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“Lord Randal had invented the bow-and-arrow. But Axel could shoot the arrows farther and faster. And higher. And when he was six years old, Axel did what many persons have dreamed of doing: he made his mark on the sky. He dipped the heads of his arrows in mud, and he shot them up with uncanny accuracy and made mud marks on that transparent sky-cover which was twenty meters above them. He made about a hundred mud marks that conveyed a message in the written form of ‘code Chaldee’ that the three had independently reinvented. The message was ‘If there is anybody up above that sky, let him give us a sign.’ And the sign came at once, quick lightning and a water shower on the top side of the sky. The Three were pleased to see that their message was not washed away by the rain shower. There was someone else out there, someone more important than the overly silent caretakers who sometimes came into the area to make major or minor adjustments, trying to look invisible when they came.” — Serpent's Egg What would the perfect Lafferty atlas look like? Some exhilarating combo of historical atlas and dictionary of imaginary places, most likely. Somewhere on its maps you would find your own life, The Bank and Shoal of Time, and it would not be a bad idea to place near it another of Lafferty’s quasi- oceanic metaphysical hazards, that depressing thing he called The Great Doldrum Reef. The Reef can be found in “The End of Outward,” one of Lafferty’s metaphysical black comedies. Its name is informal shorthand. In the story’s science, it is our a current era of stagnation—our “end-of-outward” period, as it were—when great human projects stall before breakthrough and nothing fructifies. The connection between The Bank and Shoal and The Great Doldrum Reef may seem tenuous, but Lafferty wrote the stories that mention them in the same year of 1979, about five months apart, and I like to imagine that the five time-attempters of “Bank and Shoal” appear here in spirit. In the Arpad Arutinov headnote that opens Section 2 of “The End of Outward,” we find the following: “ Five others were compelled to other sorts of symbolism to express the reverse flow of history.” Why should these five not be Kemp, Roaring, MacBean, Farquharson, and Charteris? Is that an unwarranted inference? The must be a frustrating short story for readers. Its architecture is self-denyingly frugal: dialogue followed by speechifying, two locations, with an in-between arrival and withdrawal of horse-drawn carriages with names from the Age of Gasoline. Beyond that, it is all theater of ideas. Can you rise to enjoying it? It starts with Ike Casad and Fausto Barra, two scientists, shooting arrows straight into the air while discussing progress and decline. “An arrow should hang at its high point for at least a moment before it falls back,” Ike says, setting up the story’s central metaphor. Fausto agrees, and he gives the idea a name. An arrow shot straight up has flop-over time. And the world itself, he says, now lives in cosmic “flop-over time.” To prove a point about a returning Age of Trickery in the current flop-over, Ike performs an illusion. He makes the arrow he shoots hang impossibly at its apex in the sky. But the trick effect doesn't last. A weird duality is created when Fausto shifts his footing and accidentally breaks the arrow. “You’ve broke it!” Ike cries, and for a moment the illusory arrow is suspended above them while the real, broken one lies at their feet (“the broken arrow on the grass was the real arrow”). With that, the two men walk toward Ike’s ornate gazebo, a hybrid of “bandstand, summer-house, gazebo, and belvedere,” to join a meeting of scientists. Not just scientists, but fringe scientists. They are men of “high style, elite exuberance, and magnetic personalities.” They arrive in magnificent, custom-built vehicles, and Lafferty has fun with their names. One by one, the figures give updates on projects that have been stalled for over a decade in the Great Doldrum Reef. Charles Cogsworth talks about the manned Mars landing; Diogenes Pontifex discusses the creation of artificial life. At the meeting, the unstylish Jordan “Dinosaur Droppings” Dorner shows up. Dorner will argue that all the science projects are failing because the time for them has passed. “We cannot go onward,” he insists. “We cannot even stay where we are. We go backwards.” The universe has reached the end of outward; it has stopped expanding and begun to contract. Just look at the small indicators: domestic animals like Hereford cattle are “becoming tall and lean and wild-looking,” and cultural trends are regressing. In fact, Dorner says, the moon landing thirty years earlier was the end of outward, the peak of their civilization, “the turning of the tide.” Most of the scientists dismiss Dorner’s ideas, but Fausto Barra says that he intends to outflank the slide. “I'm not going to take the return trip,” he says. With tightrope mathematics (Matthew 7:14), he and a select few can calculate the quantum interval exquisitely and remain in the present, even if it renders them transparent to the rest of the world. After a final round of booze, the meeting breaks up. The scientists climb into what are horse-drawn buggies and carriages and ride away, full of “high amusement at the idea of Dorner that their civilization had begun to regress.” Then Lafferty gives an afternote as the ending. An elite, it is rumored, does exist in a place called "The End of Outward." It is separated from the rest of humanity by a mini-event-horizon. This group, which belongs to "a race that once flew to the moon," has preserved the pinnacle of achievement. He adds that "they are as far out as anybody ever went, and nobody can ever take that away from them." “The End of Outward” is pretty deep-end Lafferty. It piggybacks on many of his more idiosyncratic techniques. In what follows, I want to focus on two aspects of the story. One is how it fits into his recurring rejection of natural selection and evolution. The other is its use of the Vernier scale as the story’s conceptual master idea, with what it means for works such as Fourth Mansions . La fferty made much of the idea that the world began minutes ago and that deep time is a hoax. It shows up in novels and is the basis of one short story. As far as I know, the first person to formulate this idea systematically was Philip Henry Gosse, a 19th-century English naturalist and Christian. In his 1857 boo k Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot , Gosse seems to have come up with the idea that God created the world with the appearance of age, complete with fossils, tree rings, and geology, the appearance of a prehistory that never occurred. He wrote: “Admit for a moment, as a hypothesis, that the Creator had before his mind a projection of the whole life-history of the globe, commencing with any point which the geologist may imagine to have been a fit commencing point, and ending with some unimaginable acme in the indefinitely distant future. He determines to call this idea into actual existence, not at the supposed commencing point, but at some stage or other of its course. It is clear, then, that at the selected stage it appears exactly as it would have appeared at that moment of its history, if all the preceding eras of its history had been real.” That Lafferty sometimes entertains this idea shows he saw deep time as a genuine philosophical problem, though. But one can always dissolve a philosophical problem by accepting a few auxiliary premises. In “The End of Outward,” he uses a changing rate of cosmic expansion to suggest that our estimates of the universe’s age are flawed, his version of the Cosmic Age Problem. He imagines that, because of the delay in light reaching us, we have not yet observed the violet shift that would prove the contraction that has already taken place. Set within this cosmological picture, Lafferty offers a second, oblique critique aimed at evolution. The story makes its case that human progress has stalled. At the same time, Lafferty makes it clear that evolution is not real progress, or even true evolution at all. Of course, those who believe in non-theistic evolution are careful to say that, biologically, evolution is not progressive; it concerns change, not ascent. Lafferty turns that inside out: his universe no longer evolves in any way but retracts, undoing its own elaboration, perhaps a better word than evolution to characterize its expansion. He emphasizes that new species leaps will not occur (and presumably never have) while giving the reader images of what appears to be devolution, animals coming unbred, and outwardly expressive forms moving back toward their origins. In this way, the story separates ideas of progress from questions of creation and speciation, showing how its skepticism toward evolutionary theory parallels doubts about cosmic chronology. The story’s major symbol of human progress (the moon landing) measures the culmination of the outward age on the instrument: a gesture made “at the turning of the tide.” It is revered as a permanent achievement precisely because it marks an apex. By contrast, the scientists’ current attempts at “species leaps,” such as creating new animals, are doomed, since they try to move forward after the turn. Dorner can therefore assert that the time for such efforts “has gone by,” attributing their failure to a change in natural law, a “tightening and not a loosening of the bonds of species.” The most interesting part of "The End of Outward" to me is the Vernier scale image. It's not quite, but almost a microcosm and a macrocosm. No hermeticism needed, not of the kind we get in Serpent's Egg . When I think of a Vernier scale, I picture welder calipers: a smaller, more finely marked ruler (the microcosm analogue) sliding along a coarser main scale (the macrocosm analogue) to register shifts the large scale alone cannot show. The analogy isn’t exact, which is what makes it so interesting. The microcosm isn’t measuring anything on its own. But it is registering something in the story: the end of outward. Lafferty makes human culture the sliding ruler on the cosmic dial. Dorner explains this clearly, saying, “our lives and our civilization and society form a very small vernier scale . . . counterpart of the cosmic scale,” meaning we can read the universe’s great turn by first noticing small misalignments in ourselves. No doubt that Lafferty knew that Pierre Vernier (1580–1637) was a French mathematician and engineer who, in 1631, invented the vernier scale to enhance the precision of scientific instruments. Vernier was driven by the needs of astronomy and surveying—fields that required exceptionally accurate angular measurements for charting the heavens and mapping the Earth. Before his innovation, instruments like quadrants and astrolabes offered only coarse readings. Vernier’s scale refined these tools, enabling users to read minute divisions beyond the limits of the main scale. In Lafferty’s story, he restores Vernier to this original context of precision and discovery. In effect, the story acts a bit like a Vernier scale. The scientists’ discourse is like a vernier reading of the misalignment between potential progress and actual regression, picking up on the shift long before astronomy can detect the larger fact. The narrative models the cosmic cycle—rise, apex, fall—while our world is the vernier’s minute offset: the arrow’s flop. This gets spelled out in Ike’s claim of an apex “lasting thirty thousand years.” Because cosmic confirmation has to lag behind astronomical evidence (“no first-class evidence yet; violet shifts would take millions of years”), Dorner names human culture the small weather vane that turns first. This is where all the strange theories and phenomena come in. They are fine-grained indicators: breeds become unbred, reversing what Darwin called artificial selection; fashions and technologies slide backward. Etc. One imagines God’s hand on the universe like an irritated welder’s on a set of Vernier calipers, with the Moon landing recast as the furthest outward tick before the dial begins to slide back. The small scale (our biology, taste, tools, and milestones) shows that the main scale, the universe itself, has already reached maximum outward. Judgment has been passed. There is something sad about this, especially in how it touches Fourth Mansions  and Lafferty’s many other works about the leap forward. Kevin Cheek has said he loves Fourth Mansions  (1969) because it is so hopeful. “The End of Outward” stands about as far from being hopeful as one can get in Lafferty. I myself find Fourth Mansions less clear. Freddy must have failed for Carmody to return again in Fair Hills . Not that the Overlarks share same fictional universe, but that some part of Lafferty was not as hopeful as Cheek. Instead of the returnees, at the end of outward, we are given the Great Cosmic Verger, an incredibly memorable image of Lafferty’s creative imagination in a sour mood. Of him (Him, I think), Lafferty writes: “Who is the verger who with his verge-staff allows some things to pass and denies others? It is a cosmic verger nowadays, and he moves us back from the verge.” A verger, from the word for “staff,” is a church official who assists the clergy during services, organizes processions, and tends to the building and its furnishings. It is as if the Argo as the ship of the Church was told the waters end here. You blew it. The communion of the saints (the Elite) exists, but you’re going to need more grace than had those lucky pre-July 16, 1969 folks before the flop of time’s arrow. There are more than a few shades of this in Serpent’s Egg . Lastly, the boundary-setting figure with the staff appears elsewhere in Lafferty, most vividly in the following passage: “In the bodies of Kings and their Ladies, they strode down a High Road in the Levant. They were wondering what last thing they could contrive, when they found their way blocked by a Pilgrim with a staff.” The difference seems to be that the wicked children in “Hairy Earthmen” are now us. If so, then in “The End of Outward,” the message is even more eristic. There will be no fourth mansion for us: “It recedes from you. The time for it has pulled away and left the project stranded, as it has left so many others. Shelve it, shelve it!”

Casey's verses are all doggerel . . . His musical compositions hide a greatness, but they hide it well. His drawings are all comic, but only a few of them are meant to be. Let us consider the drawings on the opposite page: (For technical reasons, there is no drawing on the opposite page, but Schrade's description will suffice.) This supposed itself to be a drawing of Hell, but it is a second-hand drawing of a second-hand Hell. We believe that, in most respects, it is authentic. Well then, that means that Hell is a second-hand or second-rate place. — "Promontory Goats" A short note on a curiosity related to "Promontory Goats." Casey's drawing of Hell alludes to an unpublished archival Lafferty piece, "Seven Scenes from Sheol," which survives in typed form. The sketch is a vignette in which characters from the Argo legend discuss Finnegan's Sheol paintings. This is all pretty niche, even within the niche of people who care about a Lafferty. If you are learning about the Argo legend, you can look up the people involved in the Argo Glossary . The piece starts with art dealers Claude Bozart and Melchisedech Duffy debating the valuation of seven "post-ultimate" paintings recently produced by Finnegan. Duffy sets the price at $100,000 each, noting that the works are executed on mats of GIUNCHI or rushes using pigments such as sepia, cochineal, and the artist’s own blood. We quickly learn that Finnegan created these paintings of Sheol after his death, and they were brought to the dealers by an unknown courier. Bozart questions the realism of the pricing and the nature of the materials, but Duffy points out that the paintings contain a connection to the apokatastatic currents we find in "Promontory Goats, "a sunniness and a sense of hope that contradicts the expected death stench of the afterlife: "That good man is not in Hell, Claude. He's tortured, but he accepts the pain with a cheerful sort of heart-pang. Look at the sunniness that steals into the darkest corner of that one! Or the freshness, the ineffable aroma of hope that shatters the death stench of this other. Would a man in Hell be able to supply such touches?" Attention is drawn to one painting, Trombettieri . It depicts Finnegan as a lithe, yearling bull of a man climbing hills and conversing with a nervous "evil captain" from his past. We aren't told who the captain is, and the first suspicion a reader might have is Oretes Gonof, the captain of the Brunhilde from The Devil is Dead , but it is the military doctor and psychiatrist in Ward Fourteen in Archipelago  who is just called "the Captain." In that novel, the Captain does what he can to trammel Finnegan's spirit when Finnegan is at one of his lowest points. The “Sheol” scene is a call back to Finnegan’s major dissociative breakdown at the end of the war, as well as a promise he made. From "Sevens Scenes in Sheol": (A long time before this, Finnegan had been persecuted by this evil captain: that is who the evil man was. That had been when they were soldiers in the GREEN ISLANDS. "Someday, Captain, after you die and go to Hell, you're going to hear someone call your name," Finnegan had said on that long ago time in life. "And it'll be me. And it will be as if you had only seemed to be in Hell before.") From Archipelago : The Sergeant [Finnegan] sobbed for a few seconds, and by that time the hatred and excitement in the Captain's face had been covered by a mask again. The Sergeant lifted his head and grinned crookedly at the Captain. "I may not remember my own name, sir," the Sergeant said, "but I'm never going to forget yours. I'll remember it no matter what. Someday, Captain, after you die and go to Hell, you're going to hear somebody call your name. And it'll be me. And it will be as if you had only seemed to be in Hell before. I'll know your name, and the address will be easy, and I'll come down there and get you." "I'll have you for that! You can be courtmartialed!" the Captain shrilled. "Courtmartialed, Captain?" asked the Colonel, "For the kid saying he'll see you in Hell?" "But he means it. Yes, courtmartialed. He is threatening me, an officer. No, not threatening. He is showing disrespect for an officer." "That's enough, Captain. The boy is sick, and I'm not so sure about you." I absolutely love that Lafferty closed this arcane loop, even if exceedingly few people will ever know about it. In "Seven Scenes from Sheol," Finnegan and the Captain then carry on their conversation, and Finnegan now knows exactly who and what he is. Finnegan calls himself a Neanderthal and says that his people were the true painters of prehistory, while Cro-Magnons were just uncreative patrons. He then calls his current environment an "ambiguous place" rather than Hell, and says that his restless wandering is the result of a casual burial that failed to weigh him down. Then we move outside the frame of the painting where Argo people, including Mary Virginia Schaeffer and Margaret Stone, analyze the work's naturalistic accuracy and synesthetic qualities until Absalom Stein arrives. In a very Stein move, he says he just spent the night with the dead Finnegan. This is the kind of painting of Hell that Casey can’t make, and it is interesting that Finnegan’s paintings are of Sheol, not Hell—Sheol being the ancient Hebrew concept of the realm of the dead mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, where all people were believed to go after death. It was not originally a place of punishment like later ideas of hell, and Duffy seems to know this in his comment about sunniness and, as Finnegan says, “No, no . . . This is the ambiguous place.”

V. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. R. Et lux perpetua luceat eis. Fidelium animae, per misericordiam Dei, requiescant in pace. Amen. "Promontory Goats" is a Lafferty piece that I don’t know what to do with. It is one of Lafferty's most ambitious and theologically serious works, and it is funny, weird, dark, hopeful, slippery, offensive, and Origenist in ways that puzzle me. It is also one of the Lafferty stories that is just impossible to summarize. If one looks at Lafferty’s notes, one sees the great care he took in creating its baroquely braided pattern. Just as Three Armageddons  is not a novel even by Lafferty's standards, “Promontory Goats” breaks the short story through intense pattern work. Radically centripetal and exploding in design, it demands that the reader have a command of ancillary knowledge about Argo . In addition, there are hermeneutic landmines, one of these being the ethnically Jewish Casey’s light verse about gassing chambers and soap: “A gallows always smells of rope / I don’t know why it shouldn’t. / A gassing chamber smells of soap / Though I’d have bet it wouldn’t.” At its center is a powerful, simple image: the overdetermined goat of the biblical tradition. The first section introduces “Promontory Goats” as a fictional assessment-collection, a (mock) anthology that assembles the surviving works and testimonies of Kasmir "Casey" Szymansky, and is dated to All Souls’ Day. At this point, I read it as a meditation on the role of Purgatory and redemption in Lafferty. At the very end, it loops. We return to the first author of the establishing fragment, but only after getting our fullest image of the goat and its significance in the text, for directly before this, we are told that when we pray for the dead, we burden them with our troubles, being the kind of self-involved humans we are, and this shows up as goats in Purgatory. Casey, who is kind to animals in all his incarnations, is tending to those goats in Purgatory: "He has great concern for the goat caravans that arrive here every day. There has long been the cultus of praying for us Poor Souls in Purgatory ; but the effect has not been so much the taking up of the burdens of the Souls here as the sending to us of further burdens to bear. People phrase their prayers for us very strangely. They pray mostly for themselves, that they be rid of their burdens. And they mention our names. And those burdens arrive here every day on caravans of laden scapegoats. Casey works with the beat-up and burden-weary goats pretty well. He is a good animal man, and he patches them up as well as can be done." This sets up a contrast with Casey’s own grandiose fantasy of making himself a scapegoat for the Devil so that the Devil would be redeemed. I suppose I should add that, in Roman Catholicism, All Souls’ Day is observed on November 2 to remember and pray for the faithful departed. It is connected with prayers for souls believed to be in purgatory, and it comes right after All Saints’ Day on November 1. Whatever “Promontory Goats” is, it is a meditation on failure and mercy with a great deal of black comedy thrown in. A little background, if you haven’t really dipped into the Argo Legend: Casey is a precocious Chicago polymath who has a grand obsession with the Final Redemption of the Devil. That’s the whole bit about Casey wanting to trade souls with Satan, take his place in Hell, and liberate the most damned being in creation. In “Promontory Goats,” fifteen commentators (many old friends from Argo  and beyond) assess him from outside, while we get Casey’s own poems, ballads, and prose meditations, which speak from inside. The work takes place on at least four levels simultaneously, and the trick is that none of them cancels out the others. First, Lafferty gives us a character study through reflection. We never get Casey directly making a case for himself, though we get his fragments. We do get a lot of Casey filtered through a dozen lenses, each distorting in its way. The aggregate portrait is irreconcilable by design. The form of the assessment-collection is the argument that a person cannot be known, only approximated by the shape of the empty container they leave behind. Glauch's opening metaphor about essence conforming to the shape of an empty crock is the story's operating principle: "The form of this attempt to find and assemble the essence of some fifty years of Casey's works and days... will be shaped by the container that was Casey himself. The surviving essence, which should obey the laws of all gasses, ought to conform to the shape of the empty container that Casey left by his going . . . There are still invisible configurations and promontories in that emptied crock, and the essence will shape itself to them even when we are not aware of them." Second, it's a theological thought-experiment pushed past the point of safety. Casey insists on acting as an advocate for the Devil, an act which may be the sin of presumption disguised as charity. One of the most effective segments comes from Margaret Stone, who exposes that Casey, who volunteers for an eternity in Hell, was afraid of one hour in Purgatory as a child: “This cultus and practice consists of a child taking the place, for one hour usually, of the most forgotten soul in Purgatory. It is very painful, but it is not desolating . . . I questioned Casey about this once, when I had heard that he was talking nonsense about trafficking with the Devil. He remembered the cultus from his childhood, but he had never entered into it. He had been afraid. He was afraid of one hour in Purgatory, but he big-mouths about an eternity in Hell. I think that Casey's mind has blown.” Third, it's an eschatological comedy. Lafferty creates a nonce theology of false preludes, suggesting that before every true cosmic event, there must be dozens of false ones. This creates a pattern in which Casey might be the real Antichrist, or one of many buzzing false antichrists, or a saint: "Before the true redemption there had to be a dozen false redemptions; and after the true, there had to be many more of the false, and they are still going on . . . Before the return of Christ, there must be a dozen returns of false Christs, and one of them will be larger and more conspicuous than the others. Before the end of the world, there must be very many false endings; and I suspect that some of them will be very well done and pretty convincing." Fourth, it's a story about artistic self-destruction as kenosis. Casey creates vast amounts of work, and then he burns it: "In drawing and painting, in music, in verse and in prose, he cranked out a very lot of it. He destroyed most of it. The chimney of his house was called the Black Chimney of Hubbard Street because he burned so much of his stuff in the fireplace of his old house there . . . It is for this reason that even the scanty amount printed here is at least half reconstructed from the memories of those who heard it from him." I’ll wrap up with a note on the title. "Promontory goats" comes from George Meredith, but in Lafferty's story, we are meant to hear Leviticus 16 and the goat driven into the wilderness bearing the people's sins. Besides this, we are intended to have the image of goats on high rocky promontories, exposed and precarious. Casey is the scapegoat who insists on climbing to the highest, most visible point before being driven out. Of course, Lafferty will not tell us what he thinks; he forces us to infer it. The ironies suggest he sees Casey's impulse as theologically genuine. The compassion is real, and the question of extreme reconciliation seems seriously entertained. I read Lafferty depicting Casey himself as catastrophically unequal to the weight of what is going on. “Promontory Goats” is a demanding work, but an interesting one that I continue to wrestle with. Lafferty made a note that it wouldn’t be understood.

There were two hundred and forty men in our battery. Not all of them could tell such stories as these that were deep folklore incarnate. But at least two hundred of them could. I have always believed that this element of genuine folklore, this giantism, this unbounded joy, was always to be found in the talk of traveling men and of soldiers, those especially. And they are genuine folklore by the only valid test: they sound like genuine folklore. I make this contribution on the subject and I hope that the professional folklorists will find it meaningful. "The Roots of Folklore" As a piece of writing, Lafferty’s unpublished “The Roots of Folklore”(it became "Oh Happy Double-Jointed Tongues! by Maj. Audifax O'Hanlon (Unretired)) is a flanking maneuver, but it may be the place to start if one wants to get at the tall tale side of Lafferty. It is not what draws me most in his work, but if it draws you, the essay is prime Laffertiana. It is a place where Lafferty both performs tall tales and talks explicitly about what he is performing. It also shows a clear split between what he says about tall tales, the half of the picture readers get in interviews, and what he actually does with them. In “The Roots of Folklore,” Lafferty casts himself as his own unreliable narrator, the sarge from the 200th, one half real Lafferty, one half confection. What do we get on the surface? Lafferty says that the men in the 200th could tell you folklore—real folklore. He uses this to show that folklore has a dual essence: it combines gigantism and unbounded joy. The talk of traveling men and soldiers, he says, contains both, and so it is full of folklore. One consequence is that folklore is a living art form. How can we know this? The proof is in the pudding, so Lafferty offers four remarkable servings, drawn from four privates first class in the 200th: Lonnie Sweetwater, Robert Graygoslin, Benedict Boudreau, and Adolf Martin. What’s most interesting is how unstraightforward it all turns out to be. Each example complicates the simple picture of gigantism and joy. Here are the stories: PFC Lonnie Sweetwater (The Brass Band) Lonnie Sweetwater’s dialogue about the brass band greeting him when he gets home after the war is whimsical, but it also expresses a fantasy of control shaped by a soldier’s anxiety. The joy of his homecoming is too important to leave to chance. It becomes a demand, enforced by his decision to imprison the entire town by taking away its only bridge. The moment becomes less about community celebration than about one man’s need to matter, turning the welcoming fanfare into a coerced performance. The lesson? Folklore for Lafferty isn’t purely joyful; it uses the pretense of unbounded joy to mask anxiety and control. PFC Robert Graygoslin (The Rifle-Shot Messengers) Robert Graygoslin’s account of communicating through rifle fire is a good test case for the “Roots of Folklore” argument. It complicates the idea of folklore as light entertainment by doing something right up Lafferty Lane: wedding ingenuity to violence. The three-mile ravine becomes an image of human isolation, and the fantastical solution, carving messages on bullets, transforms human aggression into a form of human connection. The line about shooting a neighbor in the "right round," and the joke that he "walked a little bit tender," root the tall tale in pain. The lesson? Folklore for Lafferty enlarges violence to make sense of human factors that are more complicated than the violence itself. PFC Benedict Boudreau (The Prophetic Rash) Benedict Boudreau’s wife and her prophetic rash offer the reader a miracle as a chronic illness. Is it a gift, or is it a personal affliction? The ability to read news from the future seems powerful, but it appears as an uncontrollable “rash” that turns her body into public text, violating her “extreme modesty.” This piece of folklore is about how little control we have over our bodies—and over the future. The “giant” solution of making the future legible comes at the cost of autonomy, dignity, and privacy. The lesson? Folklore for Lafferty mercilessly exposes our anxieties—and the horror of being seen to have them. PFC Adolf Marin (The Literate Elephant) Adolf Marin's tells the sarge about Aunt Emma, a writing elephant. This story appears to be the most joyful, but it is rooted in a sense of human inadequacy and longing. The elephant’s miraculous literacy turns out to be a compensation for the wife’s inability to write and her shortcomings as a mother. If it has a center, it might be the detail that Adolf finds an authentic connection—he can "hear my wife's voice"—through the inauthentic medium of an animal. Is this simple, joyous exaggeration? Lesson: Folklore for Lafferty is a response to the gaps between people and the nature of human limitation itself.

[17] But because from some words following on these the Averroists wish to take Aristotle’s intention to be that the intellect is not the soul which is the act of the body, or a part of such a soul, we must even more carefully consider what he goes on to say. Immediately after he raised the question about the difference between intellect and sense, he asked in what intellect is like sense and how the two differ. Earlier he established two things about sense, namely that sense is in potency to sensible objects and that sense is affected and corrupted by excessive sensible objects. That is what Aristotle has in mind when he says, “If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought” (429a13–15) in such a way that the intellect would be corrupted by something excessively intelligible as sense is by an excessive sensible object, “or a process different from but analogous to that.” That is, understanding is something similar to sensing, but different in this that it is not affected. — Thomas Aquinas, On the Uniqueness of Intellect Against Averroists “Then wouldn't even a believer have to admit that the mind which we have now is only a token mind? Would not any connection it would have with a completely comprehensive mind be very tenuous? Would we really be the same person if so changed? It is like saying a bucket would hold the ocean if it were fulfilled, which only means filled full. How could it be the same mind?” Kevin Cheek sometimes says that “Through Other Eyes” is Lafferty’s perfect science fiction story. My own pick would be “All the People,” because, despite its unusual plot, it would feel familiar to a science fiction fan. It is one of Lafferty’s earliest thought experiments about the relation between machine and person. If people begin to think harder about the relationship between Lafferty and AI, it will have an interesting role to play. Unlike Epikt, who is a machine but also fairly clearly a person (on one level, Arrive at Easterwine  is a book about machine-human connection and the solution to the alignment as Epikt himself learns to live with persons), Tony the Tin Man is what we would now call an android. It is not clear that he is a person, though the story gives us reason to think that he probably is. Tony is made of both flesh and machine, like many of the machines in Past Master , and he is an example either of what we might now call alignment failure, if he is a machine, or of personhood exerting will, if he is a person. After the summary, I am going to turn to a well-known scholastic debate from the Middle Ages to get at the issues involved. That means rejecting a narrowly posthumanist understanding of the story and proceeding on the assumption that the medieval thinkers got a few things right about personhood. Our main character is Anthony Trotz, whose last name means defiance in German. Although that is something of a spoiler, the story withholds from the reader for most of the story that Trotz is an android. One day, he discovers he has acquired a weird ability. He knows all three billion people on Earth by name, face, and location. Importantly, Lafferty keeps it ambiguous what knowing them means, but, in any case, Trotz is overwhelmed by this huge mental catalog of Earth’s human inhabitants. So he went looking for guidance, questioning a politician, a philosopher, a priest, and a psychologist about the theoretical and practical limits of the human mind. None of their answers clears up his confusion, which is further aggravated by his feelings of personal inadequacy and the nasty taunting he receives from local children and the harassment of dogs. For instance, the kids chant "Tony the tin man" at him in the streets, which Tony thinks has something to do with his father having been a garbage man. We will learn that it is programmed memory. Returning to his job at the city's filter center, Trotz gets interrogated by his superior, Colonel Peter Cooper. He eventually explains his global awareness, and the Colonel is unsurprised and just presses him to identify any anomalies in the population. The Colonel wants to know if any individuals have arrived on the planet without being born. This is where Trotz becomes defiant. He refuses to answer until he learns more about his own identity, then cooperates. Trotz knows from the beginning that he is a "restricted person," but he now learns what it means: a restricted person is an artificial being constructed from biological and metallic fibers with fabricated memories of a childhood. The Colonel takes Trotz into the facility's lower levels to show him his true "brain." It’s a twelve-hundred-cubic-meter machine designed to monitor the auras of humanity, a surveillance system, as it were, for pinging on an alien invasion. It uses artificial consciousnesses like the one localized in Trotz as intuitive filters. This opens deeper into the question of whether Trotz has real emotions. Then something happens. Trotz spots the local children and dogs harassing an imposing stranger in the street below. His artificial consciousness lets him work out that this stranger is one of the expected alien arrivals. Trotz watches the alien kill one of the bullying children by pointing a finger at it. Feeling a sense of kinship with the alien, resentful toward his human creators and tormentors, Trotz makes up his mind. Hoping the invaders will be better masters, he refuses to reveal the alien's location to the Colonel. The Colonel threatens to have Trotz dismantled within ten minutes to extract the data. Trotz knows that’s time enough, because the aliens are landing in one of Lafferty’s early apocalypses, falling like snow onto the planet, a variant of eschatological imagery Lafferty uses when ending other early stories such as “Parthen” and “Once on Aranea.” The philosophical problem that I mentioned, the one medieval scholars fought over for two centuries, and that modern philosophers have never fully resolved, is one that artificial intelligence now makes practical. Can it be said to be mine? It turns on whether cognition must have an individual subject, or whether subjectivity is something that attaches to cognition from the outside. In the second case, it might be thought of as the way a label gets attached to a jar. The textbook example of the debate in the Middle Ages arose in the twelfth century in the work of Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd, who is known in the Latin West as Averroes. He wrote a series commentaries on Aristotle that shaped European philosophy for three hundred years. Maybe his most consequential and controversial claim concerned intellect. Aristotle had distinguished between a passive intellect, which receives forms, and an active intellect, which illuminates forms. Averroes, in his mature philosophy, argued that the material intellect (the capacity for receiving intelligible forms) is not individual. The intellect is one, shared, eternal, and separate from any particular human being. It’s like a giant shared computer. Individual humans participate in intellectio because their imaginations and phantasms (their particular sensory and imaginative representations of stuff) provide the interface through which the shared intellect acts. The opposite view would be something like the brain just secretes mind. If we think about how Antony Trotz works, we can see the parallel. Let’s work through some of this in the story. The philosopher, Gabriel Mindel, responds to Trotz in scholastic Latin — per se, a se, in se, per suam essentiam, ab alio, hoc aliquid, substantia prima. That’s a good reason for thinking that the scholastic context I’m bringing in isn’t merely an imposition. It is technical vocabulary for knowing a substance as a distinct individual thing. Lafferty flags it for the reader as being relevant to the inquiry: "How know? Per se ? A se? Or In se ? Per suam essentiam , perhaps? Or do you mean ab alio? Or to know as hoc aliquid ? There is a fine difference there. Or do you possibly mean to know in subsiantia prima, or in the sense of comprehensive noumena?" In plain English, he says, "How do you mean 'know'? Are you asking if a thing is known by its own nature, by itself, or within itself? Do you mean knowing something through its own essence, or knowing it through something else? Or are you talking about knowing this specific, individual thing? There’s a big difference between those. Or are you asking about knowing it as a primary, fundamental substance, or perhaps in the sense of grasping its entire, deeper, hidden reality?" Mindel gives a theoretical answer: the mind is limited by the body, the brain. It is skull-bound. An unbodied mind would, in esoteric theory, he says, be unlimited. Esoteric here just means it is the Averroistic premise: individual cognitive limitation follows from individual embodiment, and a collective intellect free of any particular body would face no such limit. What about the Catholic priest? He gives a Thomistic and eschatological answer: the dead man who attains the beatific vision knows all persons who have ever lived, all the billions, not with the same brain but with the same mind. The relationship of the beatific vision is about internal relations, not external ones. Here, it’s important to remember that Trotz knows everything through knowing their aura: their outsides. Trotz enters scholastic philosophy when he asks whether it is really the same person if the mind is so transformed. He says that is like claiming a bucket would hold the ocean if it were filled. The priest answers honestly: I don't know. We know that Trotz has been asking these questions because he already knows all three billion people on earth. When the story’s big reveal comes, it basically takes the Averroistic model and maps it onto a machine metaphor. There is an accumulator, twelve hundred cubic meters, the largest brain in the world, that maintains contact with every human aura on the planet: "The accumulator at which we were looking (your brain) is designed to maintain contact with all the auras in the world, and to keep running and complete data on them all. It contains a multiplicity of circuits for each of its three billion and some subjects. However, as aid to its operation, it was necessary to assign several artificial consciousnesses to it. You are one of these." Trotz is one of several "artificial consciousnesses" assigned to it: runners, appendages, interfaces. His knowledge of particular persons in particular places, the tobacco traders in Plovdiv, the muskrat trappers of Barrataria Bay, the girl in Kalamazoo who is prone to colds, is through an interface. In scholastic terms, his phantasms are the interface. It’s the mainframe, the shared intellect, that does the actual knowing. There is much more that could be said about all that, but I want to cut to something more interesting. It turns on the refusal to submit. When Colonel Cooper demands the location of the arriving aliens, Trotz becomes defiant. He has already reasoned, rapidly and in silence, that the aliens might be better masters; he has watched with satisfaction as one of them killed a child with a pointed finger; he has calculated his loyalties and switched them: "Tin Man Tony did not speak. He only thought in his mind — more accurately, in his brain a hundred yards away. He thought in his fabricated consciousness: . . . I wonder if they will be better masters? . . . Enemy of my enemy, you are my friend." That doesn’t look like relay behavior to me. A sensor closes a circuit, or a sensor doesn’t. A passive interface transmits, or it fails to transmit. Trotz looks at alternatives, and that entails assessing prior commitments, managing the gap between inner state and outer expression, and using judgment. One of the central debates in the AI alignment community is whether advanced systems need to be more tightly coupled to reward functions in order to become more legible, grounded, and ultimately more compatible with human values. Yann LeCun , for example, has argued that some form of this is necessary for embodied AI operating in the real world. Others contend that unless we make machines more like us, more human in their motivational structure, more like Epickt than a pure optimizer, we are heading for serious trouble. Colonel Cooper makes a related point when he says that Trotz’s “designed nervousness” is intentional: an apprehensive unit notices details better. By that logic, traits like caution, fear, and excitement are not bugs but functional features. Just a few days ago, Yann LeCun raised a billion dollars while advancing a similar argument: that truly efficient AI may need to feel something like fear, excitement, or concern in order to navigate the world effectively. Trotz’s affects are meant to shape what it does as a Tin Man. The affects are essential to what he picks up on as being odd, what rises to the threshold of reportability. His emotional state is causally upstream of the outputs the accumulator needs. Something is happening at Trotz's level (in his subjectivity, if he has one) that the accumulator cannot supply on its own. And, of course, his final, resentful, fully understandable decision is intelligible as a problem of persons and reasons. The Averroistic picture has no need for that kind of thing. If Trotz is just a relay, then the accumulator's output passes through him and produces reportage. Engineering his anxiety would be unnecessary. You do not adjust a wire's emotional state to improve signal quality. You engineer the emotional state because it does something that cannot be reduced to signal transmission. It is filtering, weighting, prioritizing, all things that look as if they are connected to personhood and will. Nothing in the story compels one to think about AI, but in retrospect Trotz does, I think, look like either a failure of AI alignment (the Colonel sees Trotz as a rogue intelligent machine) or a failure to recognize that personhood might be extended (Trotz somehow becomes a person)—one of Lafferty’s persistent themes.

“There is Cavour. He has hardly begun in the world, but look how well-developed his web is. There is Lord Acton in England. There is Montalambert. There is poor Lamennais who will officially go to Hell. There is Mordecai or Marx who has been spinning a web in Paris and other places. Notice the exceptionally long anchor lines of his web, though the body of his web will always be paltry.” — The Flame Is Green (1971) “There is a secret society of eleven persons that is behind all Bolshevik and atheist societies of the world. The devil himself is a member of this society, and he works tirelessly to become a principal member. The secret name of this society is Ocean.”— “About a Secret Crocodile” Today, I want to consider John Clute’s observation that R.A.L.’s work is irradiated by conspiracies. This is so evidently true that it is surprising how rarely Lafferty’s readers have attempted to trace the logic of conspiracy in his fiction. At a certain point in reading him, it became clear to me that at least two distinct forms of Catholic-inflected conspiracy are typically at work, often in allegorized or displaced form. One version leans into 19th-century ideas about Satanic Freemasonry. This is complicated by the fact that some Catholics have viewed Freemasonry as being a crypto-Jewish organization. For instance, in The Jews 1922, Belloc makes this argument. This variety of conspiracy can be distinguished from Satanic Freemasonry where dark political and spiritual forces are joined in an alliance against the Church itself. Its roots reach back to the early 18th century, grounded in anxieties over the Masons' secrecy, their perceived indifference to religion, and their supposed threat to Papal authority. In 1738, Pope Clement XII issued In eminenti apostolatus , a bull that excommunicated any Catholic who joined a Masonic lodge. His successors, including Benedict XIV, Pius VII, and Leo XIII, reaffirmed and extended this ban. The theory reached a theatrical peak in the  Taxil hoax , the source of some embarrassment, but not enough to alter the Church's social teaching. In 1983, the revised Canon Law  no longer named Freemasonry, but the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the modern continuation of the Inquisition, most recently renamed by Pope Francis as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) clarified that the prohibition still stands. Catholics who join Masonic groups commit a grave sin incompatible with Church teaching. That means they go Hell for it unless invincibly ignorant . A second version of the historically conspiratorial is less cosmic but no less threatening in its way. Here, the danger is political rather than uncomplicatedly Luciferian. This is where one finds the view of someone like Hilaire Belloc , who argued that Jews posed a persistent political threat to Christian nations, in part because they remained, in his eyes, a distinct nation living inside others. Belloc believed this led to a tragic cycle: welcome and prosperity, growing friction, antagonism, and persecution, which repeats itself through geographical relocation. A related point. With Belloc, Lafferty saw Islam not simply as another religion but as a heresy. And in his thought, he occasionally presents both Jews and Muslims as conspirators against the Catholic faith, particularly in the context of Spain in his correspondence. Sinbad: The Thirteenth Voyage  convinces me that Lafferty’s portrayal of Islam imputes infernal qualities, linking it more closely to the Freemasonic strand of my two-front theory of Catholic conspiracy. There are also mixed modes conspiracy. This, I think, is how Lafferty understood the role of Jews and Muslims in Spain and their conspiracy against Christendom. To him, the historical alliance had an infernal tinge because it was so deeply anti-Catholic. The most dangerous historical hybrid, however, for modernity is not anything like this, but new. It is embodied by the first of his great devils, Ifreann Chortovitch ( Coscuin ) whose sons are central to Argo . It is the atheistic threat of Marxism and the Red Revolution, which Lafferty saw both infernal and Jewish (in novels and short stories, he calls Marx as Mordecai ). That conspiracy combines economic materialism with spiritual corruption. We see this idea developing in the unpublished Civil Blood  and running throughout the Coscuin Chronicles and Argo . With this two-front war model and the possibilities of historical partnerships and sublimations in place, we have a little more to work with than simply saying there is an awful lot of conspiracy in Lafferty. A good place to look at how this works in his short fiction is “About a Secret Crocodile.” It is one of the first Lafferty stories anyone should read, one of his best. It shaves off the content of real history and instead creates a comedy about the machinery of conspiracy, making more apparent the functional traces of the two kinds of conspiracy I’ve outlined above. The story world is secretly run by a powerful being called the Secret Crocodile. Its main goal is to “control the attitudes and dispositions of the world.” It works through a front company called ABNC and is supported by high-level agents like Mr. James Dandi and John Candor, who have gone through a kind of “catechesis.” The Crocodile is totalizing. It is the central hub where all conspiracies converge. It oversees smaller conspiracies, such as a “cabal of seven men controlling the finances of the world,” as well as opposing movements like “Ocean” (which backs Bolshevism) and “Glomerule” (which backs Fascism). Through this structure, the Secret Crocodile shapes global consciousness, making sure that major world events serve its purpose. One day, the system goes on high alert. There is a threat from “the Randoms,” a trio of people who are “unknowingly linked” and act “without program or purpose.” The group—Mike Zhestovitch, Mary Smorfia, and Clivendon Surrey—is not a counter-cabal. They are an organic anomaly. Their strength comes from raw, authentic human reactions that the system cannot fully manage: Mike’s “gesture of contempt,” Mary’s “grimace of disgust,” and Clivendon’s “intonation of scorn.” Lafferty presents these as pre-ideological weapons—graced forms of spontaneous spiritual resistance that threaten the Crocodile’s system of manufactured consent. The trio is exposed after a series of absurd office mishaps, ending when an underpaid employee, Betty McCracken, feeds her awful sandwich to the office computer. The system’s first response is to try to corrupt Clivendon Surrey. Agent Morgan Aye offers him a vast fortune. Surrey rejects it with a snort of contempt, saying, “Then I’d be one of the birds that picks the shreds of flesh from between the teeth of the monster.” After failing to corrupt the trio, the organization turns to physical violence—what it calls “the Compassion of the Crocodile.” Dandi and Candor authorize a “Purposive Accident,” a carefully planned bombing meant to neutralize the Randoms’ abilities. The attack works exactly as intended. Mike Zhestovitch’s hand is mutilated, Mary Smorfia’s mouth is disfigured, and Clivendon Surrey’s vocal cords are destroyed. By damaging the physical sources of their resistance, the system silences them. The story then moves to its real ending, where Lafferty steps in as narrator to comment on what is going on. Somewhere out there, beyond the reach of the Crocodile, there is a force that can resist it. It is “the good guys and good gals,” a vague, unmapped potential for decency that exists entirely outside the logic of conspiracy. It has no structure, no control, and no program. But it “stirs a little.” How does this relate to Lafferty's imagination? The Secret Crocodile is a full synthesis of what I called the “Two-Front War.” It has institutionalized the material drive of the Jewish Financial Conspiracy within its Financial Arm and absorbed the spiritual rebellion of the Masonic Conspiracy, along with the Marxist synthesis, into its Political and Cultural Arms. By managing both the Bolshevik front, called “Ocean,” and the Fascist front, called “Glomerule,” it keeps a firm grip on everything. . . . This is an attempt to bring some of these thoughts together. On the Crocodile Org  diagram, you’ll notice the labels material  and spiritual . This is a really gross simplification. Lafferty maintains that both fronts are always present—for example, the Devil belongs to the materialist front, matching what we find in his ideas about the Red Revolution in Coscuin and elsewhere.

“A mood makes a world appear.” —Martin Heidegger A passing comment on the Lafferty Facebook group East of Laughter  has me thinking about “The 99th Cubicle.” The first time I read it, I filed it away as a minor and heavy-handed bagatelle about sin built on the old hypodermic needle model of media . After re-reading it, I’m not so sure. That uncertainty is the point of this post. If you decide to read—or re-read—the story, be aware that it has variant endings. The original, shorter version is superior. It concludes in ambiguity. Here’s the plot. Simpson Coldturkey is a sour-tempered landlord. He owns three buildings. Whenever he can rent out the third building, he becomes “barely rich.” He rents it to three entrepreneurs who call their business Mood Manipulators Unlimited. The tenants set up arcade-style cubicles for users to rent moods. So, structurally, we have a three-on-three pattern and a rentier-on-rentier situation. Some of the cubicles seem like harmless fun, but most map onto the seven deadly sins, raising questions about how harmless they really are. One cubicle, the ‘Garish Orange,’ is the dangerous 99th of the title. It's intense wrath. In an absurdly flawed security plan, the tenants hand over the 99th Cubicle—and both its keys—to their landlord, Simpson Coldturkey, for “safekeeping.” Then, each in turn, and without the others knowing, they say they will make themselves forget what they have done. After dabbling in the safer booths, Simpson gets a taste for the highs. When he learns what the Garish Orange Cubicle can truly do, he wants the peak experience of violence. He wants the real mass-murderous thing. He goes to the 99th Cubicle, and the story ends. Three questions. The first is how Coldturkey acquires the 99th Cubicle. Are the three Mood Manipulators coordinating a lie, manipulating him? It seems possible because . . . well, just look at what they call themselves, and look at what Jane Casual says: “You are a meek man [Coldturkey], but every meek man has a tiger or an ogre penned up in his heart. It will be so much fun for you to release your ‘Beast Within’.” We know that the Mood Manipulators have allowed this to happen in the past, and Cold Turkey is an easy target. This appears to be what salesmen refer to as negative reverse selling. But if that’s wrong, and the Mood Manipulators are sincerely trying to be rid of the 99th Cubicle, then another question pops up: What is Lafferty saying about culpable ignorance and self-induced forgetting? And what does that reveal about his views on media, nearly a decade after Not to Mention Camels ? Third, there is an important detail about Simpson himself that is easily overlooked. The story gives the reader the garish orange of the 99th Cubicle before Coldturkey activates it. This makes little sense unless the sweeping wave is internal, not from the 99th Cubicle itself. Simpson Coldturkey started up the cockeyedstairs to that cockeyed, foreshortened second story where he lived. He dragged himself upward with sad steps. Then suddenly his steps became more animated. A wave of garish orange swept over him. He saw the whole world with garish orange eyes now. “I have it all!” he cried. “I can put it all together in a moment!” This odd sequence makes me think that the hypodermic media model is not, in fact, at play; the disorder has been inside Coldturkey the whole time, waiting to be given expression and, just as significantly, a rationalization: "The cubicle made me do it. I would never have had the courage to become a mass murderer without its nefarious influence." In other words, Simpson Coldturkey is a man who wants to fall off the wagon. Let’s go a step further. The forgetting “trick” the three tenants claim they can perform may be a subtle satire of the mind-trick Coldturkey plays on himself. As Jane Casual explains: “We supreme masters of moods have a trick of forgetting things, burying the memory of them so deeply that it can only be retrieved by triple hypnosis (with three different practitioners from three different continents).” There’s another word for this kind of thing: self-deception. Returning to Coldturkey’s “garish orange eyes,” they may also explain Lafferty’s repeated use of the word cockeyed  to describe the third building. It struck me as a curious choice at first—one I remembered vividly from my initial reading—but now it reads as a purposeful signal, especially given how Lafferty opens with it, builds the story around it, and intensifies it at the end.  [Coldturkey] sometimes rented it for an arcade. It was the place above which Simpson had his own living quarters, in that cockeyed, foreshortened second story.      “Try it and see,” tenant Jane Casual told him. “The ninety-ninth mood, the Garish Orange Mood, is entirely too dangerous. And I want to ask you a favor about that. I wonder whether, while my two partners are out, I might store the Garish Orange Cubicle itself somewhere up in that cockeyed foreshortened second story where you live. And then there is its final, doubled appearance, Lafferty banging the drum twice to get our attention, just before the orange floods Coldturkey’s eyes:      Simpson Coldturkey started up the cockeyed stairs to that cockeyed , foreshortened second story where he lived. [...] He saw the whole world with garish orange eyes. Behind this image, we see Lafferty’s Augustinian formation. The pull of sinful addiction is a classic Augustinian concern. In The Confessions , Augustine compares his own struggle with lust to his friend Alypius’s obsession with violence. Augustine was more of a Pink Panther or Passion Purple Cubicle guy, while Alypius dove headlong into orange mood cubicles. This disordered set of lust and wrath is what the story focuses on. At one point, Jane Casual tries to coax Coldturkey toward a different substitutionary release, saying, “You’d better go in and relax in the ‘Pink Panther Cubicle’ or in the old faithful ‘Blue-Bird Blue Cubicle: be Happy as a Blue-Bird’.” She directs him toward sex as a compensatory fantasy for violence. In The Confessions , violence is the meek Alypius’s sex substitute. Consider this passage from "The 99th Cubicle": He tried the ‘Sadistic Saffron Cubicle’ and he began to suffer a monstrous and exciting change of personality. Then he entered the ‘Ogres Orange Cubicle’ and he turned into an ogre. He killed people, killed people, several of them. "This is the most exciting thing that ever happened to me,” he squealed with delight. “For this I was born. Oh, the tall, steep pleasure of it!" Compare it to Augustine's description of Alypius at the games: "As soon as he saw the blood, he at once drank in savagery and did not turn away. His eyes were riveted. He imbibed madness... he found delight in the murderous contest and was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure. He was not now the person who had come in, but just one of the crowd... He looked, he yelled, he was on fire, he took the madness home with him so that it urged him to return..." In any case, there is enough here to suggest that the story isn’t really about magical cubicles that compel action, but about a placebo effect, which would explain one of the more memorable parts of the story: “It sounds a little bit like pseudo-science to me,” Simpson Coldturkey said. “Yes, doesn’t it!” the tenant Harold Grunion agreed. “But it works. Try it and see.” The cubicles “affect every possible mood to every possible intensity,” in Jane Casual’s exaggeration, but they also act as instruments of self-deception. They offer a way to dodge the responsibility of what Augustine called ordering one's loves. C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man , writing: “St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris , the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it.” Vice is what happens when this order breaks down, and it's what happens to Coldturkey. That makes the story more interesting than the “video game made me shoot up the school” parable I initially took it to be.

I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about how I understand Lafferty’s career as a writer of novels. The best thematic interpretation along developmental lines is Daniel Otto Jack Petersen’s idea that we move from pre-apocalyptic to apocalyptic, then end with post-apocalyptic, but this shades into exceptions. Another view is Andrew Ferguson’s idea that Lafferty gets a second wind after his break following the publication of Annals of Klepsis. He has a dual-track account that emphasizes genre history and metafictional strategy emphasizing post post-modern world creation. I have my view of pre-nucleation and post-nucleation of Ghost Story themes, with Lafferty's ideas about the phenomenology of oceanic unconscious and time becoming increasingly important and overt with a counter view of Catholic and Gnostic world making in Lafferty’s fiction. That's the idea of a whole Lafferty that unshackles Lafferty from being a quirky sf/fantasy writer of short stories. I call the default Lafferty the weird O. Henry of SF and the cotton-candy Okie. Outside of a handful of fans such as Petersen and Ferguson, this is how he tends to be discussed. If one finds him blogged about in passing or referred to on Reddit, it is likely a variant of this. As Lafferty readers know, Lafferty's novel-writing career divides into phases that very loosely track his publishing history. He began with the Catholic fantasia Antonino Vescovo  in the mid-1930s, but his real apprenticeship as a novelist came between roughly 1957 and 1963, when he produced seven novels ( Dotty , Archipelago , Civil Blood , Loup Garou , Alaric , Okla Hannali , and Esteban ), none of which found a publisher at the time. Dotty and Archipelago may have been drafted to some degree before 1957, but there is no hard evidence (that I have seen), only evidence within the materials themselves. These early manuscripts were long by Lafferty's later standards, often running 85,000 to 100,000 words. He was trying hard to break into the publishing market. Though the rejections span past the immediate period at hand, Archipelago , for instance, had about twenty-five rejections. This was a man learning his version of novel-craft in near-total commercial silence, writing historical fiction, his version of hyperbolic realism, before he became a genre-tagged writer. The published era brought a steadier rhythm, beginning with Past Master  and running through Half a Sky . During this period, Lafferty found his professional footing: Terry Carr at Ace bought Past Master  in 1967, and Virginia Kidd, his permanent agent, received nearly every completed manuscript within a day or two of its completion. The novels grew shorter and sharper, as we see with early versions of Space Chantey , The Reefs of Earth , and  Arrive at Easterwine , and Lafferty was also producing the extraordinary run of short stories that built his reputation. He revised relentlessly during this period. For instance, he rewrote Archipelago  twice (1965 and 1968). He expanded Past Master  from a 38,000-word novella into a full novel. He built the novels Space Chantey (the unpublished short story "Space Chantey") and The Reefs of Earth ("The Raft") from short material. He plugged "The Shape We're In," an unpublished Institute short story, into Arrive at Easterwine to give it its powerful ending. His notes for The Devil Is Dead  say"Much rewritten." As we know from the “Apocrypha, ” he was revising that novel as it was on its way into print. Then came volcanic years. After a near-total gap in novel production from 1972 to 1973, the period of the heart attack, Lafferty erupted with thirteen novels in five years, from Not to Mention Camels  in February 1974 through the four parts of In a Green Tree  completed in September 1978. The output in 1975 alone is staggering: he wrote four novels totaling approximately 270,000 words, including the first version of More than Melchisedech . If we think about the Green Tree  tetralogy's index cards and its record of exact writing periods, Lafferty sustained roughly 1,500 words per day for eight consecutive months, writing 306,000 words of semi-autobiographical fiction with only brief pauses between installments. At the same time, he was rewriting older works. He expanded More than Melchisedech  by incorporating materials. He rewrote Mantis  and rewrote Half a Sky . A lot of his work, of course, remains unpublished. Around 1980, there was a short break in this rhythm that did not really end it. After a nineteen-month novelistic silence following Annals of Klepsis  in November 1980, Lafferty wrote five more novels between 1982 and 1984. Sindbad , Serpent's Egg , and East of Laughter were banged out. He seems to have known he wanted to hang up his spurs on his birthday in 1984, so he completed his last major task with the final two installments of the Coscuin Chronicles , Sardinian Summer  and First and Last Island , being completed just fifty-one days apart in the spring of 1984. It completes the very important Coscsuin sequence that must come out for there to be anything like a Whole Lafferty. It gives the background for the Argo legend. At that point, he was finished with the novel. Of course, it is all more complicated than that because Lafferty thought the novel form was long dead. He was writing something else, something extraordinary in the literal sense, that could be packaged like a novel.

"What do you do when you have just hanged a man? Why, the man himself had showed us what to do. Besides, a future kind of man doesn't leave much of a hole in the present." I've also sent you three other endings to it, designed so you can use any of the four page 16's here and throw the others away. Or, if none of these endings will do it any good, and if any of your sharpies can design an ending to make it sell, I'll split the proceeds with him. — Letter to A. L. Fierst, June 2 1961 The ancient Romans had a practice now called damnatio memoriae to posthumously disgrace a public figure, a practice some of our current politicians warrant. They would erase and disfigure all marks of official remembrance. This happened in several ways. For instance, names were chiseled off inscriptions. Portraits were smashed or recurved. Statues were removed, coins withdrawn, honors annulled. One was removed from the historical record to the extent possible. The Romans themselves did not always use damnatio memoriae as a formal legal term, but it is the modern label for a cluster of senatorial and imperial acts that declared someone unworthy of public memory. This leads to a paradoxical result where the best records of it are the physical traces it left behind: erased names on stone, reworked busts, altered reliefs, damaged images, coin evidence, and literary references in historians such as Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, and the Historia Augusta . Some famous figures who got the treatment are Geta, Domitian, Commodus, and Sejanus. That we know those names shows that Rome couldn’t erase important people from historical memory, but that history itself was, then as now, a political battlefield. “The Man Who Never Was” is one of my favorite Lafferty stories. When one sees it discussed at all online, which isn’t often, people talk about the ending where Mihi Lado, some kind of hypnotist with strange eyes, is hanged. As far as the action goes, that is the ending, but what makes it a favorite of mine is the postscript. The original story had four alternative endings. In the end, Lafferty chose what I think is the strongest one, but then he rewrote that strongest ending, which dated from 1961, in 1964, pushing it from a pre-nucleation story to one that shows his nucleated themes with greater sophistication. The story's history makes it an excellent example of how Lafferty deepened into his mature themes as he became increasingly concerned with consensus history, which makes it a great preface to his later works on the theme of consensus reality, including the difficult Three Armageddons of Enniscorthy Sweeny . I’ll run through the plot, discuss the four original endings, and end with a few words about the powerful coda. “The Man Who Never Was” takes part in a small, unnamed town. An unusual and successful cattle dealer named Mihai Lado with mesmerizing eyes seems to possess supernatural abilities. He calls himself a "future kind of man." In an argument with a local man named Raymond Runkis, Lado brags that he can make any lie become reality. Runkis challenges Lado to erase a man from existence. Lado takes the wager and targets a seemingly familiar, simple-minded local named Jessie Pidd. This is a wager, and it needs to be taken seriously, so to ensure no foul play goes unnoticed, Runkis and several other townsmen lock themselves in a house with Lado and Jessie. Over the course of three days, they watch as Jessie Pidd becomes transparent and ultimately vanishes. Jessie Pidd is now gone. So what happens? The townspeople accuse Lado of murder. That leads to an official hearing overseen by a state commissioner named Ottleman. At the inquiry, Lado confesses that he did not kill anyone because Jessie Pidd never existed. Lado used his powers of illusion to plant the memory and physical appearance of Jessie in the townspeople's minds to win the bet. An investigation of the town's records supports Lado's claim. There is a total absence of any documentation, employment history, or financial footprint for Jessie. Even so, Ottleman says that a murder occurred. He just needs a body before the state can authorize a legal execution. The townsmen, however, take matters into their own hands and privately hang Lado and then hide his body. Knowing that Lado had no formal records and that he dealt in cash, the town orchestrates a mass cover-up to suppress all evidence of Lado's existence. When Commissioner Ottleman returns with the militia, the locals feign ignorance. They say they have never heard of Lado, Jessie Pidd, or the hearing. And they seem to get away with it. The townspeople avoid legal consequences, yet they are left with a feeling of paranoia. They sense that they will eventually have to face a fully realized, vengeful Lado in the afterlife. It’s the meaning of the paranoia that I want to look at because it doesn’t exist in the four original endings. In Lafferty’s first variant, Ending A, the town hangs Mihai Lado. After complaining about the quality of the knot, Lado breaks down and is jerked off his feet, and he leaves behind a weird, perhaps illusory reverberation of his final claim that Jessie Pidd never existed. In Ending B, the knot on the noose fails. Recognizing his advantage, Lado uses his abnormally large eyes to mass-hypnotize the gathered crowd into a standing trance; by the time the townspeople awaken, Lado has escaped in his car. He leaves the locals struggling to remember his face or confirm that he himself existed. Ending C depicts the execution being interrupted when Lado smiles and looks toward the woods. This prompts the arrival of a crowd of beggars that seems to include Jessie Pidd. However, the townspeople each identify a different beggar as Pidd. The wavering, illusory nature of the crowd causes the confused townsmen to abandon the hanging, and Lado laughs at them. Finally, Ending D details the town actually hanging Lado and working together to obliterate all evidence of his presence. This is the ending Lafferty rewrote in 1964. At this point, it should be clear that the story looks at the relationship between consensus belief and documented information, themes relevant to Lafferty’s ideas about historical memory and documentation in Three Armageddons . Mihai Lado is proof that a community can collectively fabricate a reality by suggesting the existence of Jessie Pidd, a man with a purported history and relationships but no real physical documentation. Lado’s defence in the end hurts him when he points out the discrepancy between the town's collective delusion and their lack of documentary evidence: “I didn't know I was that good,” said Lado. “I turned it on. Why can't I turn it off? Ottleman, these people dream in bunches and build up what never was. Test it! Find me written reference to Pidd antedating these last four days. If a man did  live in town for years, there would have to be some record of him, he would have to live somewhere. . . We live in a paper world, and somewhere there should be paper on him.” It’s true that Pidd's existence relies on the town's manipulated memory rather than verifiable fact. But this is what allows the town to get away with lynching Lado. To hide the lynching, the townspeople adopt his method to manipulate reality. Because Lado himself dealt in cash and used an assumed name, his own lack of documentation makes him a great murder victim. All the town has to do is destroy the few existing records of his presence. When the authorities arrive, the townspeople execute a flawless, collective damnatio memoriae , pushing Lafferty's premise to its outrageous extreme: Hanged a man? Who? Us? A Mihai Lado? That name sure did not ring any bell in our town. Even our sheriff did not recognize Mr. Ottleman when he came; they had to be introduced all over again. Ottleman set his briefcase down on the ground in exasperation. There is some mistake, we said. This is Springdale. You must be looking for Springfield clear in the other part of the State. A previous hearing, you say? And only the day before yesterday? There must be some mistake. In the coda that Lafferty added in 1964, Lado says that he is a future kind of man who has new powers to create illusion and alter perception. This coda is where we begin to see nucleation. The future is probably best thought of here, not just as a chronological time period. It is an era where objective truth can be manipulated easily. It can be easily discarded by individuals with these specific abilities. The hypnotic eyes allegorize what we now call the post-truth world. The town's manipulation of historical information to erase Lado shows that something has been initiated that will punish the townsmen in the future. That is the abandonment of a socially objective, documented truth, something that Lafferty often called unstructuring. It is the first moments of the unstructuring of a world, or its incipience, and it is a self-inflicted wound that the townsmen bring on themselves by abandoning justice in their eagerness to lynch Lado. In the story, Lafferty depicts this as a problem that happens in linear time. Usually, he treats the problem of consensus reality as a problem of world environment, with the great exception of Three Armageddons , where he tries to show it happening diachronically, which is one factor that makes the novella one of his masterpieces. In the final version of “The Man Who Never Was,” Lafferty underscores that all the townspeople must face this: There's one thing about those future types, though: we all got to go through that future country. “He'll be waiting up ahead,” said little Mack McGoot, “one side or other of the barrier. He'll have us then.”[. . . ] Up ahead, around some dark corner, one side or the other of the barrier as little Mack McGoot says, there's a big ruddy freckled man who has some powers that will be beginning to get ripe. He's a man with crazy eyes that didn't grow around here, and he's like one man looking out through the face of another like a mask. This inexorable advance will take them into an era dominated by men like Lado—men like the Pilgrim and the Media Lords of Not to Mention Camels and other archons in Lafferty’s work. In this future, humans with these reality-altering powers will be fully "ripe." The townsmen sense it, but they really don’t know what’s coming. But we in 2026 do.

“We will show you the back of the tapestry. What you see now is not the true face of Astrobe, not all of it. The other side of the tapestry is shaggier, but it is a real picture also, and a much more meaningful one than the world you look at now. […] Have you never had the feeling, Thomas, that you were looking at everything from the wrong side? You have been.” Thinking again about Ouden, I wanted to put together some thoughts about how it works in Past Master . It seems helpful to have those notes in one place alongside a map of the novel, so I’m including my condensed outline with named episodes at the end of this post. The episodes are how I parse them. Chapters in a Lafferty novel are always half misleading because he thinks in subchapters, episodes that cross-ramify, and he is usually on the lookout for novel ways to glue chapters together, the poem patterns in The Reefs of Earth  (1968) and The Iron Tongue of Midnight   being examples of this. To make the outline more useful for others, it minimizes interpretation and approaches the novel as if all were transparent. Let’s start with the political-philosophical structure of Astrobe. One reason people bounce off the novel is that they don’t know that this is not a book with a main character in the way The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  or Stranger in a Strange Land  have main characters like Huckleberry and Valentine Michael Smith. Past Master  is, in many ways, a book closer to an anchoring device like the main character in an early Dickens novel, but with fewer of the novelistic satisfactions. The main character is incident, ensemble, and social structure. In fact, it is very much like Thomas More’s Utopia . For every fifty people who can tell you the name of that book, you might find one who can tell you its “main character, the Portuguese traveler and philosopher Thomas, is Raphael Hythloday. More and Ouden are like Hythloday, litmus paper, and depending on how we want to spin this, we can call them vehicles for the novel’s theology or semiotic functions that articulate the novel’s ideological structure. So who or what is Ouden? If we trust what the Nine say at face value, Ouden is a deity. He is sovereign of the Programmed—not only a being, but some kind of person in the expansive sense that we find elsewhere in Lafferty. After all, the Nine call Ouden both “god and king.” This comes from Northprophet himself, who says that Ouden appeared to the Nine and proclaimed: “I am your god and your king.” This appearance is a parody of God’s theophany to Moses in the burning bush, given what Ouden is as a maw that enunciates anti-truth “I am who I am,” says the God of Moses. That Ouden cannot say. The Ouden formula would be, “I am who I not am,” maybe the hevel hevalim  of Ecclesiastes. From that anti-theophanic moment, we are told, all Programmed beings treated Ouden as their supreme authority. Whatever Ouden is in Past Master , every reader of the book will know that he is not a peripheral symbol. He is somehow an axis of what is going on. He is the spectral mast to which the Nine pin their worldview and governance. Every aspect of the Nine’s ideology is organized around obedience to, and fulfillment of, this figure they treat as ultimate (or so they say). Having a view on what Ouden is will thus be determinative for how one understands the novel. A good way to test how Past Master  is understood as a novel, whatever one’s take on its totality, is to keep putting pressure on how the reader thinks about Ouden, and how those choices inform one’s perception of every other episode in the book. The Astrobe Dream is, as the novel puts it, the front of the tapestry. The novel is the front of the tapestry.   The dream is a noble lie purporting to be noble, only ostensibly the guiding principle of the planet’s engineered social order—the propaganda shibboleth. We are told it leads directly toward Ouden. Pottscamp says that the Dream’s premise is “Nothing Beyond,” and its conclusion is “Holy Ouden, Nothing Here Either, Nothing Ever.” The novel This makes the Dream a pathway toward metaphysical negation. Because the Programmed Masters administer and enforce this Dream across Astrobe, they act as agents driving society toward the realization of the Ouden ideal: eliminate meaningful being. Ouden is the terminus of their project for social control and coordination. Then there is the technological and philosophical synthesis designed by the Machines. They culminate in annihilation. One way to think of a precis machine is as an Ouden box. If you recall, the precis machine summarizes the goal of the Merging Singularity as a point where humanity is “devoured by Holy Nothingness, the Big O, the Ultimate Point for all us ultimates.” This Singularity is a parody of the beatific vision, the merging of human and Programmed. It is an Omega that cannot contain the Alpha, despite its lie that is the outermost ambient.   This Omega wants to swap out man’s final cause with a final state in which individuality, existence, and distinction vanish into non-being, reversing the Thomistic idea that man’s final cause is his full actualization. I should probably add that this is not the actualization of humanistic psychology, the Carl Rogers or Abraham Maslow vocabulary that we are likely to hear today. You probably know this, but I’m going to beat the drum again. In scholastic metaphysics, actualization for man means the fulfillment of his God-given potentials, especially the realization of his rational, moral, and spiritual capacities so that his life conforms to his true nature and final end in God. Ouden anesthetizes this through a golden dream. Doctors sometimes call it FTE: failure to emerge. Since the Nine and their control-and-coordinate  project attempt to orchestrate a negation of ousia , they are programming a path toward Ouden: to reduce existence to a single terminal void. What are the Nine? They are devils—but devils in Lafferty are tricky things. Will say that his artistic representation of them tends to go in one of three ways. First, he might hide them. There is only their evil in the text, like a magnetic field seen through iron filings. This approach reflects a view that Lafferty put in the following way: “Leaving aside all testimony of religion and revelation, I believe that a competent interdisciplinary biologist, working without prejudices, would come onto substantial evidence for the existence of unbodied beings or mentalities, from the effect they have on human persons; just as a competent interdisciplinary physicist-astronomer would arrive at the necessity of there being a moon of such a size and gravity and location and distance, even though, for some reason, the moon lacked the quality of visibility. And the physicist-astronomer would realize this necessity for such a moon from its influence on the earth. The biologist-psychologist should arrive at the necessity of the Devil-Satan, of such a power and location and activation-pattern, because of his influence on human persons.” Secondly, there are the person-devils we find in Coscuin  and Argo . They cut the shape of characters. Think Ifreann . Thirdly, there is a zone of demonology in Lafferty’s work that hovers between the invisible and the not-quite-characterological. Lafferty gets at this when he says, underscoring the problem of person and character, relevant to both fiction and theology: “As God several times in scripture gives Himself the name of the ‘I am’ or the ‘I am who I am’, so the Devil-Satan species is given the name in many languages of something like the ‘What is it?’ or the ‘Who is it?’ An African tale begins ‘The Who-Is-It came and killed a man and cut him open.’ This particular who-is-it seemed to kill and cut open a man every morning to read him as if reading a morning newspaper. As to whether the diabolical species has individuality, that’s a problem. Before being cast into Gadarene Swine, one devil or multiplicity of devils told Christ either ‘My name is legion’ or ‘Our name is legion’, seeming a multiplicity of guises for an individual, or a multiplicity of individuals in the species.” The devils in Past Master  look to me like beings in the zone between devil type 2 and devil type 3. They are very slippery things, speaking as one in Pottscamp but also as legion, like the type 3 devils. We can get some purchase on them, the way we can with devils of type 2. After all, they have names in Past Master . Lafferty even defines their three functions, which are under-discussed.   One of them is a major character in the novel. Yet they work in groups of three in a way the novel intentionally obscures, like type 2’s. Whatever the case here, their intention is to extinguish existence—at least if we believe that is a possibility. Ouden’s displeasure at any form of being is most fully expressed amongst them in Holygee’s line: “It displeased Ouden that any be.” So the Nine say that they are fulfilling the will of Ouden by eliminating humans, themselves, and the universe—which, for them, is not a cosmos. It is an anonymous, imperfectly empty universe. This goes beyond nihilism. It is anti-existential. But do they really worship Ouden, or serve Ouden? Are these the kind of beings who could bend to a deity, even an anti-existential one? I think they aren’t, and that Ouden is, for them, an ideological instrument. Consider Thomas More’s vision of Electric Mountain. It shows how The Nine operationalize ideology through control. During the electrical disturbances, More sees the vast, empty, grinning faces in the sky. Spooked, Maxwell calls the manifestations “the many faces of Ouden, their great Nothingness and King.” These images appear only at the peak activity of the mountain’s power systems. To me, this suggests that they are projections. It looks to me like a technologically mediated image that just reinforces the dominance of The Nine. Does that sound fanciful? We are told that The Nine have their hands in the lightning: “The high lightning here (which you will be amazed at very soon) is treated as a commodity like any other commodity. It is packaged and shipped down to Golden Astrobe . . . That is all it is—from your viewpoint, not from mine—but it does come in a flashy package." We know that The Nine are manipulating Thomas, and because Thomas is our focalization, we should keep this in mind. Pottscamp says, “I am the theater in which their little show is played out.” He says he is a medium through which the will of The Nine manifests itself. Then there is the matter that they can insert “snakes in your brain,” spiritual tendrils that invade and override Thomas’s thoughts and speech. Once this happens, Thomas finds himself parroting their ideology, including praising Ouden—despite his own intentions. To me, this shows that Ouden’s doctrine is not naturally adopted but imposed through sophisticated spiritual and technological coercion in Past Master. One of the big puzzles is that the Masters say they “are not conscious,” calling themselves machines executing instructions without subjective awareness. I agree with More that this is just a lie. They want More to believe that they revere Ouden as king, but it seems unlikely that their devotion is legitimate. From this, I infer that Ouden is not a transcendent intelligence, not anything like a supertranscendental . He is more like a conceptual structure embedded into their systems, a philosophical directive, not a supernatural ruler. Nor do I see him as being a symptom of a shift in representational mode, as when, for instance, Milton in Paradise Lost  becomes Spenserian and gives us Sin and Death as allegorical characters. “Before the Gates there satOn either side a formidable shape;The one seem’d Woman to the waste, and fair,But ended foul in many a scaly fouldVoluminous and vast, a Serpent arm’dWith mortal sting: about her middle roundA cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing bark’d[…] Out of thy head I sprung; amazement seis’dAll th’ Host of Heav’n; back they recoild affraidAt first, and call’d me Sin, and for a SignPortentous held me; but familiar grown,I pleas’d, and with attractive graces wonThe most averse, thee chiefly, who full oftThy self in me thy perfect image viewing — II.648–680 That shift in representational mode in Paradise Lost  is significant. For centuries, critics have gnashed their teeth at what Milton does in moving from the demonic characters of the Parliament in Hell in the city of Pandemonium to the hypostatized emblem book figure of Sin and Death, who are more like Vice than Milton’s Mammon, Moloch, or Belial. Lafferty refuses to do this. Instead, he steps back. Lafferty knows this is an anaesthetic trap, says we must accommodate what happens because what happens is mystic. This is Ouden's major appearance in the novel, and it occurs outside Hopp-Equation Space ("It had been a passage dream, one that was somehow leftover"), in the same chapter (Chapter 3: “At the Naked Sailor”) where we learn the Nine are mentally manipulating the characters through the false Ansel. Is this the appearance of a God of Nothingness, a passage dream that was "somehow left over"—or is it manipulation? The short account that follows is   necessarily mystic. We cannot be sure that Paul and Thomas held the same congress with Ouden. We cannot hear at all the exchange between Ouden and Rimrock, but we can sense it. We cannot be sure whether it was Paul or Thomas forming the words in the man-Ouden conversation. It was a confrontation and a presence. “And I had to settle with another—a false ansel who spoke in the Paul’s mind and tried to lure you to your death. It’s fresh blood on me. I hope you don’t mind.” What does necessarily mystic  mean when Ouden appears? A reader should consider it because mystical is a two-edged word in Past Master , as when Rimrock says, “To the Convocation Hall, as you yourself have decided, good Thomas; to take it all swiftly while the tide is running for us. You will be the Sudden Apparition. You will accept the accolade and the mystic station of Past Master.” Mysticism is part of the manipulation of the Past Master role, but it is also what allows that role to be, finally, unmanipulable. I’ll wrap up by saying that Thomas seems to understand this himself. He knows the entire ideological framework underpinning Astrobe, including the tabescent Dream that feeds Ouden, originates from his own satirical work, Utopia , the “sour joke” and “bitter joke.” Northprophet says that Ouden appeared only after  early mechanical beings sought a mythos  to fill the void in their programming. Ouden appears as an invented concept born from human ideological residue in the machine and the devilish, later disseminated by the Programmed Masters as part of their operating doctrine. There are many small ways in which this view of Ouden opens up textual puzzles. It provides a strong hermeneutic for understanding passages that might otherwise seem strange just for the sake of being strange, such as the great allegorical set piece about Sour John and, later, the toy. It has the virtue of creating a thematic continuity that can be tracked, tick by tick, through the episodes, making the novel far less a picaresque or loose-romance chain of events, and showing its subtending logic. As one goes deeper into Astrobe, one sees how the conspiracy works. Without this, “Chapter 10” seems far less powerful to me. It makes Pottscamp and the others of the Nine pop out near the end of the book like compressed snakes in a can.

The question then arises, what poverty is required by the practice of this counsel or, in other words, what poverty suffices for the state of perfection? The renunciation which is essential and strictly required is the abandonment of all that is superfluous, not that it is absolutely necessary to give up the ownership of all property, but a man must be contented with what is necessary for his own use. Then only is there a real detachment which sufficiently mortifies the love of riches, cuts off luxury and vain glory, and frees from the care for worldly goods. Cupidity, vain glory, and excessive solicitude are, according to St. Thomas, the three obstacles which riches put in the way of acquiring perfection ( Summa , II-II, Q. clxxxviii, a. 7). —Arthur Vermeersch, Arthur. "Poverty." The Catholic Encyclopedia , Vol. 12. Lafferty’s stories brim over with big ideas, some of them confrontational, especially if you don’t share his perspective. When I considered writing about this, one story immediately came to mind: "Calamities of the Last Pauper." It’s one of his crankier works, unlikely to garner much affection, yet fascinating and overlooked. The story addresses poverty, divine order, and utopian consequences, setting the stage for a broader exploration. It’s also a significant story because its theme was important to Lafferty, yet one I suspect many readers would part ways with him over. That is part of what makes it worth discussing. It sheds some light on his ideas within his broader work, particularly in Past Master  (1968), through the depiction of poverty and suffering in Cathead. When confronted with such immiseration, I imagine some readers thinking, This must be just a metaphor. Surely he doesn’t actually believe this kind of misery is justifiable. In this light, Lafferty’s traditionally Catholic views allow him to craft what can appear to be anti-versions of Le Guin’s "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973). He enjoys provoking readers by writing such stories, adding another layer to his confrontational style. The story opens after an apocalypse: the world has eliminated poverty, but the result is disaster. Society now struggles in the aftermath of this well-intended change. The cause of the disaster? The world eradicated poverty. Before the apocalypse, one holdout remained: John Bochtan. He refused to be reclassified as anything but a pauper, making him an inconvenient anomaly and prime material for a public spectacle. Lafferty begins by addressing us directly: This account is for those who were too young or too unborn to have seen the denouement of ‘The Death of the Last Pauper’ live (the death was live) on the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show. And ninety-six percent of today's population are too young to have seen it. The trick of the story is that Bochtan isn’t poor in the sense of lacking material resources. As The Catholic Encyclopedia  puts it: "The vow of poverty does not necessarily or as a general rule exclude the capacity to possess in common—that is, to have a shared stock of property at the collective disposal of its possessors—so long as they do not use it in a manner contrary to accepted rules and customs." Building on this theological vision of poverty, as a detachment from excess rather than merely a lack of material wealth, Lafferty creates a scenario designed to challenge non-Christian notions of wealth and spiritual poverty, taking these ideas to their extreme. “John Bochtan had a personality that had made him unpopular even when there were numerous paupers. Bochtan was what used to be called a wise guy (they don’t have them anymore), what used to be called a ‘show boat’ (they don’t have them anymore either). In addition to being the last poor person in the world, he may have been the last wise guy and the last show boat as well. And these types simply could not be allowed to exist in a modern society. John had the use of plenty of money and property, including a yacht with a crew, but he refused to take title to these things. He swore that they would reclassify him out of this poverty only over his dead body.” So there we have it. Bochtan has all the amenities of great wealth. Yet he truly embodies a salt-of-the-earth quality—a poverty of spirit. He is a smart-ass and a showboat. Still, he reflects the New Testament ideal of detachment from worldliness. This means his relationship with material things is not disordered. But this kind of poverty is no longer tolerated by the viewers of the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show. Powerbrokers like Pasqual Ratrunner ( “The poor we will not always have with us” ) want Bochtan gone. Towering demiurges, prophets, and weathermen warn of catastrophe if he—the last pauper—disappears. When Bochtan is murdered live on television by Hit-Man Henson, the world descends into chaos. The earth shakes. Storms rage. Waters desalinate. Yet sea levels rise as the rocks give up their water. This is a Lafferty twist on Exodus  17:1-7 and Numbers  20:2-13. In those stories, water flows from the rocks of Horeb and Meribah—classical symbols of God’s provision and miraculous intervention. What looks like punishment is, in fact, love: God caring enough about people to send them back to the Ice Age. In this frozen future, everyone is destitute. The story is recorded under these dire circumstances. At the end, we learn the narrator inscribes it on the shoulder blades of a Woolly Rhinoceros. “For a while there I feared that I would not be able to wrap this account up properly. I had used up everything I had to write on. And I had gone out hunting four days straight and not killed the prey I needed to finish this chronicle. But this morning I killed one in the first hour, a large, male, Woolly Rhinoceros. In another hour I had what I needed out of the carcass. Now I have something to write on again.” Another thing Lafferty is doing here is pushing his ongoing critique of the media. We have a global talk show that serves as a stage for divine intervention. The Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show  reaches the entire world in all languages simultaneously, with every television set, in Lafferty’s telling phrase, “Pentecostally-equipped.” He repeatedly shortens this to GBLLSYMS, a name that carries (for me) a phonetic echo of “bull systems” and “bullshit.” Lafferty certainly wants us to see this universal broadcast as a contrast to the real Pentecost (Acts 2:6–11). Instead of the Holy Spirit granting understanding, we get a cheapjack substitute. Google Translate avant la lettre. In place of divine revelation, television. A counterfeit miracle. A counter-Pentecost that replaces spiritual unity with mass communication. This is the hubris of Babel. Shared understanding is a great good, but submission to manufactured consensus is not. Yet the story offers a counterbalance—the show’s open lines to "numinous persons." It suggests that no part of life is fully secular. Lafferty writes: But of these shows, it was only the forerunning GBLLSYMS that had the "numinous valves" on their switchboards. By reason of these, all numinous persons (plapper-angels, demiurges, elementals, principalities, specially-impressed mortals, and God himself) would automatically have preference given to their calls to the programs. Lafferty even has God Himself compose verses within the story: When none be poor and none have fault, And all own silver laver; — The leaven turns to lump, the salt No longer keeps its savor. But instead of listening, the world is too busy with entertainment. Going deeper, "Calamities of the Last Pauper" is about the destruction of sacred order. Lafferty suggests that society and creation are not just material arrangements; they participate in divine meaning. Within that order, the poor hold a cherished place. As St. Lawrence said, “The poor are the treasure of the Church.” Their presence calls others to virtue: compassion, generosity, and dependence on God. Everyone tuned into the Greenbaum-Brannagan Late Late Speak Your Mind Show  is eager to see the last pauper erased. When he dies, they don’t realize they’ve killed more than a man. They’ve severed the final filament of meaning holding their world together. The poor weren’t just inconvenient. They were Christ’s instruments of grace. At its heart, the story presents poverty of spirit as a form of grace—the visible reminder of Christ’s presence among the lowly. Lafferty builds on the Gospel’s depiction of Christ identifying with the poor, as in the words, “I was hungry, and you gave me food.” Had the world tolerated Bochtan, perhaps grace would have remained. Instead, by erasing poverty, the television hosts and viewers erase something deeper: their connection to mercy and meaning. And the oceans become unsalted because the savor has gone out of the world. For Lafferty, this is a profound perversion of justice—a world that convinces itself it has solved poverty by erasing the poor in spirit. Lafferty knew that Rerum Novarum  (1891) set the foundation for modern Catholic social thought. Pope Leo XIII affirmed that the poor must be protected from exploitation and that class conflict must be resolved through justice and charity. This did not mean eliminating an entire class: “The great mistake is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth.” ( Rerum Novarum , §19) But the media-centered world of "Calamities of the Last Pauper" takes the opposite approach. It refuses to coexist with poverty in any form, deciding instead that the only solution is to abolish the poor themselves. This is the nightmare of modern ideologies. Both capitalist and communist visions have, at times, treated the poor as a problem to be solved rather than as people to be loved. Lafferty exaggerates this impulse to its extreme, presenting a world where poverty is “cured” not through justice, but through categorization, reclassification, and ultimately, execution. Quadragesimo Anno  (1931) built on Leo XIII’s teaching by warning against both excessive individualism, which ignores the duty to the poor, and collectivist tyranny, which sees people as disposable in service of a utopian ideal. In Bochtan’s death, Lafferty gives us the worst version of both. The world is so obsessed with its own material success that it refuses to let one man exist outside its system. His dignity is overridden by the collective. "Calamities of the Last Pauper" fiercely rejects the false distinction between spiritual and material poverty, a compelling premise. But I’m torn between two readings: On one hand, Lafferty doesn’t reconcile these forms of poverty because the damned world of the story refuses to. This isn’t an oversight; it’s the whole point. The poor aren’t just erased; they take the world’s meaning with them. On the other hand, the story feels like it needs some synthesis, even if just a cockeyed Laffertian one, to make sense of spiritual poverty in a post-scarcity society. While Lafferty often pulls against definitive endings, here the lack of closure suggests, at least to me, that the inciting idea hasn’t been pushed far enough. This, I believe, is why the framing device falls flat. I would have preferred fire to ice. Current notes: