Jonestown Read Online Free

the perversity of symmetry and dread closure underlying the death of the arts.
    Perhaps I had known it all along, perhaps I knew my age was dying. Perhaps that was why I joined the Jonestown Church.What I had not perceived was the curious salvage of a Primitive morsel of time sprung from treason, treason’s desire, treason’s a - symmetry when one breaks a pact with authoritarian virtue and dines with the enemy in a fearful but true longing to consume fortresses of hate in him and in oneself, cemented bias in him and in oneself, cemented violence in him and in oneself.
    ‘I thought they were bloody cannibals,’ said Jones. ‘These Caribs of whom you speak.’
    I had forgotten I had spoken of them in my conversion of a Primitive morsel into a feast of terrifying conscience within the furies of history. I had forgotten that the Caribs were the authors of the American feast beneath the Virgin statue of Liberty, authors of asymmetric hospitality granted to aliens and strangers despite their suspicion of, and antagonism to, one another …
    I had forgotten … Jones appeared to remember though he spat the memory on to his plate. He hated the Caribs. He tended to loathe the soil of pre-Columbian America though he was up to his eyes in it, in its species, whale and tiger and everything else, oil and gold and wealth. He would become, if not the Bank of America, a significant agent in the Bank of Memory when I began to shoulder the trauma I would experience the following day as I lay on my pillow of stone.
    His face was curiously livid, curiously bland, as he projected his rage upon the vanished Caribs in thinking of the Police. So easy to orchestrate the law into scapegoats one would murder at the drop of a hat.
    I turned to Jones with tears in my eyes but he did not see … My tongue was burning as well and I was unable to speak. The Dream-book anticipated the moment when I would start to write and spoke for me from the future –
    ‘Are we not subject to the vocabulary of death-dealing regimes? Do we not need to consume that vocabulary and change it, consume the battle-cries, the marching songs, drums that counsel assault? Death coins every phrase that spells conquest. Death’s vocabulary is rooted in human discourse …’
    ‘In counterpoint with the extra-human dissonances of the victim soul, the long suppressed, plaintive and wonderful music of the victim soul  …’ said Deacon. He had been silent all through the meal as if he were nursing a bullet to be fired at Jones … The idea sprang into my head I knew not from where … A bullet, a morsel of a bullet in himself … ‘Is it not time – when time seems to be ending – to unravel that counterpoint, varieties of counterpoint, between priest and sacrificial victim, between huntsman and hunted species, between lovers and Virgins of the wild … God knows it’s too late for me, I have failed, but you, Francisco …’ He stopped. Was he laughing at me? Was he mocking me? Was Marie of Jonestown (with her dead child whom I was to identify with myself in a flashing moment on the morrow in the Clearing) a despoiled Virgin, a despoiled Liberty on the flag of Jonestown? I had helped to raise that flag on the day we began to build Jonestown. I was filled with anger at Deacon and at myself. I disliked Deacon then intensely as much as I feared Jones. Deacon was Jonah’s right-hand angel. He was – I dimly felt at this stage – a signal for me of the riddle of the huntsman – in the book I was to write when I survived Jonestown (a book possessing its own life to be entitled Imagination Dead Imagine )– the riddle of the huntsman, the riddle of the hunted creature, the enigma or counterpoint of shared Passion between spoilers and despoiled, the riddle of the feast when one dines with enemies who are also one’s close associates.
    After the holocaust, when I fled Jonestown, his self-mockery, his mockery of me, gave way to truths I wrestled with on every ladder between