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 Molassses 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 in the Corner"

Advanced Lafferty. A short post on a large topic.

First, a truism: most Lafferty readers rate “The Hole in 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 Autifax 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 rewrote it. Why he wrote HOLD is a mystery.

One sign of the connection to “The Hole in the Corner” is Homer Hoose’s appearance in the neighborhood. Strangely enough, Hoose survived the revision, which moves the setting from Oklahoma to Louisiana to fit the Argo Legend. You’d have to be as sharp a Lafferty reader as Chris Merrick to notice that. The transplant job is a good one: Diogenes, who becomes Zabotski in the revision, builds a version of Noah’s Ark. In the Argo Legend, Noah’s Ark is always the Navicula Petri, the Church of Peter, the Church Militant sailing through the world. I enjoy the variations in the original manuscript, but here I want to look at the disagreement over evolution.

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 him for a rube about science. The temptation is to see him as a simple young-earth creationist or crypto-fundamentalist, but the reality is much weirder. “Out of the Molasses Trap” and its light revision as Book IX help explain why, placing the dispute within his larger conception of deep and historical time. Both versions dramatize two kinds of error as Lafferty saw them. On one side are the Fundamentalers, young-earthers and fundamentalists. On the other are the Orthodoxers, textbook-thumpers who accept an old Earth and modern anthropology’s account of humans and early hominids. For Lafferty, both factions misunderstand time.

I have argued that time became the central theme of the Ghost Story as the Lafferty canon came together, and not getting a grip on it will make amazing stories such as "Bank and Shoal of Time" all but completely 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. 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.

Pristine Time is the more real temporal order in which those 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.