Wilson Harris - Jonestown

‘Alas,’ said Mr Mageye, ‘society never forgives transgressors. One knows how obdurate one is. Repentance remains a bleak task in the face of one’s own obduracy and within an unforgiving world.’ He plucked a number of threads from his unravelling robe. I was reminded of the threads that had fallen from my Nemesis Hat upon his grave in Albuoystown and upon my mother’s grave. Was Mr Mageye an apparition, a solid ghost that had begun to shed its cloak? Of course he was. I had long been aware of this. What was astonishing were the bodies within the bodies, the ghosts within ghosts, tree within tree, that addressed one within black-out music of dissolving spheres, resurrectionary spheres. Deacon had trespassed into my Ear as ghost within ghost to inform me of the face of the Child within a leaf upon the phallic tree. Mr Mageye had spoken of the Vegetable Sphinx in the desert. Titan Jonah had become a dwarf …

‘Society is adamant. It rarely forgives. One has to start from within in order to bestow — as each garment falls — another page in Memory theatre’s Dream-book on which to assemble new traces or traceries of repentance in the fictionality and actuality of the Dark soul. That is why, Francisco, I shall leave you the skin of the Predator when I go. Write upon it, Francisco. Write the last (or is it the first?) epic of repentance. Society tends to be unforgiving. Murderers never change, do they? They must be punished to the end of time. Under lock and key if not on the gallows or the electric chair. None exists to convince the social animal that the heart of the wild is susceptible to change! None except the Predator whose repentance is our only hope. I know in my innermost self and so do you. I am the Enigma of change. I live with predators. I am the Sphinx. The Lion is my dress and so is the Tiger and the Eagle and the Vulture and the Serpent’s grace and gentleness of the Dove. You are a diminutive survivor, Francisco, in whom live multitudes, prey and predators and victims alike. We are reflections of the Vegetable encounter with all species within paradoxes of evolution which may lay bare a resurrectionary, innermost consciousness which breaks the mould of the everlasting tyranny of the unconscious. We are unconscious of the debts we owe others in history, we are unconscious of the crimes that we have committed in ourselves or through our antecedents. No medium can help us except life in the Precipice of the Dark mind. No word can help us except another music that we blindly see or hear in the computerized grave of the globe or cage of rhythmic numbers.’

Mr Mageye turned his gaze on Jones. He signalled that he was about to depart, to take his leave of us. He had been in contradistinction to the tyranny of the unconscious — a supreme teacher of unravelled obduracies that gave way by stages to meaningful sacrifice within my Dream-book.

Every supreme teacher wears the Mask of Enigma, Jest and Compassion in ruined banqueting halls, ruined Colleges, ruined legislatures, senates, in Brazil, in the Guyanas, Mexico, the Yucatan, everywhere … Perhaps a state of ruin had been hidden but present all along, misconceived beginnings, misconceived empires, doomed Colonies, doomed Jonestown, Bonampak, Chichén Itzá.

He tossed the skin of the Predator to me.

I scarcely knew him now. He was devoid of his robes. The Skeleton-twin of all creatures! But that could prove to be another masquerade in some other dimension, some other universe.

‘Write upon the Skin,’ he said. ‘Use quills plucked from the Eagle or the Vulture. Write upon the walls of rotting, colonial institutions, test every fragment of a biased humanities, break the Void by sifting the fabric of ruin for living doorways into an open universe. This is my last gift. Remember me, Francisco.’

‘Francisco? Francisco? Where is he hiding?’

‘In my Mask, in my head,’ I said. But Jones looked at me, at Deacon (whose Mask I wore) with scorn.

My first task — as Mr Mageye began to leave the hall (I knew I would never see him again, and I wept) — was to collect the scraps that littered the floor of the banqueting hall. Scraps of an orgy on my wedding night. I thought of civilization’s sacrificial supper which Leonardo da Vinci had painted. I had once dreamt of buying this for the Virgin Ship but could not raise the requisite millions in gold.

Was it possible to build a Ship of Bread from the scraps in the banqueting hall? Was it possible to sail upon this to seek a fortune for Marie’s first-born? The Play in Memory theatre, my revisitation of the Day and the Year of the Wedding, required me to sail in Deacon’s footsteps to Roraima, to wear his Mask, and to return with a fortune. But black-out music made me conscious of discrepancies in Memory and of a changed spatiality in time as I contemplated the journey. I felt I was under the eye of judges whose faces I could not discern. I looked hard but they vanished.

The shattered banqueting hall — shattered across forty years from 1954 to 1994 — was littered with trampled crumbs of bread, meat, fish, rice, sugar …

‘Guyana is poor,’ I said to Jones. ‘Is it not time to contemplate a new Economy for the North, Central and South Americas? Guyana is shackled to an accumulation of negative dollars and interest on “futures” as obdurate and solid as Atlas and the globe on his back. Brazil is shackled to inflation. Destitution is starkest when seen backwards from discouraging futures within flexible generations nevertheless and a Waste Land of Politics; generations that need to ask themselves profoundest questions about the life and death of the Imagination, the limits of materialism and realism, the necessity to transgress boundaries into the hidden caveats of ancient civilizations, to leap beyond conventional codes of racial or cultural individualism, and into cross-cultural epic born of diverse re-visioned legacies and inheritances …’

I began to assemble buckets and baskets of bread scattered everywhere on the floor after a riot, a century of riots, a century of hunger and orgies.

I stopped and mounted a rostrum under the screen on which Mr Mageye’s film had appeared. Jones came close and waited. Perhaps — I was unsure — he expected me to pay him a tribute. He had forked out a lot of American dollars to make the banquet a roaring success. Poor people’s fees to the Doctor and Jones’s American dollars (Jones had been attached to Deacon in San Francisco even more than he had protected and favoured me) were not to be sneezed at. Jones saw himself as a giant back in 1954, but now that he had returned to the year of the wedding across fifty years, the disguises that he had worn, since his death (or deaths) in 1978, had perversely accumulated or subsided into the head of a mighty dwarf.

‘I am steeped,’ I said to the audience in the banqueting hall, ‘in a bottomless sense of sorrow at Mr Mageye’s departure. In olden days, it is said, humanity mourned the passing of a golden age into a silver age. In later days nostalgia seemed to feed upon despair. Gold and silver had declined into lead or bronze or coal or oil or bauxite or whatever.

‘Each age and its passing — whether golden or bronze or bauxite — was neatly labelled as fate or fact within history’s unswerving plot, unswerving closure of the lives of labouring men and women.

‘But Mr Mageye taught me differently. He sought to unshackle history and fiction from predatory coherence or closure that reduces communities to a desert …’

I stopped. I was aware that Jones was listening intently but a cloud overshadowed his brow. He listened but did not wish to hear what he heard. As if it were a book he turned each page but did not wish to read what he read. ‘Deacon is inventing a new language,’ he said silently to himself as he confronted my Mask. ‘But no,’ I replied as silently as he. ‘I am drawing upon dynamic resources within a living language that we could so easily imprison and forfeit.’