At 3700 Angstroms

Today, something interesting, although it falls into a niche within a niche within a niche. In other posts, I have written about how Lafferty uses E. I. Watkin’s 1932 work The Bow in the Clouds: An Essay Towards the Integration of Experience to create Barnaby Sheen stories. What I tried to do is go deeper than just observing that Lafferty color-coded stories by theme because the more interesting thought is how and why he did this.

If you haven't read any of that, Watkin’s book is Catholic metaphysics for a general audience. More specifically, it is St. Bonaventure for the masses, conveyed through an expensive metaphor: creation is akin to the electromagnetic spectrum. Watkins integrates the range of human experience, from the scientific to the mystical, by assigning each mode a symbolic place along the rainbow. At one end, the invisible band of ultra-violet represents brute matter, the foundational substratum of reality. The visible spectrum follows in order: violet stands for the positive sciences, blue for metaphysics, green for life, yellow for art, orange for sex, and red for religion. The book concludes with an invisible band of ultra-red, which Watkin links to the transcendent experience of mysticism, the higher reality beyond concept and image.

Although Lafferty used Watkin as source material for the Sheen stories, he also drew on it, at least once, in thinking about his work beyond them. As so often in his writing, an idea does not stay cautiously contained within the thematizing plots of The Men Who Knew Everything. It becomes a means to understand what he was doing as a writer.

On a page otherwise filled with scribbles for Sheen stories, he noted that Archipelago, his personal favorite of the novels, was “a fantasy at 3700 angstroms,” and boxes the idea to set it off from the others, which are about Sheen material. Within Watkin’s system, that wavelength (3700 Å, or 370 nm) is an important threshold: physically, it is where the invisible near-ultraviolet ends and the visible violet begins; conceptually, for Watkin, it is the boundary of unknowable reality and the dawn of human perception and knowledge.

On the ultra-violet side of the spectrum, Watkin places Matter, not perceptible objects, but the fundamental substratum of reality. In this philosophical sense, analogous to the quantum fields of modern physics or the materia prima of scholasticism, Matter is pure potentiality, knowable only through its effects. By definition, it is "imperceptible to the eye, but of potent influence," a reality whose final secrets elude scientific probing. On the violet side appears the first visible color, which Watkin associates with the positive sciences. It is where substratum takes perceptible form and gives rise to humanity’s abstract knowledge. 3700 Å: where the hidden foundation of physical being becomes just barely accessible to inquiry

When I came across the scribble about Archipelago being “a fantasy at 3700 angstroms,” I thought: now that is some Lafferty. It reads like a code that only he would think to use.

In the Sheen stories, Watkin is quoted directly, a tipoff to his presence. Here, though, Watkin is used differently: as a telescope to look across the rest of the Lafferty canon. Lafferty sets one part of the ghost story against another, embedding within the Sheen material a code by which other elements might be deciphered.

Ahoy! From way over on the Sheen side, a signal is spotted—Archipelago, flickering at 3700 angstroms. And it makes sense. Archipelago is itself a fantasy about the perceived and the unperceived, about what is separate, coextensive, and liminal.

Examples? From page one, a character can be “in the Garden” one moment and then find that “The Garden was gone, and he was in the middle of the World.” It’s a perceptual transition across a boundary as figuratively thin as that between visible and ultraviolet light. The Dirty Five are all in dual states. They are both soldiers in the Pacific during WWII and archetypes. Henry is “Friar Tuck, or Pantagruel,” Hans is “Apollo, or Dr. Faustus,” and Finnegan is “Dionysus, or Ulysses” (39), and so on. The “invisible” mythic identity coexists with the “visible” human identity. And what applies to character, of course, applies to place and time. "At the same time,” Lafferty writes, “that some of this was happening, Finnegan was spending twelve years in happy marriage to Theresa Piccone. But there is no room for those twelve years in this framework" (201).

The 3700-angstrom note was just an offhand jotting from Lafferty, but I think it’s fun—a glimpse into how his mind worked as it worked, and a reminder that once something was admitted into the Ghost Story, no part of it was ever sealed off from the rest.