Wilson Harris - Jonestown

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 …’