"When All the Lands Pour Out Again" (1969/1971)

Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say ‘seeing things as they are’ and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say ‘seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them’—as things apart from ourselves. — J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories

Lafferty disliked Tolkien’s work. Even so, Tolkien is useful for thinking about the Lafferty stories that center on recovery. In “When All the Lands Pour Out Again,” questions about plot, character, or climax miss the point. The point is the line-by-line accumulation of recovery itself. All genuine fantasy may involve recovery, but some works are built around it the way a parasol pavilion is built: recovery as the vertical mast, and everything else stretched out from it. You can see the difference by contrasting “When All the Lands Pour Out Again” with “Rogue Raft.”

One is a faux theory and the other a recovery fantasy. In “Rogue Raft,” Lafferty pushes back against the dogma that sea levels fall only during Ice Ages. He offers a different analogy instead. Continents, on this view, float freely on magma and can rise to form warm-weather land bridges during interglacial periods. It was a plot point in the earlier written “When All the Lands Pour Out Again,” in which a land bridge appears.

Snakes gathered by the ten thousands at Portpatrick in Scotland and vowed they would swim the Channel to Ireland or die in the attempt. But the land rose before them and they passed over dryshod. (What? Are snakes shod with shoon? On Jubilee day, perhaps.)

The story describes a global event called the “Jubilee,” in which the Earth’s “anchor chains” are wound up, and the continents begin to drift “in the space of an hour.” What “Rogue Raft” is not attempting is what Tolkien calls seeing things “as we are (or were) meant to see them.”

“When All the Lands Pour Out Again” begins with three learned men in conversation—Professor George Ruil, Dr. Ralph Amerce, and Nobelist Professor Wilburton Romer—about an ancient, cyclical phenomenon Ruil calls the “Jubilee.” Ruil says the event is a necessary, periodic renewal of the world, and he says it is due that very day. Early signs appear first in nature. Bears abandon hibernation and move south. Millions of squirrels shift into new territories. Radio astronomers pick up a strange “whistle” in the sky. As Ruil explains to his colleagues:

“It wasn't understood the first time it happened, or any of the other times . . . The accounts of the happenings have been rationalized, falsified, belittled, and that makes it all wrong: it was never rational, it was never false, and it certainly was not little.”

Meanwhile, individuals like Charley Malaga and Johnny Ofutino burn their Pacific café to sail toward America, joined by massive numbers of marine animals instinctively moving between oceans. As the Jubilee intensifies, the President and Congress board a massive plane to travel to an unspecified location, indifferent to their destination so long as they are moving. This total lack of possessive control is echoed by the President's own words during his breakfast with Ruil:

“‘I am not sure about that,’ he said. ‘Is it important which way a plane goes? There are several dissidents who see no reason to get on a plane and go somewhere today . . . I tell them that if all of us get on a plane and go somewhere that that will be something happening. It is possible that the pilot will know where the plane is going. If he does not know then perhaps someone will instruct him.’”

Strange reports proliferate, including sightings of unicorns and flying jackrabbits, and the arrival of small people from "the Little Sky." Secret "Wells of the World" are uncovered in Scandinavia and Arabia, revealing millions of people who had been hidden under "delusional covers" for millennia. Simultaneously, a group of three powerful revolutionaries—Saul Trummit, Pedro Cachiporro, and Arpad Koster—attempts to seize control of the chaos. They use supernatural powers to freeze the waves, halt birds in mid-air, and paralyze wandering citizens in an effort to prove they are the masters of the Earth, shouting their commands into the rising tide:

“This we will not tolerate for a moment!” Cachiporro swore, “neither the waves nor the rumors. There is sky-business involved in this somewhere and we will not permit it. If the waves are running, let them stand still!” . . . “The migrating birds will halt in midair!” Saul Trumait commanded. “Not one wing will beat till we say it may beat again.”

The revolutionaries' attempt at dominance is ultimately defeated by a collective "world-laughter" as the Earth itself rejects their authority, causing the three men to shrink and shatter into "unnameable miniscules."

It all broke loose. It broke wide open. What world-noise was that? Laughter, world-laughter. The three unpowered leaders diminished and their faces cracked like clay pots. It was the whole world laughing at them, in new mountains that had not been mountains a moment before, in craters that were fire-new craters, in pinnacles and persons that had just been renewed.

Lost lands such as Hy-Brasil and Lyonesse rise from the sea, providing new territory where the world's governing bodies congregate so they no longer "bother the peoples of the world." The continents begin to drift freely, and the original three scholars wander the transformed landscape as nameless wise men. The world is populated by newly awakened myths and creatures, such as woolly mammoths, as humanity abandons old identities to embrace a state of perpetual wandering and euphoria.

“When All the Lands Pour Out Again” is one of my favorite Lafferty stories, even though it defies almost every convention of the standard short story. Instead, it drifts toward something closer to Lafferty’s version of a prose poem, or his eccentric kind of hymn to dawn. In the immediate background stands the idea of the Jubilee year. A Jubilee year is a matter of remission and renewal. The idea comes from the Hebrew Bible and is described most clearly in Leviticus 25. Every fiftieth year, after seven cycles of seven years, the social order is reset. Enslaved people are freed. Debts are forgiven. Ancestral lands return to their original families. It is the opposite of amnesia: a deliberate undoing of accumulated social and economic distortions. The year is proclaimed by the sounding of a ram’s horn (the yovel, from which “jubilee” takes its name) on the Day of Atonement. The proclamation reaffirms communal justice, divine ownership of the land, and the limits placed on accumulation and exploitation. You can see why the three powerful men in the story want to prevent it.

The Catholic Jubilee tradition, which begins in 1300, seems less important here than this older sense of remission, recovery, and renewal.

The story is built on a pattern. It is a 3–3–3. The movement runs from stagnant intellectualism, through the failure of human ego, to a final state of mythic renewal. It begins with the three academics—Ruil, Amerce, and Romer. They do not know it yet, but they are the Jubilee’s heralds, with Ruil sounding the horn. From them and their rationalized skepticism, the story moves into a euphoria at the onset of the Jubilee. After a series of set pieces concerned with movement and recovery, the story reaches its big conflict: the three blocking figures, Trummit, Cachiporro, and Koster. They try to impose human authority on a cosmic event and fail. Their disintegration under the world-laughter forms the story’s climax if this were a normal story. It clears away the last obstruction. The story then resolves by transforming the original academics. They become the nameless “Three Wise Men,” carrying lanterns like Diogenes in search of an honest man. The mythic ground of meaning is recovered.

Perhaps these three men had once had the names of Ruil and Amerce and Romer, but they did not have those names now. They were walking in a direction that had not yet been renamed... They had sandals on their feet; they were wrapped in cloaks and euphoria; they had staffs in their hands; and they carried . . . lighted lanterns in the daytime — three wise men.

For anyone interested in tracing Lafferty’s thoughts on catastrophism and fringe thought (beyond old friends Immanuel Velikovsky and Charles Fort), the story offers two additional sources. Lafferty alludes to Patrick O’Connell, a Catholic priest and the author of Science of Today and the Problems of Genesis, a mid–twentieth-century defense of a traditional reading of Genesis that takes contemporary scientific claims seriously enough to shoot at. The book reflects many of Lafferty’s own views, especially his impatience with attempts to rationalize away the wonder of the Primeval History of Genesis 1-11. All of them are, of course, load-bearing elements in the ghost story: creation, Eden and fall, Cain and Abel, the Flood and Noah, and the Tower of Babel.

Lafferty also refers to Donald Wesley Patten, a once-prominent figure in catastrophist and creationist circles, and the author of The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch (1966), which treats the Flood of Genesis as a real, global geophysical catastrophe. Taken together, these references place “When All the Lands Pour Out Again” within what might be called Lafferty’s Genesis cycle: the group of stories in which he displaces the Book of Genesis into science-fictional and fantasy settings, from early work like “In the Garden” to later pieces such as “Encased in Ancient Rind.”

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