"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."

And Lafferty’s story, "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs," is pretty characteristic of him, about a man who loves springs and their "pegeids" (analogous to naiads). They are all imperfect, and the pegeid at the center of this story turns out to be imperfect in a scary way. Plenty of linguistic invention and verve, but probably a bit too long, too rambling. Minor Lafferty, really. — Rich Horton, Strange at Ecbatan (blog), November 2020.

"Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs" is an important Lafferty story, though you might not know it. It has been mostly overlooked in favor of other things. Petersen discusses it briefly in his dissertation. It exhibits Lafferty’s ideas and stylistic powers at full force, yet it is so deeply inside the private symbol system and logic of the ghost story that one quickly understands why it goes unrecognized for what it is: a significant work with implications for Lafferty’s entire treatment of techne. Here, Lafferty creates a fantasy about how the teleological argument upends the category of the artificial, and he writes one of his masterpieces on nature and the eschatological present. As wrong as first attempts might be to get right, one could wish for something like A Blake Dictionary by S. Foster Damon for Lafferty—that is, a book that tried to put the pieces together.

We have Crescentia, the giant, leggy tutelary water spirit, who wears pajamas under her robe and carries the main character about like a child. Along the way, we get Lafferty’s fixation on lap-sitting. Crescentia is married to Cliveden, and yet she is eroticized and becomes the object of the main character’s affair. The affair itself is at once metaphysical and intensely physical, though the physicality takes strange Laffertyesque forms. There is erotically charged, slurpy kissing and neck-nuzzling rather than anything more conventionally affairish.

Once she pulled him down in the grass with her to lie on her lanky body and her full but somewhat angular breasts. She lapped his face with her tongue as if she were a mother cat and he were her kitten. "Oh, you funny tasting man!' she said. "I will roll you in spice-grass, and then I’ll eat you." He made love to her arched neck and her throat.

Because the story is so deep, I am going to run through the plot and focus on sketching its main idea. Doing so means setting aside many of the wonderful things that happen here, including odd aspects of Lafferty that I only partially understand. That includes why he so often uses sexual or sadistic imagery to convey his deepest ideas about nature and the divine, his recurring macrophilia, and how slippery his own ambivalences are. The aim is simply to get the story’s shape 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. Crescentia 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.

Where to start, really? This is a mythological story, with a precedent in Lafferty. The female earth-figure / male time-figure / hero triad appears in The Flame Is Green, where it takes the form of Dana and the Brumes. Magelena, who is married to Malandrino Brume, becomes a focus on eros in the book. In the background of both "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs" and The Flame Is Green is there is the problem of the World, the fallen world. In "Love Affair," the Fall is even given a rough date. It is imagined to have occurred in the Mesozoic, a tidbit the reader learns from Nigel Greystone’s notebook. Nigel Greystone? Crecentia drowned him the way she drowns children.

In both “Love Affair” and The Flame Is Green, there is a wild, primordial naturalness. It is coded as female and treated in complex ways. As I said, both works are about the Fall, and about what it means to have a fallen nature in relation to the macro-nature of Prime. In each, this postlapsarian condition shows up as sexual play and sexual guilt, where strangeness stops short of being outright perversity, though it becomes hard to parse out the uncanniness from perversity. There is a sense of extreme norm-breaking in both that nonetheless conveys something about higher norms. The norms are there. Lafferty sees them. He pretends they aren't there, and it is hard to say just what lines are being crossed. We see this most clearly in the eros that shapes Dana as he moves through his early adventures in The Flame Is Green. The first half of The Flame is Green is a decoder ring for thinking about sex in Lafferty, though Lafferty readers aren't going to bring it up.

That, too, is why "Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs" is so hard and perhaps so ignored. Sex is an area of Lafferty that no reader has yet been able to describe, explain, or write about well, precisely because it is one of the most sui generis aspects of a writer who so often works entirely on his own terms. It is as if one would have to make sense of a dozen auxiliary areas before even knowing where to begin. What does one do with this?

“And you are the world expert on these things, with senses that never sleep," Dana mocked the sleeping Malandrino Brume. Brume was sleeping deeply and powerfully. Dana loved these two persons whom he had just saved, and this made a rather sharp night-going of it.Dana lay down on top of the sleeping Magdelena and kissed her strongly upon the face and mouth. She partially returned his kisses, but she did not waken. He lay upon her and soaked her hair and head and face and neck and breasts and entire upper body with his blood. Ah, what a sticky red joke he was playing on the sleeping beauty! He laughed then, and his own pain became a sort of rending pleasure upon her. He loved this as an elaborate jest; and Magdelena would love it in the morning, after she had seen what had happened in the night and that it was not Dana who was dead, and after she had realized with blue-eyed delight what outrageous calling card he had left upon her. He kissed her bloodied mouth with great passion; then he rose from her. Turning to her husband, Dana cuffed Malandrino Brume and thumped him upon his mighty chest. "Good-bye, old man," he said. 'I leave you now." And Malandrino Brume was still sleeping deeply and powerfully. Dana gave Brume a resounding slap on the haunch.

As primordial women, Magdalena and Crescentia are conceptual cousins: Magdalena of the mountain, Crescentia of water. They are examples of Lafferty’s overlapping, ghost-story characters, and they bleed into Valery Mok, as one sees in her chapter in Arrive at Easterwine. They are female figures delivered to the reader in an intensely mythic, oceanic mode. Magdalena and Crescentia are parallel creations, too, in that they illuminate what Lafferty called the Green Revolution in one of its dimensions: a greenness that is at once fallen and restored—or rather, an instance of already–not yet eschatology. Creation is redeemed through Christ, but not yet fully restored, and thus remains a vehicle for tremendous natural evil: floods, fires, cyclones, earthquakes, plagues, and the like.

This already–not yet latency in nature creates problems for those who live in the wake of a world redeemed but not restored. It shows up most familiarly in the form of one’s own nature—in one’s ordered and disordered affections. Thus both Magdalena and Crescentia become images of a non-naive openness to being. But in both cases that openness is inseparable from danger posed to Dana and Ranwick.

This breathlessly primordial ozone is one of Lafferty’s fixations, but it is also very hard to write about. To write about it at all, Lafferty typically deranges the senses through language. He developed this trick with Charles Cogsworth in "Through Other Eyes."

There is a calm voice, measured, almost placid, speaking in language that is so metonymically dislocated that it overwhelms the reader’s mind. The measured voice and the immeasured language work together in parallax. One knows that one is seeing through a glass darkly. One also knows that irrational emotions and madness are being strung along a rational syntax like beads. Enough remains visible, however, that one feels the danger involved:

Have machines moral foundations? This one has. I have, if men have such foundations, for I am a compendium and extension of man. I found Valery calculating, in a mad manner, just how quickly she could kill this man or that, and how much of him she could eat before being apprehended and dragged off of him. In her mind she stalks, and in fact she sometimes stalks. I have issued orders that the workmen still working on me should go by twos and threes, never alone. And yet one of them was nearly ambushed by Valery in an obscure corner. I have given myself another dozen pair of eyes. They may not be enough. There is hunting horror in this, there is depravity without bottom, there is sheer murder. Would she really do it? Will she? How close has it come? It once came exactly to a balance. She would have killed a poor man, she would have transmuted herself by so doing, she would have traded herself for an evil ecstasy, and she would never have returned from it. But she will not do it, not now, not right now.

What stops Crescentia?

“It’s a psycho-monitor, a sort of electronic conscience. Crescentia has no other sort of conscience. It is put in her throat because her emotions curiously center there."

In both the Coscuin sequence and “Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs,” Lafferty is working out the reformation of a character—Dana and Ranwick—and of that character’s relation to the natural order. Simultaneously, he is heightening moral ambiguity while insisting on a foundational order. More precisely, he is intensifying the not yet, rather than the already, of already–not yet eschatology. This is an element of apocalypticism in his work that often gets overlooked: the eschatological present.

The not yet is where we struggle. As Josef Pieper put it in The End of Time, “it is essential to the concept of prognosis that it stands on the ‘footholds’ in the present; indeed, the art of prognosis consists in discovering in the fund of experience itself pointers to the future, which is concealed in the present.” The plumbing in "Love Affair" works this way:

“Ten minutes of waves is equivalent to a million years of rocks, so waves may be used as a speed-up tool. There are developments and maturities in waves that have not yet appeared in rocks, so they may also be used as a prediction tool. With both, we have the spectacle of great and Cyclopean constructions, of bridges and roads and battlements, of walls and revetments, and most spectacularly of topless and toppling towers, building and collapsing underground or underwater.”

Because the present is also eschatologically not yet, it is bound up with Valery Mok’s hunting horror. It is Valery, not killing: the katechon holding back apocalyptic violence. And the psycho-monitor itself is a kind of katechon, a restraint operating within the eschatological present of “Love Affair with Ten Thousand Springs.”

What does a psycho-monitor as katechon look like?

It is very Lafferty to center all of this on the rural engineering of spring water. In the middle of his wild mythmaking, there could be few things more ordinary than walking up a creek and arriving at its source: a pipe sticking out of the earth, a pipe jammed into the throat of the ground. Keep the spring water clean: pipe a seep. Control the runoff, if you can. The primordial water flashes brightest when it passes through the pipe in the throat.

And it is very Lafferty to use such a humble object to work with such heady theological and philosophical ideas, because 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 not nature but chaos: the primordial waters of Genesis, Tiamat in the Babylonian tradition, Chaos in Hesiod, Ginnungagap in the Norse myths, and so on. 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 things in Lafferty.

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 and the teleological argument are 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 as a higher-order pattern imposed on the waters of chaos. 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.

But the lower natura, the dark waters, are somehow still present. It is as if there has been signal decay in the pattern’s information: the noise persists because of what humans did in wounding what the story treats as the pre-Mesozoic order. 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 Artificer. 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.’”

You will probably recognize what Lafferty has done. He does what he usually does: he uses counterfiguration. The storyworld’s “contrived nature” reflects Catholic doctrine about Providence—about the strategic repair of sacramentality, where God’s grace and presence are made tangible through material things. Words with negative connotations, such as contrived and artificial, are themselves counterfigured.

A piped spring requires constant maintenance to prevent mineral verdigris and silt from clogging its throat. If that happens, people are severed from the spring and left with unpatterning. Lafferty turns this into a love affair between the Creator and the world, behind and within the story’s more literal love affair with ten thousand springs. This, of course, ties into other spring-and-fountain motifs in Lafferty. Recall, for instance, the fountains in Fourth Mansions, which Lafferty patterns on St. Teresa’s fountain imagery in The Interior Castle.

Ranwick’s discovery of the pipes is the discovery of telos in the world. 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 beautiful 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 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. It is always a forge blast for his imagination. We see it in Crescentia, and we see it in many of Lafferty’s cruel yet childlike figures. It is a 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. It is not the kind of story that would be in a sampler, but it is near the center of Lafferty's own artistic project. Those who want to understand him should know it well. All the deep and difficult Lafferty is here: towering ideas, verbal genius, affective peculiarities.

Love Affair With Ten Thousand Springs Notes.pdf

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