"Brain Fever Season" (1977)

"For it is desire (cupiditas) when the creature is loved for itself. And then it does not help a man through making use of it, but corrupts him in the enjoying it." On the Trinity, Book IX, Chapter 9

I’ve been thinking again about Lafferty’s The Men Who Knew Everything stories. The more I sit with them, the more I see the sequence as one of his clearest takes on what we can know—and where knowing ends.

In Austro, who is caught in the strange orbit of those men of unusual genius, Lafferty offers a comic version of paideia: not just education, but the shaping of the whole person, full of the contradictions real learning brings.

Others have pointed out the influence of Watkin’s color theory from The Bow in the Clouds (1935) on the sequence. Lafferty’s use of color to represent bands of understanding is clearly present, and I’ve made a set of notes on this that I hope to share soon. It’s not just that Lafferty uses color to code the stories. He’s organizing his thoughts about the world through Watkin’s rainbow.

That’s not the focus of this post. What matters more is why Watkin wrote it. He writes in the introduction, “I believe myself able to control biological instinct in the service of a rational or spiritual end. No, it is commonly answered, you are but the tool of a blind and purely biological life-force, which, mocking you with the hallucination of its defeat, made you the instrument of its purpose.”

All very relevant to this story about biological instinct that uses the word "hot" 72 times.

Lafferty was drawn to Watkin, I believe, because he sensed something disordered in himself. He said as much in an interview, that he was often disordered, and most of us know what that feels like.

Watkin’s book is not only about how we think. It is also about how what we love shapes the way we think. It is about putting the heart in order. That idea, that we need more than knowledge and must also love rightly, runs through the Austro stories in a particularly pointed way.

If you're reading this, you probably know that Lafferty received an Augustinian education. You might also remember that one thing the Men Who Knew Everything have in common is that they all share an Augustinian education. As the character Laff says in "The All-At-Once Man,"

We had all gone to school together to the Augustinians at Monica Hall, and minds once formed by the Augustinians are Augustinian forever. We had learned to latch onto every sound idea and intuition and hold on. At least we had more scope than those who went to school to the Jesuits or the Dominicans.

Lafferty didn't hedge here, and it shows in his art. Just look at Past Master and the hard line between the Two Cities. There is Cathead. There is Cosmopolis. One must choose. Here, I wouldn't put him on Team St. Thomas.

Aquinas modulated the contrast. Drawing on Aristotle's Politics, he gave the earthly civitas a more affirmative place in Christian thought. Civil society is a natural good, subordinate to the City of God, yet possessing its dignity. Its value lies in cultivating the virtues that enable people to live well while restraining injustice. Here, man is closer to Aristotle's political animal than he is to the libido dominandi that orients Augustine's political theology. To live justly and happily in the earthly city is simply part of what it means to be rightly ordered.

"Brain Fever Season" is a strange story for me. It is intensely Augustinian. It opens by shoving the City of Man, and its porno stores, right in the reader's face.

Let me briefly recount the plot.

Entire populations begin to experience sudden "hot seasons" that trigger intense surges of creativity, learning, art, and other fervent pursuits. Barnaby Sheen, a wealthy lab owner, notices a strange shift. Porn addicts are now drawn to obscure Tibetan grammars, and this new wave of hyper-intellectualism is spreading across the globe through adult bookstores.

Two prodigies, Austro, a twelve-year-old from the Guna Slopes, and Roy Mega, a genius, have devised a way to transmit subliminal shapes and scents. Their work restarts ancient seasonal rhythms once every day in human life. As "hot-brain season" spreads across the northern hemisphere, people devour knowledge and produce wild inventions until the fever fades. Then comes the "hot-art season," with others still to follow. Meanwhile, the southern hemisphere enters its cycle, equally powerful and entirely distinct.

In brief, that's the shape of the story. It's one of those Lafferty tales that I think a non-Catholic reader will likely miss quite a bit because it reaches back to Lafferty's formation and what he would have learned about the Augustinian idea of cupiditas. Augustine's arrival at this view is fascinating, but it's enough to note three key aspects for now.

Epistemologically, cupiditas concerns how intellectual curiosity, if not directed toward God, turns us toward lesser things and leaves our desire for knowledge unfulfilled. Morally, it reduces our longing for truth to animal appetite. Metaphysically, it draws our gaze away from God, who should be the proper end of all knowing.

I have little doubt that Lafferty had the Augustinian idea of cupiditas in mind when he wrote "Brain Fever Season." Its intellectual core lies in that idea. He satirizes how the desire for knowledge can act on the same level as the desire for pornography and how the pornographic appetite can be disturbingly continuous with the artistic one. That is deeply Augustinian.

One thinks of Augustine's Confessions. His guilt over weeping more for Dido's death in the Aeneid than for the crucifixion. His brutal candor about the temptations of lust. "Lust indulged became a habit, and habit unresisted became necessity." No saint in the Catholic tradition wrote more openly about that struggle.

One of the little Easter eggs that Lafferty hides in the story involves the character Gippo Sharpface. A porn addict in the style of the young Saint Augustine, Gippo appears before Barnaby Sheen, full of manic energy:

“Who turned me on, odd fish?” this visitor asked as he came in on nervous but exuberant fox feet, with two dozen books in his arms and one opened in his left hand. “I was in Singapore, our mother city, the porno capital of the world, and it hit me there. ‘Why don't you have Emanuel Visconti's Costive Cosmologies Freed?’ I howled at the storekeeper. ‘How will I ever live another moment without it? I'm hot for it, man! I have to have it right now,’ I said. And never in my life had I heard of Visconti before. ‘I hope we'll have it in a very few hours,’ the porno man said, ‘I'm mighty hot for it myself, and getting hotter. Oh, there must be some way to speed it up!’ ‘A few hours!’ I exploded at him, ‘I can't wait a few hours. Don't you know when the time of a thing has arrived? What are you doing to get copies?’ ‘I've just been talking to Visconti,’ the man said. ‘He is in Istanbul, and he had begun the work half an hour before I called. It'll take him fifteen to eighteen hours to write it, he says, and it will take several hours for printing and worldwide distribution. It will be twenty hours yet. It's hard to have an item in stock before it's in existence. Here's two dozen red-hot items that might tide you over.’ Something is happening fast, Sheeny. It's happening in half of the world.”

The man was speed-reading books as he talked. He threw one book over his shoulder as he finished it and opened another.

“I see,” said Barnaby Sheen, but he didn't see it at all clearly.

After that, Gippo mostly fades into the background, a man once hot for porn, now hot for knowledge, his deficient will overtaken by the brain fever. When the fever shifts again and drives humanity into art, Lafferty shows each of the Men Who Knew Everything revealing something of his character. These are very interesting portraits, but they build up to Gippo. Lafferty writes:

It's one large Gippo Sharpface, wearing outsized dark glasses, was facing directly into the bright morning sun, and he was painting it: a brilliant burning orb, which was wearing outsized dark glasses. Gippo was doing absolutely new things with color, burning things, foxfire things. Gippo, at that moment, was the finest artist that the world had seen for at least twenty thousand years.

It calls to mind one of the most memorable things Augustine ever wrote:

“Those endowed with vigorous, healthy, and really strong eyes have nothing they would rather look at than the sun itself.”

Of course, there are the sunglasses. It’s all part of the satire. Unlike the real Saint Augustine, Gippo’s intellectual and artistic conversion is shallow and momentary. It isn’t deep, and it isn’t real. He’s all too ready to return to the world of porn.

“No, I don't want to be turned off again, Sheen, not while this season is running. I want a bucket. It's raining the queerest and hottest fish ever seen, and I have an overpowering lust for them. I want my passions fulfilled, and at the same time I want them to continue burning, and I want to make a good thing out of the hot rain while it's going on.”

How can one not hear the stormy language of Augustine's Confessions?

They clouded over and darkened my soul, so that I could not distinguish the calm light of chaste love from the fog of lust. Both kinds of affection burned confusedly within me and swept my feeble youth over the crags of desire and plunged me into a whirlpool of shameful deeds

Lafferty, at the end of the story, gives us a subtle trick, a really fun one. Throughout, Austro has used G’s instead of H’s. His last words in the story are:

“Gippity, Goppity, Goopity, Gowth! Gippo and Harry are firetailing South!”

Harry is the tipoff, drawing our attention to the "H." Why does Austro use G’s where we expect H’s? I think it ties into the story’s Augustinian thread. Gippo is Hippo—as in Augustine of Hippo, often shown in icons with sharp, angular features. Gippo Sharpface is the anti-Augustine, the big gyp-o, a sharper: all flash, no faith.

The Bow In The Clouds An Essay Towards the Integration of -- E_ I_ WAtkin -- 1954 -- Londo.

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