03AD: "Condillac's Statue"

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 fare as bleak reason will howl and cry out for blood.”

“Condillac’s Statue, or Wrens in His Head” reimagines Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s famous thought experiment about a statue acquiring the senses one by one into a tragicomedy. Condillac and the occult doctor Jouhandeau place living brain matter inside a granite statue, then give it smell, hearing, sight, and speech. Condillac wants to prove that the mind contains nothing that has not entered through the senses. But their creation, Rock-Head, develops moral judgments, affections, humor, political ideas, desires, and a personality. When his judgments contradict the theory, Condillac insists that he cannot have them.

Rock-Head takes up the revolutionary cause and asks Jouhandeau to create more effective revolutionaries. He acquires a little property when a thief hides gold in his head, then makes a real discovery: his commitment to the Red Revolution conflicts with his new interests. His new friends, the old revolutionaries, kill him when he objects to their destruction of property. Jouhandeau’s artificially narrowed revolutionaries survive to bring about the bloodier revolution the story has been anticipating.

Written in February 1968, this poignant story takes up two of Lafferty’s concerns at the time: ascendant materialism and revolutionary leftism. It partakes of the Past Master moment, but, to my mind, it belongs in a collection with his much later fairy-tale works, such as his take on Sleeping Beauty and his last great story, “The Man Who Lost His Magic.”

Making these recordings with the current technology means putting up with weird slips and blips. Accents drift, for instance, and I could spend hours trying to fix them. But this is for my own enjoyment, so good enough is good enough. I’m sure some of these frustrations will disappear in a few months. In any case, it’s all a proof of concept. I’ll be happy when the tools let me create exactly what I want to hear.

For now, I design the voices and try to keep them consistent, then use other tools to add the music. I’m a classical music junkie, so most of it is just stuff I like that seemed to fit. I’m no audio engineer, but I did layer in some effects from the BBC archive.