Chesterton’s “The Nightmare,” Oriel Overlark, and the place of Lafferty’s monsters beneath the throne in Fourth Mansions.

Advanced Lafferty. I first read Étienne Gilson in high school. A Jesuit teacher gave me Gilson’s eloquent essay on the university, its history, what it should be, and its probable future. One of Gilson’s most accessible pieces, it made an impression on me. So did the teacher who grumped, “This is from the old Norton Reader, before the Norton people let their books go to hell.” Later, I learned more about Gilson’s variety of neo-Thomism. And I learned that generations of later

The Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol 13 (1894) “Dammit, fat man, I will ask questions and I won't hide. Now tell me what the four sorts of creatures are. I'm not stupid. That's only the permanent impression I leave.”“Oh, the four sorts of creatures that surround the Castle are the Pythons, the Toads, the Badgers and the Unfledged Falcons.”“Oh what botching! Unbotch it, Bagley. Where do you get your drivel?”“I have it anciently from my own ancient person and position. And beyond t

Thinking again about Monego's essay, which I mentioned a few days ago, and it occurred to me that one probable source for the Harvesters in Fourth Mansions is Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human (1953), a landmark work of mid-century science fiction. This must have occurred to others, though I haven't seen it discussed. Sturgeon’s novum reimagines evolution acting on the communal mind through Homo Gestalt, a multi-person organism formed by marginalized individuals who learn t

Short post. Quickly sketched thoughts. Gregorio Montejo (I assume) has posted an essay on Fourth Mansions. It is worth reading. Vastly stronger than his first one. I’m unconvinced that the Alumbrados serve as direct source material for the novel, though I wish they did; even so, the direction he points to by using them is sound. I may well change my mind if I find any evidence that convinces me. Part of the reluctance is that the Pythons need to be integrated into the Fourth

“Do you understand what had to be done? The world had to be unvoided; the chaos had to be unchaosed; the spoil had to be unspoiled; and it must be continued. Everything has to be patterned and structured, continuously. That is the real beginning: the patterning." — Rich Horton, Strange at Ecbatan (blog), November 2020. "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs" is an important Lafferty story, though you might not know it. It has been mostly overlooked in favor of other works. Pe

The skull of Cardinal John Morton, patron and benefactor of Thomas More "Only a God can save us."— Martin Heidegger, interview with Der Spiegel (1966; published 1976) I have been thinking about something Daniel Otto Jack Petersen recently said: that he found it difficult to get into Lafferty’s Fourth Mansions (1969) because of its conspiratorial theme. Unlike Petersen, I am probably too quick to assume that all social organization is impossible without extensive conspiracy, b

“Lord Randal had invented the bow-and-arrow. But Axel could shoot the arrows farther and faster. And higher. And when he was six years old, Axel did what many persons have dreamed of doing: he made his mark on the sky. He dipped the heads of his arrows in mud, and he shot them up with uncanny accuracy and made mud marks on that transparent sky-cover which was twenty meters above them. He made about a hundred mud marks that conveyed a message in the written form of ‘code Chald

You may already have guessed that I once joined their company. But I was a very recent recruit of theirs and I have broken away. To make up for the part I have had in it I will try to stop the thing. Now, here is what you will do— “This is the way the world ends,” said Larker at the table across. “The lights go on and it's revealed that it was all a play-act. There wasn't any world. There was only the fiction of a world.” Let’s play with an idea. One of the great puzzles in F

“One would, however, like to say: existence cannot be attributed to an element, for if it did not exist, one could not even name it and so one could say nothing at all of it.—But let us consider an analogous case. There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one meter long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris.—But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the

On my reading, Prime in the Oceanic Novels will always be perceptually complicated, so I spent some time in the last few days thinking about how I see the deep structure and playing around with modeling it. These diagrams should speak for themselves. First, I will outline the model that I see as active in the Oceanic Novels, and then provide a worked example using Fourth Mansions.

And she was into the weave now — pink and pungent — the numinous spook, the cinnamon cookie, the mad anima who had never left off being a kid. Plappergeistic and poltergeistic, the lavender lightning was about her especially — the witch who was no more than a sketch in red chalk. She had really never had a body, that Bedelia — only a chalk sketch of one. This gave her a certain lightness, and there was enough heaviness in some of the others.Summer lightning, lavender lightnin