Wilson Harris - Jonestown

‘You are a cunning devil, Deacon. You would distract our attention from the fact that we assisted you to garner a fortune from Mount Roraima forty years ago.’

‘I know Deacon was here forty years ago,’ I agreed. ‘But I am not Deacon. He was seeking a fortune for Marie’s Child through whom he intended to rule his people. It was a kind of folkloric contract with the stars. They were savannah people. Up to all sorts of tricks and bargains. But Deacon was marked out from the day he was found in the savannahs and adopted by the entire community. A fallen angel! I know all this. I know that he fulfilled, in the eyes of the peasantry, some expectation of leadership if not kingship. He was pretty ruthless. His betrothal to Marie, for instance, was a national event. A small nation, needless to say! But does size matter? Does the size of Bonampak or Rome or Jerusalem or Bethlehem or Tula matter upon a deck of raining cards in which a kingdom or a hamlet may become the eye of a storm? The truth is I suffered from partial amnesia and severe trauma after the Jonestown holocaust. I slowly began unravelling the trauma as I made my way through Limbo Land to New Amsterdam, where I was well enough to begin my Dream-book and to sail in the company of Mr Mageye.’

‘What are you up to, Deacon? Do you think you can deceive us again? What Dream-book?’

‘Please,’ I asked. ‘Come to the point. Tell me why you have arrested me and what this trial is all about.’

‘You live in and out of your Dream-book, Deacon,’ they said with a harsh voice and humour like keys grating in prison locks. ‘ Well it’s time to come out and stay there. ’ They were mocking me I knew.

But there was more to it than the bite of mockery. There was a long and incredible pause in which Silence entered my voice as I confessed.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘come out, it’s true, on the other side of Dream, the other side where Dread stands. The trial. The judgement. On the other side of Dream. Not the other side of the grave. On the other side of Dream one lives, one is beyond all “beyonds” within a measure of measureless counterpoint between all extremities.’

My judges remained severe, unrelenting. Even as my Skeleton-twin had rebuffed me, but I knew now that rebuff and severity were part and parcel of extremity. How else would the immensity of counterpoint between all places, all extremities, prevail if one’s judges were less than severe?

‘We tell you straight,’ my judges cried. ‘Forty years ago, Deacon, we helped you to gain a fortune.’

‘I have no fortune. I am poor.’

They ignored my remark.

‘We helped you to gain a fortune,’ they insisted. ‘Roraima is the mother of Scorpions. The dread and fourth Virgin …’

‘On the other side of Dream,’ I confessed. ‘There she teaches me that Love can scarcely be borne, it is so infinite. It is Compassion, yet beyond all riddles and expectations of Compassion.’

‘We do not know what she teaches you, Deacon — you who claim to have fallen from the stars — but she taught us that without inoculation with the venom of the Scorpion you would be unable to climb the Rock …’

‘A misreading of the Scorpion Constellation,’ I said. ‘On the other side of Dream Roraima, the dread mother of Compassion, heals Mankind with and through all creatures in whose obscurity of soul repentance is the farthermost evolution Mind — despite its addiction to cruelty — may begin to contemplate …’

My judges were smiling now at the Fool I was.

‘We see you do recall the folklore of your region. So much for your plea of amnesia.’

I was stung into protest. ‘I never said I had forgotten everything. Partial amnesia. I had not forgotten pain , mental pain, and this was enough to keep me going and to give me the impetus to put myself in the shoes of the people of Jonestown on the Day of the Dead in a Play of extremities that sought to come abreast of their and my predicament. They were alive in me. So was Deacon in a variety of particularity. And Jonah …’

I stopped for an instant under the veiled gaze and unsmiling lips of my judges.

‘Deacon,’ I said, ‘was the father of Marie’s Child. This I knew, this I remembered. But — here’s the rub in eclipses of Memory that I had to endure — I suffered a void or a blank as to what actually happened to their Child, what illness. Child mortality throughout this century and past generations has been high in the Guyanas! Malaria is a species of predator. The building of Jonestown I knew was a kind of memorial for Deacon. But even there the circumstances grew vague for me after the holocaust. How to blend a memorial to a Child with the inferno! On the other side of Dream perhaps where I now stand … Jonestown was a memorial for me too when we started building … A memorial to my mother and the beggars and children she cared for in Albuoys-town. Once again how to blend a memorial dedicated to care with hell or the inferno. On the other side of Dream where we may arrive in the life of the Imagination … So you see there were eclipses and gaps in Memory theatre that I sought to fill within an original enterprise back into time yet forwards in changing dimensionalities of past time. I am not Deacon. Can you see?’

‘You are Deacon. We won’t be deceived again. We helped you …’

‘How did you help me? How did you help Deacon?’

‘We helped you by arranging for an Arawak Doctor or shaman to inoculate you with the venom of the Scorpion. Roraima is infested with scorpions. It is also a garden of rare treasures, exquisite plants, leaves, exquisite fossils of the soul of living landscapes. You were at liberty then to climb the great Rock, or mother of the Guyanas, to climb with scorpions riding on your back, on your limbs, at your throat. You were immune to their bite. Immune to pain. Their bite was nothing. It was as if you reached into and climbed Nothing. You climbed the greatest living fossil Apparition that takes us back to the rock of ages. You rifled it. You secured all you could carry. You secreted gold in your mouth, in the crevices of your body, everywhere. We helped you and we warned you.’

‘Warned me?’

‘We warned you, Deacon, that inoculation with the venom of the Scorpion forbids intercourse with women, with your Virgin wife Marie, it forbids your touching an infant in the cradle. It’s the curse of El Doradonne Midas secreted in Roraima …’

‘Oh my God,’ I cried to heaven. ‘I remember now. I see now through Deacon’s blind eyes in the Play on the other side of Dream. He forgot the shaman’s warning. I remember. I see through his blind eyes in the Play. The Play’s the thing, the real world beyond all real worlds. That is the innermost, outermost, vocation of trial and judgement in fiction. Or else fiction is dead. One must re-imagine death as a live fossil apparition. Imagination Dead Imagine. Deacon returned on the day that the Child was born, he lifted it into his arms. He felt himself superior to all curses. And the infant stiffened in his arms. A stone leaf grew where its face was, the face of the Child at the edge of Roraima. I saw it yet I did not see it in the exquisite garden of treasures, the most precious treasure of which is the soul of living landscapes which we abuse at the drop of a hat. Nemesis Hat! How can I bear it? How can I bear such knowledge in the Play? On the other side of Dream where a measureless counterpoint exists between all extremities …’ My eyes were light but I was weeping.

‘When the news of the death of the Child,’ said my judges, ‘seeped through to the waiting populace they turned upon you with a vengeance. They sought to tear you limb from limb, Deacon. You had become their Prisoner. But you escaped with the Titan’s (Jonah’s) help. He was able to bar them out. He was an American! We warned you but you forgot or ignored the curse.’ They stared at me with a veiled but savage humour. ‘Did you suffer another Eclipse of Memory, Deacon, when you lost the Child and were driven from your wife? You hid in the Shadow of a great Cat that covered the sun. Rich folklore, Deacon, but you won’t deceive us again. We have brought you out. Out into broad daylight in the setting sun …’