"And All the Skies Are Full of Fish" (1974/1980)

The world's a blast (Ka-whoosh! Ka-whish!) With healthy soul and belly, And all the skies are full of fish, And all the fish are smelly.

Charles Fort’s Super-Sargasso Sea comes up on the blog from time to time. Judging by the number of variations Lafferty gave the idea, he loved it. Oceans, seas, rivers, springs, and other waterways are a major part of his corpus. He uses them to write about time, the unconscious, and the suprahistorical. Yet there are the twists. For instance, the unconscious in Lafferty is not merely psychological, for several reasons. First, as we know, he likes to exteriorize it. He makes it the container rather than the thing contained. Second, the unconscious points to what is below the limen, so it mingles with the forgotten, the recessed, and the real but less accessible. Consequently, it closely parallels Lafferty’s thinking about amnesia. In his work, amnesia appears at multiple scales, from the ontological amnesia that follows the Primordial Fall to the historical amnesia that arises as fallen people continually create, lose, and forget their contingent worlds. The Oceanic unconscious likewise washes across scales.

With this in mind, there are a handful of architectonic counterfigurations in Lafferty’s work. One of them is what he does with the waters below the limen. Because he envisions a vertical universe, he takes what is below and sets it on high, so that the primordial waters of the unconscious take on the properties of the waters above the firmament in Genesis 1:6–8. That brings us back to the Super-Sargasso. “And the Skies Are Full of Fish” ends with a reminder of the unconscious’s verticality, which most writers imagine as depth, as something below rather than above. What does Lafferty do? He does this:

“The pool's only a mile from here, Austro?” Barnaby Sheen asked. “Which way?” “Up.”

With verticality in mind, no surprise, then, that the Super-Sargasso was such a powerful image for Lafferty who often mythologizes around the axis mundi. Fort's Super-Sargaso is a region somewhere above the earth’s surface where gravitation is inoperative, or greatly weakened, a zone of suspension. Fort called it a “neutral zone” around the earth, like a magnet’s neutral zone, where objects lifted from the earth’s surface, or arriving from other planets, can be held indefinitely until storms or other disturbances shake them down. It is a kind of warehouse for all things misplaced, lost, or forgotten: derelicts, rubbish, old cargoes from interplanetary wrecks, things cast out from Mars and Jupiter and Neptune, things lifted by earthly cyclones—horses, barns, elephants, flies, dodos, moas, pterodactyls, leaves ancient and modern—all tending to disintegrate into homogeneous muds or dusts, red, black, yellow. That is all Fort, but it sure sounds like Lafferty. Fort’s The Book of the Damned also describes both frigid and tropical regions, freshwater ponds and saltwater oceans, and floating islands sometimes stationary over parts of the earth.

If you really dig into the topic, you find that Fort proposes the Super-Sargasso Sea as an oblique belt over Great Britain, France, and Italy, extending to India, with one strange addition. Fort wrote, “I think, now, that the Super-Sargasso Sea is an oblique belt, with changing ramifications, over Great Britain, France, Italy, and on to India. Relatively to the United States, I am not very clear, but think especially of the Southern States.” Look up, Tulsans! It is obviously fascinating for Lafferty and relevant to his many sky-fallen objects. Can there be any doubt that Lafferty noticed this in Fort?

Fort was also confident that the Super-Sargasso had climates analogous to terrestrial geography: arctic ice fields, tropical zones where things putrefy, and temperate regions. One thinks of the many sky places in Lafferty, from major stories like “Not Limestone Islands” to minor ones like “Flaming Arrow.”

Fort’s argument for the Super-Sargasso was his first major attempt to hammer out a unified theory of damned facts. It rested, fundamentally, on challenging Newtonian gravitation as a fixed quantity. He wrote that gravitation must be variable and rhythmic, Herbert Spencer being his source for this, that there is thus a neutral zone, and that the Super-Sargasso Sea lies within it. What he said he wanted was a “Science of Super-Geography” and a “guidebook to the Super-Sargasso Sea, for aviators.” The Fortean stories Lafferty wrote are something like this, though he uses the notion to introduce his major ideas about time, history, and perception.

The Super-Sargasso became part of the The Men Who Knew Everything sequence when Lafferty wrote “And All the Skies Are Full of Fish,” a Fortean title if Lafferty ever wrote one. In the sequence, the story follows “What Big Tears the Dinosaur’s,” where readers meet Austro’s pet dog. Both stories were written in 1974. Both draw on Watkin.

In Watkin’s color theory as used by Lafferty, this story’s band is yellow, or art. It criticizes art that has pulled away from bodied life and become too artificial, in the pejorative sense. This appears in the contrast between two groups of children. There are the aesthetic willow dancers, who draw down a “pure,” clear rain from the sky, rain without fish. Then there is Austro and his club, drawing down rampant, fishy, crinoid-filled, ferry stuff. It is smelly, but it is also bodied, and without it, one cannot have a fish fry, one of Lafferty’s Catholic jokes in the story.

Austro is still twelve. He joins a gang renamed the Local Anaesthetics and, because another boy has shown himself to be a coward, gets his massive dinosaur dog admitted as a member. Their club opposes the aesthetic children, whose willow dances demonstrate psychokinetic control over the weather. During one display of these powers, Amelia Corngrinder creates a localized rain shower in a birdbath. Then, suddenly, a sarcodic mass falls from the sky and shatters the stone. Lafferty’s memorable Susie Kalisky is there, presumably the one who drew down the meaty chunk:

“It just seems that something is lacking,” Susie said. “There is something wrong with empty water, and there is something lonesome about uninhabited rain. Nobody lives in your rain, Amelia.”

The story then moves to its climax. A public weather-making demonstration is to be held at the Civic Center, attended by city magistrates and the four Men Who Know Everything and Laff. They talk about the relationship between human thought and environmental conditions. The aesthetic children then perform a synchronized willow dance that summons seven sparkling showers, while the Local Anaesthetics struggle to keep pace with their countermeasures. Austro’s dog hides in the plaza by camouflaging as a thirty-foot hairy hill. Despite the efforts of the Local Anaesthetics, the aesthetic children keep a lead in the competition with their production of pure rain.

Susie Kalisky steps in to settle this. She approaches the aesthetic children and says, "Your glasses are cracked, kids." Lafferty writes,

And the glasses of all seven of them were cracked (all aesthetic, willow-dancing children wear glasses). And something else about them cracked at the same time. It was their protective psychic carapaces. It was their science itself.

Throughout the story, she keeps cracking people’s glasses this way. It causes the children's eyewear (we are told they all wear glasses) and their psychic carapaces to shatter, ending their rain.

More importantly, it brings down a massive fall of ancient fish, crinoid stems, and giant ferns. The townspeople transport the fallen material in twelve-ton trucks to Sheen’s Ravine for a banquet attended by five thousand people. Barnaby Sheen welcomes this plane of reality while eating the garnished fish, as Susie showers him with a shower of frogs and eels.

We have, again, Lafferty’s use of noetic darkening centered on eyeglasses that do not make reality more visible but block access to it. We also have Lafferty's love of cracks and tears in consensus reality. The cracks Susie puts into the glasses are cracks into otherspace, cracks like the cracks in “The Man Who Walked Through Cracks.” They let reality in like a fast-fill valve and are a cousin of the rumbling of the past in “And Read the Flesh Between the Lines.” To make it work, Lafferty uses his signature technique of counterfiguration. On one side are the “pure-hearted and aesthetic children,” with their willow dances and their controlled, beautiful rain. On the other are the unlovely-looking Local Anaesthetics, with their raucous, smelly, inhabited rain, full of ancient fish and ferns.

It might look like a quaint rivalry between kid clubs, but it is a comic war over aesthetics and over what is real; over what counts as beautiful and what art should be; whether “pure” beauty, the limpid and controlled shower, is superior to a wilder, more embodied, more pungent kind of beauty, the beauty of fish fries, garnished crinoids, and inhabited rain.

I’ll end by saying a little about how Lafferty takes Fort’s idea and sacramentalizes it through Watkin. Watkin’s The Bow in the Clouds treats Art as one of the stages in the ascent of aesthetic experience toward God. If you haven't read it, The Bow in the Clouds (1932) is best summed up through its subtitle: "An Essay towards the Integration of Experience." Watkin tries to synthesize the domains of human knowledge and experience—Matter (Ultra-Violet), the Positive Sciences (Violet), Technology/the Ethical and Social Sciences/History (Indigo), Metaphysics (Blue), Life (Green), Art (Yellow), Sex (Orange), Religion (Red), and Mysticism (Ultra-Red)—into a unified vision grounded in Catholic metaphysics. It argues that all levels of reality find their coherence and ultimate meaning in the divine. On the whole, it is a characteristic example of early-twentieth-century English Catholic intellectual life, in the tradition of figures like von Hügel and Christopher Dawson.

Watkin himself was not a Thomist. He was a Bonaventurist. St. Bonaventure is the scholastic thinker who most strongly emphasizes God as beauty. His work celebrates beauty as a transcendental. Lafferty repurposes Watkin’s ideas about the nature of beauty and aesthetic perception in a characteristic way, arguing with Watkin. That is what makes The Men Who Knew Everything so much more interesting than being a set of color-coded exercises, and why Lafferty's Yellow pieces on Art is about the joyfully smelly and raucous. He sides with the rowdy, festive, incarnational version of beauty over the ethereal, disembodied, rarefied simplification of beauty. He refuses to Platonize. The aesthetic children do that and end up with empty water. In the imagination of the Church, that is the stagnant water one finds in scripture, not living water. Hence, we have Susie Kalisky's complaint that “there is something lonesome about uninhabited rain. Nobody lives in your rain.” When Lafferty writes that the scales fell from people’s eyes, we know he is quietly writing an apocalypse:

The tide of battle swung to the Local Anaesthetics. Something else was falling to the pavements of the area now. It was the scales from the eyes of the people. Now the folks were able to see the monstrous crashing ichthyoids that had been, or would be, or maybe already were fish. Ancient sorceries will whip modern fetishes every time, and it was a case of that.

Lafferty couldn't be counterfiguring harder. He switches the poles of aesthetic and anesthetic.

“And All the Skies Are Full of Fish” is not much discussed or much read, but it is great stuff. A personal favorite.

And All the Skies Notes.pdf

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