"Phoenic" (1960/1980)
- Jon Nelson
- 19 hours ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 2 minutes ago
"I took a live mermaid not far from here one morning," said John Counts. And then he paused. "That pause, old Wiedervogel," he said after a bit, "that pause was for you to say 'Incredible!' or something similarly apropos." "Consider it said. Was she real?" "She said that she was. She seemed to be. She was ugly as sin . . . Her skin was green and rough... She smelled like a mermaid, or at least like a fish . . . I tried to sell her in England. There is a man there who goes in for such things. 'But I already have a mermaid,' this man said. 'A real one?' I asked him. 'No, not a real one, but this is not the first real one that has been offered to me. What I have is better than a real one.' “It was. What the man had was incomparably better than a real one. She was a beautiful human girl who happened to terminate in a fishtail. But she was no great whiz at swimming or deep diving. She wasn't a real mermaid. I gave my mermaid back to her husband on my return voyage . . . . We did not understand the same thing by the term, but she was a real mermaid."
Now Hiram the king of Tyre had furnished Solomon with cedar trees and fir trees, and with gold, according to all his desire,) that then king Solomon gave Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee. — 1 Kings 9:11
There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. — Luke 16:19
Only seven pages long, “Phoenic” is far from being easy Lafferty. It’s more like a pop quiz. For most of its length, Lafferty keeps his hand over the challenge, then in the last few paragraphs, he lifts his hand. He amplifies all the preceding ambiguity and ends with a question: Whence is this newness? There are quite a few rhetorical questions in Lafferty. There is occasional hypophora. This is neither. And given what he constructs in “Phoenic,” it’s a tough quiz, though I’ll offer a few thoughts. I will add that “Phoenic” is a also good lesson Lafferty's early virtuous antisemitism.
Both Ferguson and Petersen have blogged about the story and its Phoenician. In my view, they miss what the story is about, though Petersen’s critical antennae are word-sensitive and he picks up the puzzle. He doesn’t impose a reading, though he does give “Phoenic” a rating.
This story can wrongfoot you. From the outset, there are two main characters in “Phoenic”: the gaunt Phoenician, Wiedervogel, and the florid Jew, John Counts. Wiedervogel is a tall old man with a beak-like nose—predatory in aspect—and a coat-and-suit maker back in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a place Lafferty calls “farther than Punt, farther than Ophir.” Returning to his home continent, Wiedervogel arrives at the port of Aqaba, where he hires transport from a boat owner, John Counts.
As they travel, Lafferty gives us a mythopoetic dialogue, juxtaposing the tall thing with the small thing—John Counts’s naked commercialism. Counts asks Wiedervogel about his purpose of travel. The Phoenician says he has "an appointment beyond. It was made long ago." He will go to the House of Ashes. When John Counts asks how much time Wiedervogel has left, Wiedervogel says, "Five days." Their conversation next turns to the supernatural nature of the region as a cauldron of story. Counts says, "The irony of the locale is that all the legends are true," and he recounts his experiences with phantom ships and a man who is repeatedly drowned, perhaps recalling Phlebas the Phoenician. Wiedervogel compares his own going to that of the elephant but adds that "in my case there will be no bones left."
When the two reach Yenbo, Wiedervogel gets a guide, a boy who might be moulded of clay (John Counts says golem, but it’s more likely this is something like the boy Adam in Past Master), who leads him inland to a great flat rock. Following an ancient prescription on the morning of the vernal equinox, the boy builds a fire. He has been told by his father to watch the ritual closely, but the boy turns away for a moment to urinate, and Lafferty writes "when he turned back it was finished." After the fire dies down, he sweeps the remaining ashes into the small sandalwood box Wiedervogel had been carrying.
The boy and a young man who looks like a young Wiedervogel return to the coast with the box. John Counts, who is not easily perturbed, picks him up. He is unsurprised by the apparent reincarnation. The story ends with a pseudo-digression. The true marvel is not the confirmation of the Phoenix legend, but the creative explosion that followed half a world away. Wiedervogel Coat and Suit Fabrique in Pittsburgh is now producing revolutionary fashion, including Fire-And-Ashes jackets, Resurrection cloaks, and the exclusive I Was Dead And Now I Live Again line. Lafferty asks, “Whence is this newness?”
Ferguson treats the story as a metafictional meditation on the creative process, and that dimension is undoubtedly present. What stands out to me is the profound ambiguity surrounding the commercialization of creativity at the story’s end: the transformation of both art and religion into trade objects, the Phoenician recast as a business-minded Philistine.
This is one reason I read “Phoenic” as a story with two protagonists. The pursuit of money forms the general equivalent for John Counts (Jew/Solomon) and the Phoenician (Gentile/Hiram) in the Ophir legend.
Textually, we see this when we compare 1 Kings 9:26 with Lafferty's story:
And king Solomon made a navy of ships in Eziongeber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red sea, in the land of Edom.
On this day [the Phoenician] was in the port town of Ezion-Geber, built by his people for Jedidiah [Solomon] long ago, and now named Aqaba.
Both Jedidiah and John share the meaning favored of God. Why Counts? 2 Chronicles 2:17–18; 1 Kings 5:13–16; 2 Chronicles 8:7–10; 1 Kings 9:23; 1 Kings 10:14; 1 Kings 10:26–27; 2 Chronicles 9:25–27; 1 Kings 4:32; Ecclesiastes 7:27; Ecclesiastes 1:13; and Ecclesiastes 2:9–11.
The importance of Solomon to the story is a given. Lafferty turns to Solomon and Hiram several times in his work, and his handwritten notes on both survive. John’s account of selling the mermaid, with the manufactured marvel substituting for the real one, connects "Phoenic" to the monetary coding in "The Skinny People of Leptophlebo Street." The mercantile trope resurfaces within "Phoenic" itself in the garish, modish clothing at the end. Unlike the armor of God in Ephesians 6:10–18, these marvels are superficial, spray-on, illusion-producing stuff. Both John and the Phoenician are money men.
It also looks like Lafferty intended John and the Phoenician to be competing figurations of time. For the Phoenician, this is a given because he is the Phoenix, but John Counts is a little trickier. The key fact is that John has a longer, better memory than the Phoenician does:
“Not two years ago. I drove right through a grand old sail-ship on just such a night as this. It had no body to it. It must have been made out of fog. The lanterns on it, and the seamen on the deck, and the smells up out of the open hold must have been made out of fog too. But they seemed real enough. It was a great lateen with a high poop from the old Caliphate days of sail. You see cuts of them in old books. They haven't sailed for near five hundred years.” “I remember them a little bit,” Wiedervogel said.
I suspect the boy's name, Otto, is a joke because the Ottoman Empire controlled what had been Phoenicia from 1516 to 1918.
But back to time. One of my favorite discussions of the kind of time John Counts and the Phoenician embody is Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Geology of Time, a book about deep time and evolution I read in my days as a geologist. As you can guess, Time’s Arrow is linear and directional history. It imagines time as an irreversible sequence of unique, unrepeatable events. This conception of time is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It emphasizes that each moment holds a distinct place in a narrative of linked events, from the singular creation of the Earth to the specific historical moment of Christ’s death and November 3, 2025.
In contrast, there is Time’s Cycle. It captures the idea of a repeating, timeless order. Fundamental states are always present. Apparent motions are parts of a recurring cycle. Throughout human history, this has been the more common view. Westerners are probably closest to it as inheritors of ancient Greek thought. It imagines time has no inherent direction and is governed by timeless laws. The main challenge to this is exact repetition. It would make events indistinguishable; so what one typically gets is a qualification, the concept of advancing cycles, where repetition happens but with crucial differences, a bit like the wheel of Ages rolling forward or “Been A Long Long Time.”
Gould argued that in thinking about deep time and geology, it is a mistake to treat the two views of time as mutually exclusive. They are partners in any attempt to understand reality more fully. To comprehend history, we need both the uniqueness provided by Time's Arrow, which marks each moment, and the immanent, general principles of order offered by Time's Cycle. Gould saw the interplay illustrated in evolutionary biology. Lafferty would have held his nose at this, yet its logic can show what lies buried in “Phoenic.” Homology, the retention of features from a common ancestor, is a direct product of Time's Arrow. It records the unique and irreversible pathway of a lineage’s descent, as in the relation between human fingers and the bones of a bat’s wing. Analogy arises when similar forms evolve in separate lineages. This demonstrates Time's Cycle, showing how immanent principles of function constrain evolution to a limited set of effective solutions to recurring problems, such as the independent evolution of wings in birds and bats. The result is a vision in which every organism is both the product of its history (arrow) and an expression of "timeless" principles (cycle).
We can think of John Counts and the Phoenician Wiedervogel as complementary figurations of time—John as Time’s Arrow and Wiedervogel as Time’s Cycle. John is linear, directional, and irreversible history, with perhaps something of the wandering Jew in him. He is a man of events and transactions: this voyage and that cargo; a man who finds a man who goes overboard four times in succession; a man with a failed business deal over a real but ugly mermaid. His worldview is unique, unrepeatable, sequentially differentiated moments moving toward a finality, seen in his declaration that “Nobody goes beyond Yenbo. That is the end of the World.” Time’s Arrow has an end and a new beginning in Messianic time.
Wiedervogel ("again-bird") is Time’s Cycle. His journey is an “ancient prescription” tied to the vernal equinox, earth’s journey toward the thermonuclear fission of the sun’s core. This journey has occurred many times. It rolls around like the years, and its phoenix will die and live again in five hundred years. In “The Day After World Ended,” Lafferty calls this Toynbee’s Phoenix Cycle. The Phoenician’s impending death is a phase transition, another step in an eternal process of renewal.
So whence is this newness?
One’s answer will be personal. Lafferty wrote the story to make it personal, which is why it will expose the critic. So this is a personal response. Time’s Arrow (Jew) and Time’s Cycle (Gentile) are necessary but not sufficient to achieve the universal. The old Wiedervogel's models were obsolete, dead stock, and simple renewal would only restart that same old pattern, another obsolescence loop. So, what exactly is the nature of this newness? Is the phoenix—that bird of flame—somehow tied to another bird, the Holy Spirit that makes new? Or is it a counterfeit? I think it’s more counterfeit than not.
Lafferty’s Time’s Arrow and Time’s Cycle point to the source. In my way of reading Lafferty, that source is the Logos through the imaginative vision of the Logos I call the oceanic. The Phoenician brings about a not-quite Pentecost. The amazing change results in resurrection cloaks and that exclusive line of haberdashery, I Was Dead And Now I Live Again. Some spirit of creativity is poured out from the ashes. The fruit of this spirit is commerce: Solomon and Hiram. The end result is the sporty, modish numbers and the fame that reaches New York. Here I see joke on Lafferty’s Not to Mention Camels (1976) scripture, Matthew 19:24, in what John Counts/Solomon says to the Phoenician’s sewing trade: “It must be that you have kept your nose too close to the needle.” That is, of course, ironic coming from John, who is another of Lafferty’s ethno-essentialized money-wise Jews. The Holy Spirit is not visible here because we have gone back to a pattern that precedes Pentecost.
That is, I don’t see the story’s ending as celebratory. The Phoenician looks to me like an apostle of business, arranging to "express" the sacred ashes from Cairo to Heliopolis to save on an extra trip. He resembles the Englishman who had a mermaid better than a real one, a personage like Kafka's Poiseidon. His newness is like rebooting a brand; it is a Madison Avenue newness, not resurrection but Resurrection coat. Flashy and temporary, it is the abrupt appearance of things that alter how other things look, yet cause no inner transformation—an almost there, but again, not quite. When the reader is told about the clothing in the story and asked by Lafferty, Whence is this newness?, I hear Christ’s booming on the throne in Apocalypse: “Behold, I make all things new.” Newness as a term? "We did not understand the same thing by the term, but she was a real mermaid."
This is a cynical reading of the story. Its gimmicky (cheesy, as Petersen says) clothing merchandise can certainly be massaged to fit a kerygmatic interpretation about renewal. Do you want to sell it? I don’t. It is cheesy. The Phoenician is a pneumatic businessman, a dealer in specious pneuma. Lafferty implies that if we miss this cheesiness, we miss something important. What is clear, however, is that Lafferty leaves the newness question open, inviting readers to arrive at their own answers.
