“It is the only animal that children dream of without having seen or been told about. Moncrief by his recall methods has studied thousands of early childhood dreams. Children universally dream of bears, Tahitian children subject to no ursine influence in themselves or their ancestry, Australian children, town tikes before they ever saw a bear toy. They dream of bears. The bear is the boogerman. Bears live in the attics of old childhood houses. They did in my own and in thousa

There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when he walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth.— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy "But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh." — Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose [Advanced Lafferty. What follows supplements my earlier post on the Laughing Christ and what Lafferty does with it in East of Laughter. The argument, in brief, is that East of Laughter rejects three

They wrote the story on a column, And on the Great Church Window painted The same, to make the world acquainted How their children were stolen away; And there it stands to this very day . . . So, Willy, let you and me be wipers Of scores out with all men — especially pipers: And, whether they pipe us from rats or from mice, If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise. — Robert Browning, The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842) “It's Gabriel's horn!” John Michael Anwal

The "Distinction and Adornment of the World" is a scholastic phrase which covers our own province and position. The ‘Distinction’ is the special focusing on our own world apart from the billions of other worlds, all special, but not all special to us. It is the scale and site we are on. The ‘Adornment’ is the process and movement and composition, and finally the Flora and Fauna (including ourselves). Sure, we are an adornment, and so is all the other furniture of the world. T

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of Gnosticism/eschatology and R. A. Lafferty lately, so here’s a quick sketch, more a prompt than a full argument, with a way in. Philip K. Dick and Lafferty share an obsession: the twentieth-century recovery of Gnosticism as the problem of modernity. Hans Jonas is the obvious touchstone; both writers almost certainly knew his work. What interests me is where they split once you ask what “Gnosticism” means under modern conditions. How muc

What was it, then, that I, miserable one, so doted on in you, you theft of mine, you deed of darkness, in that sixteenth year of my age? Beautiful you were not, since you were theft. But are you anything, that so I may argue the case with you? Those pears that we stole were fair to the sight, because they were Your creation, You fairest of all, Creator of all, You good God — God, the highest good, and my true good. Those pears truly were pleasant to the sight; but it was not

“But others of them fabulously describe the passion and restoration of Sophia as follows: They say that she, having engaged in an impossible and impracticable attempt, brought forth an amorphous substance, such as her female nature enabled her to produce. When she looked upon it, her first feeling was one of grief, on account of the imperfection of its generation, and then of fear lest this should end her own existence. Next she lost, as it were, all command of herself, and w

No, I haven't broken my good resolution to stop writing. I finished the story Flaming Arrow on January 8, 1982. This was quite a while before November 7, 1984 (my 70th birthday) when I swore off writing. The book in which this appeared (Magic in Ithkar #2) had its first printing in December 1985 and was copyrighted by Andre Norton and Robert Adams in 1985. — Letter, 1987 “I’m impressed by your irrationality. It’s beyond anything I ever met with in my own time. I’m impressed b

Lafferty drew on ideas from Gnosticism for many of his most important short stories, from "Snuffles" to "The All At-Once Man" to "In the Turpenine Trees." Gaps in historians' knowledge of Gnosticism became grist for his metaphysical imagination throughout his writing career. I’d like to have a post on this blog where I can keep updating my understanding of this side of Lafferty’s work. That’s the purpose of this space. It will include a timeline of how the West has understood

“The answer to the Mystery of Matter (why should there even be so cumbersome a thing as matter? Why did the Word have to be made Flesh? Was not the Making of Matter rather a cheap, and also difficult, trick for a Spirit to indulge in?) — the answer to this contains the answer to the question ‘How Did God Get to be God?’” — “In the Turpentine Trees” (1983) "Snuffles" on my mind. It was a good excuse to reread the edited transcript of the LaffCon3 panel on the story. It was an

In Western thought, the demiurge took a heel turn. Originally, it was the benevolent craftsman of Plato’s Timaeus, shaping matter in the image of ideal forms and bringing order. Not a god in the usual sense, the demiurge is perhaps better understood as a rational instrument masquerading as a rational agent. Plato introduced it to resolve a thorny metaphysical problem: how do those pesky ideal forms cross the divided line and take root in matter? Of course, for Plato, the form

Picking up on yesterday’s post and the theme of Gnosticism, I want to look at its presence in Lafferty’s work a little further. Lafferty often extracts elements of Gnostic thought and builds spectacularly upon them, shaping strange new conceptual structures all his own. Sometimes, this is as straightforward as in his short story "Snuffles" (1960), where a being acts as a demiurge; other times, it is a complex interplay of Gnostic and Kabbalistic ideas, as in Not to Mention Ca

Five more centuries were to pass before the structure of human relations had so changed that the use of this instrument met a more general need. From the sixteenth century on, at least among the upper classes, the fork comes into use as an eating instrument, arriving by way of Italy first in France and then in England and Germany, after having served for a time only for taking solid foods from the dish.— Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Vol. 1., The History of Manners “