"Ancient Sorceries" (c. 1983)

One of Lafferty’s deeper-cut poems is “Ancient Sorceries,” written a year before he retired from writing. It is a The Men Who Knew Everything/In a Green Tree sonnet, rooted in his private symbol system. The whole poem proceeds by association, and one could follow those associative lines for a long time.

Human beings have an older, more primitive brother: childish but powerful, and known under many names in myth, religion, monstrosity, divinity, and folklore. This is Austro, but also Finnegan as teras and Neanderthal. The poem suggests that we keep forgetting him, but that he keeps returning, and one thinks of how many of Lafferty’s stories serve as reminders of this. He is terrifying and funny, stupid and brilliant, brutal and imaginative. Through old myths, magic, and religion, human culture keeps retelling him. In doing so, we reveal ourselves as strange creators too: comic and magical creatures making stories about the universe.

The poem also gathers several of Lafferty’s recurrent symbols. There is the story of the dragon's teeth and the Argo myth, in which Jason was tasked by King Aeëtes to sow them. There are Tyre, Tarshish, and Punt, which appear so often and so oddly in his fiction as places from which inexplicable and usually untrustworthy treasures arrive. There is the unusual image of Pandora’s box refigured through hay reaped and stacked on wharves, bolting Greek myth onto Galatians 6:7 and concentrating both in an image most contemporary people have lost entirely: bales of hay, piled up as essential cargo in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the great age of hay scows and schooners, now under a cloud of amnesia. There is also the multimedia line, concerned with ontology and communications, Lafferty's great of the mid-seventies, with Austro from the early seventies working on Rocky McCrocky. That is displaced Finnegan making art on cave walls as if he were Jason sowing dragon's teeth; it is “Dorg"; and it is the cave of creation in Three Armageddons, and, more generally, primordial art that is never really behind us because it is all happening at once.

Finally, there are Edmund Weakfish and the Putty Dwarf, two of Lafferty’s most interesting images of human corruption and failure. I tend to think of Edmund Weakfish as an epistemic anti-Christ, a weak fish, and the Putty Dwarf as a figure of aphar, the clay from which Adam came, de-spirited and pulling toward what Lafferty calls hylicon.