"You Can't Go Back" (1981)

I have a theory though that a person constantly edits and updates his memories, and that the updated memories are at least as valid as the original memories. As to the original facts, they have no being except in the cloud of memories that shows approximately where they once were. — Letter

What did he mean by 'really'? We had been up into reality, up into blue-sky reality almost all day long. Why the grubby question?

Following a recent post, I have been thinking about memory in Lafferty, which made me want to reread "You Can't Go Back." One can find a short discussion of it online between two knowledgeable Lafferty readers. Reader One talks himself out of understanding the story. It happens like this. He notices the real curiosity here: adult characters return to a secondary moon and are disappointed, despite the venture's total fantasticality. Instead of taking the characters' disappointment before the wondrous as the phenomenon the story diagnoses and wants to fictionalize, Reader One treats the characters' disenchantment as a compositional problem that Lafferty failed to solve. Reader One writes that Lafferty “wanted to write a story about loss and disappointment, but couldn’t come up with a situation that wasn’t magical. So he just forced his characters to mouth words and assume attitudes of disgust.” Right.

On one level, this is generous. It imagines a Lafferty so constitutionally enchanted that wonder leaks through despite his intentions. That is where the naivety steps on its own foot. Reader Two steps in and says perhaps the moon magic could recover with “maintenance and new imagination,” and perhaps Lafferty was losing faith in his own enchantments during a difficult stretch in his life. This, too, is generous in its way, but it repeats the same error. It treats adult disenchantment as the story’s perspective rather than as the condition being rendered, what the story seeks to understand philosophically, which I believe the story does protect the magic. Reader One makes it an aesthetic issue of artistic control; Reader Two dog dips it in biography. Both treat the story’s concern with the epistemology of disenchantment as evidence that Lafferty is writing about a disenchanted world, a fictionally disenchanted one, or a biographically, probably momentarily, disenchanted one. I suppose it is an understandable misreading. What I think both Reader One and Reader Two get really upside down is Lafferty's actual story; if Lafferty wanted to say the world is really disenchanted, he would not write the story he does, one about experiencing the fantastical White Cow Moon. That is what I want to look at today.

At the beginning of the story, we meet Helen, who brings a collection of stones, bones, and a magical Moon Whistle to a circle of aging friends. The objects draw them into reminiscence about their childhood in Osage County. Once, they tell us, there was a place called White Cow Town—an extraordinary settlement on a small, secondary moon of Earth that hovered low over a local ranch. As children, they visited the moon and experienced its strange gravity, its bright colors, and its community of odd residents, including goats and yeti. They remember how they got there. They climbed through a central shaft in the moon rock and emerged into the town. That period of discovery lasted until they were twelve. Lafferty describes the ontological clarity:

The delight and magic of White Cow was just the 'living in the sky' that was the condition there. There was an immediacy, a wininess, a happiness, an exhilaration, a music, a delight about 'living in the sky' . . . All those houses up on the moon were old-looking and unpainted, but they had a sharpness of outline and a liveliness of detail that isn't to be found in the houses down on Earth. This was like being in really bright daylight for the first time in our lives.

Now well into or past middle age, the friends are divided. Was the moon a physical reality or was it a shared childhood delusion? Some think that they were hypnotized children, but Barry Shibbeen cuts in. He says the moon still exists, and he offers to take the group to find it in his helicopter. Of the friends, only Helen declines to go. She says that going would ruin her memories, but her seventeen-year-old daughter, Catherine, a student of psychological anthropology, joins the men on the expedition. They all fly to Lost Moon Canyon. They locate the floating rock, use the Moon Whistle to call it into the air, and land on its surface to investigate.

Enter adultdisappointment. The moon might still exist, but the experience is thoroughly demystified. It is dingy and sour-smelling, populated by mangy animals and a dwindling population of only seven humans. The gnomes of youth are seen as stinking moon yetis. Worse than stinking, the yetis speak in platitudes. After Catherine explores the central shaft and interacts with one of these creatures, the group just accepts its disillusionment. They fly off in the helicopter. One cannot go back. This realization is expressed as a shared failure of the characters to inhabit their own past:

"I discern the true and unmemorable quality of White Cow Moon now," Barry Shibbeen said, “but I just can't set my tongue to the name of it." "'Dingy' is the word for it," Catherine said. She was right, of course. I felt a sort of constriction in my throat and chest, and I believe that the rest of them felt it too . . . "Ugh, platitudes yet!" Catherine shuddered. And we all felt a bit glum. "How our great memories have shrunken!" Caesar Ducato lamented.

Setting aside other elements, "You Can't Go Back" is a memory story. From its first lines, we read about mementos, about bones and stones, and a Moon Whistle, being carried from one household to another. Those are physical indexes of reality, and soon we arrive at the real subject of the story, the question of what memory does to the things it preserves. We are in Flatland, being told that the setting takes place in the Latter Days. Of course, the Moon Whistle still works. It is significant that Helen, who does not go back, is the one who can blow it with laughing lightning in her eyes. The rest of the friend group sees White Cow Moon as a problem to be cracked. In other words, even if the mementos survive, the ability to perceive what they memorialize has not. This phenomenological aspect of memory is what the story wants to look at.

If there is a philosophical plot, it is about an attempt to re-access the past, failing, and then not understanding what the failure says about how most of the friends have failed to live with memory. Following Lafferty’s ideas about memory, in the decades since childhood, each member of the friend group has edited his memory of White Cow Moon, presumably into memories compatible with adult rationality. Hector edited the moon into a physical and psychological impossibility. Caesar edited it into a case of collective hypnosis. Grover edited it into being a psychological artifact with no referent. Each edited memory is, in Lafferty's sense, "valid." Valid just means the memory is functional, the working draft each man carries. Yet revision has moved the memory-cloud further from the thing it approximates. Most of the adults have rewritten White Cow Moon into something they can explain. In doing so, they have made the real moon invisible to them, even when they are standing on it.

Barry Shibbeen is the exception. He never stopped flying over White Cow Moon. He never edited it out of his working memory. He can say "the best argument that it was is that it still is" with the confidence of someone whose memory cloud has remained close to its referent. If there is someone to feel sorry for in the story, it is Barry. He makes the mistake that Helen avoids, giving in to the temptation to re-enter the childhood experience. He lands on the moon and finds the word he is looking for is "dingy." Enchantment was not really a property of his memory but a mode of reception that he, like the others, has lost. Barry differs from Hector in that Barry's editorial process has been less destructive. He at least preserved the fact.

The presence of Helen in the story shows that this is a story not about losing the magic but about keeping it. It might be easy to miss that she is the hero of the story because she doesn't take part in the voyage back to White Cow Moon. The story is melancholy, but nothing in it suggests that Lafferty was giving up on enchantment or trying to demystify it. The point is almost the opposite. The story protects itself from the projection the readings I mentioned make, first onto the story as art, and then onto Lafferty as biography.

Helen’s decision not to return is also the story's metastatement about memory’s relation to reality. “It’d spoil it for me,” she says, and then she gives the title as her reason: “You can’t go back.” Because she knows this, she gets to keep the magic. She knows that her adult perceptual apparatus would overlay the moon with its own categories (things like dingy, bilious, badly kept) and that those judgments would enter her memory-cloud and contaminate it, forcing a reedit. She protects the magic:

"It'd spoil it for me," she said . . .

"It will be all right with Catherine," Helen said. "She was born an adult, so it won't do her any harm to know that the moon is a crumby place. But I'm eternally a child and it would shatter me. 'You can't go back,' you know."

As sad as the men are in the story, there is someone who is sadder: poor Catherine Palmer, Helen's daughter. Catherine is a true native of Flatland. She introduces a third relationship to magic and memory: she has none. She went to the moon two years earlier, "but it didn't do much for me," she says. She sees the green as bilious, the smell as a badly-kept zoo, the Yeti as "the least interesting creature I ever saw." She isn’t wrong. The green is that shade. The smell is strong. The Yeti is dull. She has a thinned memory-cloud through which to receive these facts as anything other than what they are at their flattest. She is the pure empiricist. The original group of friends experienced the magic that "does cling" to the moon because they were adequate to it in a way that Catherine, born an adult according to her mother, never was. Born as an adult is, again, being born into Flatland as a piece of Flatland.

In skies unhigh it still is set. It's as it's always been . . . And yet There's thinnish magic that does cling, Diminishing, diminishing.

Lafferty gives the most important line about memory in the story to the narrator, or to himself, if we want to irritate the eighth-grade teachers who tell us never confuse a narrator with an author. The narrator says, "We had been up into reality, up into blue-sky reality almost all day long. Why the grubby question?" Hector had asked what White Cow Moon "really" was, and the narrator sees the mistake. The children were not dreaming, fantasizing, or being hypnotized. They were more fully in contact with reality than their adult selves would ever be again:

"But what is it really?" Hector O'Day asked them when we were back in the ranch house and eating a ranch house supper. "Really, I mean." That Heck! What did he mean by 'really'? We had been up into reality, up into blue-sky reality almost all day long. Why the grubby question?

This does cash out to a claim about fidelity: the standard depends on the quality of the originating instance. The children’s encounter is ontologically open; the adults’ return is degraded. The world is not less magical; the adults are. The adults have foolishly decided to contaminate their own memory-clouds, pulling the whole approximation further from the truth. That is why you cannot go back. It is not because the place has changed, or because reality has become less enchanted, but because the perceptual apparatus has diminished. A new memory is formed, and it retrocausally edits the original memory into being lesser, enervating the primordial one.

For Lafferty, this is an epistemological problem about memory, not an ontological problem about reality, which remains superabundant. One name for that superabundance is the fullness of God, the tou theou. In Lafferty, it also appears as the logoi spermatikoi: the patristic idea that the seeds of the Word are scattered through the world, sparking everywhere. This is a major theme in the Austro stories.

I’ll close with a judgment about the readings I began with. They seem to me to confuse two things: a real melancholy about aging and friendship from an aging Lafferty who by that point was experiencing the deaths of friends (a melancholy that shows up in Green Tree) and any loss of belief in the world’s magic. I do not think Lafferty was ever a man who lost his magic. Like Helen, Lafferty knows you can’t go back, but there’s an important sense in which you never had to leave.

You Can't Go Back Notes.pdf

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