"Love Affair With Ten Thousand Springs" (1975/1976)

“Do you understand what had to be done? The world had to be unvoided; the chaos had to be unchaosed; the spoil had to be unspoiled; and it must be continued. Everything has to be patterned and structured, continuously. That is the real beginning: the patterning."

But every spring is a miracle. It is the miracle of striking a rock with an Aaron's rod and having the water gush out. Aaron's Rod Spring, by the way, is in Alabama.

“Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs” is a major Lafferty story that is simply overlooked. This is probably because it bears so many of his most eccentric traits. We have Crescentia, the giant, leggy tutelary spirit, who wears pajamas under her robe and carries the main character like a child, with some of Lafferty’s lap-sitting thrown in. Crescentia is married to Cliveden, and yet she is eroticized and becomes the object of the main character’s affair.

This pattern also appears in The Flame Is Green with the character Mariella Cima, who is married to Tancredi. In the background of "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs" is a fallen world (with the Fall having been imagined to be set in the Mesozoic and the object of another character’s coded notebook). In both “Love Affair” and The Flame Is Green, a wild primordial naturalness is treated in complex ways (Ecological Lafferty). Both are about being fallen and having a fallen relation to nature, which shows up in the sexual guilt and strangeness that run through the main character in "Love Affair" and through Dana's eros and the Cimas as he moves out of his mountain adventure. Mariella and Crescentia are another example of ghost story characters that overlap, both creations that say something about what Lafferty called the Green Revolution and ordered affections, his conceptualization of a non-naive openness to being, nature, God. And with both, there is danger involved. As Mariella says to Dana in The Flame is Green:

“As the Father told you, Dana, we believe that humans have crops like birds,” Mariella was chuckling her deep woman’s chuckle, “and we do have. I have cut more than one human crop open to see what was in it. Now I will cut yours open and see whether the great rock in it is red or green.”

In a nutshell, "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs" and the Coscuin chronicles both center on the reformation of a character’s relation to the natural order.

Then there is the story’s master trope, which centers on the rural engineering of springs. It could not be less ordinary. At the same time, Lafferty is working with heady theological and philosophical ideas. He is out to create a modern myth about how, in an increasingly "artificial" world, artificiality is not the opposite of naturality. Given the ontological design the world displays, the opposite of the artificial is chaos, the primordial waters of Genesis, Tiamat in the Babylonian tradition, closer to Chaos in Hesiod than Ginnungagap in the Norse myths. It is that which is void and without form.

That makes "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs" a story about divine and human technology, and about how the two relate to each other. If divine technology sounds odd, that is because it is Lafferty’s novum this time. It bears on several of the major questions that run through Lafferty’s work, including how spirit could descend into gel cells, how Epiktistes could be both machine and person, and a dozen other problems of comparable weight.

Because the story is so deep, I am going to run through the plot first and only then sketch its main philosophical idea. Doing so means setting aside many of the wonderful things that happen here, including some things I do not fully understand about Lafferty himself. That includes why he so often uses sexual or sadistic imagery to convey his deepest ideas about nature and the divine, his macrophilia, and how controlled his own ambivalences are. For now, the aim is simply to get the shape of the story in place.

Our main character is named Ranwick Sorgente. He has spent fifty years seeking out and loving ten thousand different springs. In “Love Affair,” Ranwick travels to a remote lodge where he meets a woman named Crescentia Houseghost. Cresentia herself is one of Lafferty's great female characters:

She was too tall and too angular, too bony, too large of hand and foot, too long of thigh and of arched neck. Her eyes were just a little bit awry; one of them was slightly crossed. Her mouth was always crooked with its smile, and there was ever a trickle of saliva or spring water at one corner of it.

The pegeid Crescentia kissed Ranwick Sorgente again with a splashy smooch and then ran down the green-stone slopes like a filly colt. Too leggy, that one. Was anyone ever so leggy? And she wasn't very young. Rough, rank, yellow hair was on her head as on a shaggy bay pony, a very high standing one. All the pegeids were so.

Crescentia was an unbridled nightmare of naturalness. She was horrifyingly chaotic; she did not have a countable number of legs, for instance, nor of eyes, nor of mouth or other things. So Ranwick bitted her and bridled her. That was all that was needed. It was, of course, a sorrowful thing to have to do. But, after it was done, she was in a rational form; she was a controlled nightmare.

Ranwick knows immediately that she is a pegeid, a water-spirit of heroic dimensions. She is awkward in her "slurpy affection" and "shockingly imperfect" appearance, with all that word means in Lafferty. Crescentia takes Ranwick up a rocky slope to a gushing spring, which she calls perfect. Ranwick notes its lopsided and "crooked" nature. He says that even though he loves these springs, he is haunted by a "shameful secret" connected to them: they are all second-hand and faithless, having been possessed by others before him.

At the lodge, Ranwick meets Crescentia’s husband, Cliveden. Cliveden gives Ranwick the scientific notes of a dead guest named Nigel Graystone, which are titled "Rock Gardens of the Mesozoic." They propose a radical theory: the physical world is an artificial construct sewn together to prevent it from collapsing into primordial chaos. Cliveden believed that raw nature is waste and worthless, and he refers to the Genesis description of the world as inanis et vacua (void and empty) before Logos. What humans experience as natural beauty is an intentional patterning designed to unspoil the world and make it habitable.

As Ranwick explores the hills with Crescentia, the line between the natural and the artificial becomes even more complicated. Ranwick discovers that Crescentia has an electronic "psycho-monitor" ticking in her throat to control her behavior. He begins to suspect that the springs themselves are mechanically throttled. At the same time, Crescentia herself becomes more complicated. Lafferty describes her as a "nightmare of naturalness." She eventually goes away to hunt for children in a nearby town, saying the springs "want them." Cliveden then warns Ranwick that Crescentia is legally barred from being near children. Her madness is an unbridled, chaotic force that stands in opposition to the "bitted and bridled" order of the structured world.

In the story's final sequence, official cars arrive at the lodge to take Crescentia back to a mental institution. Cliveden tells Ranwick that Crescentia’s madness is that she drowns children and men, and he admits a murderous jealousy. Cliveden wishes Crescentia had drowned Ranwick. Alone at a new spring, Ranwick reaches into the water and pulls out a corroded, modern iron pipe that had been directing the flow. This confirms the spring’s artificiality. Now knowing that his pegeid is a killer and his primordial spring has a piece of plumbing, Ranwick does not leave. Instead, he calls out to the water-spirit of the pool. This latest “contrived" love is the strongest of his ten thousand affairs.

As I said, this is one of Lafferty’s great theological fables. Behind it is the humble human concern with the real-world mechanics of spring development, which Lafferty presents in a brilliant litany of spring names.

Rural people need to cap muddy seeps in order to create gushing, fresh, bright water, and Lafferty uses this as a metaphor for the imposition of Logos (divine order) upon chaos. In the physical world, natural springs rarely gush beautifully. A natural spring is typically a quagmire; it creates a messy, stagnant bog where water oozes aimlessly through the soil. The mechanical act of piping mirrors the opening of Genesis: the world in its natural state is inanis et vacua (void and empty).

Lafferty’s passage in "Love Affair" about the waves of earth and water is one of the most important pieces of writing he ever did about the oceanic. As Cliveden Houseghost explains, the contrived throat/pipe of the Artificer is necessary because primordial physis is lethal:

“The normal way would be for the water to come out of the ground in seeps that produce dangerous quagmires. So there is cementing and channeling of the springs to give an ordered and restricted flow. And contrived throats are provided . . . Stay away from the perfectly natural places. You'd be extinguished there. I believe that there are several such natural places on the Earth yet . . . They are insane and inane ('Inanis et vacus,' God called them in his original Latin), and they'll turn you insane if you linger with them any time at all.”

"Oh, my wife, as you may have noticed, is insane . . . Well, goodnight, Ranwick Sorgente. Oh, and I'm insane too."

A few times recently on the blog, the ideas of evolution and design have come up, since they are such important themes in Lafferty. In "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs," teleology is front and center. The story re-mythicizes for the reader the relation between physis and nomos. In the process, the word artificial shifts its referent: it comes to mean nature borne as a higher order. What is made by the hand of the potter is natura—damaged, though it may be, by the Fall. This is the higher order present in what the scholastics called natura vulnerata (wounded nature), set against the natura integrata (integral nature) that existed before the Fall.

In the storyworld, the discontinuity of the Fall happens in the Mesozoic. As Nigel writes in his notebook: “There is a second stabilization or unspoiling very late, right in the middle of the Mesozoic. It is disguised as a series of massive vulcanisms, but they were no more than disguises. It was a contrived, intrusive, artificial concretion of most strategic economy, and it was massive in effect. We still live on that deposit of stability and patterning of that too-orderly Mesozoic intrusion.”

Once again, Lafferty is being etymological. It is probably needless to point out that “Artificial” refers to the work of an Artificer, and an artificer is a maker who builds with purpose and end-goals in mind. Ranwick Sorgente’s heartbreak at finding a modern pipe in his fantasy of a primordial spring is a romantic delusion that Lafferty thinks we are all tempted by. “It isn't old, it isn't old at all,” he said. “It's modern commercial pipe. It isn't thirty years old. Oh, you are an artificial vixen! Are you not ashamed?” It is, finally, egocentric and not directed towards the Arificer. Cliveden tells Ranwick to see it under a different aspect:

“To impose a pattern is not to spoil. It is to unspoil. Everything is waste and worthless and weird in the beginning. It is uneven, and it is spoiled, stripped of everything . . . ‘Cure is a sewn-together world,’ the notes read, ‘and the word for “sewn-together” is “rhapsody.” A rhapsody is a sewing-together of songs.’”

If you read the blog, you will probably recognize what Lafferty has done. He does what he usually does: he uses counterfiguration. The contrived nature of the world in the story reflects the Catholic doctrine of Providence and the strategic repair of sacramentality, in which God's grace and presence are made tangible through material things. A piped spring requires constant maintenance to prevent mineral verdigris and silt from clogging the throat. If that happens, you are left with unpatterning. Lafferty turns this into a “love affair” between the Creator and the world. It is contemporary and living.

Ranwick’s discovery of the pipes is the discovery that we are not alone in the wilderness. The world is a home, and we are guests in a house built for us. On this point, note how Lafferty plays with “ghost” and “host” in the name “Houseghost”:

“There is strategic mountain repair within the last five thousand years. There is strategic water repair within the last five days... We ask who did all this; we ask who was here before us, and who may be here yet. We say ‘Somebody's been sitting in my chair’ and we wonder who it was. Then we notice for the first time that ours is a giants' chair.”

In the story, we learn that the “Hymn of the Rocks” became Flesh in order to save the world from its own “rampant naturalness.” For Ranwick, the ten thousandth love is a transformation. He moves from a pagan love of what he misunderstands about the wild to a sacramental love of the mediated. He begins to see that loving the chaotic water of the abyss is not love, though he can love the water that has been given a “throat” to speak.

What does it amount to? Well, his affair with the artificial is a complicated acceptance. The fallen world is beauitful and it is a “controlled nightmare,” one in which the terrifying chaos of the void has been bridled by a loving Designer. Nonetheless, Crescentia will drown children and men. Fallen nature is a controlled nightmare, one of Lafferty's key formulations:

The vivifying elements of our world structure is the Hymn of the Rocks. And the Hymn became Flesh and dwelt amongst us . . . Crescentia was an unbridled nightmare of naturalness. She was horrifyingly chaotic; she did not have a countable number of legs, for instance, nor of eyes, nor of eyes, nor of mouth other things So Ranwick bitted her and bridled her. That was all that was needed. It was, of course, a sorrowful thing to have to do. But after it was done, she was in a rational form; she was a controlled nightmare.”

At the same time, Lafferty is being daring, as he always is in his major theological fantasies. He does not deny creatio ex nihilo, affirmed at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, but he leaves open some of the philosophical puzzles associated with the Genesis account, particularly those concerning the nature of evil and the problem of theodicy as they relate to the primordial condition, when darkness lay upon the deep, and all was without form and void.

Like the best Lafferty, it is deeply ambiguous. Where do we finally stand with Ranwick, Crescentia, and Cliveden? "Love Affair" holds so much in suspension.

There was a double stirring in the deep water. These said, "Yes, there is quite a bit to that business"; and they said, "It’s the thing about the world and about us that you’ve been loving all the time: don’t stop loving it now." Ranwick went and put his two arms deep into the gushing throat of the spring. He worked around there a while. He brought out a short and corroded length of four-inch iron pipe that was grown over with moss and verdigris. "It isn’t old, it isn’t old at all,’ he said. ‘It’s modern commercial pipe. It isn’t thirty years old. Oh, you are an artificial vixen! Are you not ashamed? The amused stirring of the deep water said that the pegeid was in no way ashamed.

and

“Oh, she drowns children. She doesn’t really mean anything by it, I don’t believe. She believes that the springs want them. But the people in the little towns become very skittish whenever she goes on a children hunt.”

I’ll wrap up with something that has been puzzling me lately: Lafferty’s great phrase “the untarnished evil of children.” There is something in Lafferty that seems drawn to unculpable fallenness, something that fires his imagination. We see it in Crescentia, and we see it in many of Lafferty’s cruel yet childlike figures. It is a natural force in his work, one he never seems to tire of revisiting.

In any case, "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs" is a major Lafferty story that deserves to be better known and more appreciated by Lafferty’s readers. All the deep and difficult Lafferty is here.

Love Affair With Ten Thousand Springs Notes.pdf

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