"Been a Long Long Time" (1966/1970)

Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together, To themselves yet either neither, Simple were so well compounded; That it cried, "How true a twain Seemeth this concordant one! Love has reason, reason none, If what parts can so remain."

It was a sundering Dawn—Incandescence to which all later lights are less than candles—Heat to which the heat of all later suns is but a burnt-out match—the Polarities that set up the tension forever.

“Been a Long Long Time” is one of Lafferty’s better-known stories and the subject of Paul Saka's recent article. Saka, a philosopher and linguist, approaches it as a philosopher, asking philosophical questions rather than literary ones. So when he looks at the quatrain from Shakespeare’s "The Phoenix and the Turtle" quoted in the story, along with its textual variations across the story’s print history, he treats the passage to that end. Having studied the original manuscript, I don’t find this approach especially revealing here, either philosophically or literarily. Elsewhere it has been. However, it is always interesting to see how those from other disciplines set up a problem that interests me.

My thought as a critic when I read the quatrain is pretty simple: why? Why, of all things in Shakespeare, "The Phoenix and the Turtle"? Why does this story work up to the typewriter getting stuck on this quatrain and on that word? I have some thoughts on this—some of which would require a close reading of "The Phoenix and the Turtle" and probably belong in an academic paper rather than a blog post. What I want to do here is make a broader case for why "The Phoenix and the Turtle" matters to the story, then connect it to some ideas in Borges.

On to the summary.

At the point of creation, the universe is born from a sundering Dawn. Two opposing Polarities appear. One is led by Michael "wrapped in white fire"; the other, by Helel "swollen with black and purple blaze." Between them is our protagonist, Boshel, a "weak creature, too craven to accept either challenge," whose whimpering hesitation introduces a randomness into the universe. He is an irritant for both Michael and Helel, with Helel even saying that Boshel "hasn't enough brimstone in him to set fire to an outhouse." Boshel is left alone in the void. Michael is told (presumably by this universe’s God) that the responsibility for punishing Boshel’s hesitancy is his.

Michael eventually comes up with a punishment, explaining that Boshel "made time itself stutter at the start . . . He set up a random that affected everything." Inspired by a book he read in L.A., Michael decides that Boshel should oversee a group of monkeys until they randomly type all the works of Shakespeare exactly from Blackstone Readers' Edition Thirty-Seven-and-a-Half Volumes in One. To mark this passage of time, deeper than deep time itself, Boshel asks for a clock. Michael creates one: "a cube of dressed stone measuring a parsec on each edge." He explains the timepiece to Boshel: "A small bird will come every millennium and sharpen its beak on this stone." Michael offers no guarantee the project will finish before the stone is gone, but tells him, "you will be able to tell that time has passed."

Eons pass. More than eons. Entire universes expand and collapse in cycles that seem "like a light blinking on and off." The monkeys keep at it, and after "a few billion cosmic cycles," there is "a gash in the clock-rock that you could hide a horse in." A monkey named Pithekos Pete finally completes The Tempest, but then creates his own improved version. "But it's better, Bosh," Pete says. Boshel is furious: "Of course it's better! We don't want them better . . . Can't you monkeys see that we are working out a problem of random probabilities?" When Pete suggests copying the book, Boshel stands firm on the nature of his punishment, yelling, "Rules, you lunkheads, rules!"

After an unimaginable span of time, a near-perfect version is completed. We can’t call this progress. After all, it’s random, but the output passes two readings. Then the final angelic scribe, Kitabel, hesitates. "There is something sticking in my mind," he says, "something like an echo that is not quite right," despite Boshel's desperate plea: "Oh, by all the worlds that were ever made, sign!" Kitabel discovers a single, devastating error in the poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle." Instead of the line "Save the eagle, feather'd king," the monkey had typed "Save the eagle, feather'd kingg," finishing the quatrain, "Damn machine the g is sticked." The story ends with Boshel and his monkeys still at their task. ("There is still hope. And the bird has now worn the rock down to about half its bulk.") Lafferty writes that they’re still working on it tonight.

On the subject of time, Lafferty once remarked that about 160 years stood between a year in which he was writing and the birth of his grandfather. That stuck with me for two reasons. First, it’s just about the window covered by the Coscuin and Argo materials, so like many writers the grandfather’s generation is profoundly significant. Second, I also grew up in a home with a long memory: my great-grandfather had been raised by people who were already adults during the Civil War, and he passed along the stories they had told him. I am now in my forties, but I may be among the few in my generation to have grown up that way—living with one man who remembered seeing his first car and his first airplane and another one who had served in the Pacific Theater in WWII. As of it were yesterday, my great grandfather could talk about quitting a job because a landowner used a bullwhip on black sharecroppers.

Throughout the history of our home, along with memory, one constant was a love of Shakespeare. In college, one of my most memorable experiences was a year-long course on his complete works, and as an adult I have made it a practice to reread them every five years or so. This is typical of a certain of kind of southerner. The King and the Duke could sell all the seats in a house in Huckleberry Finn for a reason. So I can recall the very first Shakespeare I ever tried to read. I was probably seven, leafing through a thick one-volume family edition like the one Michael punishes Boshel with, when I alighted on the shortest work I could find outside the sonnets: "The Phoenix and the Turtle." 

There was my ticket in. I had no idea that even its title was misleading, invented centuries after Shakespeare died for an unusual poem that originally lacked one. Nor did I realize I had stumbled onto one of the most difficult poems in English, the hardest thing Shakespeare ever wrote, a puzzle that has baffled readers for centuries, one that tested the arguably best close reader who ever lived, William Empson. For a strong account of how it has confounded generations, John Kerrigan’s essay in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry (2013) is both substantial and among the most satisfying close readings.

This all has a point. Lafferty’s favorite writer was, of course, G. K. Chesterton. He read everything by Chesterton he could get his hands on, and he subscribed to The Chesterton Review after it was founded in 1974. And, of course, Lafferty loved Shakespeare, whom he probably thought was Catholic (he puts this in the mouth of a character in the unpublished novel Civil Blood). He alludes to him often.

At the age of sixty-two, Chesterton was in poor health and declining. His dictated essays from that period show him flagging. One exception is a relatively well-known essay he wrote on Shakespeare—“well-known,” that is, among Chesterton readers, for whom anything Chesterton says about Shakespeare is of interest. Not only was this Chesterton essay about Shakespeare, it was about "The Phoenix and the Turtle," a poem that has been read as evidence that Shakespeare was crypto-Catholic (Shakespeare’s father was recusant in 1592, around the time Shakespeare would have been getting started with plays such as The Taming of the Shrew, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus). And not only was it an essay about "The Phoenix and the Turtle," it was about how baffling the poem is. Chesterton says it is the one piece of Shakespeare where the poet kept something of himself for himself.

He writes,

On the other hand, we may be fairly certain that those who say they know their Shakespeare do not know their Shakespeare. If they did they would not fall into the fallacy of supposing that he was theirs. In all this common cultivated acquaintance with the classics there is a certain unconscious trick of omission for which we must always allow.

Chesterton does his Chesterton trick:

Shakespeare did really wish to leave behind him one real cryptogram; not a silly alphabetical cypher to say that he was Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth, or the Earl of Southampton; but something to say that he was the Shakespeare whom we shall never know. As if he had been suddenly alarmed at the horrid notion that he had really unlocked his heart with the key of the Sonnets, as Wordsworth suggested; and had then resolved to leave behind him a casket that no key can unlock.

Why do I make such a point of this? While “Been a Long Long Time” certainly is a story about evolution, it is so only because it is a religious story about persons, and Lafferty was convinced that persons could not be produced by any non-teleological process. Its title at one point had been “Saecula Saeculorum,” which is the skeleton key to its revised title.

One of the deeper puzzles in the text is this: how could a non-teleological, polarity-driven universe produce its own version of William Shakespeare (whose works might then be read by its Michael in L.A.) yet not, by the same logic as the infinite monkey theorem, generate causally separate but otherwise identical tokens of Shakespeare’s writings?

Put another way: natural processes were able to generate Shakespeare the person (if the whole story cosmos is non-teleological). But those same processes cannot randomly generate his works (in the same non-teleological story cosmos). To me, it seems clear that what cannot be produced randomly, on Lafferty’s view, is personhood itself, and this is collateral story damage. In his view, something like the human genome is subordinate to personhood because personhood is not reducible to any form of physicalism. Even if we grant him fairness on science in this story (and why would we since he isn’t really trying?) this would still be the wedge of the spear. I think it’s why he was faster to go at abiogenesis that natural selection most of the time.

So how close is the cosmos of “Been a Long Long Time” to Prime—the cosmos as Lafferty himself thought it to be? Is he telling the reader that everything in this story is awry, metaphysically suspect from the very beginning? Boshel’s whimper that opens the story, answering “the Revolt rending the Void in two,” contrasts with Genesis 1: it is a reversal of the voice of God. Not booming, but cowering. Not Creator-like, but creaturely. This is plainly not a transcendent act of creation. And everything that follows reinforces the point: the portion of the universe caught in cyclic destruction is non-teleological; the story-space in which Boshel undergoes punishment is non-teleological; and the experiment with random typing is non-teleological as well.

What is the logic here? Enter Blackstone’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare. These texts, with their word-tokens, bear a causal relationship to Shakespeare the man. Shakespeare's words index his personhood (Model A), rather than bear a non-causal relationship to it (Model B). Here I’m going to stretch a term-of-art to say that a true index has causal tie. Even if the words look the same they are not for this reason. (I know that this quickly will take us into deep waters in the philosophy of language.)

The point at which the typewriter key sticks (the moment when randomized tokens look most like true index of Shakespeare) is the quatrain in the poem. What I say next is just interpretation, but I think Lafferty would have known Chesterton wrote that the poem was Shakespeare's secret, where Shakespeare withheld, concealed, and guarded himself. Lafferty’s encyclopedic knowledge of Chesterton and near editeic memory justifies suspecting this. He had on his mind the notion that in “the Phoenix and the Turtle” Shakespeare set his personhood beyond posterity, refusing to disclose it through the medium of a language that could be randomly tokenized. And I also think Lafferty would have read the poem closely as a test: “Does it make sense to me if it baffled my favorite writer?” So one should try to understand it to understand the story.

In other words, the key sticks because personhood (the soul) itself cannot be mechanized away. Pete’s complaint about the stuck g is, in the story, abour a typewriter jam, but in the story’s logic, it is a literary figure for what Lafferty took to be a metaphysical truth: people have souls. What matters here is not how one plays with mathematical probability, but how a writer plays with figuration. One can be right on every mathematical point and up-to-date on microbiology and genomics and Lafferty is still going to throw down on whether the soul can be decomposed into the physical.

Once again, Lafferty shows that he is not writing science fiction. If "Been a Long Long Time" was simply a work of speculative fiction advancing a philosophical argument about mathematical probability, or about Darwinian evolution as being both non-teleological and random (a straw man argument), then it would be bullshit. But it isn’t. It is a religious allegory about the soul, masquerading as science fiction. Is it nonsense about the soul? Perhaps. Maybe we don’t have souls.

Take the monkeys. Michael taught them to speak—though it took him 80,000 years—and now they are unmistakably persons, just as Austro is a person. They have voices. Pete’s, in this case, is the voice of someone noticing, complaining, expressing frustration. The monkeys were supposed to be pure probability engines, blessed or cursed with infinite patience, typing without intention. But Pithekos Pete has become a person, and in becoming a person he cannot help but comment on the mechanical breakdown at the point where Shakespeare’s personhood is most guarded: "The Phoenix and the Turtle." This fits with how generous is in giving “person stuff” souls in his fiction. Animals, machines,all kinds of being get them. Was Lafferty this ontologically generous in his theology? I doubt it. It was a way for him to think about human and divine persons. But I may well be wrong. Saka sees that Pete as an intentional agent, but I think his reading that the monkeys cheat is besides the bigger point. That point? They’re persons.

What seems to me more certain is that Lafferty is suggesting that one cannot mechanically reproduce Shakespeare’s soul. As soon as one approaches what Chesterton called Shakespeare’s “locked casket,” the collect-all-the-phenomenally-similar tokens game breaks down before you can catch them all. Personhood itself reasserts itself. That’s because this isn’t a story about tokens but about, yes, ensouled beings and how their works connect to their ensoulment. On one side, this is Shakespeare irreducibly himself, outflanking his own pseudo-index, the monkey's flawed "The Phoenix and the Turtle"; on the other, it is Pithekos Pete—like our friend the Australopithecus Austro—irreducibly a person in his own right, much like the golden apes in Serpent’s Egg.

What's interesting here is that Lafferty had no problem calling machines persons at times (Serpent's Egg). But he insisted that any machines that were persons would have to be part of a teleological process. That’s just him making his art; I don’t think its a seriously speculative premise. In his fiction, there are upward machines—spiritual machines, let’s call them—and there is also the machine as everything downward and diabolical (Past Master). In this sense, he called 20th-century liberalism a machine. In this story, however, he is referring to reified probability as mechanical in the downward sense, at odds with the final causes that make people individuals.

This is clear from the beginning. Michael sets up the Boshel experiment in mechanical terms: "the typing has to be random, Bosh. It was you who introduced the random factor into the universes. So suffer for it." The monkeys are conditioned "to punch the typewriters at random," acting as probability engines. But they don't stay mere mechanisms. Pete develops opinions and frustrations. The philosophical conflict is between the mechanical (random typing as a downward process) and the personal (authorship, improvement, aesthetic judgment as an upward and teleological process).

The governing image of the mechanical in the story can hardly be accidental: the millennial bird. This bird is a near-cousin of the “bad birds” banished from the funeral in "The Phoenix and the Turtle." That is what happens in the quatrain Lafferty quotes in the story—where the g sticks: a speech act that banishes birds like the millennial bird. And it does not merely stick, but sticks on the tyrant wing. Suppose one examines the typography and stops there, without considering what is happening in the poem itself. In that case, I think one is missing an essential part of the argument being made by the story, which seems to be part of Lafferty's joke. A non-teleological universe built on the void and polarity can never possess the mystical and participatory unity in Shakespeare’s poem. That belongs to a different sort of cosmos.

From this session interdict Every fowl of tyrant wing, Save the eagle, feather'd king; Keep the obsequy so strict. Let the priest in surplice white, That defunctive music can, Be the death-divining swan, Lest the requiem lack his right. And thou treble-dated crow, That thy sable gender mak’st With the breath thou giv’st and tak’st,’ Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.

But here the bird is not interdicted. The millennial bird wearing down the stone is a tyrant bird for Boshel, and the image of its tyranny is time as a mere mechanism: “You can tell the passing of time by the diminishing of the stone . . . you will be able to tell that time has passed.” No wonder the angels in this universe have no experience of the aevum.

There is more to say about how "The Phoenix and the Turtle" shapes the story, especially the role of polarity and the metaphysics of polarity in the poem, as well as the theme of eternity and why none of the angels here experience aeviternity (how would impatience work with the aevum?). But I want to close by turning to Borges.

Borges's version of Lafferty's "Been a Long Long Time" is not one story but three: "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "The Library of Babel," and "Shakespeare's Memory." The first two are justly famous, while the last is little known but among Borges's finest. Together they trace the precarious relationships between authorship, infinity, and identity.

In "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," Borges imagines a 20th-century writer who recreates several chapters of Don Quixote word for word—not by copying, but through his own creative process. The result is an identical text that nonetheless gets treated by the critic as a new and far richer work, simply because of the historical and personal context in which it was written.

In "The Library of Babel," Borges gives his most famous example of the infinite monkey theory. It imagines an infinite library containing every possible book, where all knowledge exists but is drowned in endless volumes of nonsense, driving its inhabitants to despair as they search for coherence in a sea of randomness.

And in "Shakespeare's Memory," a scholar receives the entirety of Shakespeare's personal memories and gradually finds his own identity overwritten by the overpowering consciousness of genius, until he discovers that the essence of creation cannot be transferred or possessed.

Since we often hear the Borges–Lafferty comparison without much explanation, let's work through how it might apply in this case.

In Lafferty, we get a cosmic staging of "The Library of Babel," with a universe of infinite random combinations where Boshel's monkeys must sift through an eternity of textual gibberish in search of the coherent artifact: the complete works of Shakespeare, affordable on a budget Blackstone edition, one volume, 37 plays with collected poetry, “The Phoenix and the Turtle” included. Michael's punishment carries the irony of "Pierre Menard," since the task is not just reproducing the words but generating a specific edition with perfect fidelity through randomness alone with a different causal chain and indexical relationship. When Pithekos Pete produces his "improved version" of The Tempest, it must be rejected because it is the work of a person intruding: Pete is authoring, not randomly generating. He attempts to assert personhood into what must remain a randomly produced identical token of another token in Blackstone's Shakespeare. How dare he be a person! This is punishment. Boshel isn't the smartest angel.

Finally, Lafferty resolves this whole cosmic experiment through something we find in Borges's "Shakespeare's Memory": the nature of personhood. The way the two writers approach this differs and speaks to their distinct temperaments. The Boshel-Monkey project fails at the most secretive point in the Shakespearean canon (what Lafferty took from Chesterton as being Shakespeare's locked casket). This is individual consciousness. It's soul stuff. It's the stuff that jams the stuck key. The thing that overwhelms the scholar in "Shakespeare's Memory" (the untransferable singularity of creative consciousness) might as well be called "The Phoenix and the Turtle" factor.

Chesterton (1936) - The Phoenix and the Turtle.pdf

Download PDF • 142KB

Pierre Menard.pdf

Download PDF • 877KB

The Library of Babel.pdf

Download PDF • 424KB