"Continued on Next Rock" (1970)
- Jon Nelson
- 1 day ago
- 11 min read
Updated: 23 hours ago
“But others of them fabulously describe the passion and restoration of Sophia as follows: They say that she, having engaged in an impossible and impracticable attempt, brought forth an amorphous substance, such as her female nature enabled her to produce. When she looked upon it, her first feeling was one of grief, on account of the imperfection of its generation, and then of fear lest this should end her own existence. Next she lost, as it were, all command of herself, and was in the greatest perplexity while endeavouring to discover the cause of all this, and in what way she might conceal what had happened. Being greatly harassed by these passions, she at last changed her mind, and endeavoured to return a new to the Father.” — Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, Book I, Chapter 2
"You fear the earth, you fear rough ground and rocks, you fear moister earth and rotting flesh, you fear the flesh itself, all flesh is rotting flesh. If you love not rotting flesh, you love not at all. You believe the bridge hanging in the sky, the bridge hung by tendrils and woody vines that diminish as they go up and up till they are no thicker than hairs. There is no sky-bridge, you cannot go up on it. Did you believe that the roots of love grow upside down? They come out of deep earth that is old flesh and brains and hearts and entrails, that is old buffalo bowels and snakes' pizzles, that is black blood and rot and moaning underground. This is old and worn-out and bloody Time, and the roots of love grow out of its gore."
My first real exposure to Greek mythology was a paperback edition of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology (1942). Luckier kids had been initiated through the genius of the D'Aulaires. Hamilton, though, was peddled at the Scholastic book fair, so Hamilton it was. If you have read Mythology, you know how dry it is, and how it simplifies, sanitizes, and diminishes the wonder of myth.
Let's do it to Lafferty:
Lafferty takes the bones of this earth-and-sky myth (or something close to it) and re-enchants myth through, of all things, the contorted specificity of archaeological detail. “Continued on Next Rock” is, without doubt, one of Lafferty’s absolute masterpieces. Its subtleties are so tightly constructed that any summary is bound to rush past a lot of what matters. Still, the overall plot shape is simple enough.
Five people (four archaeologists and a mysterious young woman) excavate at a chimney rock and surrounding mound. On the dig site, they meet Anteros Manypenny, who has a supernatural connection to the place and a gift for uncovering objects that don't make chronological sense. Over several days, the group finds inscriptions on flint and shale that defy stratigraphy. What is exceptionally strange is that they seem to be addressed to the party’s youngest member, Magdalen Mobley. As the inscriptions accumulate, so do the passion and menace they convey. The voice in the writing identifies itself as the earth.
On the fourth morning, an upward-striking bolt destroys the chimney. Magdalen Mobley dies. The survivors then recover a basalt statue of a weeping Anteros, and Terrence Burdock calls it a major discovery. But the truly strange part is a co-occurrence: the archaeologists develop a kind of amnesia about Magdalen. It is almost as if Magdalen had never been there.
In writing "Continued on Next Rock," Lafferty kept his original idea for the story: use geology to play with time's arrow. The chimney rock, which ought to be older than the mound, contains strata that run vertically into the future. The rocks Anteros leaves for Magdalen are in ever more recent systems of writing: Nahuatl–Tanoan glyphs at the base (associated with the Proto-Plano/Late Folsom period), Anadarko–Caddo hand talk higher up (within the last three hundred years), and Kiowa picture writing higher still (no more than a hundred and fifty years old). Finally, in a “wit-stealing fog,” one archaeologist, Steinleser, believes there is language (the present) on the next object. But it isn't stone. It is an Osage orange, perhaps an echo of Persephone and the pomegranate. The dark capping rock, “a stratum that hasn’t been laid down yet,” the unformed future, falls. This is what kills Magdalen. She climbed the broken chimney.
Making everything more complicated, Anteros himself seems to somehow exist outside and inside sequential time. He dug at Spiro decades earlier; he was the deer Magdalen had Robert kill; he is pre-Caddo. The Nahuatl time glyphs on the first stone depict something descending from the chimney rather than ascending. The chimney is thus a vertical column of time. It runs from the deep past at its base to the unlaid future at its summit. Anteros places his love letters throughout it. He seems to be pursuing Magdalen across epochs and in the real time experienced by the archaeologists. It is as if temporalities have been madly cross-hatched. Chronotopes collide. There is the game being played with archaeological time of sediment and the one with the four days of the excavation. It is a wildly fantastical ride of a story, even by Lafferty's standards. Yet Lafferty keeps the real world in sight.
Much of the story parallels the real-world archaeological site that the archeologists talk about in the story, Spiro Mounds in Oklahoma. Spiro’s Great Mortuary was a huge influence on the story. At Spiro, centuries of heirlooms and trade goods were compressed into a single, dense context. That created an archive that made standard linear dating extremely difficult. Lafferty’s plot is a fantastical version of that problem. One of the more interesting parallels is that “Continued on Next Rock” follows a team of five archaeologists who uncover the mound; in real life, the Pocola Mining Company, a group of five treasure hunters, famously looted Spiro in the 1930s. Lafferty seems to have remixed this into his group of five.
The mythological elements of the story map onto Mississippian cosmology as preserved at Spiro, where the axis mundi, a cosmic pillar linking Underworld, Earth, and Sky, appears in shell engravings. Against that background, it is a short leap to read Lafferty’s chimney rock as a version of the World Tree or Sky-Bridge. Lafferty repeatedly tells the reader that this pillar at the dig is damaged: the chimney is “half fallen against a new hill”; it is a “broken chimney.” In “Continued on Next Rock,” Magdalen Mobley, whose etymology refers to the towering chimney and the mound, tries to use this broken axis to bypass the world.
The story’s languages (Nahuatl, Kiowa, and Tanoan signs) also fit with Spiro as a cosmopolitan trade hub where goods and symbols from the Great Lakes to Mexico met. The story’s apocalyptic Fourth Morning likewise squares with Native American beliefs about the cyclical destruction and renewal of worlds. And then there is the wonderfully outrageous figure of the bead-spitter. As a beadspitter, Anteros can spit future artifacts and prophetic stones into the deep past as part of his courtship of Magdalen. Lafferty, more or less, tells the reader to look it up. If you do—if you look into John R. Swanton’s Myths and Tales of the Southeastern Indians (1929), one of Lafferty’s favored sources—you can see the raw material he was working from when he adapted the bead-spitting episode. (Swanton is a well Lafferty drew on for Okla Hannali and other stories as well. I will include a PDF at the end of this post). In “Continued on Next Rock,” the beadspitter becomes a mythic explanation for one of the story’s wilder archaeological impossibilities: the discovery of modern “Hong Kong Contemporary” glass beads buried at the site.
Of one Creek myth, Swanton writes,
In the morning he had disappeared, but when he came back he had a mouthful of beads which he blew all about. The one he had slept with gathered them up and began stringing them, and she said to the other, ‘You string some of these beads also,’ which she began doing.
Swanton gives a descriptive passage of a Koasati version, where an owl tries to do this:
Then he picked up some of the beads, put them into his mouth, and sat down. When the young women got there the Owl tried to cough as he sat and scattered beads about his yard. Then the girls picked some of them up, but there were not many.
“Continued on Next Rock” is such a rich story that I have not settled on a single reading, but I have some provisional thoughts about how it fits into the Whole Lafferty. What Lafferty says in “How I Wrote Continued on Next Rock” includes an important parenthetical: “the flattest thing you can imagine has to have at least two sides; it can have many more.” What are those other sides?
In its broadest outline, I see the story as one about sacramental failure, and I place it within the gnostic cycle of short stories Lafferty wrote, situating Magdalen as another Sophia figure. Lafferty’s most direct use of this type, showing his knowledge of Valentinian Gnosticism, is Zoe Archikos in “The All-At-Once Man.” I think the Sophia figure was on Lafferty’s mind at the time. Both “The All-At-Once Man” and “Continued on Next Rock” appeared in print in 1970. Knowledge of that relatively obscure story is probably necessary to grasp how deeply Lafferty had engaged with Valentinian Gnosticism.
As I have argued before, Lafferty rarely reproduces Gnosticism straight. Instead, he raids it for parts—sometimes with cartoonish simplicity (“Snuffles”), sometimes in a dense blend with Kabbalah and other elements (Not to Mention Camels). In “The All-At-Once Man,” Lafferty wrote a brilliantly concentrated parody of Valentinian Gnosticism. Briefly, in that story, John Penandrew, one of the “men who knew everything,” tries to “possess his whole life at once” by becoming all his ages (his “aeons”) simultaneously. He draws on secret knowledge from Prester John to escape death. It doesn't go as intended. He becomes spiritually lopsided, breaks into degenerate “nephews” (Gnostic emanations) and destroys the prior harmony of his marriage to Zoe Archikos (Sophia) leaving them trapped in a grotesque, haunted-house union, a self-contained demiurgic prison. Lafferty takes the props of Valentinian myth (Pleroma, aeons, Sophia/Achamoth, and archons) and makes them the story of an uncanny marriage: John's spiritual overreaching makes him the gifted man with hubris who splinters himself and multiplies archonic forces, so that he and Zoe become a degraded syzygy, an aeonic pairing that should be harmonious but isn't. That is a lot, but if you read the story, Valentinian fingerprints are all over it.
Now, let’s read "Continued on Next Rock" across Lafferty work and through his interest in Gnosticism to understand it as part of the whole Lafferty, not just one story amid others. If something like Valentinian Gnosticism is at work in the story, right under the surface, then it can be understood as a pseudo-revelation text. Its gnosis consists of the absence of any gnostic escape route. There is simply nowhere for Magdalen Mobley, the Sophia in "Continued on Next Rock," to flee. This is the most grotesque feature of the story. Readers are given elements of Valentinian Gnosticism, but the story world lacks the escape machinery that would enable gnostic ascent.
Consider the story’s assertion that “There is no sky-bridge.” Arguably, it is the most important thematic line in the story. It supports an anti-gnostic, anti-docetic thesis as part of the story's sacramental meaning: one cannot ascend out of substance. Any spirituality that attempts to do so is self-deceived. That is fully compatible with Lafferty’s sacramental vision of the world. Read this way, “Continued on Next Rock” becomes a story about failure to participate in the sacramental order: spirit refuses to meet earth. This is where Magdalen, as Sophia, makes her mistake.
We know that Anteros is in some way flat (Laffety says this), so he cannot be taken as the whole truth. What he says to Magdalen is partly false. In his billet-doux, inscribed into rock, he tells her that love’s roots lie not in a purified Above but in “deep earth” and “old . . . bloody Time.”
Well, that is just Hades and Persephone. It is cyclical time again, with no escape from the wheel. It is “Phoenic,” “Scorner’s Seat,” and others. Something like time’s circle is where the story will end. Setting aside Anteros as being part of the problem, Anteros is perfectly right that the earth is necessary. There must be directional truth in his indictment of Magdalen’s refusal of reciprocity—“you cannot give, you cannot take.” This critiques a Sophia-like posture made one-sided: “wisdom” as fastidious, self-protective ascent, seeking transcendence without any embodied relation. In short, I think we have characters who are right about each other but not about themselves.
Lafferty’s “How I Wrote” explains the method. He says that he “turned the systems of values backwards,” making “repulsive things appear poetic.”
This next bit gets a little heavy. In rereading the story, I think it helps to know a little more bout the gnostic concept of kenoma. Kenoma (Greek κένωμα, “emptiness/deficiency”) is the zone of lack outside (or below) the pleroma (“fullness”). It is the realm in which time, mixture, decay, and the imputed poverty of being predominate, and it is often traced to Sophia’s derailment and the resulting production of a damaged material order that can only ever imitate pleoromic fullness. In this Gnostic scheme, following her descent into matter, Sophia ascends to escape the kenoma and return to the pleroma. Anteros says, "I am the bog earth that sucks you in. You cannot give, you cannot like, you cannot love, you think there is something else, you think there is a sky-bridge you may loiter on without crashing down. I am bristled-boar earth, there is no other. You will come to me in the morning. You will come to me easy and with grace. Or you will come to me reluctant and you be shattered in every bone and member of you." Here is the Gnostic prison world wooing psyche.
Where does this put us? Well, in one of Lafferty's counterfeit worlds. These are the closed gnostic-cycle worlds found in stories like “Snuffles” and “Been a Long, Long Time.” Anteros personifies kenoma and materiality: the sucking (kenomic), animal, heavy world—“I am the earth . . . the bog earth . . . bristled-boar earth.” This cancels Magdalen’s gnostic fantasy of pleromic ascent: “There is no sky-bridge.” Anteros is a monologist like Snuffles. Anteros is love mad. Lafferty fixes the identity of Anteros as secondary substance at the end of the story in the basalt statue—“He was earth, he was earth itself.” That is identity being asserted three times. Earth. Earth. Earth. Anteros, as counter-love, as deadly gravity, is also the kenoma’s alienation from pleroma as unrequited lack: “Why is my love unrequited?”
Putting it all together, both Anteros and Magdalen read as trapped gnostic archetypes in a broken Gnostic Kosmos. That makes “Continued on Next Rock” yet another of Lafferty’s theological horror stories. Magdalen Mobley is the gnostic soul in a Gnostic-inspired cosmos where Gnosticism cannot work. The chimney rock really is broken even before it collapses at the end of the story. A sky bridge is part of an axis mundi mytheme, as it were. It makes both Gnosticism and sacramental participation conceptually possible. Lafferty snapped the axis mundi, broke the chimney rock, to enable the story. It was part of making his things backward.
Again, this is far from a full reading. It just points out some of what makes the story difficult to interpret, things that tend to get overlooked and keep readers stuck circling the “chthonic god is in love with the girl” or falling back on lazy Freudianism.
One last thing about gnosis and Gnosticism. There is another good reason for thinking Lafferty had it on his mind when writing “Continued on Next Rock.” The next time you read the story, pay attention to how Lafferty takes pains early on to put gnosis as preternatural knowledge on our radar by foregrounding it narratively. He fires it like a M8 flare. Magdalen knows information she shouldn’t, most dramatically in the deer episode. She uses her knowledge to pinpoint the buck for slaughter.
On the other side of gnosis, Anteros parades knowledge of deep time, though the story ends with grades of amnesia, the wit-stealing fog that leaves the archaeologists unsure whether the Sky-Maiden ever existed at all. Instead of salvific anamnēsis, we get forgetfulness—anti-gnosis.
That reads to me as a Catholic satire of a Sophia-style wisdom that prefers a fantasy of purity, ascent, and knowledge over participatory love enacted in flesh, time, and death. Lafferty brackets out the possibility of the sacramental worldview, and sacramental irony rushes in. Not to say that it isn’t poignant.
