"Bank and Shoal of Time" (1979/1981)

Lunel, France

“ . . . the Coming (the First and Second comings are non-sequential aspects of the same event and are neither first nor second) . . . Part of the difficulty seems to involve the difference between time and eternity . . . the trouble with time is that it is so temporary. In eternity there is no time element. There is no beginning or end, and the trouble with interpreting it is that simultaneously it will have been ended . . .” — Lafferty, Letter to Robert Sirignano

"You could enter false worlds that never existed if your reconstructions are too subjective. But you are five correctives to each other in this." — Peter Luna

Advanced Lafferty.

Today, thoughts about “Bank and Shoal of Time.” Having recently looked at “Rainbird,” Lafferty’s most straightforward piece of writing about time travel, I have been thinking about "Bank and Shoal of Time," not least because it came up in a recent conversation.

“Rainbird” says nothing interesting about the metaphysics of time. It says something interesting about the nature of human life as sequenced in time. It reminds the Lafferty reader of the duty to be happy) within historical constraints (Aurelia) and to be smart about the opportunity costs. In contrast, “Bank and Shoal” is very much about the metaphysics of time: it's a poetic story that mashes together a half dozen or more ideas about time that appear with great frequency in Lafferty’s work from the mid-1970s onward.

But is it really a poetic story? One reason to think so is the role Belloc plays in the story. One should read the Belloc essay "On An Unknown Country" that Lafferty quotes in Section 2 because Lafferty is being so programmatic. His headnotes do many things. One to solicit the reader to consider the original context from which he disembeds his quotations.

Belloc writes: “All that can best be expressed in words should be expressed in verse, but verse is a slow thing to create; nay, it is not really created: it is a secretion of the mind, it is a pearl that gathers round some irritant and slowly expresses the very essence of beauty and of desire that has lain long, potential and unexpressed, in the mind of the man who secretes it. God knows that this Unknown Country has been hit off in verse a hundred times.” Poetry and the poetic will be important.

And because we are dealing with both poetry and the theology of time, as well as time paradoxes as Lafferty understood them, the story is highly symbolic, and it lacks the neatness of something like the bootstrap paradox in “Rainbird.” It is an open question whether Lafferty worked out a poetics for what he wanted to accomplish from the mid-1970s onward. He clearly thought it was more important than the market. The strongest case for thinking he did not work out a poetics is his opacity. I think we often just lack the conceptual tools to read him. If we had those tools, the continuities would be apparent. We could move more easily from a story like “Rainbird” to one like “Bank and Shoal.”

Relevant to this story is something Lafferty wrote in a 1988 letter:

“And then there are the paradoxes of Time and Eternity, which hint that the ‘when’ in the questing ‘when will these things be?’ has no meaning. ‘When’ applies to time, and the interstitial coming is the intersection of time and eternity. Every individual door through death enters eternity where one might say that everything is simultaneous, except that one cannot apply simultaneous (at the same time) to eternity, which is completely beyond time and sequence and which has no ‘before’ or ‘after.’”

In "Bank and Shoal," Peter Luna’s death will open a door onto eternity. It will also open one onto time travel for the thirty-year-olds Luna summoned to Moonwick Estate. This is a story about the individual door Lafferty’s refers to in his letter, a thought experiment about the intersection of time and eternity.

At the start of the story, Peter Luna is genial and dying. He owns Moonwick Estate in France and has summoned a matched set of at least five experts in theoretical time travel. The ones who show up aren’t quite top-rank time-attempters, but the fact that they show up will change this. Among the five are Henry Kemp, the Time-Reconstruction Man, and Annabella MacBean, the Clotted Dream Woman. The invitation arrives via the mysterious World Courier Service and promises the witnessing of a creeping time-satellite that Luna claims to have built at his estate, a place where “Time is a mulch many meters deep.”

Upon arrival at Moonwick Estate, the five experts find themselves in an unusual temporal bubble. Time is under a slow-jog, a state of near stasis where watches stop, and they experience days’ worth of activities (playing tennis, exploring the grounds, and having four good meals) in what Annabella calculates is “the most filled-to-overflowing less-than-three seconds that I ever spent in my life.”

This is talky stuff, thick with private symbolism and Lafferty’s big ideas about time. At the estate, Luna and his guests have lengthy discussions about the mechanics of time travel. The central obstacle they have all faced is the same impediment they call the “shoal”—a personal temporal barrier of roughly thirty years. Luna explains to them that “a person . . . cannot make incursion back into any time in which he already lives.” This prevents time-attempters from traveling into their own past. Travel to the future is deemed possible but futile, as one simply “comes to his own hour of death all too soon, and he dies.” The truly great time-travel feat would be to journey into the past before one’s own birth. Hence Luna’s time-satellite. It is designed to achieve this by providing a launch point “beyond the shoals and beyond the interference.”

While living within the bubble of slow-jogged time, several of the experts search Moonwick Estate for any physical machine, but they find nothing. Abel Roaring, the Time-is-a-Pile-of-Transparencies Man, grouses that a workable satellite couldn’t be smaller than ten meters in diameter, yet no such device can be found. The strangeness of Moonwick itself is deepened by Lafferty’s use of an external perspective: a local taxi driver who dropped off a guest returns later to show his wife the beautiful big house, but it has vanished. Where it stood is a weed-grown pile of old rubbish. He and another driver who witnessed its appearance earlier agree there is “something dislocated and hellish wrong here.”

The mystery sorts out when Peter Luna reveals his true identity. He confirms Henry Kemp’s suspicion that he is that Peter Luna, the one who was “supposed to have died away back in the year 1928.” Luna then makes his big revelation: the current date is indeed that year, and he hasn’t died yet. This is his death day. He has put his final moments into an extreme near time-stasis because, as he puts it, “I’m not in a hurry about dying.” He tells them his death will be the catalyst for their journey—rank superstition made real. “I am the dying cat thrown through the hoop of fire,” he says, “but the hoop of fire is my own aura; and it is the five of you who will fling yourselves through it.” Through his aura, the time-attempters can pass into the past beyond the bank and shoal.

The climax is Luna’s death. Luna tells the five, “Oh, you’re inside the satellite. All of us are. The entire estate of Moonwick is a time-satellite.” By coming to the estate, the five experts were transported inside the device. They arrived in 1928, decades before their births and safely beyond their personal shoals. “The ‘Road to Yesterday’ is wide open to you,” Luna says.

At the moment of his death (which he announces with a kind of pleasure by saying, “The clock has stopped”) Luna’s aura flares forth, a quivering and quaking loop, a circular image of eternity. The aura expands. The five guests step through it. It collapses. Lafferty writes, “Peter Luna was dead.” The five “happy-sad time-achievers” then proceed “with lively step down the ‘Road to Yesterday.’”

Where to start? With the title, I suppose. It is an allusion to Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7. The scene matters because what is at stake for Macbeth is the nature of judgment and eternity, and questions about risk. Specifically, in the bank-and-shoal thought, Macbeth weighs murdering King Duncan. He measures ambition against conscience, and he decides that, because life is brief and fragile, just a narrow “bank and shoal” between the infinite seas of birth and the afterlife, he will do it. He will murder Duncan and gain the crown, even if the act brings him judgment and damnation.

To skip a step ahead, the integrity of judgment is central to "Bank and Shoal," so it might be worth keeping in mind the Macbeth passage. Shakespeare influences the theological problem Lafferty sets up with Peter, the time-attempted, and his version of the shoal. When Macbeth stands on the bank and shoal of time, the stakes are immense. It’s the edge earthly power and eternal ruin. Macbeth knows that killing Duncan could make him king but also destroy his soul and unravel the moral order that binds him to loyalty and humanity.

Now flip all that because Lafferty does. He makes Peter Luna a self-sacrificial figure who uses his death to pass the crown of time travel to the five time-attempters. Peter is an interesting character, with certainly more than one game being played on his name. As the guardian of the doorway to time, he is a type of Peter, the porter at the gate. And as a man named Luna, he is tied to the moon, with all that symbol’s temporal associations of time and tide, as well as Lafferty’s watery, moonlit oceanic.

There is also something Christlike in the logic of what happens in the story: the narrow path to time travel occurs through the aura the time-attempters must pass. This is not to say that Peter Luna is a Christ-figure (this is not the blood of Christ), but it is to say that the sacrificial logic of passing through a person into another temporal regime is Christological in pattern. That’s all of St. Paul, so it is thematically significant to a large number of subelements in the story: a person gates time and eternity.

One last thing. This story is beautiful and brilliant, yet it has much going against it: foremost is its cast, and how they lay out information, then the deep roots of all that happens in the Whole Lafferty.

Perhaps the easiest way to get past this first shoal is to bite the bullet. Think through the first Britannica entry that Lafferty quotes, the one at the beginning of Section 3. One has to get clear on the five. The story starts with a dramatis personae, but that is something of a red herring. The real dramatis personae found the Britannica entry, because the characters are living exemplars of its pedantic definition of time, forming a matched set five “four-color” Lafferty personalities with some key dualities.

Henry Kemp and Abel Roaring are the attempters who understand the physical experience of time. For them, time is a medium that can be built or archaeologically excavated from “remembering-transparencies,” similar to how archaeology works in The Elliptical Grave (1977/1989). This fits with the process philosophy aspect in the entry of time as being metaphysically ultimate.

Then there is Annabella MacBean, with her clotted dreams, and Ethan Farquharson (his name is a literary allusion), who says that intuition is the key. They’re all about the psychic experience; what can seem to be the illusory view of time as a subjective, mental construct. Rowena Charteris challenges the one-way flow assumption with her theory of quantum displacement.

It is Peter Luna himself who provides the practical mechanism by creating a localized field (the slow-jog) that illustrates how time’s flow is relative to the observer’s velocity: everyone in the story is relative to Peter Luna's slow-jog, his last five seconds of life. He has made them relative to him, to his temporal order, the order of Moonwick as he dies, that will separate when the five pass through his aura. The aspect of Moonwick, the physical structure, the un-satellite time traveling doublet of Moonwick (it is only an estate, a bit of geography in in France) will then be a corpse, just like the dead body Peter’s lawyer finds; and like a corpse it will decay and leave rubbishy matter.

Together, the quintet synthesizes philosophical and physical principles. What is abstract in the Britannica definition is operationalized in time travel. And interestingly, all their equations, despite the different interpretations of the data, point to the same metaphysical reality. [As an aside, there is a fun joke here that another five that might be about the Institute for Impure Science: "There are at least five rather furtive and sleazy persons already on the time-roads."]

With Peter, the five time-attempters, and the five seconds, we arrive at some of the deeper elements in the story. Ideas like aeviternity. On my reading, we have more than a three-tiered cosmology in the story, but we need a three-tiered rig even to get started.

In short, most human existence in the story is bound to the default temporal realm, a linear path where people are trapped unidirectionally. Here is time’s arrow. As it moves, the shoal moves with it. To escape, one cannot sail directly into the past (one could not leave the harbor) but must first reach an aeviternal analogue that lifts one over it. One needs a time satellite like Moonwick Estate.

Moonwick is this a little like an observation plateau. It exists between ordinary time and true eternity. From its location, a quantum push through a specific gateway (Peter Luna’s dying aura) becomes possible. It propels the characters beyond the temporally limiting shoal: the aura of Peter Luna is released as he enters eternity.

The homeliest way to put all that is by way of the great Junior Johnson, moonshine runner turned racing legend. The fearless Johnson was the first American driver to discover how to use another car’s slipstream (or “draft”) to his advantage. He would tuck in close behind a competitor to reduce drag, then he would slingshot past the other guy. Here, the car’s drag is like Peter’s aura and the five are like Junior Johnson.

Junior Johnson uses his discovery of slipstream.

Moonwick Estate also allows the characters to experience something like a Boethian simultaneous view, accessing all history at once from a summit. There is more than a little Boetius in this, accounting for God’s foreknowledge and man’s free will.

The time satellite is a satellite because it exists outside ordinary time (it is slow-jogged to Peter's being/aeon) and outside eternity, on the cusp of the aeviternal, where sequence can be experienced. The benefits of slipstream will arrive with Peter Luna's death and the hoop-of-fire aura. Peter has brought the five so close to his aeon that the five time-attempters can "draft" into time travel, right through the aeon/hoop. Luna says, "They have it topologically backwards though. I am the dying cat thrown through the hoop of fire, but the hoop of fire is my own aura; and it is the five of you who will fling yourselves through it. And I am the slave killed so that the traveler may step through his expanded dying aura and be back in time for the length of the slave's life. Yes, it is the rankest of superstitions. Cannot you find it likeable in me?”

But why would Lafferty create this kind of plot? I think it has to do with his Catholic views of particular and universal judgment, something he spent a lot of time thinking about. For either of the judgments to be consistent with ethical monotheism, one could not occupy the same point in the sequence at the same moment. This might seem non-intuitive, but I’ll try to set it out as clearly as I can.

Again, aeviternity is the issue. It is the middle condition between time and eternity: angels and blessed souls exist here. Events have logical sequence but not temporal succession. There is order without passing moments. (Read this post for a deeper dive into the issues.) That order (ordo rerum ad finem) is necessary for divine providence and judgment, because every creature’s moral history must take place in a determinate sequence. It can be seen whole by God the Father in the particular judgment and judged publicly by the Son in the universal judgment (a wrinkle on this in a moment). That is Boethius’ summit.

Peter Luna enforces that rule, the one that no one can occupy the same time twice. It dramatizes a deep Thomistic principle. The shoal of time (the span of one’s own lived years that cannot be revisited) is a metaphysical firewall preserving the ordered chain of acts by which a person is knowable and judgeable. To cross back into that span would transform sequence into non-sequence, destroying the intelligible order of cause, choice, and consequence on which both morality and reality depend. For the same reason no one can occupy the same point while traveling in the past.

The slow-jog field at Moonwick, where moments nearly stop, is for this reason a quasi-aeviternal state between temporal change and eternal stillness. Peter Luna is thoroughgoingly Thomistic when he says that his guests must leap beyond their own shoal but never into it. In Thomistic terms, the shoal marks the particularized boundaries between human temporality and aeviternal order: again, violating it would not merely break time but jeopardize ordo iudicii, the divine order of judgment itself.

This is, of course, my distinctly Thomistic reading of the story (“It’s Gothic with the bright sun shining on it. All other Gothic is between haunted twilight and lightning-riven midnight”). Yet there’s also one Origenist in the group. I am never quite sure what to do with Lafferty’s occasional flirtations with Origen and universal salvation (he usually treats them as thought experiments), but they can’t be ignored. Origen is here at Moonwick Estate, and he does seem to get a hearing: a clear instance of what Gene Wolfe meant when he said that fragments of patrology mattered to the fiction:

“Oh, Peter, this is part of the main show,” Annabella insisted. “It's at least the first act of it. I think it's a full show, five or seven acts at least, and at the end of each of them we die and are then reborn on a more vasty plane. But there aren't any skimpy acts in our main show; surely the first act isn't; and it's criminal for us to skimp any part of it. We must range forward and backward through the act we are living in; we must learn every direction and dimension of it. We have an obligation to understand and to explore, in every way. Life is made up of this compacted emotion and experience and happiness, and if we cut ourselves off from any dimension of it then we live the less. We must unclot it and open it all up. The ‘Road to Yesterday’ must be one of the opened roads, or we are the less for it.” “It's rather good cake,” Peter Luna said as he took a forkful of his own Death-Day Cake.

I’ll wrap up by saying something about 1928. It’s the only year mentioned in the story, and that is quite important. It’s a magical year in the Whole Lafferty. Peter Luna dies at the moment Lafferty sets as the passage away from his generation’s childhood. In the Green Tree materials, the year 1928 holds profound significance. Remember that its first volume is titled My Heart Leaps Up: 1920–1928, a title that alludes to Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807). Back to Belloc’s and the poetic.

As with Green Tree, allusions to Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode” help solve a few puzzles. One of the stranger bypaths in the story is the passage on babies and time travel. Wordsworth, of course, imagines a spiritual pre-existence in which “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” Peter Luna is thoroughly Wordsworthian—if not in method, then certainly in outcome—by giving this idea a literal, cosmological explanation. He says the youngest children, especially those still in the womb, indulge in time travel. Their out-of-body experiences become a tangible version of the Ode’s “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” This visionary access is then lost. In reading this, I could not help but think of Wordsworth’s line, “shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy.” Lafferty treats this spiritual fading as the quantifiable concept of the shoal, the barrier of personal-life inertia that widens with age. It turns the “visionary gleam” into something that can be mapped. As a result, the nostalgic longing of the “Intimations Ode” looks a great deal like the attempters’ concrete quest to get behind this barrier, to go “nearer to our well-springs.” This is probably the largest part of what time travel in the story is about, its “Road to Yesterday.” This takes us back to Belloc's "On An Unknown Country" and what it asserts about poetry. It is the story’s private poetry.

All that to say, the year 1928 is a Wordsworthian flashpoint in Lafferty. It is the culmination of the children’s shared identity at Crucifixion as children. It is the start of their diverging destinies in the upcoming decade of upheaval. Completing eighth grade also bound them permanently as the “Class of ’28,” giving them cohesion and belonging even as they scattered to different schools and futures.

Economically, 1928 foreshadowed opportunity amid impending crisis, and Lafferty gives it special attention as an important year in his work. Alfred F. Pitchblende knows that a downturn is coming; it allows him and his step-family to prepare. Young investors like James Tyrone use that insight to buy cheaply in oil and profit as prices rebound during the Depression.

Academically and personally, the year is one of transitions. There are new schools, new friendships, and first romances. That tested loyalties and broadened horizons, bringing the Class of ’28 closer together, making them more a clot of time. In sum, 1928 was an ending and a beginning: the end of Lafferty’s imagined hedged childhood circle and the starting gun for the period of grasshoppers and wild honey.

Peter Luna creates his own Class of ’28. While the children of Green Tree are unknowingly headed toward Flatland, Peter Luna’s class moves in the other direction. Rowena Charteris grumps to the other Britannica entry, “But why do you say it is a one-way flow?” You can sense how far from Flatland we are, what the other side of the shoal might be, what an astonishing gift Peter Luna's aura is, when Lafferty writes of Moonwick:

“And the great rolling outdoors of the estate was about a square kilometer in area. It was in the fork of two branches of a small river that rolled chortling the mere twelve kilometers into the Gulf of Lions of the blue Mediterranean. The third and north boundary of the Moonwick Estate was a line of steep and sudden cliffs about fifty meters high.”

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