3A: Consensus Reality and Ptolemaic Clocks

Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. —W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951)

Even so, something was a little bit wrong with things. Some people said that the days were off by maybe a millionth of a second from what they should be. Other people said that the days were off by several hours. They were off, that’s certain. There was an easy solution, of course, for a mechanically sophisticated people—Ptolemaic Clocks with Epicyclic Compensation. These clocks and watches, which were quickly manufactured in the millions and as quickly adopted, showed the hours as they should be for the particular days. All that it took was a great number of epicyclic gears inside. So, with the new Ptolemaic clocks accepted as the objective standard, the popular feeling that the days were remaining at maximum length became a new subjective impression that was contradicted by the clocks. And, as such, it weakened and weakened still more until the people who were able to say with half-honest conviction “Aren’t the days getting shorter now though!” And, again after a few months “Say, aren’t the days getting longer lately though!”

More about time in The Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny. Why is Ptolemy so often a villain in Lafferty? One sees this most clearly in the unpublished “Claudius and Charles,” a Lafferty story probably read by only half a dozen people, if that. It was left out of The Man Who Talled Tales, but it should count as an unpublished story, even if unfinished. Lafferty readers would probably enjoy a book collecting that sort of material from the archive: story ideas, fragments, unpublished stories, and so forth.

But back to Ptolemy. For Lafferty, he represents the extremely intelligent man who helps an elaborate falsehood become consensus reality.

One glorious example of consensus reality silliness in Three Armageddons is Ptolemaic clocks. They become fashionable as Ennis nears death. Knowing he will die in 1984, he starts drawing out 1983. I suspect Lafferty had long planned to retire in 1984, given how he uses that date in Three Armageddons and elsewhere. That year in Prime, he raced to complete the last two Coscuin works, Sardinian Summer and First and Last Island, as if time were running out for him.

Could one build a Ptolemaic clock? Sure one could. The trick is to make an unchanging day appear to follow the seasons. In mine, the sun shines for sixteen hours every day, but clocks fewer daylight hours as its calendar approaches winter. It does this by slowing its hand during daylight and speeding it up at night. At the winter setting, sixteen hours of sunlight take up only eight hours on the dial. The red hand keeps uniform time, so you can see the adjusted hand fall behind and catch up.

Open the clock to see how it works. A central gear turns steadily, while an outer ring supplies the “time correction,” turning backward during daylight and forward at night. Three smaller gears mesh with both; the carrier joining their axles drives the clock hand at the resulting speed. I think of it as a metaphor for consensus reality and its relation to Prime. The clock doesn't shorten the daylight. It just changes the standard by which people judge it, until they distrust their own experience and accept that the seasons are passing normally.

Just as Prime catches up with Pilgrim in Not to Mention Camels, it catches up with Ennis. As the crux individual, Ennis belongs to a line of supremely important figures in Lafferty’s novels, from Freddy Foley in Fourth Mansions to Quasimodo, the Doomsday Equation, in Annals of Klepsis. Thomas More in Past Master is another such figure who presides over a world's death. Elsewhere, as in Serpent’s Egg and East of Laughter, Lafferty distributes that role among a group of individuals.

When his time comes, however, Ennis is far more blessed than Pilgrim. He slips out of time, whistling his “Sly Pig Sequence,” while most of the world goes down with his Armageddon III, paying what the novel presents as the price of birth control, abortion, and euthanasia. This is one of the work's most Catholic aspects, and I haven't seen it noted, though the work builds toward it. It may make an already difficult book even more off-putting to those who disagree with Lafferty’s politics. Of course, he would first need more readers, and those readers would have to read him closely enough to care about such matters.

The consensus reality that wins the world and kills it is one in which a life no longer matters much. By the end, that indifference extends to whether the world itself survives.

3A has my favorite of Lafferty’s non-endings, not least because I recognize its mood in 2026. We face threats from nuclear war, engineered pandemics, the misuse of powerful AI, ecological breakdown, and worsening heat, drought, and floods, even as the international cooperation needed to contain them weakens. Everything around us grows weirder, and at times we seem as indifferent as Lafferty’s people to whether the world has a future.

Seven dark and smoky spirits of Sweeny jumped out of the tree and fell to the ground. Then they sank down through the ground as if it were water, and disappeared there. And one golden spirit of Sweeny flew out of the tree, and up and away, whistling (this is the absolute truth of it) the “Sly Pig Sequence” from Prohibition, A Farce, an old and almost forgotten comedy. That, so far as we have record of it here, was the earthly end of the old and almost forgotten prestidigitator Enniscorthy Sweeny. So Final Armageddon was burning and raging out of control, and the World was ending. That’s funny. The people didn’t act as if the world were ending. But they didn’t act quite as if it were going to continue either. They behaved as though they didn’t very much care whether it ended or not.