"Thieving Bear Planet" (1980/1982) and "The Fishhooks of Hesebon"

“What we eat out of your minds are the most serious things that your minds are capable of holding. What we steal and eat out of your bodies are the tastiest things in your bodies. We come to table on you, and we feast on you.”

Lafferty returns often to the idea of privation as a threat to the person. Of the many examples one could point to, his best-known is probably Ouden in Past Master—Ouden, the nothingness.

“It displeased Ouden that any be . . . He has a jealous maw.”

“We are devoured by Holy Nothingness, the Big O, the Ultimate Point for all us ultimates.”

“Big O, the gawking Omega, the vile Ouden-Nothingness.”

“The Avid Nothingness, the diabolically empty Point-Big-O, is it cast away again?”

In the philosophy of mind, there is the well-known interaction problem: the challenge of explaining how an immaterial mind or soul can causally interact with a physical body. This is best known as a problem for substance dualism, as proposed by Descartes, which holds that mind and body are distinct substances—one mental, one physical. If the mind is not physical, how can it cause physical actions, like moving an arm, or be affected by physical states, like feeling pain?

Lafferty’s “Thieving Bear Plant” takes up the interaction problem by imagining interaction as parasitism. On my reading, this builds on what he created in Past Master with the character of Ouden. But here we see the idea in action. The mouth is working, so to speak. To make it work, Lafferty came up with the image of the thieving bear. It was one of several ways he tried to explore this problem through art. I do not think Lafferty was a substance dualist, but he knew that dualism gave him a useful way to express certain ideas.

This approach did not always succeed. Sometimes it nearly worked, and he stepped away. In his archives, there is a fascinating story fragment called “The Fishhooks of Hesebon.” The title refers to the pools of Hesebon in the Old Testament, to which the eyes of a woman are likened in the Canticle of Canticles. In Lafferty’s version, the pools are zones of interaction. They are his image of the problem. Bubbles rise from below the surface and move into the air. Lafferty writes:

Today, the waters always rose slightly to the cast hook, but no fish rose. Well, Tim Highbridge wasn't fishing for fish. Bubbles rose several times to meet the hook and Tim would have hooked one if he could. The hook would go right through the bubbles, and the bubbles would rise out of the water and into the air with a small disturbance of the two surfaces but with no breaking of them. That was impossible, of course. Under-water bubbles cannot rise into the air. They have no skin, as do air-bubbles. They are in no way analogous to them. Nevertheless, it did happen. Highbridge had the fancy that several of the emerging bubbles, after rising out of the water, drifted over and sat on the rocky edge of the pond just across from him and watched him like blackbirds. There was the smell of quick freshness whenever one of the bubbles emerged. There was a sort of blue glint as of reflected light.”

I’ll state the obvious. It is physically impossible for underwater bubbles to rise out of the water and float into the air. A bubble formed underwater is just a pocket of gas surrounded by liquid. It has no elastic surface to hold it together when it reaches the surface. As soon as it breaks through, it bursts. The thin film of water breaks. The gas is released into the atmosphere. There is no skin holding it together, so the bubble cannot keep its shape or float. But in Lafferty, this is a fascinating image. You can think of his version of the human and the ghostly as playing across the breaking surface of the waters at Hesebon. In the fragment, Lafferty explores variations on the interaction problem. One of the most interesting is a newspaper with writing that has specific addressees and then disappears. Again, Lafferty imagines a physical medium to dramatize interaction, whether in the print of a newspaper or in “Thieving Bear Planet” in the darker form of the thieving bear.

So what happens in the story? It’s a planetfall story. A new expedition of six explorers lands on Thieving Bear Planet, long known as a strange and persistent anomaly. The planet seems calm and welcoming, with a near-perfect climate and striking natural beauty. But there’s a kind of curse. An old report from the legendary John Chancel warns that it “forces [explorers] to write things that are untrue,” and another visitor notes that “things go wrong here in the most pleasant way possible. But they do go wrong.”

The crew lands on the Plain of the Old Spaceships, a field marked with full-scale outlines of every ship that has landed before. They are soon swarmed by the Thieving Bears—small flying creatures more like oversized squirrels than bears. These “tittering little obscenities” begin stealing everything in sight, from equipment to the very sticks used to chase them off.

Their situation changes quickly. During a celebratory meal, Commander George Mahoon feels hungry and sick. He plugs into the ship’s monitor and gets the report: “Essential food value suddenly stolen from your ingested food . . . Pepsin stolen from your stomach . . . words, ideas, and inklings have been swiped from several parts of your brain.” Then, without warning, crewmember Dixie Late-Lark—“sheer Spirit, she!”—disappears from a chair that, moments later, no longer exists. In her place is left a fetish doll, made of wax and rags, stuck with pins and thorns. It has Dixie’s face and a mouth frozen in a silent scream. The idea, we are told, was stolen from a French horror novel.

As the planet’s influence deepens, the explorers begin to unravel. Luke Fronsa says, “I’ve lost all my ideas, and all that I have left now are notions . . . notions are only the shells or hulls of ideas after the meat is eaten out of them.” Their concern for Dixie fades for no clear reason. The mystery turns horrific when they discover not one but seven life-sized replicas of her, each murdered in the same way as the fetish doll. As they watch in horror, they hear giggling in the voice of the Thieving Bears coming from her silent mouth. Then all seven bodies transform into young Thieving Bears and run off, still tittering.

During one of the planet’s violent “electric nights,” a ghost appears and explains everything. It is the spirit of John Chancel. The Thieving Bears, he says, are just physical forms—like tumbleweeds or nettles—used by the hungry ghosts of a failed colony that starved long ago. That hunger draws ships to this plain. “Come, let us eat you.” He explains that Dixie was never a real person. “Dixie was your esprit de group, your group effigy . . . the toothsome imaginative essence of all of you.” Why was she made visible? “Because we like to see what we’re eating.”

Chancel warns them that their ship has already been consumed in essence, and is now permanently inoperative. Then another ghost appears—Manbreaker Crag. Unlike the others, he is direct and cruel. He roars, “What we eat out of your minds are the most serious things . . . I eat the bodies of whole people where they stand.” The crew attempts to resist but fails. They escape in a capsule and watch as their ship crumbles into a new outline on the plain.

Their memories are fading fast. All their recording ink and memory jelly has been eaten. Following the tradition of earlier expeditions, they open their veins and write the final log entry in their own blood.

There is a line of thematic continuity that runs from the version of Manbreaker Crag in this story to Northprofit in Past Master. Northprofit tells Thomas More, “Yes, all life, yours and ours . . . We will close down the worlds and make an end of life. It will be nothing, nothing, nothing, forever, for ever, for never, for never. And when all has ceased to be, it will also happen that nothing has ever been.” As in my other readings of sin and corruption in Lafferty, I take this as a vision of privatio boni—the absence of good. "Thieving Bear Planet" helps us deepen that idea, because it shows corruption in motion.

Ouden, whoever is speaking through him, says: “Every dull thing you do, every cliché you utter, you come closer to me. Every lie you tell, I win. But it is in the tired lies you tell that I win most toweringly.” In "Thieving Bear Planet," Luke Fronsa says, “Somebody is eating all my ideas right out of my head and leaving only the hulls of them. Did you know that notions are only the shells or hulls of ideas after the meat is eaten out of them?” I read all of this through St. Thomas.

He argued that physical corruption is the natural process by which a material being loses its proper form and integrity. It is the loss of form that brings a body from actuality back into potentiality. In his Aristotelian system, every composite thing is made up of matter and form. Because matter is always potential, it is also always corruptible. This is how he explains what later becomes known as the interaction problem. Corruption happens when the form that completes or perfects matter is lost. That is the moment when the structure that gives life and unity breaks down. Corruption is not a positive force or substance but privation, the absence of the perfection that should belong to a thing by nature. Physical decay (whether it’s the breakdown of elements, the aging of a body, or the death of an organism) is a sign of a deeper truth: evil and corruption are parasitic on the good. They do not exist on their own. They exist only where something once whole, alive, and ordered toward its natural purpose has been lost.

This is one of the stronger ways to read the epigraph from The Introduction to Ghost Stories of Sector 24. Its author, Terrance Taibhse (his last name means “apparition”), writes: “People without an accompaniment of ghosts are a deprived people.” This shows the Thomistic logic of privation in cultural and spiritual terms. The absence of ghosts (living memory, continuity, and the animating presence of the past) is a form of metaphysical decay. It signals the loss of form in a community’s moral life. A people cut off from their ghosts lose the unifying principle that gives order to their identity. This is like a body losing its form and falling apart into matter, the image Lafferty gives us with the disintegrating spaceships. And the same is true in reverse. Ghosts without the “neighborness” of people suffer a kind of loss too. They are form without matter, presence without substance, and they distort themselves trying to regain wholeness. Both states (the crew without memory and the ghosts mostly without flesh) show what happens when the natural unity between spirit and body, or form and matter, breaks down. Taibhse’s warning that “both of these conditions are unhealthy” is right.

I’ll end by saying that this is one of Lafferty’s scarier stories. I expect it will only grow more frightening for me as I get older. Whenever I read it, I think of the indignities of age that Lafferty eventually faced, and how most of us will meet the Thieving Bears.

Theiving Bear Planet Notes.pdf

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Fishhooks of Hesebon Notes.pdf

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