Wilson Harris - Jonestown

A deck of cards (celestial mathematics Deacon would have said) fall apparently randomly, haphazardly, upon the Skin of the Predator in Memory theatre. My body is amongst them now, old, young. The Ship of Bread is amongst them now. Eclipses appear within the Sky of the past (Eclipses of Memory) which one revisits and sees through historic blinds or curtains: such Eclipses have immediacy in the Dark of the Mind, the Mind of Memory, the Mind of history. Memorial stars appear over the cradles of humanity and arch in the neighbourhood of Eclipse. Such curvatures of light were apparently non-existent in the past to the Eye of history.

When the alterations in specialities of time, in the bristling life of the Predator that one touches in oneself, through oneself, beyond oneself, appear negligible, as negligible as a smashed, ghostly finger that one brings from the future into the past, one is (I am) inclined to dismiss or underestimate one’s trespass in space in the body of dreams and the scars that remain after every encounter with life in space. Such encounters slip from dream-memory but are revisited upon us in the fierce games that we play on Earth, games that sometimes shatter us into a revelation of inner, textual bodies, outer, textual bodies, inner tongues, outer tongues. But one misreads — in the flat, mechanical word — the intensity and the extensity of the Game, the Game of resurrection within and beyond the Grave of space. That is my Play of staggered yet orchestrated imageries …

Every misreading on my part stirs the Breath of the Predator into the pulse of another random fall from a deck of cards. In addition to a ghostly, sliced hand (that may attempt to sort the cards I receive) I suddenly find incalculable time imprinted on the gaol of flesh, the youth of flesh that I treasure. Imprinted on my Mask! On Deacon’s Mask when he fought as an Eagle-knight, an Eagle-angel, with the Titan Tiger Jonah! And still one may seek to deny an orchestration of self-confessional, self-judgemental imageries and their inevitable counterpoint but changing roles of appointment with the Predator whose claws are visible everywhere in a wounded universe. The epic repentance of the Predator takes us beyond the framed and flat word into the Virgin-archetype and the rhetoric of intercourse with reality shorn of violence in the illimitable (however apparently black-out) music of counterpointed universes into which we may leap.

Giant rocks and waterfalls and precipices on the Virgin deck of space intermingle with the Predator’s random, chastened pulse. Such is the riddle of my Play (my Play, Deacon’s Play, Mr Mageye’s Play?) in its Virgin transgression of frames of terror.

I turned at last to confront the Apparition of Roraima in geological time. I felt the scars of rock and waterfall and fossil grain in my bones and upon my skin in their eclipsed encounters with apparently inhospitable space, inhospitable grave.

Diamonds and gold seemed to bubble at my fingertips as I reached into the inhospitable grave of Roraima in its long and dangerous sojourn through geological ages to acquire a perch, an Eagle’s fierce perch, within and upon the watershed between the floodwaters of the Amazon and the torrential rapids of the Orinoco.

On the Eagle’s beak I saw a glistening network of Scorpions that seemed to aid me — within eclipses of Memory — in the acquisition of gold from the rock of ages, the waterfalls of ages in great Roraima.

Extraordinary plants and flowers shone with teeth and brilliant flowering, repetitive lips in the Shadow of the Scorpion Constellation … Yet when I reached again nothing was there. Nothing itself was a fossil apparition in space. Much depended on the apparently random fall of the deck — its corresponding imprints upon oneself — if one were to reach into time past in the present relived moment for an incalculable storage of wealth that had evolved and accumulated. The hazards and dangers varied with apparently random imprints that made time past accessible in tangible form when one rifled secret hoards in fire and rock and water and space.

I had clearly no apparitional key — in this instance — to secure a fortune in apparitional diamonds and gold from apparitional Roraima. Were I to return in a hundred years or a million years I would then perhaps be able to trespass into fire and rock as if I had arisen from the Grave. I would have conversed with life in the universe for the necessary key. Or perhaps I would fail again, be driven to retreat again, and return again through eclipses of Memory theatre …

Scylla and Charybdis were Clashing Rocks but there were Swimming Rocks in Roraima or fossils imprinted with Vegetable gold that I tried again to reach but it seemed to reside on the sickbed of the Predator and within some unfathomable music or orchestration of the powers of Love within the Virgin …

I knew I could not seize the Vegetable gold but my mind and heart were light in my ageing body …

It was then that I was seized by the natives I had seen upon the hillsides. They were masked judges and I was unable to tell who they were. Their slightly halting, awkward pace made me wonder whether they were as old or young as I, lame or leaping as I.

It was a consolation to dwell upon such thoughts. Surely they would question me and let me leave. But they seized me roughly and bore me up a hillside towards a cliff-top above the Waterfall.

When we arrived they took the Skin of the Predator from me and spread it on a table.

‘We caught you red-handed,’ they said, ‘with your hands in the Roraima till, Deacon.’

I wanted to laugh as if their utterance was a joke but I knew it was no joke. I flung out my hands from my body.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I tried to reach into what I saw. There was something there. It seemed at one stage to nestle in my fingertips but it melted, one assumes, for there was nothing there though I swear there was something. It was like a sunset and a sunrise within the breaking, crumbling Void of the universe. They are nothing, but when they harden yet run within volcanic space they become a black river of gold.’

I tried to brazen out my predicament in the light of the severity of their veiled faces, veiled eyes, unsmiling, bitter lips.

‘Liar,’ they cried in unison. They seized me and pushed their fists into my pockets. I felt their fists opening like roses or crabs and in an instant they came forth with gold and diamonds that were strewn on the Predator’s Skin into neat piles and heaps.

‘Liar,’ they repeated. ‘Where did you get this?’

I was utterly astonished and unable to reply.

‘Soon you will tell us, Deacon, that you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth and that you sold this in your infancy, infant unconsciousness, for a fortune.’

‘Mockery is not proof,’ I cried. ‘I tell you there was nothing there. You have framed me. ’

‘ We have framed you ?’ They spoke with fury and deliberation.

‘Well you must have done so,’ I cried. ‘For there was nothing there. And I am not Deacon .’

‘Ah! we were waiting for that. We knew you would deny it all.’

‘Deny what?’

‘Deny that we have caught you at the scene of the crime. You couldn’t keep away, could you, Deacon?’

Where and what I wondered was the scene of the crime? I stroked the Skin of the Predator. In the dying afternoon light it shone with disturbing beauty. There were idyllic portions in the Skin where sheep and lambs seemed to graze and birds flew. There were portions that gleamed with swords and shields and armour. There were portions that appeared to invoke the launching of ships, the arrival of Cortés and Pizarro in ancient America.

‘Where is the scene of the crime?’ I demanded.