From Jonestown (Imagination Dead Imagine)

Note

This extract is taken from fiction-in-progress provisionally entitled Jonestown (Imagination Dead Imagine).

The Longman Chronicle of America tells of the "tragedy of Jonestown" and of the scene of "indescribable horror" that greeted the eyes of reporters when they arrived in Jonestown in a remote forest in Guyana in late November 1978.

Questions are raised about the charismatic power of a cult leader to induce such self-inflicted holocaust.

My fiction possesses its trigger in such events but it is, in no respect, a historical portrait. Jonah Jones, Deacon, Francisco Bone--who appear in this excerpt--are archetypal and fictional characters. They bear no resemblance whatever to living or dead persons.

Francisco created a book of dreams in order to break the trauma he suffered in surviving the holocaust. He sees Jonestown as a recent manifestation of the enigma of vanished populations, abandoned cities, lost cultures in the Central and South Americas.

Bone is affected by a strand in the ancient Maya civilization in which the linearity of time is breached in favor of a twinning of pasts and futures. The archetypes of the past become unfathomable and are woven into "unknowns" arriving from the future. Such compressions in and of time would imply, I feel, gestating resources within the womb of tradition. Tradition, then, cannot be taken for granted. Our tendency to do so reinforces fixtures of bias that we erect into absolutes and closures that threaten the life of the Imagination.

I have adopted the phrase Imagination Dead Imagine from one of Samuel Beckett's short novels.

Wilson Harris
July 1994

I lay in a clump of bushes like a dead man. Scarcely breathing. My head rested on a cushion of stone. I dreamt of angels ascending and descending into Jonestown. Jonestown was above me in the skeletons of the stars. No stars now at midday. Only the sunlit dead on the ground. How incredibly soft is stone when one fears flesh-and-blood!

Jonah Jones was still alive with a gun. He would appear, I knew, at any moment in the Clearing.

There was a split leaf close to my nose through which--with slightly lowered head away from my pillow--I began to count the dead bodies on the ground. They lay not far from the rude church in which they had worshipped an hour or two ago. One swore one could hear their voices still rising into the heart of the South American Forest that seemed now in me yet as remote from me as the Milky Way blotted out by sunlight . . .

I felt a mental splinter sharp as the nib of bone; and voiced my own lament in tune with their vanished voices. The voice of bone was the art of the Word, of sculpture, of painting within the holocaust.

"Good God!" the bone sang.

The bone ceased for a while its tremulous, echoing tracery of scriptures of sorrow. It ceased yet never ceased for it continued to make silent pictures until the wordlessness of the sleeping choir of the dead in the Clearing welled up around me.

A woman whose name was Marie Antoinette was clutching a mystical cup or grail of music from which she had drunk milk and sugar and deadly cyanide. Her head lolled on the ground. Her torso wore the blind sunlight of Carnival. It was the sheer ordinariness of the cup against the lips in the head that struck me to the heart, the lips' communion with Silence.

All at once the Reverend Jonah Jones, tall, commanding, came out of the rude Church of Eternity into the Clearing. His face wore an air of triumph like a general's on the field of battle. He stopped above the eloquent lips and head and the communion cup. There was a child beside her I had not seen before. A child I knew all at once. me! Me in another universe, a parallel universe to this. I was in that parallel...