A brief supplemental post about how Aurelia puts late modernity under judgment. Judgmental pressure expands Aurelia’s postfiguration sideways into epistemology. All in it should be read in light of what Aurelia says about Final Happiness, full personhood, justice, and the Father of Lights. To show this, I have created seven diagrams at the end of the post that unpack the pre-Tower-Jump interrogation, which postfigures the questioning in the temple, commonly known as Christ Am

"There is no way that I myself can be hurt. I am beyond that. I can be killed, but I cannot be hurt. I have a 'Home Free' certificate. And how does one get such a thing? One reaches out the hand, and it is given. If you don't have such a ‘Home Free’ entitlement, it is only because you didn't hold out your hand for it. People of my governorship, if I were to give you hard sayings you would try to figure them out and perhaps fulfill them. Because I give you easy sayings, which

Vietnam was unified on July 2, 1976, with the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Because one digressio leads to another, I want to note one of Aurelia’s stranger internal crossings. Although completed in 1976, the novel already contains the Vietnam argument that Lafferty later makes explicit in Part IV of In a Green Tree, “Incidents of Travel in Flatland.” It is an instance of Lafferty allegorizing history from within the postfiguration machinery of the novel

The Frenchman Jules Verne appeared with a blaze of novels that were all "voyages" (but all Science Fiction stories are ‘voyages’ in a sense): Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863); A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864); From The Earth To The Moon (1865); Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870); Around the World In Eighty Days (1874). Verne’s "voyage"novels were genial and pleasant and original. There was good comedy in them. As a comic writer, Verne was at least equal to

“All these things are possible. If you will worry about them, then I will cease doing it. I hate duplication.” “I will worry about them,” the bodyguard said. “It is my job to worry about them. Are you also going on a peripateticus, as Rex calls it, when Aurelia goes?” “Yes. Today. And that is all the questions that I will answer, Mr. Bodyguard.” “But I would like to know—” “Black lightning of which you felt only a sample, man! Black lightning to burn you to a cinder!” Cousin

“Who wants to die? Everything struggles to live. Look at that tree growing up there out of that grating. It gets no sun, and water only when it rains. It's growing out of sour earth. And it's strong because its hard struggle to live is making it strong. My children will be strong that way.” ― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn “I heard you talking to Herr Boch about antlers and horns. You believe that horns are more predilected to evil than antlers are, and that is the tru

“To remedy this insufficiency, I’m enclosing a little book, very informative, though only a little over six hundred pages. It’s a sort of resume of the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. You’re very well informed on all the perimeters of the subject, but your information on the center itself is very weak. I’ve given away about twenty copies of this book in the last twenty years, but only to people intelligent enough to handle it.” A post on Walter Farrell, O.P., whom Lafferty respected

Advanced Lafferty. What comes next won’t depend on it. Not much has been written about Aurelia, but of the handful of things said about it, by far the most interesting and intellectually strongest is Gregorio Montejo’s essay “Eudaimonism in R. A. Lafferty’s Aurelia,” which appeared in Feast of Laughter in 2015. Anyone who wants to read Aurelia seriously should understand its argument. As a teacher of mine used to say, firstest with the mostist criticism. Today I want to walk

“Jump, jump, jump!” they called, and others took up the cadence “Jump, jump, jump!” People came from the hills and the lake and from all the luxury cabins around there. The “with-it” people came, and the sectarians, and all of the “Kill Aurelia Now League.” Even the strong partisans of Aurelia were caught up in the moment and cried “Jump, jump, jump!” Aurelia jumped. She lept out into the golden air, and she plummeted the thirty meters to the ground, a modified plummet, for s

This is a very miscellaneous post about a text I have wanted to write about for a few months: To Aurelia With Horns. It can hardly be called a version of Aurelia, but it is a kind of drafting out of ideas that were later repurposed for it, even if 90 percent of those ideas were drained away. There is zero St. Thomas Aquinas here, which will be surprising for anyone who has read Aurelia. Altogether, it is one of the strangest Lafferty documents that I have read. Enough of it s

perfect (adj.) — early 15c., classical correction of Middle English parfit “flawless, ideal” (c. 1300), also “complete, full, finished, lacking in no way” (late 14c.), from Old French parfit “finished, completed, ready” (11c.), from Latin perfectus “completed, excellent, accomplished, exquisite,” past participle of perficere “accomplish, finish, complete,” from per “completely” + combining form of facere “to make, to do” (from PIE root dhe- “to set, put”). — Online Etymology

Aurelia aurita I’ve been thinking about Aurelia, one of my favorite works by Lafferty, even though much of it continues to puzzle me. Today, I want to share a few thoughts on Lafferty’s two Camiroi stories: “The Primary Education of the Camiroi” and “The Polity and Customs of the Camiroi” and the novel. I’ll also explain how I’ve been organizing the Camiroi material in my mind and how I think these pieces fit together. This will be a rushed account, to be sure. Still, my hope