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

Condillac angrily beat on the lower part of the statue with his leaded cane, breaking off toes. “I will not be lectured by a rock!” he crackled. “You have not these ideas originally, and mature brain matter will reject such. Therefore, you have them not! Reason is the thing, Statue, rationality. We promulgate it. It spreads. It prevails. The tomorrow world will be the world of total reason.” “No, it will be the Revolution,” said Rock-Head. “A world condemned to such short far

Technology is a queer thing. It brings you gifts with one hand, and stabs you in the back with the other. —C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures These were sometimes criticized, but mostly by persons of standards derived from an earlier age, from the pre-postliterate age. — Serpent’s Egg Lafferty sent this little piece off on February 2, 1975, for the “Oklahoma Authors” series in Oklahoma Librarian. It appeared eight months later in the October issue, alongside a great Lafferty photog

I have total freedom to do whatever I want to do, but at this point in time I am enjailed in a pokey or slammer in Boondocks New Jersey. — “The Wheel and the Shoosh” (unfinished draft) Lafferty was extremely good at getting the most out of his drafted material and ideas. Almost everything gets used, as if he were dealing with a buffalo. Over the twenty-plus years of his writing life, when he turned out the huge corpus, it seems he made most of it work. There are the unwritten

“Charles,” Gorgonius Pantera said, “you wrote some of the easiest-to-ignore works in all the history of disreputable literature. Did you really have anything to go on at all? You created a whole universe of your own, but did you use anything at all that was material in that creation?” “No, Gorgolanza, I didn’t create a universe, I discovered one. I named it the Fortean Universe when I found that it was unnamed. I don’t know why many persons didn’t discover it before I did. Th

“Ginny Wrapped in the Sun” (1967) draws on a few unusual sources, including Isaac Asimov. Lafferty takes what should be a reassuring calculation from Asimov and turns it into evidence that humanity may be living on borrowed time. The source of the calculation is pretty obscure, and I came across it in some incidental reading. Lafferty, breaking into science fiction, must have read “The Slowly Moving Finger,” published in the February 1964 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and

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

“It is inconceivable, that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact…That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance, through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I b

Some modern scientists feel a powerful affinity with their ancient intellectual forebears. While Anaximander’s understanding of the apeiron may be hard to grasp, some 20th-century physicists found it a helpful concept. In the 1930s and 1940s, physicists worked to turn quantum mechanics (a theory of particles and their interactions) into a theory of particles and fields (i.e. quantum field theory). But they encountered difficulties, as attempts to do so often led to the appear

Little c went to visit the Great Zambesi-Chartel in his cell. “It is time we had a talk,” he said. “No, no, it's too late for talk,” said Charles Chartel. “You have disgraced us both, Charles,” said celach. “It goes very deeply when it touches me.” “I never even knew who you were, little c. You are protean and you are not at all plausible.” Advanced Lafferty. Charles Chartel is our main character, a professional magician who performs under the name the Great Zambesi. He is kn

Since acorn worms and the human lineage diverged 570 million years ago, pharyngeal slits for filtering food evolved into gills for extracting oxygen, and later into today’s human upper and lower jaw and pharynx, which encompasses the thyroid gland, tongue, larynx (voice box) and various glands and muscles between the mouth and the throat. Humans and other terrestrial vertebrates actually initiate vestigial gills while embryos, though they disappear quickly and rarely persist

"The Covenant,” it said. “Large, hard-roasted, de-oiled, white peanuts under the Goober John trade name. Three a day, and they must be Goober John Number Ones. Failure to provide them will void the Covenant.” “There will be no failure,” said Malcomb ‘the Marvelous’McGruder. “It shall be done.” “We like-stuff pledge fulfill the Covenant,” it said. In his review of The Best of R. A. Lafferty for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Matt Keely writes: “Lafferty was an electrical eng

If present mathematics does not fit black holes, then present mathematics must be extended a trifle. That's better than smashing and exploding all the worlds. The fictions based on all this are unoriginal, yes. And the science that stutters around it is likewise unoriginal. — "Something New Under the Black Suns" (1979) Lafferty wrote “Aloys” in the Fall of 1957 when he started his serious bid to be a professional writer, one of the strongest of the early Lafferty stories just

[17] But because from some words following on these the Averroists wish to take Aristotle’s intention to be that the intellect is not the soul which is the act of the body, or a part of such a soul, we must even more carefully consider what he goes on to say. Immediately after he raised the question about the difference between intellect and sense, he asked in what intellect is like sense and how the two differ. Earlier he established two things about sense, namely that sense

Tulsa postcard, c. 1965 The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual. — C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology The only one of us (and he is not technically of us) who holds fully to the Third Revelation is Diogenes Pontifex. Diogenes is completely outside

“Nor Limestone Islands” is the hit single of Lafferty’s Fortean stories. It has a sticky title. Within that heterogeneous group, it is reader-friendly. It is centripetally Fortean. In these ways, it is like “Fall of Pebble Stones.” Both stories point like the Hand from Heaven to printed lines of Fort’s The Book of the Damned (1919). Lafferty seemed to tire of using Fort in this way. His preferred method became reimagining Fort. He then raids Charles Fort for ideas, twisting F

Though more than half of mankind does not believe in the ultimates and basics, surely less than five percent of the Science Fiction People have any belief at all in what is real. Science Fiction is, for ninety-five percent of the people who indulge in it, a surrogate “True Belief,” in things from which the truth has been carefully removed. It is a “True Belief” in a false religion, one without dimension. — “True Belivers” (Prose Statement) The city is built To music, therefor

In such a context . . . the values of being are replaced by those of having. The only goal which counts is the pursuit of one's own material well-being. The so-called "quality of life" is interpreted primarily or exclusively as economic efficiency, inordinate consumerism, physical beauty and pleasure, to the neglect of the more profound dimensions . . . of existence. . . . Within this same cultural climate . . . interpersonal relations are seriously impoverished. The first to

“I become a transparent Eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature The attempt to see into the world of Karl Kleber was almost a total failure. The story is told of the behaviorist who would study the chimpan

“But we haven’t any wings, father,” Job Salto protested. “You have feathers, and feathers are certainly an intimation of wings. Some of you even have a few elbow-feathers. I will call them pinion-feathers, and perhaps your elbows will have turned into wing-pinions by tomorrow.” But Darwinism and all the denials that make it up does give silly and evil answers; and it is guilty of Mistakes of Interpretation against dozens of sciences as well as against the Word of God. — unpub