Ecological Lafferty and Venus-Noga
They fight! There is a duality in the fight itself. There are things seen, and there are things visceral that cannot be seen. There is blood spilled that is more ornately red (violet-flecked and shimmering it is) than is the blood of Earth-Woomagoo. This is blood as seen by the light of the sun that shines through the green-and-copper atmosphere of Venus-Noga. It is slippery blood, blood smelling of tincture of iron, blood that one gathers in the two cupped hands held below the heart, and then spills when one finally faints and falls and dies. They fight, they clash, they split, they change. They groan and they agonize. They burst open. This is the conflict that is the reason for the skylark, this is the skylark that is the reason for the worlds. There are more creatures in the scene than are given in the play-bills. There are more copper dragons than one battling. There are more World-Woomagoo groups than one. There are the Golden Guys of Galus battling the dragons. And as allies they have the Numinorians, the Guelphs, the Macedonians, The Doomsday Dukes. All of these battle dragons.
A throwaway post on two topics.
Ecological Lafferty has been updated and improved: more functionality, photos, a passage-only viewing option, links to Works, etc. One new tool is being able to save passages if one is working on something. The thing is closer to what I want, but more needs to be done.
The second topic is Iron Tongue of Midnight, which, in my estimation, is one of the best and weirdest things Lafferty ever wrote. I love it and have been thinking about Venus-Noga, one of my favorite stretches of his prose: a psychedelic set piece that recalls “And Mad Undancing Bears” and “Sky.” In Chapter 7, a single afternoon is told both as a battle with copper dragons and as an outbreak of gang-violence in a city compound. The competing accounts exemplify the novel’s baroque overlapping of single events, yet its wild operatic spectacle can make those connections opaque. I created two plates to show how I understand what Lafferty is up to in the chaper as well as in the novel as a whole.
The first of these plates, “Skylarking and Venus-Noga,” goes big. It sketches the whole novel’s world in cross-section, filtering everything through the madness of skylarking in Chapter 7. One layer is the fantasy fabric of Venus-Noga, where “even the clouds are made out of fabric.” Another is the brick of the City, where the social groups are represented as different kinds of brick and the Scenarists as mortar. The third is the stone of the Vale of Faillium, where Matteo Mattutine tells Terminal-Illness Cheapwine, “This is the Lord’s own reality.” Skylarking itself runs as a thread from each group up into the fabric. The guard’s riot report sits beneath Venus-Noga as another account of the same afternoon.
The second plate, “Obverse and Reverse,” demonstrates one of the novel’s radical techniques: showing events from different consensus reality epicenters.
In this plate, accounts are paired as double-headed playing cards, drawing on the poker analogy in the novel’s Poor Barons’ Action Handbook. It shows each group as it sees itself and as the others see it, and depicts Scottsdale Boland and Lemuel Bang as one man split in two. The seven supposed murders, for instance, are later explained as one actual fratricide and six echoes of earlier violence; the Vale is both a retreat and a prison.
They fight, they clash, they split, they change. They groan and they agonize. They burst open. This is the conflict that is the reason for the skylark, this is the skylark that is the reason for the worlds. [ . . . ] Fat-Face Cass and Desdemonia Harper were dead. This was not any fantasy of Venus-Noga. They were really dead. Fat-Face was dead there on Venus-Noga. Desdemonia was dead back in the shabby street of a Lunacy Compound in a medium city on a Woomagoo-type world, however she got back there.
Then, from another angle, a guard’s account:
This little bunch of Gangers were torturing dogs, killing them, and cutting them up into pieces while they were alive. The gangers said (partly in words and mostly in gestures: their eyes always seem to be looking out on some other space when they’re on one of their blood-lettings) that this dog business wasn’t what it seemed and that they weren’t either. They were not Green Gangers, they indicated: they were the Royal Skylarkers of Warumoka. And those things that they were dismembering, they were not dogs: they were the Living Copper Dragons of Venus-Noga. The Gangers had been abusing a few girls there. They indicated that these were not local girls, not real girls at all: they were the consorts of the Copper Dragons of Venus-Noga, and they were really female dragons and not girls. Killing them was as much an act of precaution as of passion. Two of the Gangers, a man Cass and a woman Harper (always bad cases, the both of them) were dead. One was dead in their own haunts there. The other one was dead on the world of Venus-Noga. We have this latter information from an informer whose cover we refuse to blow. There seems no way of determining how they came by their deaths.
It is a fascinating prose experiment.
Following the plates is my own experiment that did not quite work as I intended, though it may convey something of what Lafferty is doing. The idea was to draw on three styles in the work of the Irish artist Harry Clarke to convey the radical perspectivism of Chapter 7: the romantic, sexually androgynous world of decadent Venus-Noga; the squalid view of the wan wits; and the religious reality of incarnational Prime, which subtends both.
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