"The Rod and the Ring" (1980/2017)

“One would, however, like to say: existence cannot be attributed to an element, for if it did not exist, one could not even name it and so one could say nothing at all of it.—But let us consider an analogous case. There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one meter long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris.—But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a metre-rule.—Let us imagine samples of colour being preserved in Paris like the standard metre. We define: "sepia"means the colour of the standard sepia which is there kept hermetically sealed. Then it will make no sense to say of this sample either that it is of this colour or that it is not.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §50

     “We assume that you have read the words on the cover,” one of those subliminal voices came crawling up over the threshold to inform them. “These are the words that read: THE GAME CAN NEVER BE PLAYED THE SAME WAY TWICE. WHY NOT? BECAUSE IT CHANGES THE WORLD EVERY TIME IT IS PLAYED. You should always read what is on the cover before you go to what is inside.”      “Those are only words,” Bagley (the Patrick or the Emperor) protested.  “They are advocacy words, they are psychological words, they are slanted words. But they aren’t words to apply to a real and material world. Should a world be governed by words that appear on the cover of a box?”      “Sure,” the subliminal voice pushed words up over the threshold to them. “If it's the box that the world came in, the world should be governed by the words on the cover.”

Advanced Lafferty: "The Rod and the Ring." 

Lafferty told Hirushi Inoue that he had read several of Wittgenstein’s works. At another time, he said to him, “I do not mean to puzzle people with my writings, though any good story is the unraveling of a puzzle.” “The Rod and the Ring” is one of his trickier puzzles, and I wish I understood some aspects of it better.

As to be expected of a short story that starts with the lines, “The set-up here is like the Greater Tulsa Telephone Book,” Randy Andy Oglesby stated. “Too many characters, and a weak or non-existent story line,” a plot summary won’t much help. But here are the broad strokes.

A group of thirteen people participate in "The Rod and the Ring," an immersive and dangerous game set in a dilapidated former cockfighting pit. The game's objective is to "break the consensus" of reality through shared insanity and stimulants, leading to the literal destruction of the world.

As the players are drawn into subjective realities, they are on the verge of winning (that is, destroying their world) by unanimously agreeing. One player, Bertigrew Bagley, he of Fourth Mansions, hesitates and questions the grubby insanity of the act.

This returns the players to the pit where the game's simulated violence becomes real, resulting in the deaths of two participants, including Bagley. It ends with a test report, picking up on the idea that this wasn’t really a short story in the first place.

The rod and the ring are many things, and I plan to add notes on that later. For now, given the story’s density, I want to outline how I understand their logic within the text—apart from their roles as emblems of eternity and linear time, figures for temporal and spiritual authority, tropes for contingency and necessity, and so on. What I have to say comes down to the weird box The Rod and the Ring game arrives in, which I take to be Prime or, here perhaps, the whole problem of Prime.

As I have argued, Prime in Lafferty is characterized by what philosophers call underdetermination. This makes consensus reality an unavoidable feature of the world. Without something like Prime in "The Rod and the Ring," the story collapses into consensus realities spinning frictionlessly. Some people might not mind that much, being like the eleven, but it is what Bertigrew Bagley prevents from happening, so it would miss a big paradox in the story: it is only by a lack of manufactured consensus that World stability is maintained. In being so obstinately finkish, Bagley is a wall against anti-foundationalism. If what is inside the box was fictional, and the box itself was fictional, we never would get off the Möbius strip. This would be all ring, no rod. And look at what happens to Maurice Fantome-Glaive who "fought under the aegis and totem of the ring":

They were back at the old game-cock pit. The arrow shot by Toro Manatee, going once more at a hundred and eighty miles an hour, went clear through the throat of Maurice Fantome-Glaive, the greatest swordsman in the world. Fantome-Glaive fell down dead and destroyed and with a disgusted look on his face. And eleven others of them were angry and disgusted. “Bagley, you unspeakable fink!” they roared. “We had the game won, the ultimate game. We had the world destroyed, and you botched it. You rat, you fink, you obstructionist! You wouldn’t let us dismember the world. Look to yourself then in this dismembering moment!”

In thinking about the rod, I think about Wittgenstein's famous remarks on the meter from Philosophical Investigations. The meter is a product of consensus reality because, as Wittgenstein points out, the term meter only has meaning within our practice of measuring. Historically, this practice was tied to a unique physical object, the International Prototype of the Meter, a platinum–iridium bar kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, France, from 1889 until 1960. It was the official standard.

It is senseless to ask whether the International Prototype of the Meter is “really one meter long,” because it does not exemplify a standard but establishes one. You can ask this question meaningfully of all other meters. To ask such a question of the prototype is nonsensical, confusing the rule with what is measured by it, much like asking whether the king in chess is powerful misses the point that the king’s role defines the grammar of the game. It would be just as mistaken to say that a meter doesn’t measure anything since the concept has meaning within the language-game of comparing, calculating, and applying measure. You can’t shave off either consensus or Prime and its symbols: they are aspectual, tied to consensus, but real.

“The rod and the ring should never have been separated. Together they were the scepter, the royal rod with the royal sphere on the end of it, the authority of the world. Whenever they were separated, the authority of the world was broken and the world came apart.”

1. Modes of Reality

   "The Rod and the Ring" is an agon that happens when people confuse Prime for its symbol, and then stage battle a symbol of Prime against a symbol of consensus, confusing the preconditions for consensus with consensus itself.

   
   

2. The Testers as Agents of Chaos

   The 13 Testers aren’t just characters but forces trying to destabilize consensus by paradoxically building consensus, testing whether subjectivity can sustain a world.

   
   

3. Rod and Ring

   The Rod is not Prime but its symbol: order and grounding, a prototype meter. The Ring symbolizes Consensus: collective agreement. One needs Consensus (the Ring) to have the measure of order (the Rod), but one has neither without the enabling conditions that undeterdetermine both.

   
   

4. Loosening the Mood

   The overwhelming smells, stimulants, and decay create the “murderous mood of loosening,” dissolving coherence and corroding the bonds of consensus. This is a figure of the murkiness of underdetermination, the loosening a return to its primordial state. This is impossible to achieve. There can be loosening, but there will always be denominators for the same reason one cannot have a private language in the Wittgensteinisn sense. The other view is Jasmine Mahoney’s idiotic fantasy in the story.

   
   

5. The Logic Gate

   The game demands unanimity: all thirteen must agree the world has been destroyed. We must agree on the meter to use it as a unit of measure. You must agree to forget the prototype meter to negate all the derivative meters. This would be the loss of the name of the denominator, and all the derivative meters would then become something other than meters, something like sticks of wood or long tent spikes, or whatever else your new consensus-reality pocket denominates the underdetermined to be. However, it will still be constrained by Prime. 22,000 parts. Smells. Etc.

   
   

6. Bagley’s Refusal

   Bagley calls it “grubby insanity” and breaks unanimity. To the others, he ruins the game; read through Prime, his dissent shows that Consensus alone cannot replace the underdetermined ground that makes both Rod and Ring possible. Take Rod and Ring together. You really have no other choice.