"Eurema's Dam" (1964/1972)

Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865-1923) with Albert Einstein and Others.

“Of course I'm unwell. Always have been,” Albert said. “What good would I be otherwise? You set the ideal that all should be healthy and well adjusted. No! No! Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die. The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or celt or stone knife. It was a crutch, and it wasn't devised by a hale man.” "Eurema's Dam"

A post today on a story that warrants extended attention.

Last time I wrote about Lafferty and the Law of Intellectual Constancy, which he associates with Havelock Ellis. Rather than repeat that brief, I'll jump in and point out a few ways the Law appears in "Eurema’s Dam," his Hugo-winning story. Lafferty made the mistake of saying it wasn't one of his stronger stories. It's a remarkable story.

Look up “eurema” and you’ll discover a genus of yellow butterflies. These appear in several illustrations of the story and have a thematic fit—if one stretches the idea of a caterpillar into that of a worm. Lafferty once did just that. In the unpublished “Pamponia” (1958), he writes, “They see the worm that is, not the butterfly that will soon appear.” That line could describe Albert, the protagonist, whose machines call him “a worm of a man.” By the end, Albert names his project “the Turning of the Worm.” Still, the butterfly image risks sentimentalizing the story. One reader breaks the butterfly on the wheel by suggesting it alludes to the butterfly effect. I’d leave that to Ray Bradbury.

What is not a stretch is the etymological game being played in the title. “Eurema” derives from a Latinization of the Greek eureka, and is related to heuristic (“I find); “dam” (the female parent of an animal) comes from the 15th-century damme, a variant of dame, which meant lady or mother. So here we have the mother of invention: necessity. Lafferty tattoos the point on the reader's brain when Albert takes a proverb test: he must supply the missing word.

“______ is the mother of invention,” it said. “Stupidity,” Albert wrote in his weird, ragged hand. Then he sat back in triumph. “I know that Eurema and her mother,” he snickered. “Man, how I do know them!”

Nothing in the story is more thematically relevant. So, with necessity being another name for law, and the Law of Intellectual Constancy being the topic of this post, a brief recap of the story’s plot.

Albert is a dolt. He's the last of them, an inept outlier who relies on compensatory gadgeteering to navigate life, from completing his schoolwork to overcoming social awkwardness. Although personally clumsy and limited, Albert uses the things he invents to overcome his defects. These inventions then become important to society, solving major problems such as pollution and youth delinquency.

Even so, Albert never fits in. Throughout his life, his attempts at companionship fail. An outburst at an award ceremony reveals his belief that invention originates in dysfunction. Inspired by one of his inventions, Hunchy—a machine that gives him the hunches he is unable to have—Albert goes from planning suicide to upending the orderly world with chaos and mischief. He and Hunchy declare war on a society that has become sheep-like.

Albert shares more than a few traits with his author. As a child, Lafferty struggled to speak straight. Adults thought he was either very slow or very clever. Like Albert, Lafferty had “abominable handwriting”; like Albert, he was uneasy around girls. Lafferty once said, “I was very awkward and shy, then. I missed the school dances; I hadn’t begun to go with girls—I was afraid of them; still am a little bit.” How not to view the following fiction as displaced autobiography?

He had another difficulty when he came to his fifteenth year. People, that is an understatement. There should be a stronger word than “difficulty” for it. Albert was afraid of girls. What to do? “I will build me a machine that is not afraid of girls,” Albert said. And he set to work on it.

Of course, unlike Albert, Lafferty built stories. And if he took the Law of Intellectual Constancy from Havelock Ellis, I think he took more than that. If he read Ellis’s A Study of British Genius—and I believe he did—he could hardly have missed one of the book’s really big ideas: the odd relation between deficiency and high intelligence. Ellis returns to this idea several times in his pages, until he finally spells it out in the book's section called "Conclusions":

“Since a basis of organic inaptitude — a condition which in a more marked and unmitigated form we call imbecility — may thus often be traced at the foundation of genius, we must regard it as a more fundamental fact in the constitution of genius than the undue prevalence of insanity, which is merely a state of mental dissolution, in nearly every case temporarily or permanently abolishing the aptitude for intellectual achievement. [emphasis added]"

Ellis not only argues that genius is more closely related to imbecility than to insanity, but also that genius and imbecility share a kind of organic inaptitude. The inapt minds of idiots and geniuses differ from the aptitudes of average minds, which are well-suited to ordinary life and therefore rarely driven to innovate. In contrast, genius often arises from an under-organized or inhibited brain, a condition that can resemble congenital imbecility. This kind of neurological inaptitude may block normal functioning but can unlock extraordinary abilities in narrow fields, as we see in savants and “men of one idea.” So says Ellis.

The upshot is that, while madness often appears among geniuses, it is not what defines them. Aristotle—and later the Romantics—overstated the connection. What lies deeper is a kind of organic fragility. Madness signals the breakdown, when the natural rhythm between exertion and recovery fails. Aristotle claimed that genius contains “a spark of madness.” Havelock Ellis countered that it carries a trace of something less than mediocrity.

This imbecility-genius axis in Ellis’s thought, along with Lafferty’s ideas about the Law of Intellectual Constancy, explains much of what occurs in "Eurema’s Dam." At the beginning of the story, the Law is already in effect, and it remains so at the end. Intelligence follows a fixed budget, in the style of de Gourmont and Ellis. From the outset, Albert is born a dolt, while other children are born smarter.

We can make better sense of this by drawing a line between two byproducts of the law of intellectual constancy: innate and expressive. Let's call innate intelligence the built-in, biological capacity to learn, reason, imagine, and remember. While not reducible to Spearman's g, it comes first, before any schooling or cultural support. It is roughly analogous to fluid intelligence.

Expressive, or effective, intelligence is what appears in the world. It is the practical problem-solving ability that a person, like Albert, or a society, like the one in the double millennium, can draw on once the tools of culture are in place. It corresponds more closely to what psychologists call crystallized intelligence.

In "Eurema’s Dam" the cultural inheritance includes machines, writing, formal schooling, clean air, polite streets, and so on. Effective intelligence in the story follows a piggyback formula: innate capacity plus crutches. The trouble is, most people fail to recognize how much they depend on those crutches. This is a blindness to the Law of Intellectual Constancy. It feeds a widespread cognitive bias about expressive intelligence. As Ellis observed, “The achievements of today impress us more than the achievements, so far as we know them, of primitive man. We overlook the fact that the difference is accidental—the accident of position and the result of accumulated traditions.”

At the beginning of the story, the other children appear more intelligent because they know how to leverage their cultural heritage. In the last post, I wrote about how Lafferty claimed the world effectively ended sometime between the 1910s and the late 1960s. I laid out how that belief shapes his version of the Law of Intellectual Constancy through what he called “occult compensation.” I argued that occult compensation disappeared when democratization, homogenization, and the more equitable distribution of social goods made compensation no longer hidden (for the full version, see that post). In "Eurema’s Dam," part of which takes place in the year 2000, the “smart kids” are the ones who benefit from that shift. They thrive because occult compensation is gone, though its disappearance brings some unfortunate consequences of its own.

Albert, being a dolt with poor motor skills and an inability to calculate, creates machines to calculate, his crutches. Ironically, society embraces Albert’s inventions, which restore parity and solve problems for everyone.

This recapitulates Havelock Ellis’s theory of genius: organic inaptitude leads those with defects to genius-level flights. Ellis makes this point when discussing William Morris, the man who inspired Lafferty’s “The World as Will and Wallpaper” (1973) in these terms:

"A typical example of this in recent years was presented by William Morris, a man of very original genius, of great physical vigour and strength, of immense capacity for work, who was at the same time abnormally restless, very irritable, and liable to random explosions of nervous energy. Morris inherited from his mother's side a peculiarly strong and solid constitution; on his father's side he inherited a neurotic and gouty strain. It is evident that, given the robust constitution, the germinal instability furnished by such a morbid element as this — falling far short of insanity — acts as a precious fermentative element, an essential constituent in the man's genius."

In other words, Morris’s irregularities are near the wellspring of his genius. Albert announces this law-like fact in his disastrous speech,

“You cannot live without the irregulars . . . When there are no longer any deprived or insufficient, who will invent?”

Several months ago, I came across a person online who was outraged by "Eurema’s Dam." What a cruel story, the person thought. And that ending? The person speculated that R. A. Lafferty was the school-shooter type. This, of course, misses the point entirely.

What makes the story especially interesting is that, in the essay “Notes From the Golden Age” (1974), Lafferty imagines Flatland as a condition of possibility, a concept he also explores in “The Day After the World Ended” (1979). Something like that happens here, though things get bad, bad enough to make Albert want to blow his brains out.

Albert’s world has stalled in Flatland. The Golden Age will not come. The status quo is a complacent, albeit smog-free, pseudo-utopia, something like the Astrobe Dream in Past Master. But where Past Master locates danger in the political machinations of powers and principalities, "Eurema’s Dam" treats it as a waystation of the Law of Intellectual Constancy. Luckily for the world, there are Albert and Hunchy, two outsiders who would feel right at home in Cathead.