Free Jonestown by Wilson Harris Page A

apparition, a solid apparition arisen from a coffin, the coffin of ancient kings that empowered the magus- philosopher-jester of history that Mr Mageye was.
    ‘Where does it all start?’ I demanded. ‘If Old Gods and Prisoners are a sphere within ourselves, acting and running more deeply than the mechanics of political sovereignty, where does it start?’
    ‘Deacon would say it starts with wars in Heaven,’ said Mr Mageye. He was jesting but his face seemed straight as a bat in the hands of a weirdly gifted cricketer of genius. He had umpired many a game in Albuoystown. His apparitional nose seemed to have flattened itself. But then it grew again, it straightened itself into the colour of sculpted soil in Deacon’s Courantyne savannahs .
    ‘Let us,’ he said, ‘prepare the ground of theatre, the ground of folklore in the ancient savannahs. First the infant Deacon falls from the baggage train of routed angels. He falls to earth and is given a home by the savannah folk.’
    I was angry. I was jealous.
    ‘Is Deacon a bloody king?’ I demanded.
    ‘He is an adversary of Old Gods. He sustains on Earth an age-old quarrel in Heaven. When is the gift of fire to be exercised and bestowed upon humanity? When is the gift of freedom to be exercised and bestowed upon humanity? That is in large part the substance of the quarrel. Should humanity claim freedom? Perhaps it has with detrimental consequences on every hand! Should humanity claim freedom in the teeth of obstinate and uncertain regimes? Where does authority truly reside? We may think these questions are old-hat but they are not. They are moresavagely pertinent to human affairs than we care to admit. Should we pursue our adversaries, should they turn on us at every opportunity? Should we perpetuate forms of punitive logic to punish those who punished us when we rebelled? I tell you all this, Francisco, for it is pertinent to your visitation of the childhood of Deacon in the folklore, archetypal theatre of the Courantyne savannahs.’
    The scales of blended times had changed in the half- apparitional , half-concrete fabric of my Dream-book and arrival on the Virgin Ship in the Courantyne River from which we made our way into the savannahs.
    ‘Deacon had been affianced to Marie of Port Mourant before he left to take up his scholarship in San Francisco,’ said Mr Mageye.
    ‘Yes I know. He told us so.’
    ‘But he met her for the first overwhelmingly intimate yet expansive time (that fires both love of art and science, and greed for fame) at the age of nine,’ said Mr Mageye, peering into his Camera as if it were a computer of chasms in creation and visionary years. ‘That meeting was the fulfilment of an age-old prophecy for the savannah folk. An infant child would fall from the stars in 1930. Carnival has its calendric humour, has it not, Francisco? The child – in his tenth year 1939 – would encounter a wonderful maid, a dangerous maid, a Virgin, in the savannahs at the end of a drought season when the first, torrential rains broke the walls of heaven.
    ‘This would confirm the adversarial destiny of the angel fallen from the baggage train of the stars. It would confirm the venom of the Scorpion in his veins. The mark of a great hero …’
    ‘Monster,’ I cried.
    ‘You need to see it happening all over again in your Dream-book . It is pertinent, believe me, Francisco, to a discovery and rediscovery of the depth of your own passion and emotion which you may have eclipsed or hidden from yourself until the tragedy of Jonestown brought you face to face with the accumulated spectres of years, the dread spectre of the twentieth century as it addresses the psyche of ageless childhood.’
    I adjusted the Nemesis Bag on my head even as I looked into Mr Mageye’s Camera.
    ‘Deacon ran into the maid in the torrential rain. She seemed utterly changed from a child he knew! Had he not seen her before at school? Human magic dazzles the eyes of a fallen angel when destiny