"Unique Adventure Gone" (1979/1983)

"The "Sad Adventure of Consciousness," an unpleasantness that lasted no more than seven thousand years, was a sort of response to former dilemmas, a cure that was worse than the sickness . . . There are no more dilemmas or other two-horned problems bothering the world now. So we raise one-horned monuments, single-horned for our single-mindedness . . . A two-horned head, of whatever sort, was likely to have a two-pronged or conscious mind inside of it. But now it will all be easy and unopposed, and there will be no bother left in the world."

A double minded man is unstable in all his ways. (James 1:8 )

Advanced Lafferty.

Relatively unknown, "Unique Adventure Gone" is a difficult Lafferty. It reaches deeply into his private symbolism. Yet in another sense, it isn’t difficult at all: it delivers exactly what we expect from him, being another short story built on recurring themes where a utopia reveals itself to be a dystopia because, in Lafferty, overt utopias are always covert dystopias. There is also a surface-level critique of coordination and control, as well as Lafferty's recurring emphasis on eyes as his arch symbol of noetic darkening. Through patterned counterfiguration and linguistic displacement, Lafferty uses consciousness as a conceptual bridge between the hard problem of artificial consciousness and his theological commitment to the human soul.

Though the story is familiar in the ways just described, it is nonetheless difficult. Minor as it may be, I think it is important within Lafferty’s oeuvre for at least three reasons: its treatment of machine intelligence, its vision of the post-conscious historical period that increasingly occupied his imagination (we are living it), and its account of humanity’s relation to animal nature. After a brief summary, I will consider each in turn.

In “Unique Adventure Gone,” humanity undergoes a sudden transition into a state called “single-mindedness.” The official world-cultural line is that this is a wonderful cure for the “sickness of consciousness,” and it seems to be paying off. Global problems such as illness and social division have supposedly been solved, resulting in a world of total unity and efficiency. Those who have transitioned into single-mindedness are “blank-eyed” and “tinny-voiced.” They perform complex tasks and build massive monuments, yet do so in a state resembling sleepwalking. At the same time, the ruling systems and computers celebrate this as an “anti-disaster.” All is going well, but a few remaining conscious individuals, known as Tardies, remain. They sense something is wrong; it is as if something has been lost.

The story itself centers on a dwindling group of these Tardies. They gather at O’Brian’s Roast-Beef Noonery, where they discuss the changing world. The new single-minded world has something called the Analects that promotes the virtues of the unconscious and the elimination of “doubleness-of-mind.” The logic is presented as a matter of efficiency:

‘A person can run faster when unburdened than he can when carrying a heavy load. This is so obvious that we cannot see why nobody understood it before. Divisiveness or doubleness-of-mind was a heavy burden that all persons carried until recently. Now most of the persons have gotten rid of that burden.’

Divergent thought is strictly monitored; whenever someone says he or she has second thoughts or a sense of self, a buzzer sounds above the person’s head. Official guards rush in and feed the people to savage dogs. Over time, the small group loses its members. Some transition into the single-minded state, while others are taken away. Those who are still hanging out at the Noonery observe that the world is physically deteriorating, with bodies lying in the streets and dogs turning feral.

At the end of the story, the final conscious characters are Jonquil Eerie, Charley Singletree, and Jim Hickory. Hickory and Singletree succumb to the transition, losing their pupils and their individual memories. Jonquil Eerie is the last person to be awake. She is struck down by unconscious guards and left to be consumed by feral dogs, but she remains stubbornly conscious until the very end of her life. Lafferty ends with a reflection on the loss of consciousness, noting that because the people can no longer define or remember what it was, they dismiss it as a trivial and unimportant thing to have lost.

Before turning to the story itself, a few points about its use of noetic darkening and counterfiguration. In the image of losing one’s pupils upon entering the single-horned world, we see blindness mistaken for enlightenment, a trope that runs throughout Lafferty, from Not to Mention Camels to “Jack Bang’s Eyes.” It is difficult to overstate how often variants of it appear.

Lafferty draws on the notion that Greek statuary lacked pupils. Historically, the statues were painted, and the pupils were part of that work. Lafferty’s leap is to take their apparent blankness as symbolic. The unseeing eye becomes a sign of false illumination.

He pairs this with extreme counterfiguration. Scripture warns against being double-minded (James 1:8) and calls believers to unity of mind. Lafferty reverses the trope. In his usage, double-mindedness becomes the capacity for dialectical vision and individuation. The demand to be “of one mind” becomes the mark of an anti-sacramental order that extinguishes personhood.

One of the deeper issues raised by the story is the relation of human and machine agency. "Unique Adventure Gone" rewrites many of the ideas in Past Master in an esoteric register, with humanity being absorbed into the coordinating machine of the One Horn. Not long ago, I read Mattingly and Cibralic's Machine Agency (MIT Press, 2025), which makes the case for what the authors call a "minimalist theory of agency." This is the idea that agents are any systems that can represent the world and use those representations to guide their behaviors. The theory is designed to accommodate machines, so we learn that a thermostat represents ambient temperature and acts on it, and a self-driving car represents traffic conditions and navigates them. Representation is being treated in an unusual way, and the key move is to bracket consciousness. The standard philosophical story about agency runs through beliefs and desires—I believe there is mustard at the store, I desire mustard, so I go. On that account, only entities with the right kind of mental life can be agents. Obviously, this rules out machines by definition, and the problem becomes: is this machine conscious?

The book’s gambit is to suggest that beliefs and desires do their work in this story because they are representations: a belief represents how the world is, and a desire represents how you'd like it to be. The question becomes whether representation as such, rather than the specifically human mental states that implement it, is what agency requires. For instance, a bimetallic strip in a thermostat represents ambient temperature by its curvature. A setting on the dial represents a desired temperature. The mismatch between the two guides the thermostat's behavior. No beliefs and no desires are here, but representations are guiding behavior, on the book’s account, and the authors argue that this is enough. Beliefs and desires, in other words, are the way humans happen to implement a more general capacity. They are instances of representation, not its definition.

There are some obvious results of such a view if it is correct. You don't need to settle whether a system has beliefs, desires, or phenomenal experience in order to identify it as an agent. You can be agnostic about whether your LLM is conscious or not. You need only confirm that the representations guide behavior. The authors do acknowledge that consciousness "does appear to be closely connected to what we think of as the difference between our bodies simply doing stuff and us acting," and they call this "a persistent and powerful worry." As you can imagine, if you read this blog, I think that is a pretty big omission. But, to be fair, their bracket move is methodological, not ontological. It sets aside consciousness to ask other questions first.

This seems to bear on certain ideas in "Unique Adventure Gone," which is in part a fantasy about what happens when that bracket becomes the world. The people have become post-conscious and yet somehow still have agency, even though they don’t know why they are doing what they do.

"I remember, from the days when I studied Photuris Entomology, about the species of blind fireflies who flashed in unison by the millions, covering extensive slopes and valleys with their waves of pulsating light at night. How did they do it, since none of them could see its own light, or that of the others? How do the, ah, ‘new people’, the single-minded people do such marvels, since by definition they do not know they are doing to them?"

"It seems, to my own obstructed vision, that the new ‘great ones’ are performing all their mental and cosmic prodigies in their sleep. It seems that they are a sleep-walking and a sleep-living people now. But how can they perform such wonders when they are virtually asleep? Can a person design a ‘new concept’ three-hundred-story building, down to its last fluid detail, in his sleep, and not even know that he's doing it?"

"It all becomes very funny though, screamingly funny. I wonder whether the elevated ones, the great ones, find it all funny?" "No, they, we do not,” Charley Singletree rattled in his new tinny voice. "The sickness of humor was part of the sickness of consciousness, and it has been swept away with it. You must have no traffic with humor, person. ‘Funniness’ was a thing of no substance, and now it will be gone."

"It's still funny that the great ones do things and don't know that they're doing them. Even the act, they must do it without knowing that they're doing it. What's the fun in that? Oh, it isn't supposed to be fun, is it, now that fun will be gone." "You misunderstand it, person," Charley Singletree said. "The act always contained a strong element of the unconscious, even with people most afflicted with consciousness . . . What happens now is that a thin and unwholesome scum named consciousness is swept away from the surface of minds, and the great depths are able to move themselves and be alive again."

Then a couple of unconscious guards, answering the buzzer, came and struck Jonquil down. They didn't know what they were doing, of course, and they failed to kill her; there was something sparky in her that refused to be extinguished too easily.

If the story has a major theme, it is the problem of agency, human and machine. It is as if agency were severed from belief and desire as definitional for agency. Humanity undergoes a mutation to "single-mindedness" that abolishes consciousness while enhancing every functional capacity: the single-minded solve intractable problems, build monuments in days, and achieve universal plenitude. By every criterion the minimalist theory foregrounds (representation, behavioral repertoire, goal-directed action), the pupilless inhabitants of the post-conscious world are superb agents. Lafferty has one of his characters spell the comparison out:

“If computers perform mental marvels without being conscious, why can not people do the same? But I myself have second thoughts about these things (‘Second thoughts are infidelities that are as superfluous as they are illegal’ is one of the new Analects of today), I myself have second thoughts about the Great Ones. I feel that there is something very tinny about the tone of each of those great ones just when he comes to his most majestic stage.”

But the story's argument is that the theory (because it cannot distinguish between this outcome and a genuine flourishing) is missing something it has no vocabulary for. The single-minded satisfy the criteria of agency, and the world they make is a spiritual catastrophe. It is another gnostically closed cosmos filled with blank-eyed sleepwalkers.

This is, of course, another eschatological nightmare. As such, I think it is being contrasted with what Lafferty takes to be authentic eschatological fulfillment in the companion of the saints. This part of the story is not particularly subtle, but if one doesn’t know the idea, it could look as if Lafferty’s satiric norm were just negative liberty, or possessive individualism, or the sovereign self, or whatever other liberal stand-in we want to propose to neuter the theological edge. The "single-mindedness" and "one-horn" parodies the communion of saints and the life of the Church by making spiritual unity a forced, unconscious collectivism. Lafferty makes this obvious by using ecclesiastical language. He refers to the "single-minded gospel," the "holy hymn" of the One-Horned Cow, and the "ascension" of those who lose their individual consciousness to join the "Great Everything." The hymn performed by the computers emphasizes the lack of interiority in this new unity:

The true minds soar intense and narrow And single-minded as an arrow. They're mighty in their leap. They're even mighty in their sleep. The one-horned cows rest on their haunches And are not really very conscious.’

This mimics the theological concept of the Body of Christ. In both the One-Horned Cow and the Communion of the Saints, believers are urged to be of one mind and heart; however, in the One-Horned Cow parody, unity is achieved through the death of the person rather than through their sanctification—which is to say, through the person's full spiritual actualization. Lafferty has a brilliant moment where he shows this by having Singletree forget Jonquil’s name and address her as "person." The One-Horned Cow has the word person, but it doesn’t know what the word means.

For me, the English writer who gets this right is William Blake. His Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion is about how one can belong to a spiritual collective without losing particularity. A little background helps if one has not read it. Jerusalem was Blake’s last and longest prophetic poem (written and engraved c. 1804–1820). It is a difficult masterpiece, an illuminated epic.

The fallen giant Albion, symbolic of England and of humanity, must awaken to spiritual unity in what Blake calls the “Human Form Divine.” Blake wrote the poem amid the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution and the aftermath of the French Revolution. He believed imagination, individuality, and spiritual vision were being crushed by materialism, institutional religion, the sleep of Newton, and what he famously called the “dark Satanic Mills.”

Jerusalem is part of Blake’s campaign, conducted through poetry and art, to show that humanity is “One Man” in Christ, yet redeemed only through love of the living uniqueness of each person

A few examples of what this looks like to show how the One Man differs from the One-Horned Cow. Jerusalem, Plate 34, contains the following lines:

. . . we live as One Man; for contracting our infinite senses We behold multitude; or expanding: we behold as one, As One Man all the Universal Family; and that One Man We call Jesus the Christ: and he in us, and we in him Live in perfect harmony, in Eden the land of life.”

What makes Blake's One Man different from the One-Horned Cow is the emphasis on minute particulars.

In Plate 55, Blake writes,

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars; General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer: For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

And just above:

Labour well the Minute Particulars: attend to the Little Ones; And those who are in misery cannot remain so long, If we do but our duty to them.

These minute particulars are what the One-Horned Cow cannot abide and abolishes when it wipes away the pupils of those who are brought within its regime of post-consciousness:

"In Greek statuary, the people always had pupils in their eyes, but the gods did not. The gods were always blank-eyed," Jonquil said. "There was a reason for that, person," Singletree said. . . "The pupils of an eye particularize and focus. But to focus on any one thing is to insult the Great Everything. Let us all have blank eyes, unfocused and open to everything. I tell you that there is jubilation in the wide halls of the unconscious over this new unchaining from the fetters of consciousness."

Finally, one of the strangest and most interesting aspects of the story is the change rung on Lafferty’s zoon anthropikon in what happens with the dogs. As I read the story, people exit from the sacramental economy and join the One-Horned Cow and it affects nature. Singletree says, "Do you know that dogs, to some extent, have shared the sickness of consciousness with people? But they'll soon be cured of that." As is often the case, the extension of the term consciousness in the story goes beyond what we usually refer to as consciousness. To see this, consider that when Jonquil is eaten, she has to be eaten in every minute particular for her sparky consciousness to be destroyed. Just as the body is the form of the soul in hylomorphism, Jonquil’s body has to be negated out of existence entirely to destroy her spark:

The feral dogs came to tear her apart and eat her body then. But she was stubbornly conscious right to the very end of it. Aye, in every torn-apart piece she was conscious until the pieces were completely eaten.

The domestication of the dogs, in the story's logic, was a form of participatory consciousness, a sacramental participation of the kind one finds in stories such as “Animal Fair.” We are told dogs became what they are through millennia of cohabitation with conscious beings, sharing in the human order the way lesser participants share in a liturgical reality. When that order is rejected, when its human members exit the sacramental economy and join the One-Horned Cow, the participation is withdrawn and the dogs revert.

Again, this is esoteric and Gnostic Lafferty, full of wonderful, weird stuff. It is worth wrestling with in this new Machine Age.

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