Evolution and "Out of the Molasses Trap" (1976)

“Molasses is a little like amber,” Diogenes said. “It flows so slowly that sometimes it seems to be solid. Creatures can be imprisoned in it and apparently be held motionless in it. They must deceive themselves as to their own time scale, for if they do not deceive themselves they will be dead . . . . Things can not have been going on for the orthodox time at the orthodox pace.” — "Out of the Molasses Trap"

“There are no duplications in the Pristine World, and there are no non-valid persons or situations. So I eliminated all duplicated or non-valid persons and situations from my thinking and from my history, and by that trick I came up with my Pristine History . . . . The Pristine World is like that: it is the real and essential world. It does exist. Nothing is left out of it except the duplicated and the non-valid; but very much is added to it. The Pristine World, in fact, is so intuitively imbued and indwelt that I can live overflowing years of it in the same space taken by a draggy day or two in the Molasses World.” — "Out of the Molasses Trap"

Homer had a little trouble with the doorknob. They don't have them in all the recensions, you know; and he had that off-the-track feeling tonight. But he figured it out (you don't pull it, you turn it), and opened the door. — "The Hole on the Corner"

Advanced Lafferty. A short post on a large topic.

First, a truism: most Lafferty readers rate “The Hole on the Corner” highly. Daniel Otto Jack Petersen chose its title, with good reason, for his YouTube series on Lafferty. What isn’t known is that the story has a loose sequel, “Out of the Molasses Trap.” You may even have read it: it became Book IX of More Than Melchisedech. Lafferty completed the original story, about Diogenes Pontifex and Audifax O’Hanlon, in 1976. He made a note to send it to Virginia Kidd, then crossed out the line and wrote one word: HOLD. He later gave the story another coat of paint, changing the characters. Why he wrote HOLD is a mystery.

One sign of the early connection to “The Hole on the Corner” is Homer Hoose’s appearance in the “Molasses Trap” neighborhood. Strangely enough, Hoose survived the revision, which moves the setting from Oklahoma to Louisiana to fit the Argo Legend. Poor Homer Hoose. The rewriting of Diogenes’s story as Duffey’s works well: Diogenes, who becomes Zabotski in the revision, builds a version of Noah’s Ark, and, as Argoheads know, Duffey pilots the bark of Peter as the priest Melchisedech. In the Argo Legend, Noah’s Ark is always the Navicula Petri, the Church of Peter, the Church Militant sailing through the world.

My pet theory is that the ark’s centrality made Lafferty realize he had written an Argo piece. The transformation makes sense, and if, like me, you love this stuff, it is even a little poignant. Lafferty takes from Diogenes and gives to Duffey, but most of his readers would take a Diogenes over a Duffey. I’m torn about the revision, though. I enjoy the variations in the original manuscript and like it as a self-contained story. I want it to be a companion piece to “The Hole on the Corner,” where we learn that Diogenes, in this reality, is married to Miss America Waldo.

But set all that aside. Here I want to look at something else that was very much on Lafferty’s mind in the 1970s: biological evolution, popular debates about the ark landing on Ararat, and historicity.

Lafferty’s opposition to all forms of human evolution, including theistic evolution, can be surprising. Someone recently wrote about this online and seems to have taken Lafferty for a disappointing rube about science. The temptation is to see him as a simple young-earth creationist or crypto-fundamentalist, but the reality is much weirder. His position seems to combine a metaphysics of time with a coherentism that takes the Magisterium as the dead center of any valid web of belief.

In “Out of the Molasses Trap” and its light revision as Book IX, Lafferty places the dispute between idiotic Christian fundamentalists and hardcore (soft) scientists within his larger conception of deep and historical time. The Fundamentalers are young-earthers and fundamentalists; the Orthodoxers are textbook-thumpers who accept an old Earth and modern anthropology’s account of humans and early hominids. For Lafferty, the two factions embody different errors, but both misunderstand time.

In the original story, Diogenes builds an enormous contraption in his backyard from ancient instructions he can only partly decipher, prompting complaints from his neighbors. His strange ability to step in and out of realities in “The Hole on the Corner” returns in “Out of the Molasses Trap.” He regularly visits the Pristine World, where he spends years while only a day or two passes at home. His associate, our old friend Audifax O’Hanlon, studies the discrepancy between this swift, abundant existence and the distorted chronology of the everyday Molasses World.

Diogenes’s shenanigans once again affect the neighborhood: within five days, a small boy grows into a grandfather and his father lives out a long life. In a debate with the biblical Fundamentalers, Diogenes explains that Pristine History contains the essential reality of events, freed from trivial repetition. When their discussion turns to Noah’s Ark, he discovers that his mysterious building is an ark, which will come as no surprise to the reader, given Lafferty’s obsession with all things Noahic.

As the Orthodoxers, violent guardians of scientific orthodoxy, threaten Diogenes for rejecting their account of history, his wife, Widow Waldo, prepares to accompany him with children from her orphanage. The children load the ark with roughly shaped clay animals that can receive life. A cloudburst arrives. Diogenes says that the coming flood will be the first true Flood: earlier floods were rehearsals, and all the ancient arks are discarded models. He escapes his persecutors and sets off with Waldo, the children, and their animals. Once the ark floats, he says, the Pristine World will become exclusive fact.

Audifax and the neighbors stay behind as their world hardens like molasses turning into amber. The magazine closes by promising a future description of the ark as the Pontifex family’s lakeside home, where its inhabitants continue to live at a mysterious speed.

I have argued that time became the central theme of the Ghost Story as Lafferty’s canon took shape. Without a grip on his conception of time, amazing stories such as “Bank and Shoal of Time” remain all but inaccessible. When asked why he drank, Lafferty described alcoholism as an attempt to escape time. Perhaps I’m psychologizing too much, but that also strikes me as a pretty good description of the Ghost Story: an attempt to break through time. Judging by how often he returned to questions of time and evolution in the 1970s, they were at the forefront of his mind. The escape imagined in “Out of the Molasses Trap” is from Molasses Time into Pristine Time.

Molasses Time is the impeded temporal order of ordinary history, swollen by repetition, duplication, and non-valid persons or events, so that immense duration is mistaken for fullness. It is a dead block or slab of time, cut off from anagogy. A big chunk of meaty dead time.

Pristine Time is the sublimed temporal order in which those meaty impediments are absent, yet existence is paradoxically more abundant. As all things come to fruition in anagogical space, it contains the “overflowing years” and “very much” that Molasses Time lacks.

The Orthodoxers mistake Molasses chronology for reality itself. The Fundamentalers come closer to Pristine chronology, but they mistake a partially correct Pristine timescale and its anticipatory events for the fulfilled reality to which they point. They also fail to see the thickness of Molasses Time. Their thinner account of time leaves them, ironically, with less access to Pristine Time. It is as if they mistake the shadow of Pristine Time for Pristine Time itself.

As I understand Lafferty, Prime is not textual: it is where you and I are right now. Within this story world, though, it is where Molasses Time and Pristine Time connect. It is where we see the writer balancing his scientific literacy against his religious commitments.

Such is the big picture. Now for the story’s logic, stated plainly, if a little dryly. That logic keeps Lafferty from being either a Fundamentaler or an Orthodoxer. The story dramatizes the intellectual tension of an exceptionally intelligent man deeply committed to the narrative of Genesis without being a literalist. Most people who abandon literalism treat Genesis as poetic truth. Lafferty swung hard toward anagogy, the fourth sense of Scripture, as a higher literalism concerned with eschatological completion.

P1. Something can be real and unfinished in Molasses Time while already complete anagogically in Pristine Time.

P2. Pristine Time is a good and complete order in which everything has already happened anagogically. Its goodness supplies the measure of fulfillment; completeness alone does not make it good.

P3. Things in Molasses Time can anticipate and signify that completed order, fail to do so, or do so repeatedly without ceasing to be real.

P4. The connection between Molasses Time and Pristine Time exceeds chronological succession. An event still to come in Molasses Time can already be complete anagogically in Pristine Time. It remains the same event, distinct from other events.

P5. Someone living in Molasses Time can participate incompletely in Pristine Time. The incompleteness belongs to the participation, not to Pristine Time itself.

P6. Anagogical completion preserves the truth of Molasses history. What failed, repeated, or remained unfinished really did so.

P7. Duration exists in both orders because time itself is duplex. Pristine Time possesses succession even though everything in it is already complete anagogically.

A1. The Molasses World is real but provisional and wasteful; the Pristine World is already complete, as Eternity is looking back on the meaning of time itself. Passage into the Pristine World completes participation in an order that does not itself await completion.

A2. The earlier floods in Molasses Time are real anticipations. Pontifex’s Flood is their first definitive fulfillment within Molasses history, opening into what is already complete in Pristine Time. It is not the earliest flood chronologically.

A3. The Pristine World’s becoming “exclusive fact” brings the Molasses World into its already completed order. Calling the Molasses World “finished” does not erase its history. Calling persons or events “non-valid” does not mean that they never existed or occurred.

C. If these premises and assumptions hold, events can be unfinished in Molasses Time and already complete anagogically in Pristine Time. The final passage completes participation in that order without undoing the reality or history of Molasses Time. The Fundamentalers (free flies) recognize Pristine Time as the true order but get hung up on temporal units. The Orthodoxers (flies in amber) not only misread events in Molasses Time, as with the hoaxes of the “African Extravaganza,” but misunderstand the nature of Molasses Time itself.