Now we must apply what we have said of the part to the whole living body. For the same relation must hold of the whole of sensation to the whole sentient body as obtains between the part and the part. That which has the capacity of life is not the body which has lost its soul, but that which possesses its soul; seed and fruit are bodies of this kind potentially.The waking state is actuality in the same sense as cutting is the actuality of the axe, or seeing of the eye; but th

And once more it was like a high dive that Leo was afraid to take, like a leap across an abyss — but he must get it off to however unlikely a goal was left him. So he achieved separation. Then Fang struck and broke the body of Cuthbert in half, and there was no life left in it at all. — "Goldfish" “His brain is now emitting impulses in the delta pattern... Lisman is sending, he's probing, he's getting ready for a leap. He's gauging the footholds and handholds on the other sid

Some advanced Lafferty. I find Not to Mention Camels a hard book. Its components are easy enough to understand, but understanding what Lafferty is doing and how it fits together is challenging. One way to model the main conflict is to map it as being directly about good versus evil. Another is to step back and see it as a clash between fundamentally different and incompatible power systems, each vying for dominance within the derivative media bubbles of non-Prime realities. T

“I am ancient Og who rode the ridgepole of the ark all through the deluge, and who held the umbrella over the ark.”— Not to Mention Camels (1976) [Noah] was a Magician even as I am. Is that scrap of a tale in the folk tales you've examined?” — "The Man Who Lost His Magic" “Og, the giant, was a descendent of one of the fallen angels. He lived for many, many years. At the time of the flood, he came to Noah and asked him to admit him into the ark. One look at his gigantic statu

“The faith to move mountains is not an empty sophistry, not a hollow vessel of speech,” said Joshua.“There is a power, and we live by that power. The weakest of us live onthe accumulation of power, and those of us who are stronger add continually to that power store. I say to you that it is not a great thing to move a mountain. I say that tohold a mountain in being is a much greater thing?" -- — "John Salt" “Be quiet.” Polder spoke softly but carryingly in his powerful

"Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin" "The eyes of it were the last remnant of the real Pilgrim, and now they’re dead." The other day, I posted about noetic darkening. Today, I want to flesh out its details, as it appears frequently in Lafferty's work. The typical pattern looks like this. Lafferty embeds counterfiguration into the plot mechanics of a scene, or he makes epistemological darkening the structural center of the story. Often ingenious, it is usually framed in the dual lang

"We've reached the place I told thee to expect, / Where thou shouldst see the miserable race, / Those who have lost the good of intellect." Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto III Those of us who spend time with Lafferty's fiction know that conventional interpretive methods fall short. His work is intellectually intense, filled with surprising connections that make its literary magic resistant to ordinary analysis. Really discovering him comes with the recogni

William Blake, The Red Dragon and the Woman Wrapped in the Sun, c. 1805 My last post looked at Lafferty's aesthetics and theology in abstract terms, briefly mentioning his short story "Ginny Wrapped in the Sun." Today, I want to descend the ladder of abstraction and look at that story in detail. Its plot is deceptively simple: a long, digressive conversation between Dr. Minden and Dr. Dismas. Gradually, we begin to see that Dismas's daughter, Ginny, is implicated by Minden's

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

Lafferty’s description and visual imagery are as idiosyncratic as every other aspect of the man's work. Today, I want to consider a trick he uses in nearly every piece of his fiction. It works somewhat like metonymy and somewhat like iconicity. Metonymy is a rhetorical figure in which one thing stands in for another with which it is closely associated (as in "the kitchen is working overtime," where "kitchen" represents the staff who work in it). Iconicity, on the other hand,

"I am a very disordered and very often a very bad man, but I know that there is this clarity and order and certainty: the Procession of the Creatures, the Distinction and Adornment of the World, the Final Things are all a part of it." Lafferty makes an exceptionally strong claim here. He doesn’t say he believes in the procession of the creatures or the distinction and adornment of the world. He asserts that he knows there is this clarity, order, and certainty. This is the str