The first offense was the taking of the forbidden fruit. The second offense (which I believe is more grievous than the first) is the refusing of the bidden fruit. It is even the hacking down of the tree of the fruit. Advanced Lafferty today, and undoubtedly too brief. I’ve been rereading Serpent’s Egg, trying to understand how the Kangaroo connects to Inneall’s ocean, and throughout that novel one fact kept coming up. Once again, Lafferty is thinking about original sin, maybe

G. The Argo & Argonauts (Primordial Aspects) The Argo and its Argonauts represent a complex system operating across multiple realities and timelines. Central is the Ship Argo, a foundational vessel acting with apparent intention [D:21], known under names and descriptions including Navicula Petri [A:44], Abd-Aliah's flagship [M:404], the Brunhilde [D:21; M:404], Land of Behest [M:404], Flying Serpent, Catherine, and Salle du Roi [M:404–405]. Archipelago adds the possible names

II. Character Types and Cosmological Entities ​​​​​A. External Archetypes Lafferty does not treat archetypes as psychological products. They do not arise from inner mental states or from individual subconscious activity. Instead, in his fiction, they appear as external forces—ontologically real, active, and hard to avoid —though characters may shift between roles or embody multiple archetypes. Characters are buffeted by their basic presence and strong influence. The members o

A Rat-King The plot has all the unhinged unity of any shipwreck. And there is movement and force and power. Power above all! This is Destruction as pageant and presentation. One has the feeling that something very large will come out of all of this. Yes, like the destruction of the world. — The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny (p. 352) My second read showed pretty clearly why I remembered merely the premise and little of the plot: there is little plot to remember, in a

The face was skinny and ruddy. The nose was powerful and beaked; not like that of a bird of prey but like that one of the Roman-nosed water birds. The nose was always peeling, as though it were growing out from the inside and flaking off in those strips. That gnarly ant and aphid image with its glistening drop? Really important for understanding 3A. Nuts and bolts or maybe bolts and nuts. The Three Armageddons can melt one’s brain, so it's helpful to have a baseline for under

Give me back the Berlin wall Give me Stalin and St. Paul Give me Christ Or give me Hiroshima Destroy another fetus now We don't like children anyhow I've seen the future, baby It is murder —Leonard Cohen, “The Future” As to your selecting the name “Kirol” that was just to preserve you from a little numerological trap. Advanced Lafferty. The previous Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny post called the book one of Lafferty’s most Catholic works because the bloodshed of

Anthony Quinn's illustration of Mad King Sweeney Eorann: All the same, I would prefer a hollow tree and Sweeney bare — that sweetest game we used to play — to banqueting with him today. I tell you, Sweeney, if I were given the pick of all in earth and Ireland, I'd rather go with you, live sinless and sup on water and watercress. — Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray “I suppose that I had better take up my den in the tree,” Enniscorthy Sweeny had said. “They won’t know how to drive

“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

And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. And Zillah, she also bare Tubal-cain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah. —Genesis 4:19–22 Those students who are now developin

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

Well, why did not the men of Kyklopolis get together in great numbers with many boats and torches and weapons and hunt out and kill this Grendel? Should such a peril be allowed to live? But this is to ignore who Grendel really was, to forget of what race he was the last surviving member. For Grendel, who had once been completely human, was of the race of Cain. Moreover, Grendel was not only the descendant but also the murderer of the murderous Cain. He had disregarded the Mar

There is rollicking good-humor all through every Scripture. Samson, the riddle-telling judge and strong man, is full of high spirits even when going down to Gaza and to his death. David is full of fun when he invents the story of his victory over Goliath and sings it to his own harp music. Goliath was not that big, nor David that small; and moreover Goliath was killed by another warrior, Elhanan. But a story-teller can always fictionize accounts. There is a lot of fun in Bala

Once I was crossing the Neva in a boat with my friend A., with whom, before this and later, I had many conversations on the subjects touched on in this book. We had been talking, but approaching the fortress we both fell silent, looking at the walls and probably thinking more or less the same thoughts. “There are factory chimneys too!” said A. And indeed from behind the fortress there rose brick chimneys with smoke-blackened tops. And suddenly, as he said it, I had an incredi

“You are a dozen or more from among the six thousand characters I have written to represent the six-billion persons who will have lived in the world after my death. You are sketches that I did not quite fill out, you are people in my still quite sketchy world of the future. And yet I did all of you as well as I was able to.” Summer teaching—one class on economics and culture, another on Dante—together with the usual department grind, has eaten into the spare time I can carve

And the story FAITH SUFFICIENT is tied in with the Ministry business. I am a strongly believing Catholic myself, and one sentence of Christ that I never forget is "Other sheep I have that are not of this flock." He also says (through Saint Paul) that we should preach the faith 'in season and out of season.' But the manner of the preaching is left to each one. There is lots of grotesque preaching done, and I believe that it may be a subject of humor. And John Salt and his frie

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,

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

“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

“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