“Molasses is a little like amber,” Diogenes said. “It flows so slowly that sometimes it seems to be solid. Creatures can be imprisoned in it and apparently be held motionless in it. They must deceive themselves as to their own time scale, for if they do not deceive themselves they will be dead . . . . Things can not have been going on for the orthodox time at the orthodox pace.” — "Out of the Molasses Trap" “There are no duplications in the Pristine World, and there are no no

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

There came a roaring like horses in the sky. Then was the multiplex crash (God save his soul, his body is done for) of bloody torso and severed limbs falling into the room froma great height, splintering the table at which the five of them sat, breaking the room, splattering them all with blood. But the ceiling above was unbreached and unharmed and there was no point of entry. “I am not man enough even to watch it,” Buford Strange gurgled, and he slumped sideways unconscious.

“Your machine can say how old a thing will be in its totality, but it can’t say how old a thing is right now?”— “Mostly it can do both. The present orientation can nearly always be coaxed out of it, though the clock considers the present of little importance. This is no gadgetry, people. It is positive science and it is wonderful.” “The block has solved many problems of involution and devolution,” Barnaby said. “Naturally the clock does not accept evolution, or has any intell

My working theory is that the best chronological anchor for The Devil Is Dead is Lafferty’s statement that “the Brunhilde sailed on November 7, a Friday morning.” Lafferty is usually vague about the year. Here he even says that “the year is uncertain.” Yet he does something unusual: he gives the day of the week, thereby creating several calendrical locks. November 7 was Lafferty’s birthday, which makes the specificity suggestive. Within the plausible postwar range, November 7

Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888) "Yes. The creator could save himself a lot of trouble by setting beginning very near the end. He could make it all its mementos and history and cosmic evidence whenever he chose, or as late as he chose." "Yes. He could make it all at the last moment, all complete, and who would know the difference? He could make it between the moment that he had Gabriel set lip to horn, and the moment that he sounded that last (and only) note." "And if he c

But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: ‘O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time. — W. H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening” Often, and now more often, Vincent felt that he was touching the fingers of the secret. And always, when he came near it, it had a little bit of the smell of the Pit. “The Six Fingers of Time” is a prenucleation Lafferty fantasy that already bears on questions at the center of his imaginative project: how to think the diff

Yes, I believe that there will be a coming of Christ, an actual physical appearance, comprising the eternal incarnation, redemption, and resurrection. So did Christ believe this and repeated it many times. It is to be believed literally, down to every jot and tittle of every letter. Those who have had visions of the Coming (the First and Second coming are non-sequential aspects of the same event and are neither first nor second), those who have had apparently authentic vision

And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come. — Revelation 4:8 “And I’m on the verge of doing away with all eyes except one pair to a person,” said Mary Fat-Land. “All of them except one pair are an illusion anyhow. Let me touch my mind to that Illusion of an Exuberance of Eyes as I might touch my cigar to a child

“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

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season. — Psalm 1:1–3 “Scorner’s Seat” is a pungent, funky slice of Lafferty—a story full of algae and sewer stench. It grew out of his correspondenc

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way asthe others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must becontent to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the othersare men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds ofpoets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himselfthrough what we call "real things." — C. S.

When the Abebajos block had been removed from Human minds, people began to make decisions faster, and often better. It had been the mental stutter... Transportation and manufacturing had then become practically instantaneous. Things that had once taken months and years now took only minutes and hours. A person could have one or several pretty intricate careers within an eight-hour period. It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the

The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve; lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time. I fear we shall outstep the coming morn as much as we this night overwatch'd. — William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I “ . . . the sun really is darkened and the moon really does not give its light. The time has almost all run out. The iron tongue of midnight is already swinging, and when it will clash and sound, the angular velocity of psychic accumulation is seen to

“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

Lunel, France “ . . . the Coming (the First and Second comings are non-sequential aspects of the same event and are neither first nor second) . . . Part of the difficulty seems to involve the difference between time and eternity . . . the trouble with time is that it is so temporary. In eternity there is no time element. There is no beginning or end, and the trouble with interpreting it is that simultaneously it will have been ended . . .” — Lafferty, Letter to Robert Sirigna

“I have watched the wheels go round in case I might see the living creatures like the appearance of lamps, in case I might see the Living God projected from the Machine. I have said to the perfected steel, be my sister and for the glassy towers I thought I felt some beginnings of his creature, But A, a, a, Domine Deus, my hands found the glazed work unrefined and the terrible crystal a stage-paste . . . Eia, Domine Deus.” — David Jones, “A, a, a, Domine Deus” I caught this mo

Who was Arpad Arutinov? We may never know, but he left us with a puzzlingly heterodox work, The Back Door of History, the definitive version of which is the magisterial Second Revised Edition. Arutinov effected an epistemological break with conventional historiography and the natural sciences, his thesis being that consensus reality is almost invariably a lie and that the front door of empirical evidence and rational analysis will always be insufficient for comprehending phen

SEVEN, FIVE, THREE, ONE, SIX, FOUR, TWO: “We can always leave.” Escapement. An odd word in watchmaking. I thought about it last year when my son Henry broke my trusty Hamilton, and I had to have the movements repaired. It wasn’t cheap, so I’ve learned to keep the watch well out of his reach. Imagine blowing up a balloon, then pinching its neck to let the air out in small, precise bursts, timed to the exact moment. That’s escapement. Swiss watchmakers use it to design the part