29 Misc Laff: "The Wheel and the Shoosh"

Lafferty was extremely good at getting the most out of his drafted material and ideas. Almost everything gets used. Over the twenty-plus years of his long life, when he turned out the corpus, it seems he made it work. There are the unwritten story ideas, like “Brainworld” mentioned in the last post, but one sees him acting typically: the material, if I’m right, gets snapped apart and used in Past Master and “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne,” showing how those two very well-known Lafferty works share some hidden DNA via the third source, the busted story “Brainworld.”

The most interesting of all the really unfinished, unpolished stories that left a trace, to me, is “The Wheel and the Shoosh.” Maybe something of its feel finally came through in “Lord Torpedo, Lord Gyroscope,” with its contrasting images of movement; if so, what was produced was a hard break from the ur-material. It was, if anything, two images of movement that Lafferty had in his head and wanted to write about.

So what was “The Wheel and the Shoosh”?

Well, as far as I can tell, it was to be a comic prison story about an attempt to master two apparently incompatible ways of understanding the world. Its premise is that every successful person invents either the wheel or the shoosh, but no person can invent (or even comprehend) both. You are either a wheelie or a shooshie. The narrator in the fragments intends to break that universal law.

The notes associate the wheel with “time orientation” and the shoosh with “space orientation.” People of the shoosh move easily between places that wheelies reach only with difficulty. The Shooshie narrator, meanwhile, rejects the wheelies’ conception of time as divisible, progressive, measurable, and countable. This echoes old Lafferty ideas. For instance, one finds something of it in “Phoenic.” Yet the narrator wants to become “a comprehending wheelie as well as shooshie.” He wants to have an understanding whose assumptions he still regards as mistaken. Extreme cognitive dissonance.

In the handwritten opening, this undertaking takes place in a jail in “Boondocks New Jersey.” The prison sets the inciting joke: a Shooshie is being asked to “do time.” One fragment puts it this way:

The Shooshie’s speech supplies evidence of possible change. He says “at this point in time” or “one more time,” then catches himself using temporal expressions that don’t square with his understanding. He cannot decide whether this represents progress or “horrible retrogression.” Learning becomes something the reader might detect in his language before he, as a character, can confidently recognize it himself.

Lafferty wrote another opening. It reverses the direction: its imprisoned narrator is trying to learn the principles of the shoosh. Extraordinary prisoners provide precedents, including a maker of keys who works from echoes and a historian who recovers lost inscriptions by feeling them with his tongue. The narrator calls his proposed mental re-education an even greater feat. That comparison places the acquisition of understanding alongside, and potentially above, spectacular feats of escape.

Across both openings, there is the prisoner, wheelie or shooshie, attempting to acquire a capacity that his existing understanding apparently excludes.