06 Misc Laff: To Aurelia, With Horns

This is a very miscellaneous post about a text I have wanted to write about for a few months: To Aurelia, With Horns. It can hardly be called a version of Aurelia, but it is a kind of drafting out of ideas that were later repurposed for it, even if 90 percent of those ideas were drained away. There is zero St. Thomas Aquinas here, which will be surprising for anyone who has read Aurelia. Altogether, it is one of the strangest Lafferty documents that I have read. Enough of it survives to give one a strong sense of how it works, and yet, more than with any other Lafferty document I have read, one gets the sense that Lafferty is really thinking through a problem and not quite getting where he wants to go. Toward the beginning, it looks as though we are going to get a plot in which Dionysus plays a major role, and by the end, Lafferty tells us that a narcotic has changed the world. Even more than the published Aurelia, with its linearity, the manuscript pages for this other Aurelia seem to me to belong to the perspective and narrative skewering he was doing from Not to Mention Camels through Iron Tongue of Midnight. As in Not to Mention Camels, we are in a universe with a prototype world and derivative worlds. As in Iron Tongue of Midnight, there is a sense that the overlays are flickering in and out of focus while occupying the same space. It is almost the point, I think, where Lafferty broke off from trying to explore these ideas in the novelistic way he had been pursuing. Aurelia would be something else, closer to the Oceanic works of the 1980s.

To the degree that there is a narrative in To Aurelia, With Horns, and the draft opens with an extrememly strong narrative about Aurelia in Germany, the story circles back to Aurelia McDermott. Here, Aurelia is not a fourteen-year-old Camiroi but an adult woman, an artist, traveling through a stylized antiquarian Germany. She takes a night river-boat (Die Nixe) from Heidelberg to Heilbronn, where she plays high-stakes poker with four strangers, all characters we meet again in the novel Aurelia. There is Julio Cordovan (a thousand faces), Helen Staircase (two meters tall, made of cheese), Karl Talion (who tears a double deck of cards in half with his bare hands), and Blaise Genet (a private investigator who turns out to be a police informant). Aurelia wins one million Baden-Württemberg Marks, which we are told is a "transcendent whole number."

Then Aurelia walks three miles uphill to Weinsberg and goes into Antikenladen of Herr Boch, an old fat man with double eyes who is custodian of a figurine of the Prince of Nysa, who is Dionysus himself, imprisoned inside a rubber frog-sheath that makes him look like a bullfrog to one set of eyes and a prince to another. Boch feels it's worth selling for one million of whatever currency; Aurelia has exactly that sum. Yet Boch warns her not to buy, and then a creature inside him takes over, perhaps the Prince of Nysa himself, and he assaults her. It is one of Lafferty’s more violent pieces of writing, a scene that stops short of consummation, which wasn't its goal:

Then the manuscript takes a turn. Aurelia paints the Prince's portrait with automatic hands on the roof of das Einhorn, and Julio steals it; the draft moves into a number of smaller pieces: philosophical asides about Aleika (the strange drug), the twilight hours, optics, and the floating world. It seems as if Aurelia and her companions on the Night Boat are all archetypes of some kind, locked into variations of a play. Aurelia is shot with needles by three strangers who tell her, "When we shoot you as an arrow, not when we shoot you as a target," which is what happens in Aurelia, the novel, as if Aurelia were one version of the realities we learn about on the Night Boat and how it transects worlds.

In a surviving sequence, a food magnate named Irving Pluto, who originated Aleika and feeds a billion extra people, is hauled before Senator Capitoline and crucified Prometheus-style, eagles eating his spleen, for the crime of making the world better. The powers that be just wanted the world to be more involved. The manuscript breaks off.

So what is going on? Very hard to say. What does come through is a very strange cosmology.

First, there is the solid world or worlds. It is the ordinary modern world—cars, electricity, Stuttgart automobile factories. It's always there. I assume Aurelia walks through a version of this to get to Weinsberg early in the manuscript. But she won't see it. We are told by the narrator that Aurelia's perception literally filters reality:

Aurelia nowhere traveled through any except the stylized antiquarian country, although there was almost everywhere another and more modern land that was coextensive with it. Aurelia, however, would not see the more modern land. She was in a mood, she was in a phase; worse than that, she was in a period. She was in an old brown-and-gray-stone period and she was not ready to come out of it yet.

That takes one to the stylized antiquarian world, which Lafferty, with his love of Germany, has fun writing about. Aurelia lives here by preference, and the manuscript treats it as more real than the modern world, not less. We are told that Die Nixe burns fish oil in its lamps while the other river boats run on electricity. Die Nixe is "a masterpiece of wood carving," while they're "tin tubs made in a tin tub yard." The antiquarian world is richer, a place where everything possesses deep context:

Is a setting less real if it is seen in its deep and wide context rather than as isolated? Things could be, in these last many hours, seen by Aurelia with all their analogies and congruences in place about them. Not only could events and encounters be seen and experienced, but also the ancestors of those events and encounters, and all the deep parallels and alternates to them.

We tread about the floating world, a concept that is reused and varied in Serpent’s Egg, and are told it is Bohemia, with Lafferty borrowing the Japanese ukiyo concept and transplanting it. It has no foundation, no territory of its own. You can go into nine dwellings and be in the solid world, then walk into the tenth and be in the floating world instantly. It does have a magical property, though—instantaneous transmission: tell a joke in a Floater in Vladivostok, and they laugh in Rio or Pasadena, Texas. Nothing originates there ("there is no way that originality could break through its atmosphere of stale innovation"), but everything new passes through it first, including the drug Aleika. The Night Boat itself, which seems, again, to anchor our archetypes, moves mostly in the floating world, docking at entertainment docks on the Arkansas River in Tulsa. Lafferty writes that the floating world is pseudo and yet not dismissible:

It is a pseudo world, a place of pseudo art and pseudo lives style, pseudo relationships, pseudo lives and loves. And yet there is a lot of fun to be found there on an irregular basis, and much sorrow and degradation as a daily thing. But many great personages loved to walk in the floating world, and not all of them were slummers. Dionysus rode in a chariot through the Floating World; and Christ walked in it. They were not slummers.

Then Lafferty introduces a fascinating idea he calls the twilight hours. There are two extra hours every day (one at dawn, one at dusk) that "do not count on the clock." They exist whether or not you're taking Aleika, but Aleika intensifies the experience. Their duration can't be measured:

The two twilight hours, one at dawn and one at dusk, are possibly given over to alternate worlds. They do not in any case represent time consumed in the regular world . . . There is a duality about the 'hours', for the regular hours are going on in some manner even while the twilight hours are reigning. And the twilight 'hours' are not to be measured, so they may parallel very many regular hours, or sometimes only a minute of so.

Regular time continues to run beneath them, like a river under ice. The night river-boat is said to straddle the boundary: "one side-wheel in the twilight hours and the other in the regular hours, one foot in each world." Special people appear only during these hours, and whether the dawn people and the dusk people are the same people is compared to the old question of whether Venus is both the morning and the evening star. Then Lafferty writes, "And the question is not settled." The twilight hours may be where alternate worlds are accessed.

Finally, Aleika. The drug. Lafferty doesn’t explain much about it. He says it comes in boxes of shapes that are mathematically impossible and may be empty. It "heightens all the senses and sensibilities." It's "synonymous with luck." It's part of the "Wonder Story"—Lafferty's term for the numinous substrate underneath everything. In one of his more interesting asides, he writes:

Aleika is a Wonder Story and it has serpentine roots. It is the magic; but the essence of a magic is that it can only be grasped in a changed form . . . The real essence of magic is that it will be partly forbidden magic. Even the most tedious of all things, the porn, is part of the Wonder Story; it is a part of the Wonder Story that has gone wrong.

Aleika doesn't create the other layers (the twilight hours exist without it, the floating world predates it), but Aleika saturates them all, making each one more intensely itself.

So we have all of these planes. How do they relate? They aren't stacked. They aren't sequential. They don't have borders. It looks to be a simultaneous superimposition, where everything happens at once in the same place, and what you experience depends on your form of apperception. As Herr Boch explains it:

"There will be alternate worlds as long as there are alternate forms of apperception, as long as there will be alternate forms of consciousness to which one may arrive . . . And that will be for as long as there are alternate forms of people." "True," said the Prince of Nysa who was table companion to Herr Boch.

An odd and mysterious fragment of fiction from Lafferty that became more radically transformed than any other piece he wrote that I know about. It is certainly an interesting place to begin thinking about Aurelia. Lafferty demolished it to write the novel we know.