"Encased in Ancient Rind" (1971)

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. — Genesis 1:6

Then came the clear instant . . . when it was shattered completely and the blue sky was seen supreme.

The unpatterned primordial water in "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs" has me thinking about Lafferty’s short story "Encased in Ancient Rind,” a pretty gloomy piece in the felix culpa tradition. Both the Fall and the Flood have already happened. That is quite bad—but it is usually what has already happened in a Lafferty. Here, however, Lafferty is working within a deeply Augustinian perspective: fault transfigured into a greater good. The image through which this fault is expressed is remarkable, not only in that it occurred to Lafferty to use it at all, but also in how he uses it. Most of this post will be an attempt to understand this conceit, which is the brilliant, clear, dry-day blue of the sky itself. Again, for the story to take place, two judgments must have been meted out to humanity: first the Fall, and then the Flood. They are in the background, and without them, there would be no cerulean expanse and no bow in the cloud.

One of Lafferty’s techniques here is to quote passages as if they were appearing from nowhere, with Sally chiming in. The effect creates an extradiegetic overlay of human voice over a story driven by conversation. This voice-on-voice is a modernist technique that I always associate with Eliot's The Waste Land, but Lafferty uses it well. An example that will come across as perhaps too strong unless one has watched Lafferty earn it by what comes before:

There were other vestiges that hung like words in the fog and rank dew of the world. "And the name of the star is called Wormwood." "In the brightness of the saints, before the day-star." "It was the star-eater who came, and then the sky-eater." "And the stars are not clear in his sight," said Job. "Poor Job,’ said Sally."

The story shifts between being ashy, foggy, or misty, reflecting the imagined carbon cycle at its core. The narrative is constructed as voices overheard, encouraging the reader to listen in on conversations. Some characters in the ongoing dialogue lose their memories of the world they've left behind and enter the new world with the rind, making his narrative another meditation on remembering. Each of the story's three parts begins with a lyric by O'Hanlon. One such lyric, “may my right hand wither yet / if I forget the sky,” echoes Psalm 137:5 (“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning”), linking remembering the sky to the act of remembrance itself.

The ancient rind of the title refers to the renewed or second formation of the heavenly waters—those that God separates in Genesis 1:6-7—creating a world shielded by water. Living under the rind leads some characters to forget the sky. It creates their sky amnesia.

In my post on "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs," I discussed Tiamat, a figure of the primordial, undifferentiated waters. Scholars addressing theodicy have found in that cosmology a chaos, or potential for evil, that is inherent in the world's materials. That is how it works in the Mesopotamian epic Enûma Elišh. The sky forms when the ocean-goddess Tiamat is split, and the lower and upper waters are created. The blue sky arises from the separation of upper and lower waters: Marduk stretches part of Tiamat's body to create the vault of heaven, which holds back the upper waters:

Then the lord rested, gazing upon her dead body, While he divided the flesh of the … , and devised a cunning plan. He split her up like a flat fish into two halves; One half of her he established as a covering for heaven. He fixed a bolt, he stationed a watchman, And bade them not to let her waters come forth. Enuma Elish, Tablet IV

Genesis 1 also has the two waters. A dome-like firmament restrains a celestial ocean by separating “waters from waters.” What Lafferty does is take the blue sky that would have appeared when the body of Tiamat was riven and stretched, and reserve its appearance for after the canopy of the upper waters Genesis 1:6 has fallen in Genesis 6-9.

It may be worth pausing over this. Lafferty does it differently. He withholds the blue of the sky from the point where almost everyone else places it, that is, in the separation of the lower waters from the heavenly waters. In Enûma Eliš, the blue sky appears when the upper waters are commanded not to come forth; in Lafferty, there is no blue sky at that moment because the ancient rind still remains, an aqueous canopy.

This is where things become slightly complicated. You see, I have cheated by letting Lafferty have his version of the whole account. There are long Jewish and Christian traditions that do not imagine the upper waters falling in the deluge of the Flood. In some medieval accounts, for instance, the upper waters are fixed at the limit of creation itself. I will include a timeline so it is clear how what later came to be called the canopy theory of the upper waters fits into and departs from these older cosmological schemes of the heavenly waters.

Suffice it to say that there is a tradition in which the canopy of the upper waters of Genesis 1:6 does break, and it becomes the mechanism of the Flood. In the 1960s, Isaac Newton Vail’s nineteenth-century version of this kind of canopy theory reappeared, tidied up by apologists, with some of its lunacy incised and drained. In The Waters Above the Firmament, also published as The Earth’s Annular System: The Mosaic Record Scientifically Explained, Vail (1840–1912) argued that the Earth was once surrounded by Saturn-like rings, which he called annular canopies. These rings collapsed in stages, producing catastrophic events, events Vail used to "explain" phenomena such as the Flood and major fossil-burial episodes. He also used the theory to explain the extraordinary longevity of the patriarchs, who were said to have lived under the primordial canopy of the heavenly waters.

Vail, The Earth's Annular System (108)

In 1961, John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris published The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications. If one of the reasons Vail wrote The Waters Above was to undermine the uniformitarianism of geologists like Charles Lyell, who thought that Earth’s history was largely catastrophe-free and that uniform processes accounted for geologic history, then The Genesis Flood was a return of Christian Catastrophism, a meteor-like event in American religious culture. The book became hugely influential. It was thumped at the pulpit and spread wide and far through popular Christian culture. If one attended a Christian school in the 1980s (I know, because I was there), one would almost certainly have heard about canopy theory. There would have been nifty drawings explaining it. Lafferty read The Genesis Flood, and he was convinced by it. “Encased in Ancient Rind” is where his belief in the canopy shows up most clearly in his fiction.

Lafferty's story begins during a global environmental crisis. Extreme pollution has reached a critical mass, causing widespread death by suffocation. A group of intellectuals (the “mentality set”), some of whom don’t quite cut it, meet for dinner at the Mountain Top Club. The group includes Harry Baldachin (a baldachin is a canopy), Clement Flood, and Charles Broadman, and among them is a young actress named Sally Strumpet. Baldachin and Flood are the villains of the story, and Lafferty has fun showing that, no matter the historical conditions, these two will be on the wrong side of interpreting them. They believe humanity is on the brink of total extinction. Against this view are Broadman and Sally. They believe they are not dying but are instead physically changing. They are gaining weight and developing thicker features. Broadman says that the group will meet again in exactly one hundred years, a proposal that Baldachin and Flood find improbable since they expect to be dead. Thus ends section one.

“By your voice I know that there's a thickening of the pharynx,” Charles said. “By your swollen hands I know that there is already a thickening of the metacarpals and phalanges, not to mention the carpals themselves. Your eyes seem unnaturally deep-set now as though they had decided to withdraw into some interior cave. But I believe that it is the thickening of your brow ridges that makes them seem so, and the new bulbosity of your nose. You've been gaining weight, have you not?”

Section two begins one hundred years later. The same four people reunite at the club. The Earth has been transformed by a canopy of water vapor and carbon that has moved into the upper atmosphere. This created a global greenhouse with no wind, rain, or direct sunlight. The world is now filled with giant plants and neo-saurians. Humans have gained longevity, potentially living up to a thousand years. At the same time, they have become pachydermous, with thickened bones and features. They resemble Neanderthals. Sally is now one hundred and seventeen years old. She says she is finally fertile and plans to marry an aviator who illegally flies above the canopy to see true colors and the sun. Section two ends.

The beginning of section three starts after another century has passed. The group meets one last time. Sally brings her husband. He is an outlaw pilot who argues that the short and happy life of the old world was superior to the stagnant, century-long prison under the canopy. Baldachin and Flood, now heavily adapted to the slow, gray world, try to have the younger couple arrested by ponderous guards. Sally and her husband invite Broadman to join them as they escape. Unfortunately, Broadman finds he is too physically thickened to move quickly enough to reach their craft (the Swift Wisdom). Sally and her husband escape through the canopy into the sunlight. Two slow tears roll down Broadman’s pachydermous face.

At the center of the story is the reappearance of the raqia of Genesis. In an argument with Ed Babinski, Lafferty had an idiosyncratic philological critique of the scholarly consensus that the Hebrew raqia denotes a solid, "hammered-out" vault (raqa). The consensus view is that using raqia to denote a sphere is a later development of the word; it is what happened to the word raqia when it encountered Greek cosmology. Lafferty said this is "etymology-fiction" and "Hebraistry-fiction." Then Lafferty used a version of Ben-Yehuda’s seminal Hebrew dictionary to argue his case. He said, look, the adjectival form of the word. Ben-Yehuda says it means spherical. Therefore, it is warranted that we believe the Genesis author possessed a sophisticated, non-primitive understanding of geocentric spheres.

Lafferty to Ed Babinski

Then Lafferty integrated this linguistic claim into the vapor canopy model popularized by Henry M. Morris where the "waters above" are a series of Vail-inspired mantles. Lafferty then went full canopy-endorser, saying he believes the modern ionosphere is the "remnant of the broken-up raqia-sphere." That makes the ionosphere the atmospheric vestige of a once-contiguous aqueous envelope. The collapse of the upper water mantle caused the Noachian Flood and altered Earth’s primordial climate.

Lafferty draws heavily on Whitcomb and Morris throughout:

So much for the sources. But why? I think it has to do with an easily overlooked Christological dimension hidden in the story it. The raqia sphere would have existed since the second day of creation until the flood. Only after the flood would the blue sky be revealed. This would have caused the shortening of lifespans and the appearance of modern-looking men. Lafferty is clear that the thickening of features is not just turning into saurians or pachyderms, but becoming more Neanderthal.

As you probably know, the felix culpa is the happy fault, all the joys that came after the Fall, but that are redeemed through the coming of Christ. The phrase comes from the Exsultet (the Easter Proclamation). It is a hymn sung during the Catholic Easter Vigil with the line: "O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem" ("O happy fault, which gained for us so great a Redeemer"). Lafferty’s use of the blue sky in “Incased in Ancient Rind” is an application of the felix culpa because of how he imagines the rind.

The rind is rooted in a specific theological timeline of the vapor canopy: the canopy began as a prelapsarian "transient backdrop" created on Day Two (the only day God did not call good). After the Fall of Man, it transformed into a postlapsarian prison of "Slow Wisdom." The characters in the story are in the position of the patriarchs. They are in a postlapsarian state, a gray, stagnant "ancient rind" that grants long life and denies the "bright death sword" of the sun. The second "fortunate fall" coincided with the destruction of the ancient rind: canopy is shattered, the Deluge happens. This shortened human life; yet it was fortunate. It opened the blueness of the sky, revealing color and grace.

It was first put there very early, on the second day, as a matter of fact. You likely do not remember that the second day is the one that God did not call good. It was surely a transient and temporary backdrop that was put there to be pierced at the proper times by early death and by grace. One of the instants it was pierced was just before this present time. It had been breached here and there for short ages. Then came the clear instant . . . when it was shattered completely and the blue sky was seen supreme.

Within the story, the blue sky and the rainbow function as tokens of anamnesis, set against the amnesia that comes from living inside the modern rind. Sally and her late fertility clearly recapitulate Sarah, pregnant with Isaac at ninety. But who is the aviator husband? It is hard to work out a strict parallel, beyond noting that he is married to Sally, who herself figures as a kind of wisdom-as-bride.

What matters more is his choice. He would rather die younger than thicken into amnesia. In this regard, it is interesting that in the story characters move from smoke, ash, fog, and other pollution to mist and mead on Wednesdays, as if echoing Ash Wednesday. Preferring an early death with the blue sky intact is, of course, the kind of decision made by Christ—and by those in Past Master who choose to live in Cathead, which is a large measure of what Cathead is about.

Better to be crucified than to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit. That, of course, is why most readers cannot take Cathead seriously: Cathead is incomprehensible against a horizon that lacks the theological virtues. Lafferty puts it extremely well in "Encased in Ancient Rind":

“The short and happy life, that is the forgotten thing. The blue-sky interval — do you know what that was? It was the bright death sword coming down in a beam of light. Do you know that in the blue-sky days hardly one man in ten lived to be even a hundred years old? But do you know that in the blue-sky days it wasn't sealed off? The sword stroke was a cutting of the bonds. It was a release and an invitation to higher travel. Are you not tired of living in this prison for even two hundred years or three hundred?”

Finally, there is the joke of the title. The characters are not encased in an ancient rind, but in a modern rind. The modern rind looks to be of the same species as the ancient rind, but it isn't the prelapsarian rind, the rind before the forbidden fruit and its rind. That is why there is no real patriarchal narrative here, but rather the slow wisdom of forgetting. It is an interesting story, one with clear ties to Lafferty’s preferred cosmology (think what you will of it), his ideas about historical forgetting, his sense that human suffering may be preferable to human stagnation, and his faith in the felix culpa. In that sense, it stands as a counterimage to the hedonistic, disordered love of the sky found in "Sky."

Encased in Ancient Rind Notes.pdf

Download PDF • 295KB