\u201cIf God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. The logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus <\/i>(italics added)<\/p>\n
Like the Guyanese intellectual, Virgil, one of the four protagonists in my novel, Resurrection City,<\/i> I seek understanding in literature, philosophy, and art. Unlike him, I have not given up, nor shall I. What I pursue is clarity. Not logic or order. Certainly not beauty.<\/p>\n
In his endlessly fascinating essay, \u201cThe Myth of Sisyphus\u201d \u2013 which Virgil reads and re-reads \u2013 Albert Camus, philosopher and novelist, Resistance warrior and ethical soul, analyzes Dostoyevsky\u2019s existential hero of The Possessed<\/i>, the engineer Kirilov. Though I confess I have yet to finish The Possessed<\/i>, I see in Camus\u2019 description of Kirilov an approximation of the Jonestown suicides of November 18, 1978.<\/p>\n
In my reading, Kirilov does not stand for Jim Jones alone, but rather all the adults who chose to die and to kill others who could not or would not kill themselves. This approach diverges from the psychological explanation of paranoid delusions and\/or deep depression. It removes international politics from the equation as well as the criminal repercussions of that afternoon\u2019s murders on the runway at Port Kaituma.<\/p>\n
Much has been made of Jones\u2019 claims over the years to be god, or to have replaced what he called the \u201csky god\u201d with Socialism as an alternative deity. The stories that he stamped on the Bible \u2013 telling his followers to stop paying attention to it and to focus on him instead \u2013 may be apocryphal. What seems most relevant is Jones\u2019 embrace of that \u201cSkygod\u201d in the last hours of Jonestown.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor months I\u2019ve tried to keep this thing from happening,\u201d he says on the final tape, \u201cbut now I see that it\u2019s the will of the Sovereign Being that this happened to us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Suddenly, god or God \u2013 the \u201cSovereign Being\u201d \u2013 is no longer inside him or inside Peoples Temple, but rather an outside entity over which he and the others have no agency. It is as if, in those last minutes, the Jones and Jonestown that determined their own world had evaporated, and, at this moment in his speech, Jones surrenders to the omnipotent God of his youth, the same God he had pointedly disavowed during the intervening decades.<\/p>\n
* * * * *<\/p>\n
\u201cIf God exists,\u201d writes Camus, \u201call depends on him and we can do nothing against his will. If he does not exist, everything depends on us.\u201d<\/p>\n
The roughly one-third of Jonestown\u2019s population consisting of adults of sound mind and body who took their lives willingly \u2013 as opposed to those who were forcibly injected \u2013 are responsible for their acts. They cannot evade their terrible responsibility, nor should they. Neither Jones nor Dr. Schacht nor the nurses or guards forced their hands to self-annihilation.<\/p>\n
In the anthology, In A Dark Time<\/i>, Drs. Robert Jay Lifton and Nicholas Humphrey write, \u201cFor it is the privilege, and the burden, of human beings to have knowledge of good and evil, and free will: when we come to judgment we come to it on our own account<\/i>, according to how we have lived our earthly lives.\u201d So for those who chose to die, whether imagining they might become god or rather to escape the horrors of November 18, 1978, they did so on their own account, with all the burden and privilege that choice confers. They chose death, and in their aftermath, we who remain have no choice but to live in the wake of that decision.<\/p>\n
I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing:
\ntherefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.
\nDeuteronomy 30:19<\/p>\n
(Annie Dawid recently completed <\/i>Resurrection City, a novel of Jonestown. An <\/i>article<\/a> about her novel and an excerpt<\/a> appear in this year\u2019s edition of <\/i>the jonestown report. Her complete collection of writings for the site may be found here<\/a>. She can be reached at <\/i>annie@anniedawid.com<\/a>.)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIf God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. The logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.\u201d Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (italics added) Like the Guyanese intellectual, Virgil, one of the four protagonists in my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":31981,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-31977","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31977"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52007,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31977\/revisions\/52007"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}