"Rivers of Damascus" (1973/1974)

"Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean?” So he turned and went away in a rage." (2 Kings 5:12)

Part of The Men Who Knew Everything cycle, “Rivers of Damascus” is one of Lafferty’s standout stories. It is also one of his great meditations on the nature of history. I view it as a spiritual sequel to an earlier and more accessible "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967). At this point, Lafferty had not yet developed the full repertoire of fictional tropes that would later put off many readers; these begin to appear clearly (in my reading) in 1973. John Clute puts the result succinctly in the SFE when he writes, "For his career's sake, it was certainly unfortunate that his response to renown seems to have been an intensification of the oddness of his product; final judgment on the effect of this failure to observe normal canons of writing still awaits a coherent presentation of his work as a whole." One consequence is that “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” is far easier to approach, but it offers little insight into Lafferty’s broader concerns—certainly nothing approaching the intensity and depth he achieves in “Rivers of Damascus.”

It might even be said that if one can make the leap from enjoying "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" to enjoying and understanding "Rivers of Damascus," one will have about twice as much Lafferty to enjoy.

After summarizing the story, I will turn to what it says about history and explain why, despite appearances, this is not postmodernism—and why Lafferty becomes harder to understand if one approaches him through that way. My reading relies on a distinction between History 1 and History 2: History 1 refers to history as a sequence of objective event states; History 2 refers to history as narrative. I’ve come across this distinction in several places, and I find it useful here. There is also a significant element in the story that touches on Lafferty’s view of Islam as a heresy, but I will set that aside for now. Khalid is not unambiguous.

The McGuffin in "Rivers of Damascus" turns on capturing the historical meaning of the famous Siege of Damascus. Lafferty writes that in the Year of Restored Salvation 635, a band of caravan clowns arrives in the city on a bold-bashful skylark. Guards mock the skinny desert Arabs as coney-eaters and camel-suckers, and one effortlessly snaps the sword of their leader, Khalid ibn-al-Walid, one of Islam’s great military geniuses. Khalid weeps at the humiliation. Later, these desert gamins attempt to storm the city using short ladders that reach only a third of the way up the basket wall. The guards laugh at the sandmice until the ladders break. The Muslim invaders tumble into the sand. Khalid retreats, shouting back that he is actually a "mind-worm working inside" the city. Needless to say, this is not how the Siege of Damascus is remembered.

Soon we know why. What we have seen is a para-archeological probe conducted by the Landwitch Covenant, a team including the dowser Joseph Waterwitch and the eidolon man Abel Landgood. The attempt to film The Fall of Damascus has been a professional catastrophe. Critics have panned it as a sick parody. Khalid has even been given the title of "Worst Actor of the Year, of Any Year." Enter the Man-Who-Knows-Everything, Professor Cris Benedetti. He sees the fundamental error: the Landwitch Covenant used highly polarized information, so it captured the events not as they objectively occurred, but as seen through the arrogant Byzantine look of the city's defenders. To the Byzantines, the Arabs were insignificant beggars. What happened? The scientific instruments rendered them as weak and incompetent.

The team's methodology relies on detecting patina. Lafferty calls it a "reverberating surface ghost" that encrusts objects with their own history. Waterwitch theorizes that if biological life vanished, "secondary life" would spring immediately from these deposits. But something odd is happening. The recreated Khalid won’t fade like a standard after-image when his time-release holding-coil expires. He says he is more than "funny flesh," more than a mere electric man. So the ghost of Khalid joins the researchers. We next learn about the two rivers of Damascus. Khalid says he drank from the other river, the Pharpar, which runs under walls and allows entry into the fortified places of the world and the mind.

To save the project, the group recruits our old friends Roy Mega and Austro. They are to refine the equipment. Roy dismisses the time-residue ghosts as experiments, but Austro, often the Lafferty stand-in, sees the power of the "hidden and intuitive waters." Khalid urges them to "assail the encrustation from inside." They need to use their own hubris and scientific doubletalk to breach academia. The plan they come up with is hijacking a global television broadcast titled "Science Supreme, The End Of The Crackpots." They’ll use "urbane arrogance" to modify the signal and force the world to see past the polarized data.

As the broadcast begins for an audience of one billion, the Covenant acts as mind-worms within the electronic signal. They heterodyne the transmission, which strips away the rough and intolerant prejudice of the original data to reveal the noble thing itself. The broadcast does not ridicule the "crackpots" as intended; instead, it forces the scientific community to welcome the new para-archeology. Everyone watching can see the dimensions of time and space with elegant eyes. The second river of Damascus has been rediscovered, the one that flows beneath the surface of history with history.

“Rivers of Damascus” is a fascinating story for many reasons. What interests me most is the clarity with which it shows why Lafferty’s strange thinking about history is not postmodern. His approach to history is so unusual that he can sometimes resemble a kind of constructivist—or more precisely, someone who edges dangerously close to the view that the spade of history turns when it strikes constructivism.

Returning to the distinction between History 1 and History 2, the usual argument for constructivism (here a large category for historical approaches) arises from the epistemological gap between them. History 1 refers to the actual course of past events. History 2 refers to the written account or narrative of those events. The central problem is observation. History 1 is strictly unobservable. It is gone. What remains are only inert traces that cannot speak for themselves.

Lafferty’s story inverts this framework by introducing scientists who believe they are about to observe History 1 directly. But even for them, the historical object remains inaccessible. Constructivists such as F. R. Ankersmit and Hayden White respond to this problem by arguing that History 2 does not merely represent the past. It constitutes it. The role of the historian, then, is not to discover a pre-existing narrative within the data, but to select a narrative structure and impose it. In doing so, the historian creates historical reality through language.

On this view, History 2 becomes the only tangible reality. It absorbs the unknowable History 1 into a text that is, at its core, a fiction—not a report of objective fact.

At first glance, this may seem like exactly what Lafferty is doing. One might read the story as if it were saying that we cannot simply rely on biased data; we have to average it out to get a fuller picture. But I think this misses Lafferty’s point. If we could do that, we might approximate History 1 on our own. We would become like the scientists in the story, only with better instruments—more refined history dowsers.

In The Prince, Chapter 24, Machiavelli famously writes that virtù is the ability to manage the river, to steer the course of events. Even if this is never entirely possible—since the river is always partly beyond one’s control—it still allows for prudence and preparation. To say that this story is simply about biased data is to suggest that we can half-control the two rivers it presents. But that is certainly not what Lafferty is saying.

To see why, we need to consider the title and the story’s central idea, which draws on 2 Kings 5.

This is the famous story of Naaman. He is a respected Syrian military commander, but he suffers from leprosy. Seeking healing, he travels to Israel to visit the prophet Elisha. What Elisha does seems almost insulting. He does not come out to meet this great man—Naaman, the original of Khalid—but instead sends word: Naaman must wash seven times in the Jordan River.

Naaman is furious. In one of the more memorable moments of the Old Testament, he compares Israel’s small, unimpressive river to the grander rivers of his homeland—Abana and Pharpar, both known for their clear, abundant waters near Damascus. He says, in effect, that the Jordan is trash. The idea that healing could come through the humility of washing in that river strikes him as absurd, even beneath his dignity. So he leaves, still leprous.

The mystery that haunts the biblical account is this: no one knows what Pharpar is. Damascus has only one river. Pharpar appears nowhere else but in these documents. What Lafferty does is to make Pharpar the equivalent of the Jordan—the spiritual river of Israel, the visible sign of the invisible spirit. In the story, it is a hidden river, a figure for a dimension of reality accessible only through an ontological shift, not a methodological one. One cannot reach it simply by hearing both sides of a story.

That is why it is a mistake to reduce this to a tale about media bubbles. Such a reading domesticates the story, making it less strange, less demanding, and far less interesting. To put it more sharply: this is not a story about “getting the whole story.” It does not suggest that one can arrive at truth by refining the data set, applying better methods, or improving the statistical models. That is what the Landwitch scientists try to do—and it is exactly what fails.

This is where the charge of postmodernism collapses. Lafferty’s approach to history is so theologically radical that he can start to look like a postmodernist. But he is not one. He is so committed to his vision of the Logos—to the two rivers as one, yet another instance of the oceanic—that his claim, in effect, is simple: accept it or be left with nothing. Be left with fiction. Be left with constructivism.

A constructivist argues that since History 1 is inaccessible, History 2 must be invented. Lafferty believes that History 1 is accessible—but not to the materialist. Not through Abana, the river of empirical science. Abana is clean, logical, and visible. But it cannot resurrect. It leaves behind only the “encrustations” of fact and the “sick parody” of a failed film. To reach the Noble Thing—the living truth of the past, which exists all at once in eternity—one must wash in the Pharpar. The Pharpar is hidden. It flows through intuition, faith, and communion.

Because this point is so often misunderstood, it is worth stating again. When the scientists in the story finally succeed, it is not because they have invented a fiction by averaging the competing versions of History 2. They succeed because they tap into a spiritual reality that was already there, already flowing beneath the foundations of their skepticism. This is the Christian vision: the Spirit that was there all along but only revealed at Pentecost. Lafferty is not saying that history is a text we write. He is saying that history is a patina we must commune with if we are to live within it, if we are to move with it, if we are to be creatures of both Abana and Pharpar.

You need elegant eyes. And the eyes you need are not those of a relativistic author imposing a structure. They are the eyes of a healed Naaman—one who has humbled himself before the mystery. Behind this is Lafferty’s philosophical realism. It is also mystical. And because it is mystical, it can be mistaken for something other than realism. But it is realism all the same.

It is hard to see how anyone could read this story and conclude that Lafferty is a postmodernist arguing for the subjectivity of truth—or why anyone would want to reduce its marvels to a lesson about data sampling. Lafferty is a sacramentalist, arguing for the visibility of the invisible. And if that sounds like a contradiction, he does not care. It means the reader does not have eyes to see.

For this reason, it is worth noting what may be the most important moment in the story: it ends with people watching the Siege of Damascus with elegant eyes. The reader does not witness the siege directly and is left instead with the shoddy, farcical first production. What the reader sees is them watching it. Lafferty leaves an invitation. To join them, you will need elegant eyes yourself.

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