all the extraordinary — sometimes nightmare — guardians of unconditional love; from its ash would spring the Predator, the magnetic beauty and charm of the Predator clothed in bars of shadow and fire. So was the Predator born in the vein of species, in the wake of a lie which would convert fire into ammunition and self-injury for humanity. The stress of counterpoint appeared within an inimitable haven (hoped for, longed-for) between fire and fire, therapeutic heart of fire and injurious ammunition of fire that humanity employs. A chastened and chastening music was born (within Love itself) whose sublimity, whose toppling precipice of sound was possessed of harmony and complaint, earthquake, lightning, storm, concordance, dissonance.